Beautiful photography of a beautiful area! Thanks for sharing these!
Is it a trick of the reel or are those riverside rocks as smoothed as they look?
Love the tiling on the villa and how each room has a unique style to it, from floor to roof, yet it all still feels cohesive somehow.
Surprising to see a church¹ in the middle of it all, somewhat blending elegant Japanese architecture with the heavy and rough styles expected from typical medieval Europe. The inside also has that Japanese white panelling.
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On a slight sidetrack, is "地蒧" an older way of writing it, another bodhisattva, or maybe the IME playing tricks?
I'm asking as "蒧" isn't available as a character on my system, however, based on image search, the character is similar to the "蔵" of "地蔵" as in "Kṣitigarbha Jizō Bodhisattva of children, travellers and the underworld". On a side note, watching over the road and river like that fits as a metaphor for all three roles.
1: By the by, this post is the first result on Bing, DDG, and Qwant when searching for the name in English: Nikko Mahikari Kyokai
I took a great many photos of the villa, enough to fill a post on it alone for it is as you observe, each room different yet somehow cohesive. Japan has a long Christian history, one that was driven underground for much of the Edo era. Once it opened up to the world after Perry’s visit, missionaries came and with the aid of the indigenous christians, opened churches or on their own for the increasing numbers of Westerners taking up residence in Japan.
Jizo is translated by some of the websites as Earth Mother, Earth Born and similar. I get the impression that it is the idea of a guardian born of the earth, carved from stone that looks after children and travelers. Many Japanese kanji are in fact older forms of Chinese that have since fallen out of use in the original language; either by Chinese “newspeak” as one Chinese American friend explained to me, or just becalm obsolete over time. Is this the case here, i know not enough to answer, but it is a possibility. As you have brought up similar situation in other posts, the same is true with the English language. Reading English from the same time as the post cards I have been posting, we will often find spellings that are no longer in use. Or even names that have since changed. Top me, this is a fascinating aspect of language. It can also be a frustrating one as we try to decipher what they meant at the time they wrote whatever we are trying to translate into the modern form of the language.
Yes, the rocks well worn by the water over time as the pics show. Some had sharper edges than others which I take to mean that the sharper edges were the result of recent fractures in the stone.
Most of the land mass of Japan is uninhabitable. This means that there is a bounty of virgin wilderness, the edges of which when bounded by ancient structures and accessible by train provide stunning views. I am happy to share the beauty I have I seen to an appreciative audience. Thank you for your comments.
Very much true about other languages developing similarly. I find another interesting aspect after trying to learn Japanese is how you may start noticing things like how there are similarly "strengthened" words in English such as forefront; i.e. "fore" can be interpreted as "front", "underneath", "downfall", "uplift", etc or turning (ad)verbs into nouns like with "be" in "beneath", "behind", "belie".
Or, at least in my case I never noticed such things about the languages I learned before hitting my teens.
Beautiful photography of a beautiful area! Thanks for sharing these!
Is it a trick of the reel or are those riverside rocks as smoothed as they look?
Love the tiling on the villa and how each room has a unique style to it, from floor to roof, yet it all still feels cohesive somehow.
Surprising to see a church¹ in the middle of it all, somewhat blending elegant Japanese architecture with the heavy and rough styles expected from typical medieval Europe. The inside also has that Japanese white panelling.
--
On a slight sidetrack, is "地蒧" an older way of writing it, another bodhisattva, or maybe the IME playing tricks?
I'm asking as "蒧" isn't available as a character on my system, however, based on image search, the character is similar to the "蔵" of "地蔵" as in "Kṣitigarbha Jizō Bodhisattva of children, travellers and the underworld". On a side note, watching over the road and river like that fits as a metaphor for all three roles.
1: By the by, this post is the first result on Bing, DDG, and Qwant when searching for the name in English: Nikko Mahikari Kyokai
I took a great many photos of the villa, enough to fill a post on it alone for it is as you observe, each room different yet somehow cohesive. Japan has a long Christian history, one that was driven underground for much of the Edo era. Once it opened up to the world after Perry’s visit, missionaries came and with the aid of the indigenous christians, opened churches or on their own for the increasing numbers of Westerners taking up residence in Japan.
Jizo is translated by some of the websites as Earth Mother, Earth Born and similar. I get the impression that it is the idea of a guardian born of the earth, carved from stone that looks after children and travelers. Many Japanese kanji are in fact older forms of Chinese that have since fallen out of use in the original language; either by Chinese “newspeak” as one Chinese American friend explained to me, or just becalm obsolete over time. Is this the case here, i know not enough to answer, but it is a possibility. As you have brought up similar situation in other posts, the same is true with the English language. Reading English from the same time as the post cards I have been posting, we will often find spellings that are no longer in use. Or even names that have since changed. Top me, this is a fascinating aspect of language. It can also be a frustrating one as we try to decipher what they meant at the time they wrote whatever we are trying to translate into the modern form of the language.
Yes, the rocks well worn by the water over time as the pics show. Some had sharper edges than others which I take to mean that the sharper edges were the result of recent fractures in the stone.
Most of the land mass of Japan is uninhabitable. This means that there is a bounty of virgin wilderness, the edges of which when bounded by ancient structures and accessible by train provide stunning views. I am happy to share the beauty I have I seen to an appreciative audience. Thank you for your comments.
Thanks for the information!
Very much true about other languages developing similarly. I find another interesting aspect after trying to learn Japanese is how you may start noticing things like how there are similarly "strengthened" words in English such as forefront; i.e. "fore" can be interpreted as "front", "underneath", "downfall", "uplift", etc or turning (ad)verbs into nouns like with "be" in "beneath", "behind", "belie".
Or, at least in my case I never noticed such things about the languages I learned before hitting my teens.
Gorgeous pics, thanks for taking us along!
I did a search and Wright's train station is lovely, and is JR East's oldest wooden structure.
https://en.japantravel.com/tochigi/nikko-station-tochigi/6968