alien guts

This is from 10 days ago, just after the plasterers had finished the second layer, and we were waiting for it to dry to do the final white layer. The flowers growing at the bottom of the wall are kanna. and they grow up to 2 or 3 meters. They're tough as nails: started about 20 years ago when Negishi, a friend who lives nearby and is both a movie importer (he's responsible for any Sam Peckinpah film that Japan has seen) and a botanist, stuck a few in the sand. They've made it through at least ten typhoons that I know of--meaning that when a typhoon comes even close to Japan, the worst waves make it up to the base of the wall and knock them down and uproot them. But, as I've said before, they always come back.
This was today, and I'm not quite sure about them making it this year. It's looking pretty desolate. Our nextdoor neighbor on the right had waves come up, crash over the wall and into his house. The only difference between his and ours is that his house comes right up against the wall, while ours is set back about 4 meters. But the flowers have been maimed. The waves must have just come in, and washed away all the sandy "soil" from their roots, which are left laying on the beach like some alien beast's intestines. We're praying for their survival.

hayama-rama

Bruce Osborn, photographer and friend, sent along this amazing series of photos, taken around his place during and after Typhoon Melor. Luckily his own place is safe, but it looks like the rest of Hayama suffered. We were in Tokyo, and though my Super Cub bike ride to work was the closest thing to a theme park ride I've ever experienced without paying for it, you never really get the sense of the power of nature when you're in the city unless a building falls on you or, like New Orleans, the water basically flushes the entire population out of the city.

I love this progression of the power of the sea, followed by scenes of destruction, and then--like always--the beauty of the sky after a typhoon. Those moments have to be the highlight of every year. The air is so transparent and objects are so perfectly visible that it looks like everything is done in computer graphics.

Enough said. Thanks, Bruce.

typhoon melor

Just got off the phone a little while ago with the contractor.

Just prior to that, my friend Bruce called from Hayama, which is just down the road from Akiya, to tell me that the super typhoon that has just soaked half of the country has wreaked quite a bit of havoc along the coast. Bruce's place is also on the sea, and he said 4-meter waves were crashing on his sea wall; that windows of buildings all around him were shattered; that cars had been shoved around by the floodwater; that earth had been washed all over the roads.

So I called the site foreman with some fear, though I kept telling myself that they would have called me if anything was wrong. He assured me that all is still standing, though he said the windows were completely white from the salt spray. That's something I got used to at the old place, and now that we have double the windows, I presume I'll be spending a lot of time rinsing them down.

The foreman said that the waves were reaching the base of the sea wall at the bottom of our property, but no higher. That means, of course, that it's the annual washout of all the kana, the tall orange and yellow flowers that are destroyed each typhoon season yet miraculously return to their previous glory by the next spring.

to stain or not to stain

These are the exterior materials, clockwise from top: red cedar for the hafu, the barge boards that are the finishing pieces at the end of the ridge ends; sugi cryptomeria for the shitami-ita, the wood siding; and the scraped off-white mortar.
Below are the same materials (clockwise from top: cryptomeria, cedar, mortar) after spending an evening testing a natural stain. The contractor wanted an answer soon, so I called him on Sunday morning to tell him that we're going to stain the wood, rather than leave it clear.

ben's gifts part two

Looking at the old table top got me thinking about the old house again, so I thought I'd put up some more of Ben's photos of the old place, taken just before it was torn down. Above the doors are the ranma transoms of wood and shoji that we saved for use in the new place.

counterpoint

This is the dining room of the old house, with the table that we got at an old man's workshop in the Northern Alps. The table is not big enough really to work as a dining room table in the new place, and we were stumped for a place to use it, until the idea came up of using the top as a counter between the kitchen and the dining room. Kind of a place to pass things over as well as being a place where you could pull out a stool and have a cup of coffee. When we got to the site today, the master carpenter had done a master job--and he seemed as excited at showing it to us as we were with his work.
Somehow he'd grooved the post and slid the table into the wall, so tightly that it doesn't even need a leg to hold it up. He put all his weight on it, and then convinced m to climb up on it . . .. . . and though you can see it juts out quite a ways from the wall, it held her with no problem. He had to cut one quarter of the table off because on the kitchen side we have an old cupboard that we want against the wall, and he offered to make a little chair of the piece he cut off. (In the shot above, that's Suzuki-san, the carpenter, in the blurry background with m at his feet, sweeping up piles of sawdust and scraps from his saw that she wants to bring home.)

It was a hell of a job. If you look closely (which might be hard to do as I was completely ignoring the camera focus when I shot these pictures), you can see that the mountain craftsman had left the natural curve in the wood. There is no completely level surface, and the bottom side has waves in it that match the sea outside our window on a breezeless day. But every joint is perfect, and M and I are overjoyed at having reality kick our expectation's ass.

whose siding are you on?

Got down to the site last weekend and was caught by surprise to find that they'd finished putting in the walls and ceiling of the bath. It's all hinoki, Japanese cypress, and it has a scent that seems to enter every pore of your body. We didn't have the means to make a really nice Japanese bath with stone floors, but it's two tatami mats in size--or one ken by one ken--and it is made in the 3300 year-old measurement system that our carpenters are using.

A lot of baths are available from the tub makers in units, which are basically an entire room in molded plastic that allows you to take a real Japanese bath--including the splashing and pouring of water outside the tub--without worrying about leaks and mold. But we were able to find what they call a "half unit," which is a molded room from the top of the bathtub level down, and it allowed us to build the rest of the walls and ceiling in hinoki.

Hinoki is an awesome wood. When I first moved into the old house on the premises, it had an oval bathtub made all of hinoki, and when you filled it with hot water the aroma would invade the entire house (if you left the bathroom door open). Unfortunately, the bath disintegrated after many years of use, as they tend to do in spite of great care, and a new one runs in the many hundreds of thousands of yen. This hinoki enclosure over a deep tub is now the best we can do. When m opened the door to the bath, the hinoki DNA seeped out in an explosion of head-spinning scent, so I think we probably made the right compromise--though my dream is to someday have a hikoki tub again.

The carpenters removed the boards over the atrium, so it was the first time we got a peek at what it's going to be like. Straight ahead is the opening that will hold the windows to m's room; to the left are the windows to the master bedroom.The carpenters also started on the shitami ita, the traditional clapboard siding that covers the mountain side of the house. We decided not to stain it for now--or any of the other exterior wood--until we get a feel for how it ages. My image is of the old houses that I've seen in Niigata prefecture--and it's a mixture of a deep red of aged wood with a creosote stain that protects those old houses from several meters of snow. I know it's kind of ridiculous to base a house design in such a mild climate as ours on the bitter winters of Niigata, but that's life. I've got to find a way to get this wood to match that image.

On the way home, m and I passed a stable that had always been empty, but for some reason had been rejuvenated and had a few horses to ride. She hopped up, and didn't look back at me.
I hope she made the distinction between that live one, whose name was Klaus, and her Disneyland mount of a few days earlier.