Scale

When my son came back from Japan he talked about its beauty and he said I would love it, as it’s not all bright lights, automation and Pokemon. His photos, however, didn’t give me much hope. I trust he’ll forgive me for telling you that he took terrible photographs. There were about one hundred and twenty pictures of the back of one man’s head.  If you’ve been reading my holiday blogs then you might think that my photos are a bit better. I’ve taken over a thousand photos but they don’t really do the country justice.

What you don’t get with photos is a sense of scale.

The Japan I’m visiting does huge and tiny and from the photos you can’t tell which is which from a photo. A photo doesn’t give you that breathtaking feeling as you realise just how massive something is. Some of the things we have really enjoyed that don’t get high marks in guidebooks, such as the Imperial Palace or the Higashihonganji Temple impressed us because of their size.

     

You can’t tell from the pictures. They just look like any other temple but they left us slightly breathless with awe.
“It’s just so...” I said, lost for words.
“It’s so huge I can’t get it all in,” said the Long Suffering Husband, fiddling with his camera.
Normally, I love a spot of innuendo but I was too busy gawping.

Not all Torii gates are the same. Some barely scrape over a tall Western man’s head, while some monsters tower above.

You can’t always tell from the photos because of perspective.

The gardens have replicas of waterfalls and mountainsides that I’ve seen in real life, with rocks eight times as tall as Robert Wadlow. These duplicates are perfect miniatures but you can’t always tell from the photo.

Today we went to the bamboo forest in Arashiyama. Maybe it was inevitable after 1000 photos but I suddenly got a bit grumpy about taking any more.
“There’s no point,” I sulked, “You just can’t get the feeling in a photograph.”

That’s why we travel, rather than just looking at pictures, or watching TV programmes. Films or books might get you closer to a feeling but those feelings belong to someone else.