The Artful Engineer

There is always a big difference between urban and rural areas, but certainly in Japan, where Tokyo is on one side of the comparison, the difference is pretty extreme. I enjoyed seeing the this row of giant radishes hanging from a pole, which is definitely not something you would find in Shinjuku City. I’m not sure why they were hanging from a pole, but I assume that is the prefered way to store them. Japan is nothing if not damp, so maybe the air circulation keeps them fresh. And I suppose this keeps them higher than the rabbits can reach, too.

The rabbits won’t have any trouble reaching these, of course, but are not nearly so tasty:

Picking up a theme from earlier in this series, and at the risk of over-generalizing, I would not give Japan particularly high marks for maintaining the exteriors of their buildings, no matter how nice a job they do with the interiors. These vines, although beautiful, are completely out of control:

And these are not far behind:

l have shown quite a few Torii gates in this series, and most of them are beautifully constructed and lovingly maintained. A lot like the one in the distance, below, but this DIY version of pipes and tape in the foreground was, in my admittedly limited experience, unique. It’s sturdy enough, but I have to believe it went to the low bidder.

It’s no secret I like photographing abandoned buildings. As is often the case with dilapidated structures, it elicits (sometimes illicit) questions. In this case, the puzzling item is the love seat that clearly hasn’t seen any love in a long, long time. I initially thought that I hadn’t held the camera level, but after trying to straighten the building up I realized that even the concrete parts were inconsistently out of plumb.

We’ll finish this post with a picture of a single shuttered window. I have resisted showing a lot of windows in this series because I tend to take a lot of them and don’t want to be monotonous. But this is a nice one and the hard shadows give it some graphic punch.

It was nice to get out into the countryside a bit on this trip. Next time I would like to rent a car for a while, though, it makes exploring away from the city so much easier.