Otherworldly Architecture in Japan’s Magical Mountainside www.nytimes.com

posted by  banzaitokyo | 7 years, 8 months ago in Art & Culture

The mountain town of Karuizawa is about an hour’s train ride northwest of Tokyo, a journey that zooms past the small, heartbreaking scenes of beauty that any traveler here knows, an endlessly repeating pattern of fragile persimmon trees, their unlovely black branches sagging with dusty orange fruit; splintered wooden torii gates, their vermilion paint bleached to a fleshy pink; tin-roofed factories and squat apartment buildings, their patios hung with laundry.