Wild on Japan, you can't stop us...

Alright, Kyoto temples and gardens now. Take off your shoes before you go in gaijin.


Just looking at this photo lowers your blood pressure. Sitting next to it for 45 minutes requires a crash cart to get you up and moving again.


Favored garden.


Hockney produced a significant image here, so I was excited to see the place. It was really wonderful, though next to impossible to photograph, like trying to re-sculpt the David. I just went for the cheapo postcard version.


Typhoon #21 or so was hitting the coast and killing people just south of us. We huddled under umbrellas and felt fortunate we did not go South for the surf, as we had tentatively planned.




Y'know, you spend all this time taking photos and such, and what always happens is the cute animal photo is the one people just love. So here you have it, turtles and duck... Hockney did not get this one and I bet it would sell the socks off his feet at the Wal-Mart.


Here is a link to a fair image of the Hockney, probably the first time the garden had ever been photographed showing all the rocks in the garden, as from single point perspective all the rocks cannot be seen at once. Quite a choice for the illustration of his concepts, something he is annoying the art world with to this day in his current book. Pearblossom highway is his magnum-opus, but this one is important; its the one on the right:

David Hockney.
Walking in the Zen Garden at the Ryoanji Temple,
Kyoto. Feb 21 1983.