front alley view of my studio

I promised photos some time ago… Forgive me for being a little overdue, but it’s taken a while to clean the place up to a presentable condition.

This is my new painting studio. My town of Echizen is very remote and rural, so it has a real rustic feeling to it. It was never firebombed during WW2 like its neighbor to the north, Fukui, was. Its pretty rural so it hasn’t seen a big building boom like most cities have during the post-war years. And its so remote that globalization/Westernization hasn’t taken place nearly so much here as it has in other places.

A lot of people might consider these bad points, but I think most of the foreigners who come here see those as very positive points. And the town seems to see that as a good thing too, because they spend a lot of money promoting this as a “time capsule” town, with placards and signs all over displaying historic photos. The town has seen a lot of history, and to be honest, it’s the only town I’ve seen in Japan that is putting real effort into preserving what little history it has left (sadly, none of the 4+ castles that were built here over the centuries remain).

a traditional antique stove

But I digress. My point is that there are lots of very very old houses here — ancient houses from the pre-electricity days, from back before the Japanese customarily tore down houses every few years to rebuild a fresh new plastic cookie-cutter monstrosity in its place. Through the magic of 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon, my English student who used to be my Japanese teacher has a friend who knows somebody who works for the local radio station whose owner also happens to like these ancient style houses and happened to have some rooms to rent. So after a long string of contacts, I was able to rent one of these houses for pretty cheap.

It would be my dream to live in one of these and do a big fixer-upper project, but that’s for another time.

So I’ll tell you a little more about the building. It’s built in a very old style of traditional townhouse (machiya) which originated in the ancient capital of Kyoto and spread to other urban areas (ancient Echizen was a huge urban center). If you’ve visited Kyoto or Kanazawa, you’ve no doubt seen tons of these gorgeous traditional buildings. Here is Echizen there is less money to use to preserve these houses, so they’re in varying stages of decay, but I would say there are almost more old buildings per capita than in Kyoto (of course Kyoto is huge and Echizen is tiny). The houses typically have a storefront area and a residential area, and are fairly cool in the summer (cool is a relative term, since these are pre-air conditioning houses). The building I’m using is shared between me and a radio station. Its in an area filled with old houses, alleys, no big streets, old shops, temples, and traditional crafts. A neighboring house has also been rented by an artist and is being used as a gallery. It’s a really nice area, with a slightly old and dirty look, but I tend to think of it as the patina of centuries of culture.

And now for a very brief photo tour:

inside the front door, with the staircase to the 2nd floor on the left

view of the radio studio on the 1st floor

the 6’x6′ backyard space, currently overgrown, but you can see the remains of an old stone lantern

one of my painting rooms on the 2nd floor; the other is still pretty messy and not fit for showing

rear view from the machiya from a back alley — the window opens to my painting room above

neighboring art gallery (look closely and you can see some of my chickens on the window poster)

another neighbor, Natsukashiya, connected to the gallery above