All Things Japan - Scenery, Art and Photography

Live in the place you want to learn about.
Seems about right.

Being interested in the raw of nature I took a camera with me when I went travelling. Part of the appeal of travelling to a foreign land is the differences you hope to find or be surprised by. I was hoping for both when it came to the physical countryside of modern-day Japan.

Ancient Japanese art on nature is classic. It's elegant, minimalistic and wonderfully rich in the romantic aura of the wistful, the epic. I wonder whether this has swayed other minds on Japanese natural landscape - as it's portrayed so elegantly in Japanese calligraphy style ink tracings - languid mountains and barely-there details hidden by an evoked mist and fog.


Landscape: mountains, stream and houses provided by Google images.
From the website for the Smithsonian museum of Asian Art

Or the emptiness they fill with imagination. Giving less, so the viewer supplies more.

Hiroshige Snow falling on a town provided by Google images
From the Art history website

I went looking for what had inspired such art, armed with a camera and a hopeful expression.

Here is what I found..

Imperial Bridge - Kyushu

Golden Temple - Kyoto

Finding the natural beauty of Japan is not a lost cause, despite the statistics of housing demand and growing population costs seeming to threaten to swallow the natural landscape whole each year..

The city sprawl - Nagasaki

The view from my hotel window in Nagasaki.

Thankfully there are still places of wonder and colour, and often religious mystique ('Shinto' is the ancient traditional Japanese nature-worshipping religion. Most of the ancient wooden temples built on the mountain sides are from this peaceful, spiritual religion) to be found not only in the preserved wilds of the Japanese isles..

A small shrine - Kyushu

..but even in city centers:

Temple near my school - Gifu City, Honshu

I passed this Temple (and several others) just catching the bus to school every day, Gifu City.

For more images of the beautiful scenes of the modern day physical landscape of Japan - you are welcome to visit my flickr account.

For your own images, all I can say is best of luck 


– and a final tip – visit that same place at different times of the day, and in different weather. The mood, lighting and timing might just serve you a surprise, and make something extraordinary out of, forgive the cliché, ordinary ;)