Street Archives - The way of the exploding fish

Jingu Michi

Posted on 18.5.201519.5.2015 by Sami

Jingu Michi is a road stretching from the Heian Shrine to Maruyama Park near Chion-in temple on Wikipedia temple. Our planned route was to walk along Jingu Michi to the park, then continue along Nene no michi at Japanvisitor.com, a famous flagstone road to ninenzaka and sannenzaka and finally to the Kiyomizudera temple on Wikipedia.

The photo is taken about 800 meters from the Heian Shrine close to the Shōren-in temple that is known for its ancient camphor trees, some of which reach over the road. I processed the image with warm tones that have an old-fashioned feeling to emphasize the historical atmosphere and the warm sunny weather.

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Heian Shrine

Posted on 9.4.20153.5.2015 by Sami

There’s a short walk from the giant torii gate to the actual shrine. You enter the shrine through the main gate, called Ôtenmon, pictured above. The Heian shrine is a shinto shrine built in 1895 to commemorate the 1100th anniversary of Kyoto, and it was modeled after the old Kyoto Imperial Palace. In reality, many of the buildings have been rebuilt in the late 1970s after a fire ravaged the shrine, but that doesn’t make the shrine any less majestic.

In addition to the great torii gate which, being 24,2 meters tall, is one of the tallest in Japan, the Heian shrine is also known for its gardens. Having a tight schedule we decided to see them another time, but at hindsight we definitely should’ve visited the gardens as well. The entrance to the gardens costs 600 yen, but the entrance to the shrine itself is free and there’s plenty to see there too if you just want to admire the buildings. Even though I have been to the Heian shrine a couple of times, the size of it still blows my mind. I hope the following photos give you some idea of the size of the area.

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The building on the corner in the photo above is called Sôryûrô (Blue dragon tower) and on the other side of the yard there is another one called Byakkorô (White tiger tower). The photo below shows a close-up of the Sôryûrô.

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Heian shrine’s torii gate

Posted on 9.3.201523.5.2015 by Sami

We started our shrine tour from the Heian Shrine. The whole shrine area is quite impressive in its size, but one of the most notable features of the shrine is the huge torii gate on Jingu Michi road. The gate is built in 1929 and, according to statistics from 2006, at 24.2 meters it is the seventh tallest torii in Japan. It certainly dwarfs people walking underneath it. Although it was Saturday morning (or maybe because of it), the shrine and the area around it weren’t too crowded.

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1.10.2009 – Day 4, part 1: Sendai in three photos

Posted on 10.3.201431.7.2014 by Sami

We woke up early because we had a busy day ahead of us. After a sturdy breakfast we checked some details from the Internet at the hotel lobby, packed our gear and headed back to Sendai station. Here’s a few images from the walk back. These are not very representative of any tourist attractions Sendai offers, just general views of the city. It was a cloudy day and everything looks a bit gloomy, but despite that Sendai seemed like an attractive city.

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This next building caught our eye (or actually the thing on the roof did). It turned out to be a wedding hall called Palace Heian, which explains the unusual architecture. I think the style of the roof construction is called Shinmei-zukuri.

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Walker

Posted on 20.6.201312.4.2019 by Sami

Here’s another image from 2007. Google was kind enough to give me a free copy of Nik’s plugin bundle and this was the first image tested it on. I used a very randomly selected set of filters from Color Efex to get this look and the image instantly became one of my favorites.

As a side note, I’ve created a Facebook page for my images. If you don’t like RSS feeds, you can now keep keep up to date with this blog by liking the page. If you like the images there (or here), feel free to share them to your friends.

I’ve still got loads of exciting news to share, but I’ll try to keep my posts short, so more on those next time.

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