Kogen-ji Temple

Tiny Kogen-ji is one of the subtemples of Tenryu-ji in Arashiyama. For Kyoto standards, it is comparatively new, having been established in 1429 by a high-ranking official in the Muromachi Shogunate, Hosokawa Mochiyuki. The name Kogen-ji is derived from Hosokawa’s posthumous Buddhist name. Kogen-ji was originally located at the foot of Mount Ogura north of Tenryū-ji, but following a number of fires it was relocated to its present site in 1882.

Because the temple is so small, its main attractions are the temple’s treasures. It has a number of paintings by Takeuchi Seiho and his students. Takeuchi Seiho (1864-1942) was a nihonga style painter and extremely influential in Kyoto’s artistic circles throughout his career. He is most famous for his paintings of animals that incorporated a realism usually found in Western art at the time. Takeuchi was friends with the head priest of Kogen-ji, and when his son Shiro fell ill, he was allowed to convalesce at the temple. Despite the lovely surroundings, it must have been a relatively dreary place, so Takeuchi’s students created many paintings to cheer up Shiro; their paintings that are held at the temple to this very day.

Staying with paintings for a moment, before entering the main buildings, the Bishamon Hall lies on the left side of the path. The plaque above the entrance features calligraphy by famous priest Kobo Daishi (774-835). Inside, there is a wonderful ceiling with 44 paintings of flowers of all the seasons, created by Fujiwara Fuseki, also a nihonga painter. The colors are very lively, so the ceiling must be comparatively new.

The rest of this building is subdued as usual, so as not to distract from the main image, a beautiful standing statue of Bishamonten, a god of war. It dates back to the 9th century, and the graceful curve of his body as he slays a demon is worth a closer look. Unfortunately, the hall may not be entered, but there is a life-size photo of the statue at the entrance.

Further down the path lies the main hall, built in the early 1600s. It is made in a residential style rather than in classic temple architecture. Maybe this was the reason why in 1864 samurai of the Choshu domain army bivouacked at Kogenji and Tenryu-ji. Before their attack on the Imperial Palace, they tested their swords on the wooden pillars of the main hall. To this day, you can see the cuts the made in the wood; however, the swords were not sharp enough to win them the battle.

Of course, Kogenji wouldn’t be a proper Zen temple without gardens. The Lion’s Roar Garden is the main garden of the temple. It is a typical dry garden with a big sea of grey sand, but the hedges surrounding it add a splash of color. There is also a garden at the back of the main hall, which has lush greenery and must look lovely during the momiji season Arashiyama is famous for.

Overall, I’d say Kogenji is nice to visit if you’re looking for a more quiet place and if you like nihonga paintings. Otherwise, skip it in favour of Hogonin, another sub temple of Tenryu-ji or the main halls of Tenryu-ji itself.

Historic Research

Yesterday, there was a talk about “Kyoto’s festivals and events in October” to which I was invited. At first, I was reluctant to go – this is complex stuff with advanced vocabulary – but it turned out alright, thanks to the many photos and a bit of background knowledge I had gathered over the years. I was able to understand the gist of the talk, and it was fun, too.

Directly afterwards was another talk, and since there was no break, I felt it was rude just to leave, so I was a bit annoyed at first that I was forced to stay. With the handout we all got at the beginning consisting mostly of text, I didn’t expect to understand anything.

However, this talk turned out to be extremely interesting. When you look at a map of Kyoto, you may notice that Oike, Horikawa and Gojo dori around the city center are significantly wider than any of the other streets in Kyoto. The reason for this is that they were artificially widened during WWII, when people were worried about air-raids and resulting large-scale fires. At the time, Kyoto still had mainly wooden buildings, especially in the old part of town in the center. So, the above mentioned streets were broadened – Oike dori from some 20 to now 50 meters – and together with Kamogawa river, they still create a rectangle around what was then the most populated part of Kyoto.

Looking down Oike dori towards Karasuma dori
Oike dori during Gion Matsuri.

This is especially obvious at the crossing of Oike – Horikawa streets, where these two huge roads dwindle into nothing towards the north and west, in the case of Oike dori immediately behind the crossing. And on photos of Gojo dori in that area, you can clearly see that the northern side still has a number of old, wooden houses, while the southern side consists of mostly new(ish) apartment buildings. Also, according to the talk yesterday, what is now the pavement on the north side was once the entirety of Gojo street.

I had indeed noticed the abrupt ending of the broad Oike dori at Horikawa before, but never questioned the why. I mean, it’s Japan, don’t they do all sorts of weird stuff? Knowing the reason behind this makes it even more fascinating. And a bit sad too. Who knows how many ancient machiya were destroyed at the time…

Anyway, both talks were given by members of the Kyoto Historical Research Society, a loose organisation of local history buffs. Obviously, I was lucky to understand what was going on yesterday, this won’t be the case in general. However, I hope there will be more of these talks about festivals, they are fairly easy to understand, and as a bonus, help me with my job.

Snakes and Earrings

Snakes and Earrings
Hitomi Kanehara

19-year-old “not a Barbie girl” Lui meets mesmerizing Ama in a club and moves in with him right away. She is fascinated by his forked tongue, and soon takes the first step to get one herself: Ama’s friend Shiba pierces her tongue. On a whim, Lui decides to get a tattoo as well, and Shiba uses the opportunity to talk her into having sex with him. Lui is torn between the two men, but when Ama’s jealousy explodes, she is forced to take drastic measures. Can she prevent things spiralling out of control?

The unexpected meeting with Ama draws Lui towards the edge of Japanese society, where people experiment with body modifications, choose unorthodox lifestyles, and mingle with underworld types. This book provides an interesting glimpse into a part of society that (prefers to?) remain in the shadows.

I picked up this book because Dogen mentioned the author in one of his videos. To be honest, I didn’t like it very much. Although the subject matter reminded me of Ryu Murakami, she’s not a writer of his calibre, and some of the violence and s&m sex scenes were too graphic and drawn out for my taste. Since these occurred fairly early in the book, I wonder if the author wasn’t only after the shock value. It was also pretty short, more of a novella, and the best thing about it is that it’s a fast read.

Hitomi Kanehara was born in Tokyo in 1983, dropped out of school at age 11 and left her home when only 15. Snakes and Earrings was written when she was 21, won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize, and subsequently sold more than a million copies in Japan. She claimed that some of the themes in the book were inspired by her own issues with self-harm. In 2012, she moved to France with her husband and children, where she lived for 6 years before returning to Japan. Kanehara has gone on to write more than 10 books to date, some of which won further literary prizes or were translated into other languages as well.

If you want to try something a bit different, you can get this book from amazon. But don’t say I didn’t warn you!

Visitors

It must be the garden. Or just the fact that I’m now living on ground floor. I’m getting much more visitors of the crawly, unwanted kind than ever.

I suspect there is a whole cockroach colony living behind my kitchen cabinets. Besides putting up traps and keeping the kitchen as clean as possible, there is not much I can do about them. Pumpkin is used to have his nibbles over night (especially in summer, he ate mostly then). So, essentially, I’m feeding not just him, but the cockroaches too. Let me know if you have ideas.

Ants are also attracted to Pumpkin’s food dish, but they are relatively easy to get rid of. A bit of insect spray on their path, and they won’t return. For the most part, they stay in the garden anyway.

I have no idea how the spiders enter the house, though. Attracted to the light, they magically appear in the evenings. The little jumping spiders, no bigger than 2 cm, are cute, and I try to catch them in a tissue and put them outside. But there are others…

One night, I found a brown hunting spider the size of my palm perched on the inside (!) of the fly screen in the toilet. I carefully closed the window, and after a couple of days, it was gone – outside, hopefully. A few days later, when I went to bed, there was an even larger spider sitting on the door to the library. Pumpkin scared it off – or maybe it was my screeching? It was enormous, leg span around 20 cm, the size of my spread hand, and as it escaped over the tatami, it resembled the “Thing” from the Addams Family. I could even hear its footsteps.

So, instead of going to bed, I picked up the insect spray from the kitchen, then huddled on the top end of my futon, waiting. Three hours later, the spider re-emerged and nonchalantly placed itself on the wall less than a meter from my head. It eyed me with curiosity (obviously planning on how to eat all that.) I still shudder thinking about what happened next, so let’s just say my insect spray and I prevailed in the end. Let’s hope it didn’t install its family inside the house.

But not all the visitors are bad. I’ve seen geckos climbing fly screens and windows to hunt. The little fella here has greeted Pumpkin and me on our morning walk in the garden for the last couple of days. I wouldn’t mind if they were to bring their families!

The Hardest Part of Japanese

I’ve stumbled across this youtube channel and have been binging his videos ever since. Dogen-san makes fun of (learners of) Japanese, (foreigners living in) Japan and, every so often, himself too. His Japanese is impeccable, and he has a patreon where he teaches Japanese pronunciation.

This is one of his slightly less serious lessons. If you ever struggled with this part of the Japanese language, you’ll understand.

Typhoon Aftermath

This season’s typhoon #14, “Nanmadol” has cleared Japan yesterday. It wreaked havoc as it crossed first through Kyushu from south to northwest and then when it returned from the west through northern Honshu. At the latitude of Kyoto city, it was far enough out on the Japan sea to only cause a bit of rain in the night to Tuesday. Looking at all the damage it has done in the rest of Japan, we were very lucky.

It could have been much worse. In August, we had a number of very heavy rainstorms. One of them caused more than 90 mm of rain in a single hour in northern Kyoto city, and at some point people there were even asked to evacuate. Note that Kyoto’s Kita-ku district reaches far into the countryside, so I’m not sure where exactly that was.

Given that I live fairly far uphill now, my area isn’t prone to flooding, at least according to the local hazard map I received when buying the house. However, during those rainstorms, the little stream at the back of my house swelled to a raging torrent, and what is usually not more than 10 cm of clear brook turned into a brown soup that filled half of the bed provided for it.

It took several days for the waters to recede, and the loud noise coming from the otherwise so quiet stream surprised me quite a bit. At that time, I finally understood why the agent mentioned it several times at the time of the sale.

But now, the only consequence of the typhoon is that the temperature dropped by about 10 degrees over night. Although we still have 23 degrees during the day, and the temperatures should rise again soon, it feels pretty cold right now. So much so, that last night, for the first time since this spring, Pumpkin wanted to sleep under my blanket. I guess we’re officially in autumn now.

Two-Holiday Week

It’s a super short work week, with only 3 days in the office!

Today is Keiro-no-hi, “Respect for the Aged” Day, where Japan honours the elderly. And there are plenty of them. For the first time, there are more than 90,000 over-100-year olds, all of which receive a congratulatory letter and a silver cup from the government. Or rather, a sake cup made from nickel alloy with silver plating, as the real silver would be too expensive. This year, 80,161 women are over 100 years old, with only 10,365 men reaching such an old age. The oldest woman is 115, the oldest man 111 years old, definitely something to strive for.

I was planning to visit a museum today, but we’re all sitting tight because of typhoon # 14 “Nanmadol”, which is coming up the western coast of Japan. There is even an extreme weather warning in place, and when I woke up in the morning, my neighbours had all their shutters closed. So far, however, the day was quite humid but with not much rain. Maybe tomorrow?

And on Friday will be Shubun-no-hi, the autumnal equinox, with another day off. The typhoon should have passed by then, so I’ll just move today’s plans to Friday.

Moonstruck

Just a quick heads up. A friend of mine from Tokyo came for a visit, and we roamed through Okazaki yesterday: Keage Incline, Murin-an, an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art…

It was definitely worth it, but I was pretty exhausted afterwards because of the heat. And I need to play catch up with work. So, just a wonderful picture from our dinner on Monday night – the harvest moon, only two days after it was full. Courtesy of my friend.

Austria’s Most Wanted – Tibor Foco

On March 13, 1986, a young woman named Elfriede Hochgatter was found shot dead near rail tracks leading to Linz, Austria. The 24-year-old, whom her friends described as a nice but headstrong person, had worked as a prostitute nearby the place where she was found. A suspect was arrested the very next day. This seemingly straightforward murder and its aftermath would turn into one of the best known criminal cases of Austria. It is still not solved today.

Tibor Foco was born in 1956. His parents were business owners in Linz with roots in Hungary. Tibor is described as intelligent and extremely disciplined, and he enjoyed fast cars. His hobby turned into a career when he became a professional motorcycle race driver, where he had a number of successes. Despite that, the promising young man decided to open the “Bunny Bar” in the red-light district of Linz, apparently to finance his racing career. Maybe it was also a manifestation of his dark side, because he was said to look down on women and knew how to successfully manipulate him. Yet, he tried to do his business as much above ground as possible – a novum in the red-light district – which may have earned him some enemies.

When the body of Elfriede Hochgatter was found, Tibor Foco because the prime suspect from the start. Not only was his own bar next to Elfriede’s workplace, the two had had an altercation that had got physical in the night of the murder. And when Regine Ungar, Tibor’s mistress and prostitute in his bar, testified to the police that Tibor had forced her to shoot Elfriede, it was an open-and-shut case. Despite a number of inconsistencies, and the fact that Tibor Foco always proclaimed his innocence, he was sentenced to life in prison in March 1987. Tibor Foco was incarcerated in Stein near Linz, one of Austria’s high security prisons.

With his sentencing and imprisonment, the case should have quickly lost the public’s attention, but the opposite happened. None of the evidence found on the body or even the crime scene could be linked to Tibor Foco. Other evidence was misplaced or disappeared, and allegations of police misconduct surface. The prison director believed Tibor to be innocent, and even jurors openly questioned his guilt. But all applications for a retrial were denied.

Instead, Tibor Foco was allowed to study law at the university of Linz, which no other prisoner for life has ever been allowed to do. Here, Tibor’s iron discipline was a boon. He was a good student and model prisoner, and eventually got permission to attend selected courses in person, always accompanied by two policemen. But the lecture on April 27, 1995, he would miss.

On this day, he and his police escort arrived at the university at 8:25. One officer stayed in the car, the other accompanied Tibor inside. There, through some smart planning and quick thinking, Tibor was able to shake off his guard and retrieve a package left for him in a toilet. It contained the key to a nearby garage where clothes, money, and, most importantly: a motorcycle were waiting for him. By the time reinforcements arrived at the university, Tibor Foco was long gone. His escape – meticulously planned by himself from prison – took less than 10 minutes.

In the aftermath, old accusations of police misconduct and procedural errors quickly resurfaced. Regina Unger recanted her testimony and alleged that she was tortured. And Tibor’s alleged accomplice was granted a retrial and was fully acquitted in 1996. One year later, Tibor’s case was reopened, and he was even offered safe conduct if he returned, but he didn’t take the offer.

To this day, Tibor Foco tops Austria’s Most Wanted List at Interpol. Rumours place him in Eastern Europe or even farther away from Austria, but given his discipline, it is unlikely that he will ever be found. Today, many Austrians, including the victim’s late mother, believe Tibor Foco to be innocent.

This is just a short summary of one of Austria’s most spectacular criminal cases. Whether Tibor was really innocent or just a master manipulator, will probably never be found out. I have written a much longer article on Tibor Foco and his escape called “Austria’s Most Wanted: 27 Years and Counting” for the anthology The Best New True Crime Stories: Unsolved Crimes & Mysteries, which will be officially released on Tuesday.

The book contains 14 more unsolved crimes from all over the world, and I couldn’t put it down and breezed through it in a few days. I knew some of the presented cases already (like the case of Emanuela Orlandi from the Vatican), so I found it a little less interesting than the prior anthology I contributed to. However, it is a fascinating read in any case, so, if you’re into true crime, you should definitely pick this one up. Here’s the link to amazon. I hope you’ll like it!

I’m back!

What a summer! It was mostly relaxing and stress-free, this my first summer in my new house. And it wasn’t quite as hot in my bedroom underneath the roof as I had feared. The temperatures stayed mostly in the low to mid 30s during the days and dropped just enough in the evening to make sleeping possible most nights. I’m not sure if this is because of the “cool mountain air” “up here” where I live now, or if summer was generally a little cooler this year.

Pumpkin did suffer from the heat too and visibly perked up the few times I used the air condition. He spent most of July and August inside the oshi-ire in my office, and during the nights he slept on the cooler wooden floors, trying to catch even the tiniest breeze coming through the house. Now he’s back on his zabuton cushion next to my futon at night, a sure sign that autumn is coming.

As was to be expected, summer wasn’t super busy, but a few things did happen, and I will write about some of them in more details in future posts. Here a few titbits:

I am getting older… I’m back at the physio therapy for my hip pain, which took a while but was relatively easy to do. And I now have glasses for reading, which was quick but more complicated to achieve. At first, the doctor gave me the wrong prescription; the second one isn’t 100% correct either. By now I think that the first prescription was correct, just had the left/right eye swapped…

Thanks to the new glasses, I can now read furigana again, which is absolutely necessary in my Japanese studies I have picked up again. I am planning to take the next JLPT in December, starting small at the lowest level.

I learnt other new skills that will help me keep the house in order in the future.

Thanks to those skills, one more room is finished/furnished.

And then, there is Project 50 x 50…

But more of all this at another time. Nice to be back!