Categories
JapanGuide

Sankei-en gardens

If Shinjuku-gyoen is my favorite park in Tokyo, Sankei-en 三渓園 is my favorite one in Kanagawa. It was a private garden owned by a family of silk traders one hundred years ago. Sankei Hara was the family member who first bought the land. He loved Japanese gardens and architecture so much that he decided to design the garden by himself, he also brought traditional wood houses that he loved from all over Japan.

If you visit it early during a weekday it is a very quiet place with areas where the forest and the Japanese style houses will be for you and nobody else. I recommend it to everyone who complains about being tired of visiting temples and shrines filled with tourists when traveling around Japan for the first time.

sankeien

Categories
Traditional

Living on the floor

First it was hard for me to take off my shoes every time I entered a Japanese house or private space. Now I’ve become so used to it that when I’m back in Spain I tend to take off my shoes even in the cases I’m not supposed to.

My subconscious tells me that it is not good to walk into a house with my dirty shoes. Even if the shoes are not really dirty, the fact that the shoes have been “outside” makes them “dirty”, or “not-pure” enough to touch the floor of an interior place.

I’ve found that living on the floor has its advantages. I love that it makes even tiny houses look wider when you are inside. By forcing you to be on the floor you tend to have less furniture. If I really need furniture I try to buy “low” ones (low chairs, low tables etc), so I have good access to them even when I’m sitting on the floor. It also makes everything look like much less cluttered than when we fill our rooms with “high” bookshelfs/beds/kitchen-tables like we do in western houses.

Take off your shoes, sit on the floor next to a window filled with sunlight, read a book while drinking a tea.

 

tatami

Categories
Moments

In Praise of Shadows by Tanizaki 陰翳礼讃

I took this picture at Kanda Myojin shrine after reading In Praise of Shadows by Junichiro Tanizaki. I learned more about Japanese aesthetics from this book than from any other one.

Wabi-sabi, impermanence, asymmetry, imperfection. Light, darkness, and all the shadows between them. Black, white, and all the tones between them.

 

shadows