* Wysteria Vine.
It is not written, but I am pretty sure it's Kameido Shrine.
You need to come at the right time to see flowers like that though.
* Nikko
All pictures that show shrine and pagoda
* Osaka Castle
* Daibutsu, at Kamakura
* Jinrikishia
Now it's for tourists, but you can ride in Asakusa.
* View Ojigoku on Great Boiling Springs, Hakone.
* Wrestlers.
Sumo still exists and looks like that.
* Gion Machi Street, at Kyoto.
Looks a bit different, but there are still many old houses like this.
* View of Nara.
* Tennojo Buddhist Temple
* Hakone Lake of Fujiyama
What does not exist anymore is any picture showing a town or village.
I feel sad about this. There are a very few places that kept this (E.g. Shirakawago).
Now all houses look boring. Only recently people thought to build pretty houses again.
Osaka Castle is a reconstruction. It's an empty shell, almost like a movie decor at this stage. If you want to see a real castle, there's the Himeji castle not too far from there.
You are absolutely right. The inside of Osaka castle is now concrete or something. But the outside and castle grounds still look like the article picture.
Himeji castle is a great recommendation.
> Now all houses look boring. Only recently people thought to build pretty houses again.
When I visited Japan last year most of my pictures were of old "crummy" looking buildings and older homes. They had character vs the modern flat buildings popping up all over. I even snapped pictures of the overhead wiring, utility poles and building connections. I now understand the prevalence of overhead wires and utility poles in manga/anime. I even read a white paper on Tepco's commitment to move as much of these old overhead wires underground.
Speaking of "crummy," R. Crumb talked about an afternoon he spent driving around the suburbs in the 1980s taking pictures of houses, streets, and strip malls so he could draw realistic backgrounds for his comics.
> “People don’t draw it, all this crap, people don’t focus attention on it because it’s ugly, it’s bleak, it’s depressing,” he says, “The stuff is not created to be visually pleasing and you can’t remember exactly what it looks like. But, this is the world we live in; I wanted my work to reflect that, the background reality of urban life.”
I don't have a reference for it (it might be from the film "Crumb") but I remember him saying that people would rave about how he artistically exaggerated the proliferation of poles, signage, and overhead lines to create over-the-top dystopian images, when he was just copying backgrounds from photographs of suburban California.
Unfortunately those pretty houses come at a cost. Traditional materials and techniques usually come at a price. Lots of wood and joinery work needs to be done, much of it by hand. They are also not well insulated so hard to keep warm in winter. They're so pretty though!.
You can still see a few of these houses and their traditional gardens in some of the wealthy, old-money smelling parts of Kyoto.
My next door neighbour lives in one of those thatched roof houses. I once visited in mid May, it was sweltering hot outside so I was in Tshirts and shorts. Inside, it was freezing! They had the kotatsu and a kerosene stove on.
You'll probably enjoy this project https://hikaria.org/ we have been working on with the Guimet museum in Paris (https://www.guimet.fr/fr) to showcase 19th century Japanese photos.
We are building that website to oroganize various collections, and allow users to search through them using object detection (Clip model)
And this stuff is why I love either super creative science fiction or travelogues (and the formers are hard to find).
You can try to imagine a brand new world or simply try to re-live our real and past world. To me that is even more amazing, as it often can be the door to understanding some things of today's cultures and/or discover lost little worlds.
Currently I'm going through this book of a guy who cycled across Central Asia and in Japan. The guy is sometimes quite direct in his writing (unlike other writers) but it's so interesting to experience the world of just 100-200 years ago through the lens of one living there. I truly recommend it.
Some video games try and do the former; I play too much FFXIV and a recurring theme there is that you go to a new area and you get the tourist's experience, tour the area, view the sights, meet the locals, figure out the local history and culture, etc.
Sure, it's kind of superficial, usually based on human civilizations / design trends / etc; that is:
* Heavensward: Europe / traditional knights and castles and church stuffs
* Stormblood: East-Asia / Japan, clearly a favorite thing to work on from the developers
* Shadowbringers: is actually pretty independent
* Endwalker: Rome / Greece on the one side, India on the other, philosophical existential crises in the late game (that part is actually really good, they invented multiple (7-8 or so?) different civilizations who all achieved some kind of immortality and pursued the meaning of life, ending up disillusioned)
* Dawntrail (latest): south & mesoamerica on the one side, cyberpunk sci-fi on the other
Yeah, I saw that concept but I always feel like I'm supposed to be 6 years old to enjoy the interactions and the dialogue (both in FFXIV and FFXV). Also the "tourist moment" felt too much the canned tourist experience where everything is perfect, clean and everyone nice.
Instead travelogues are not that, they are not about being perfect or beautiful, it's about the places and people being as they are, however they are.
Didn't try all ths games you mentioned, I will take a look. Thanks!
Having visited last year, the scenery around Toshogu Shrine in Nikko isn't all that different, if you manage to visit like we did first thing in the morning as soon as they open and before the tour buses rock up. (The shrine is surrounded by acres of sacred forest where construction is prohibited.)
The cities like Kobe and Nagasaki, on the other hand, are completely unrecognizable.
Kyoto was never bombed, but outside a very few carefully curated touristy bits, it's still an ugly AF concrete jungle that looks nothing like these pictures.
Cool photos! My workplace is an old machiya [1] in Kyoto that's more than a hundred years old, so I kinda live like the people in these photos (not really of course - no konbini back then).
Thanks so much for checking out the website! I hear machiya are quickly disappearing in Kyoto (often turned into generic apartments) so it's great to hear your friend is keeping the old city alive.
What a difference presentation makes. On Ops link I could enjoy scrolling through the photos, to see them on the Smithsonian site ,I had to find the "See all digital content in FSA.A1999.35" link then 4 clicks for each photo from a harsh index page.
Thank you to makers for putting the sites together, one for storage and the other for consumption.
It's amazing to see pictures of feudal japan and think that some of the people who grew up there would be alive in the 1950s. Talk about witnessing progress.
Keiko Fukuda, a judo trainer (10th degree black belt) in SF who died in 2013 aged 99 (she taught in her dojo in Noe Valley even into the last year of her life) was the student of the judo founder Kano Jigoro who opened his first judo school in 1882.
That’s how I feel about present day humanity with regards to computer tech. I was born around the time of the 8086; my parents never really became fluent with computers. I was a nerd and got into computers as a teen, soon enough I had internet and then WiFi and now frickin smartphones hooked into LLMs. We’re the Information Age equivalent of those folks who spanned all the from the feudal era to riding Honda motorbikes.
I'm possibly a similar vintage and enjoy telling my kids about changes that have happened within my lifetime, and not just things I've read of. TVs without remotes, to corded remotes, to normal remotes, all-in-one things, remotes with touch pads, everyone watching shows on personal devices with touchscreens, etc. Or from rotary phones to corded to cordless to early mobile phones, to what they're familiar with now. Record players, rewinding cassette tapes with a pencil, recording songs from radio, carrying around CDs with your Discman, minidiscs, MP3s, streaming. Such an interesting and wide series of changes.
Meanwhile, earlier this week my otherwise-clever 12 yo tried to pinch zoom a paper map...
Readit News
* Wysteria Vine. It is not written, but I am pretty sure it's Kameido Shrine. You need to come at the right time to see flowers like that though.
* Nikko All pictures that show shrine and pagoda
* Osaka Castle
* Daibutsu, at Kamakura
* Jinrikishia Now it's for tourists, but you can ride in Asakusa.
* View Ojigoku on Great Boiling Springs, Hakone.
* Wrestlers. Sumo still exists and looks like that.
* Gion Machi Street, at Kyoto. Looks a bit different, but there are still many old houses like this.
* View of Nara.
* Tennojo Buddhist Temple
* Hakone Lake of Fujiyama
What does not exist anymore is any picture showing a town or village. I feel sad about this. There are a very few places that kept this (E.g. Shirakawago). Now all houses look boring. Only recently people thought to build pretty houses again.
When I visited Japan last year most of my pictures were of old "crummy" looking buildings and older homes. They had character vs the modern flat buildings popping up all over. I even snapped pictures of the overhead wiring, utility poles and building connections. I now understand the prevalence of overhead wires and utility poles in manga/anime. I even read a white paper on Tepco's commitment to move as much of these old overhead wires underground.
> “People don’t draw it, all this crap, people don’t focus attention on it because it’s ugly, it’s bleak, it’s depressing,” he says, “The stuff is not created to be visually pleasing and you can’t remember exactly what it looks like. But, this is the world we live in; I wanted my work to reflect that, the background reality of urban life.”
https://time.com/3802766/r-crumbs-snapshots-source-material-...
I don't have a reference for it (it might be from the film "Crumb") but I remember him saying that people would rave about how he artistically exaggerated the proliferation of poles, signage, and overhead lines to create over-the-top dystopian images, when he was just copying backgrounds from photographs of suburban California.
You can still see a few of these houses and their traditional gardens in some of the wealthy, old-money smelling parts of Kyoto.
We are building that website to oroganize various collections, and allow users to search through them using object detection (Clip model)
You can try to imagine a brand new world or simply try to re-live our real and past world. To me that is even more amazing, as it often can be the door to understanding some things of today's cultures and/or discover lost little worlds.
Currently I'm going through this book of a guy who cycled across Central Asia and in Japan. The guy is sometimes quite direct in his writing (unlike other writers) but it's so interesting to experience the world of just 100-200 years ago through the lens of one living there. I truly recommend it.
I'll plug Wilfred Thesiger's Arabian Sands as an extraordinary deep dive into a world that's entirely disappeared in our lifetimes:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/825419.Arabian_Sands
Both books (not just Japan, he cycled around the world): https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/1710
Sure, it's kind of superficial, usually based on human civilizations / design trends / etc; that is:
* Heavensward: Europe / traditional knights and castles and church stuffs
* Stormblood: East-Asia / Japan, clearly a favorite thing to work on from the developers
* Shadowbringers: is actually pretty independent
* Endwalker: Rome / Greece on the one side, India on the other, philosophical existential crises in the late game (that part is actually really good, they invented multiple (7-8 or so?) different civilizations who all achieved some kind of immortality and pursued the meaning of life, ending up disillusioned)
* Dawntrail (latest): south & mesoamerica on the one side, cyberpunk sci-fi on the other
Instead travelogues are not that, they are not about being perfect or beautiful, it's about the places and people being as they are, however they are.
Didn't try all ths games you mentioned, I will take a look. Thanks!
Go on, give us a clue. Title, author, even language...?
The cities like Kobe and Nagasaki, on the other hand, are completely unrecognizable.
getting utterly destroyed by fire bombing (or atomic bombs in the case of Nagasaki) does that to cities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machiya
Side note: I quickly checked the dedede project and I'm so enthralled with it! I will use it to improve my Japanese, thank you!
Thank you to makers for putting the sites together, one for storage and the other for consumption.
Meanwhile, earlier this week my otherwise-clever 12 yo tried to pinch zoom a paper map...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Along_the_River_During_the_Qin...
The juxtaposition really brings out how isolationist they were back then. A country that is like a time capsule to the Tang dynasty
It's like if there was an island full of people still wearing Roman togas and going to the local hippodrome