Moving on to Art - Yuki Moinuma

Yuki Moinuma is an illustrator in Japan, much of whose work is used on stationery type items.  I could find several fans of her work, but not a lot of information about the artist herself.

You can see more of her work here.  Or the work of another Japanese modern artist, Chinatsu Ban, whom I've blogged about before here.

This postcard was sent by Tomomi from Shizuoka, Japan through Postcrossing.

Japanese Umbrellas

In case you haven't noticed, I'm having fun with segues, shifting effortlessly (at least in my view) from "The Umbrellas" of Christos in California and Japan, to umbrellas in Japan.

Another Postcrossing postcard, this time from Kazue who lives in Nara, close to Kyoto. To me, this is a spectacularly beautiful, and very Japanese image, which came to mind often during and after the tsunami in Japan.  I find the stark contrast between this shot and the shots of the tsunami destruction particularly moving.

Japan is a bucket list place for me, in part because I lived there for a couple of years when I was very young, and while I spent a lot of time with our Japanese neighbors, I don't remember anything. I'm told I spoke Japanese at a two-year old level, which is how old I was.  When I am with a group of Japanese speakers, I feel the rhythm of their language at a visceral level, and would love to immerse myself in the culture one day.  I'm convinced the language is buried in the deep structure of my brain, and through a combination of studying and total immersion, I might actually be able to learn the language without too much difficulty.  Wishful thinking, perhaps, or not..