High End Audio in Japan, Part Six: A Photographic Conclusion
- BLOG
- by Jonathan Valin
- Jun 06, 2009
I can’t resist ending this essay with a little photo gallery of some of the breathtakingly beautiful things I saw during my stay in Japan.
The first printed above is a photo of the gate leading to the Kitain Temple in Kawagoe. The second (below) is a photo of the garden path inside the gate.
Below is a beautiful copse of trees with a red Japanese bridge in the distance.
One of my favorites, a genuine Japanese garden taken from the porch of Kawagoe Castle. Earth, air, water, and mind are herein mixed to make an idea of the world—and the world into idea.
The Gohyaku-Rakan Statues on the Kitain grounds are a genuine wonderment. Five-hundred-and-thirty-four individual statues, each unique, each representing one of the five hundred disciples of Buddha. The story goes that you’re supposed to visit this statue garden at night and touch the head of each statue with your hand. The one that feels warmest you should mark. When you return in daylight the particular statue you marked will be the one that looks most like you!
I have scores of photos—Japan is a photographer’s paradise—but I’ll end this essay with two that I think rather symbolize the Japan I saw and would love to see again: A Japanese man in stately traditional garb riding a very twentieth-century bicycle, and a statue of the Buddha in a garden.
By Jonathan Valin
I’ve been a creative writer for most of life. Throughout the 80s and 90s, I wrote eleven novels and many stories—some of which were nominated for (and won) prizes, one of which was made into a not-very-good movie by Paramount, and all of which are still available hardbound and via download on Amazon. At the same time I taught creative writing at a couple of universities and worked brief stints in Hollywood. It looked as if teaching and writing more novels, stories, reviews, and scripts was going to be my life. Then HP called me up out of the blue, and everything changed. I’ve told this story several times, but it’s worth repeating because the second half of my life hinged on it. I’d been an audiophile since I was in my mid-teens, and did all the things a young audiophile did back then, buying what I could afford (mainly on the used market), hanging with audiophile friends almost exclusively, and poring over J. Gordon Holt’s Stereophile and Harry Pearson’s Absolute Sound. Come the early 90s, I took a year and a half off from writing my next novel and, music lover that I was, researched and wrote a book (now out of print) about my favorite classical records on the RCA label. Somehow Harry found out about that book (The RCA Bible), got my phone number (which was unlisted, so to this day I don’t know how he unearthed it), and called. Since I’d been reading him since I was a kid, I was shocked. “I feel like I’m talking to God,” I told him. “No,” said he, in that deep rumbling voice of his, “God is talking to you.” I laughed, of course. But in a way it worked out to be true, since from almost that moment forward I’ve devoted my life to writing about audio and music—first for Harry at TAS, then for Fi (the magazine I founded alongside Wayne Garcia), and in the new millennium at TAS again, when HP hired me back after Fi folded. It’s been an odd and, for the most part, serendipitous career, in which things have simply come my way, like Harry’s phone call, without me planning for them. For better and worse I’ve just gone with them on instinct and my talent to spin words, which is as close to being musical as I come.
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