A rough coast through a long lens. This was taken from the verandah of the room where we were staying.

That’s not sky at the top of the picture, by the way — I was shooting into a mountain:

It all comes together in this one, my favourite of the bunch. It’s a superb illustration and perfectly pitched advertising, beautifully executed and richly sentimental.

A late winter afternoon turns golden and the fragrance of the plum tree brightens as the air chills. An exquisitely turned out creature who could be a young woman or yet but a girl has been amusing herself at play while awaiting someone’s return by sea. She sits on the verandah, her Osaka Steamship kite propped against the house behind her, in a luminous and cloyingly well-composed image of domestic warmth. We know there has been anticipation, but of what kind? Her gaze — is it just banal? Oh, inscrutable Orient! — is absolutely unreadable.

She is bound to the image — is it the man she is to marry who returns? — by the promise of spring: trees and flowers link her graphically and organically to foreground and background elements and suggest that her role in this domestic universe is as simple and ordered as the plum tree’s, whose branch seems to entwine, chastely, the floral design on her kimono just below her knee. The design sweeps up to her hand which holds a racquet whose brush of bamboo carries our gaze across her obi to the continuing effloresence on her collar. Her head is perfectly superimposed against a pine tree on the bluff at the end of the garden so that the flowers in her hair seem almost part of it rather than her.

She’s not just home, in the sense that she comfortably occupies the landscape, she is the landscape. And now, thanks to Osaka Steamship and her awaited one’s return, that landscape will be complete.

My daughter taking a picture of the moon on Yakushima.

Desktops:
1024 × 768
1280 × 800 MacBook
1440 × 900 15” MacBook Pro
1680 × 1050 17” MacBook Pro, 20” Cinema Display
1920 × 1200 23” Cinema Display
2560 × 1600 30” Cinema Display

You definitely want to see this one larger. A good example of the type of forest you see on Yakushima just under a kilometre or so above sea level.

I think this is my least favourite of the 5 cards in this series, but I’m not sure I know why. I was going to write something about kitsch across the waves, and how the channels opened up by steamships and eventual globalized travel enabled not only grand, epochal historic forces but also minor little cultural warps such as kitsch, but I have only something about her pose and the underside of her left arm to go buy and certainty deserts me.

Of course you knew you were going to see onigawara from Yakushima and here are two terrific specimens, one by day, the other by night. Above is the roof of a house that must belong to a fishing family: the fellow in the middle of the onigawara is Ebisu, god of fishermen.

This one is made of tin, I think, and was on the not-quite-mature copper roof of a prohibitively expensive shop selling things made from yaku-sugi (a beautiful cedar from Yakushima).

Click either photo for a larger view.

•••

I’m trying to grow a lotus in a pot on the concrete stoop in front of my room. I’m not having much luck, but perhaps it’s just taking its time getting settled.

I am having terrific luck breeding mosquitos, though, and the pot teems with wrigglers great and small. So today I introduced predatory fish, medaka, to feast upon the larvae. They’ve only been in there a couple of hours but have gone to it with great gusto. I put 7 of them in the lotus pot and 3 in a pot in which my wife is growing some sort of other water lilly (with somewhat more success, damn it) and which is also a-wriggle. You get 10 fish for ¥400.

I’m hoping at this point for future generations of specially trained attack medaka.

I noticed they seem to go after the larvae that give them a bit of a chase, ignoring the easy ones right in front of them. They’re sporting about it, and not unaware of the thrill of the hunt, bless their carnivorous little souls. I hope they prosper and multiply (within balance).

In The Ecology of Eden Evan Eisenberg mentions the importance of having a garden, even if it’s only a plant in a pot on a windowsill, in order to have something to take care of, some other living thing on which you must attend. I’m hoping for a little ecosystem out the front there, with fish fattening on mosquito wrigglers, their pooh nourishing lotus blossoms, friendly organisms, a nitrogen cycle, births, deaths.

And then there’s the aesthetic pleasure, tinged a little morbidly with the eternal struggle, of seeing the surface of the water churn when one of the fish takes a strike.

Imagine a roughly circular granite island 12 kilometres in diameter which rises to a series of peaks approaching 2 kilometres above sea level, the highlands of which receive, on average, 8,000 milimetres of rain a year (yes, that’s 8 metres of rain annually). You’d expect the water and the rock to come to some pretty interesting arrangements over the millennia. On Yakushima they most certainly have, and negotiations are vigourously ongoing.

The photo above, a two-shot composite, shows Ohko-no-taki by the light of the August 9th full moon. The waterfall is 88 metres in length (of which perhaps 50 metres can be seen here). We returned the next day and swam at its base (I could only get to within a couple of metres; the wind and spray makes it uncomfortable above the water and a strong wash keeps you away below).

The topography also turns roads into the driving equivalent of mountain streams. The photo below shows a stretch of road that positively meanders compared to some we drove but will serve to give an indication of the motoring pleasures to be had:

The view to the left just beyond the guardrail was spectacular. The 6-shot panorama below doesn’t begin to do it justice (click for a larger view):

We returned from Yakushima yesterday and all I really have to say about it today is that if you are in the vicinity of Japan, it is not to be missed. More photos soon (but none of which, I warn you now, will begin to capture the beauty of the place).

Speaking of islands and journeys by sea, we reach the halfway point in the Osaka Steamship series with this postcard, certainly, to my eyes, the weirdest of the bunch.

Militarist overtones, the fire in the sky, the coincidental but poignant historical foreshadowing of the flag dipping into the sea, and what I thought was a vulture but must be a condor (and might be an eagle, although that might have been too American at the time: I’m wondering if this poster doesn’t date from the war years or just before) and a disembodied point of view in the painting (then as now, you wouldn’t want to be on the deck of a ship with a giant condor coming straight at you over the waves so we float above the sea on an omniscient pictorial vantage point) remind us that nations can think they have everything but ultimately have only the promises they make to themselves.

Tomorrow we leave for a week on Yaku Island where the trees — thousands of years old — apparently have “the power of words.”

Looking forward to finding out just what that means.

Is it rude to blog at dinner? I’m talking fish farming segueing into shark breaches of the nets to that’s where shark meat comes from (the very expensive great white variety), expensive because you’re not allowed to catch them (in Australia at least) and then a wrapping up with brief discussion of their numbers. Got the computer out because we’re going to upgrade some software here and thought it might be an idea, while we were talking about the sea, to post another steamship postcard. My host will understand.

Found in the second-hand bookstore today a set of postcards representing great advertising moments from the history of the 大阪商船会社 — or the Osaka Mercantile Steamship Co. Ltd., as one of the postcards has it. I’ll post some over the next few days.

The back of the cards just says “Mitsui O.S.K. Lines” and then “Since 1884”, so I’m guessing these cards were printed in 1984 to mark the centenary of the original company (which was merged with Mitsui Steamship in 1964).

Unfortunately, there’s no additional information on any of the cards other than a very tiny “The Mitsumura Printing Company, Kobe” on one of them (and bravo to them: they’ve done a wonderful job with these cards), so I can’t tell you anything about them.

The festival starts tomorrow and runs for a week.