Monty Don
Enough people mentioned them to me that I sat down and watched the two programmes on Japanese gardens by Monty Don. I try not the be the sort of scholar who sucks his teeth at all the inaccuracies and misrepresentations in popular media, so let’s just say that it was a mixed bag: full, of course, of a lot of the romanticisation and exoticism that has been present in writing about Japan in the West for well over 100 years, but also some interesting titbits. For me the highlight was his reflections on Tofukuji: sitting looking at one of Shigemori’s gardens, he said something to the effect that he’d been sat there for a while thinking about the landscape, and whatever you make of it, well, he could quite happily stay there thinking about it for quite some more time. That, I think, is a pretty good defence of the garden as a work of art: it makes you think, don’t it?
Translations
As a result of a twitter exchange, I realised that my copy of The Pillow Book was the older version (Morris, not Waley), and that more recent Penguin versions were a newer translation, by Meredith McKinney. So I bought a copy of the newer version 🤭.
I’ll be interested to see how different it feels, but for now I looked into the first couple of pages. I love Morris’s start “In spring it is the dawn” and I think it’s a no-win situation: McKinney pretty much had to change it (I’m away from my copy right now, but I think she starts “In the spring – the dawn”), but it’s such an iconic phrasing that it’s nigh on impossible to match it.
It reminded me of Miyazawa Kenji’s most famous poem: Ame Ni Makezu. It’s been translated many times into English, but I don’t think I’ve ever reads a version that really does justice to the opening lines:
雨ニモマケズ
風ニモマケズ
雪ニモ夏ノ暑サニモマケヌ
Wikipedia gives 4 links with the opening lines “Be not defeated by the rain”, “Unperturbed by the rain”, “Standing up to the rain”, & “Someone who is unfazed by the rain”. None of these work for me much. I’ve always thought the obvious way to go was:
Yielding not to the rain, yielding not to the wind, nor to the snow nor the summer’s heat
This seems much my lyrical to my ear, anyway.
Fuji
I’ve come to Japan to run a workshop, down to Zushi, an hour out of Tokyo and somewhere I’ve never been in the past. I arrived late in the afternoon and promptly fell asleep. When I woke the following day, it was astonishingly clear, and I discovered that there’s a fantastic view of Mt Fuji. Big things far away is a classic thing that is much more impressive in person than by photo, by here’s a grainy effort from the bus: 
Donald Richie said that when he arrived in Japan in the wake of WW2, you could see Fuji from the centre of Tokyo – nowadays you have to be at the top of a very big building on quite a clear day in my experience. Here, it’s been much less visible since that first day, even though several of the days have been otherwise quite nice. But from what you can see, it looks like the snow is disappearing by day and by day.
Fireflies 