Fall

After work one day last week I braved the chilly Tokyo evening, hordes of old men with big cameras and tripods, and young couples with women tripping along in completely useless high-heeled "booties." A pretty little Japanese garden by day, Rikugien does a evening light-up during fall foliage season (and sells yummy grilled rice cake dango with sweet miso or soy sauce... mmmmmm!)

Without a tripod, and not wanting to stop traffic by setting up such equipment even if I had it, most of my pictures turned into fuzzy blobs of bright colour, but the light up is beautiful and the garden well worth a visit at night, or during the day.

You start with a view of the lake with buildings and trees lit up on the opposite side

Then walk along lit and semi-lit paths through the forest

Some trees were lit up from below. 

And the stream that used to flow through the garden was brought back through undulating blue lights.

  
But the best view was one ignored by most visitors - a Japanese maple at the height of its fall glory was a blaze of red and orange, tucked into a corner beside the outhouses by the entrance. Not a single extra-large lens and tripod toting ojisan in sight!

Fall Recap

I realize I've gotten far behind, but I'm finally just going through my photos and I found all the fall foliage photos I took and... well... here's a peak at some I took on two different days in Asukayama Park... sigh...

Wordless Wednesday - Rainy Day Park

On Saturday I went on a walk on my lunch hour. It was rainy and cold and miserable, but still beautiful!

Seasonal sights

Summer in Japan is hot and sticky and ugly. Winter, in poorly insulated and badly heated homes, is cold and miserable. Spring and fall, however, can be gorgeous - sunny and warm and full of colour. In the spring it is the cherry blossoms covering everything in pompoms of pink and white, and then raining a snow of petals. In the fall it is ginkos and maples and a host of other trees turning colours from deep yellow to bright bright red. Some people have a clear favourite, the sakura (cherry blossoms)

or the koyo (fall colour),

but others, like me, can't choose just one. The sakura, with their fresh but ephemeral beauty and the koyo with its majestic and awe-inspiring ability to paint an entire hillside a rainbow of reds and yellows.

Well what if you didn't have to choose? What if you could have your sakura AND koyo too?!

Known as ju-gatsu sakura or aki-zakura (October or autumn blooming cherry), there are cherry trees that bloom in the fall, their delicate pink and white petals standing out against the showy vibrant trees.

Sure the sakura were rather scraggly, but sakura AND fall leaves?! Now that is having your cake and eating it too!

Wordless Wednesday - Fall Close-up

It's been getting colder and we've pulled out the electric blanket to warm the bed at night. But midday, in the sun, can be sunny and warm and beautiful!

Falling for Nikko

An old friend (from grad school, a Japanese art historian) had a few days in Tokyo at the end of a work trip through Asia and decided she wanted to go to Nikko for the weekend.  She planned to spend Saturday (when she knew we had to work) wandering around the shrines but asked me and U if we wanted to join her for a hike in Oku-nikko on Sunday.

So, U skipped out of work by 3pm and picked me up outside the museum at 5:15. We stopped for dinner at one of the service areas and pulled up to our ryokan by 8:30. After we discussed plans for the next day, U excused himself to soak in the onsen bath and my friend and I knitted and chatted, catching up until the crazy work schedule she has been on the past few weeks caught up with her. A quick soak in the bath for me, and I too was ready for bed - burrowing under a thick down comforter as Nikko is quite a bit cooler than Tokyo.

The ryokan my friend had picked, the Annex Turtle Hotori-an, seemed to cater to foreigners and, instead of the usual grilled fish and rice and miso soup for breakfast we were given a large plate of lovely fresh fruit, a hard boiled egg, and thick slices of crusty french bread dripping with butter. U wavered in between saying he was glad it was a light meal as he doesn't like heavy breakfasts and complaining to me that it wasn't a "traditional" ryokan breakfast, but I was a very happy camper.

As we drove up Iroha-zaka all three of us tried to remember the old poem for which the road is named, the old order for Japanese characters, which is used for the road as a sort of numbering with each switch back given a successive character as the road snakes back and forth up to Oku-Nikko.

We parked by the Yu-no-taki and caught a bus up to Yumoto, then walking back along the lake and then doing the Senjogahara hike back to the car. The hike was gorgeous. The path wound through forest and across the Senjogahara plain (debating the differences in meaning and local usages of "plains," "marsh," and "moor"). Nikko itself is still green, but as we drove up to Oku-Nikko the spots of colour increased, a little splash of yellow here, a bright red blotch there... And Senjogahara was beautiful! Probably not quite peak, but given the peak of fall colour will also mean hordes and hordes of people, I'll take almost peak and only mildly packed parking lots!

After our hike we drove back to Yumoto and soaked our feet in the free public foot bath (a long narrow covered wooden building with a stone bath with hot hot hot spring water bubbling out of cement fonts. I'm trying to break in a semi-new pair of hiking boots, so the ashiyu was a perfect follow up to the hike.

All too soon, however, it was time to head back to Tokyo (first via a road called "Japan's Romantische Strase as we knew the roads would be packed with cars heading back after a weekend enjoying the lovely fall weather... something we're going to have to do again and again this fall!

Wordless Sunday - Fall

So often the beauty of fall is on a large scale - a mountainside afire in red and orange and yellow. But if you look closely there is beauty in the detail too.