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Morning Thick Tea and Yuen »

Nov 09, 2024 - 02:56 UTC »

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Time ：5:30
Scroll ："yuen" by Kitaro Nishida
Bowl：9th Ohi Chozaemon
Tea： Hoshinoen "Hojyu"

Had a nice bowl of thick tea this chilly morning.

Nishida is the founder of the Kyoto School of Philosophy and one of the founding members of the Chiba Institute of Technology. The scrolls says "yuen" and it means far and distant in time and space or eternity.

Tea practice has made me much more aware of time - many of the utensils we use are hundreds of years old, and the scrolls and the utensils we use will likely continue to be used for hundreds of years. Hold an ancient bowl; one can imagine when it was made, the people who handled it, and the society and history surrounding them. Then, it is easy to imagine the bowl in the future and the people and cultures they will live in. Then stretch and keep pushing time in the past and the future until you envision eternity.

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Ikezu stickers of Kyoto people with a hidden side »

Joichi Ito

Jun 22, 2024 - 05:13 UTC »

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I was born in Kyoto and Kyoto is one of my favorite cities. It's rich with culture and nuance. One of the hardest things for non-Kyoto people to navigate is the many layers of politeness. Everyone smiles at you and treats you very nicely. However, it's quite dangerous to take everything at face value. The people of Kyoto often tell you what they want you to do, veiled in a nice-sounding statement or request, which is hard for non-Kyoto people to understand. Sometimes, if you take the comment or offer at face value, you will be shunned without even knowing it.

I saw some wonderful stickers on Twitter that show what Kyoto people might say, "tatemae," and the reverse side that shows what they really mean, "honne."

I asked permission to translate the stickers so non-Japanese people could understand them. However, upon translating them, I realized that the politeness of the "tatemae" and the rudeness of the "honne" doesn't really come through in English, but I think you'll get the gist. And Rie's face says it all.

Enjoy.

Ikezu stickers of Kyoto people with a hidden side

The following text was translated from the original post in Japanese.

If someone says, "Do you want some pickles?" to you in Kyoto, it means "hurry up and leave."

This kind of high-context communication that most people would never notice is called "ikezu."

This "ikezu culture" has long been recognized as uniquely Kyoto, but we have noticed that it has not yet been converted into a tourism resource.

Just as Osaka has turned the prefectural stereotype of comedians into a tourism resource, Kyoto's "ikezu" should also become a tourism resource.

With this in mind, we created a new souvenir of Kyoto, the "Kyoto-people-with-hidden-meaning ikezu sticker."

This product takes advantage of the characteristic of "ikezu" to "convey in a roundabout way what is difficult to say". It allows Kyoto people to convey their real feelings to those outside of Kyoto.

As the name suggests, this product has a double-sided structure. The front side depicts a polite but somewhat mean-spirited "ikezu" front, and the back side reveals the hidden true feelings of the Kyoto people.

The front of the card shows the "tatemae" which is the polite roundabout words.

The back side has "honne" which is what the words actually mean.

Product Lineup

We have created four types of products for each "hard-to-express" requests that occur in various situations at home so that people from outside of Kyoto can take them home and use them.

Toilet section: When you want to tell someone, "Please don't pee standing up."

Front text: "My toilet seat may not be the most comfortable, but if you don't mind, please try it."

Back text: "Don't do it standing up, okay?"

Entrance: When you want to tell someone, "Please don't come to my house in dirty clothes."

Front text: "How nice to see you. Did you go to Lake Biwa?"

Back text: "You come here looking dirty! Go wash everything in the Kamogawa River."

Dining table version: When you want to tell someone, "Please don't make sounds while you eat."

Front text: "You know what? It's okay to eat buckwheat noodles with a slurping sound."

Back text: "Kucha kucha kucha you're noisy!"

Post section: When you want to tell people, "Please don't put unnecessary flyers in the mailbox."

Front text: "Sorry, we only have a small mailbox. Thank you, Mr. Habakari."

Back text: "Don't put those stupid flyers in here. They're a nuisance."

Credits

Translated with permission. Original

Planning and production: Not.inc, CHAHANG

Model: Rie Onishi (Onishi Tsune Shoten)

Photographer: Hanako Kimura

Printing: Shubisha Ltd.

Kyoto Kotoba supervisor: Hiroshige Nishimura

PR Advisor: Kota Shirai (frame)

Ikezu Roundtable: Rie Onishi (Onishi Tsune Shoten), Maho Nakajima (Saga Arashiyama Bunkakan), Rokue Nakamachi, Futagozanomaro, Yasuyo Mitani (Okini-no-Utsuwa), Yukifumi Mitani (Okini-no-Utsuwa), Miepparina Kyoto People bot, Masaki Yamashita (Shubisha), Satoshi Yoshikawa (Kyoto Love. Kyoto), Guts (Alpha-) STATION)

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True North Between the Dragons »

Joichi Ito

Apr 01, 2024 - 00:10 UTC »

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This calligraphy mounted on a hanging scroll was written by the Zen monk Sogan Kogetsu, who lived from November 8, 1574 to August 19, 1643, in the Momoyama period in the early Edo period. He was the chief priest of Daitokuji Temple. He was the son of Munenori Tsuda, a wealthy merchant in Sakai who served Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi as a tea master. In 1611, he took over the Kuroda family's family temple, sub-temple Ryuko-in which contains, Mittan, a national treasure tea room which I visited last year. Kogetsu's calligraphy is popular for tea ceremony hangings.

The calligraphy characters are: 斗指両辰間 - toshi ryoushin no kan

斗 means "dipper" and refers to the Big Dipper which always points to true north.
指 means "to point".
Together, they mean to point to true north.
両 means "both" and 辰 means "dragon" and "間" means space. "両辰間" mean the space between the two dragons. The two dragons represent extremes in a dichotomy such as good and evil, light and dark. The phrase means that you should find your true north and follow it and navigate between the extremes. The "middle way" is often described in Buddhism.

This hanging scroll is also very appropriate for this year because it is the Year of the Dragon and somehow relevant to my own life. It's currently hanging in the President's office at the Chiba Institute of Technology.

I was reading Souoku Sen's book on Tea recently and he writes about how when you look at the 茶会記 (tea ceremony logs) of the period, they describe the hanging scroll's colors, dimensions, etc. but usually don't record what the scroll actually says or means. It could be that most people couldn't read them. This was a bit heartening for me since Japanese calligraphy is very hard to read and understand, but often rewarding once you do. (Souoku is a descendant of Rikyu and the current head of the Mushanokoji School of Tea.)

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No mud, no lotus »

Joichi Ito

Jul 15, 2023 - 22:10 UTC »

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Thick Nhat Hahn, one of my favorite Buddhist monks, often said, "No Mud, No Lotus." This is very similar to the saying, deichuunohasu (泥中之蓮, でいちゅうのはす), which translates to "lotus in the mud." In Buddhism, the mud symbolizes suffering and darkness, from which emerges the lotus flower. Without the mud, the lotus would not emerge. There are sutras and meditations where one imagines oneself as the seed of the lotus emerging out of the mud.

Recently I've been studying and practicing Japanese tea ceremony, and one of the key elements of the tea room and the ritual is to choose a hanging scroll, often with something written on it by a monk. In my group, I have started exchanging seasonal Zen sayings and proverbs before tea sessions as a way to study both tea and Japanese. I've also started practicing my Japanese handwriting and calligraphy, which is in an abysmal state.

This week's proverb was "泥中之蓮" which is seasonal because this is the week that lotuses are to begin opening according to the Japanese seasonal calendar. (It looks like the lotus blooming at the temple next door is already over. I guess we need to adjust the calendar for climate change.)

As I repeatedly wrote the proverb in my slowly improving, long-neglected handwriting, the characters emerged from my brush like the lotus trying to grow out of the mud. Along with the characters emerged a resonance with my own life which feels like a lotus trying to emerge from the mud of the last few years. It is also a societal metaphor for our society trying to come together around a common purpose and harmony in the midst of a truly mud-like moment in history.

And with this vision, I start this morning with a new metaphor and image to meditate on as we attempt to emerge from this submergence.

It turns out that "乃" is not the right "の" for this proverb. It should be "之". I'm leaving the wrong "の" as is to preserve the muddiness of the moment. I'll try to post a correct and better looking rendering of this proverb once I practice my calligraphy more.

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Using High Dynamic Range (HDR) iPhone Footage in Premiere Pro 2.3.2 »

Joichi Ito

May 19, 2023 - 23:52 UTC »

Two photos of the same scene comapring HDR and non-HDR — A comparison

tl;dr

iPhone videos shot in High Dynamic Range (HDR) would look blown out when edited in Premiere Pro. (Newer iPhones shoot in HDR mode by default now.) This was screwing up iPhone-user YouTubers, including myself. There were tons of not-too-useful videos on how to work around this, including selling you plugins and LUTs. In February 2023, Adobe fixed this by adding tone mapping so most of these “fixes” are mostly no longer helpful.

More detail followed by a How-To with images:

Newer iPhones now support Higher Dynamic Range (HDR) video, which has a “larger color space” and allows whites to be whiter and a broader range of colors making videos more vibrant than standard monitors and videos in Standard Dynamic Range (SDR).

The problem is that not all cameras, editors and displays support HDR, and the tools are just starting to support HDR.

Color spaces are standardized to be consistent across devices. The common color space standard for video is Rec. 709, which is what Adobe Premiere uses as a default. There is a different color space called Rec. 2100, which is a larger color space that supports HDR, unlike Rec. 709. If you record with the HDR setting on the iPhone, it will record in Rec. 2100.

The problem was that if your timeline on Premiere Pro was set to Rec. 709 and you added a clip recorded in Rec. 2100, the images looked blown out and saturated because the colorspace was too big and didn’t “fit” inside Rec. 709. You needed to either “map” Rec. 2100 to Rec. 709 and shrink the color space to fit in Rec. 709 or edit the entire video in Rec. 2100 by setting the color space to Rec. 2100.

Some people got thrown off because if you tried to edit a Rec. 2100 sequence with a normal display setting (your computer is default sRGB which is the computer equivalent of Rec. 709), the Rec. 2100 images would look blown out and weird on your display (even though they are actually fine on the sequence.) To properly edit Rec. 2100 videos, you must set your display settings in Premiere to map or recognize the Rec. 2100 settings in preview mode.

Lastly, even if you set the sequence to Rec. 2100 and the preview in the edit to Rec. 2100, if the export is set to Rec. 709, you would end up with the same blown-out image in the exported file. So the key to doing a proper HDR video is to shoot with HDR on, make sure your sequence is set to Rec. 2100 and your export is set to Rec. 2100. If you want to edit and export in Rec. 709 (normal video color space), just make sure you set tone mapping on and set your sequence and export to Rec. 709.

Luckily, if you set tone mapping on, any videos you put into your sequence will automatically map to whatever color space you edit. Also, if you choose New Sequence From Clip, the sequence will properly default to the color space that your clip is in.

How To Post iPhone HDR Videos to YouTube or Vimeo

Go to Settings->General on Premiere Pro and ensure that Display Color Management and Extended dynamic range monitoring are on. This is required to view Rec. 2100 HDR videos in Premiere Properly. If you don’t set these, they may look blown out when you try to edit them.

Screenshot 2023-05-19 at 6.35.51.png If you record a video with HDR on and examine it in QuickTime, for example, you should see the color space as Rec. 2100. (In this image: Transfer Function: ITU-R BT.2100 (HLG)) Import this into Premiere Pro 23.2 or later.

Right-click this clip and select New Sequence From Clip.

Right-click the sequence in the project pane and select Sequence Settings.

Observe that Working Color Space is Rec. 2100 HLG. (HLG stands for hybrid log-gamma.) The Video Previews Codec should be Apple ProRes 422 HQ. This is the compression standard (codec) that supports HDR. This shows that the sequence is the same setting as the HDR media. Depending on the source resolution, the size may be HD or 4K.

Go to export, select QuickTime as the format, and ensure your color space is set to Rec. 2100 HLG. Although the Apple Default is Rec. 2100 HLG for iPhone HDR videos, for posting on the Internet, Rec. 2100 PQ is probably better.

Screenshot 2023-05-20 at 9.46.28.png

If you export this and upload to YouTube or Vimeo, they should both recognize that they are HDR and display with high dynamic range for users able to view them. You will see “HDR” on the settings gear. It can take a few minutes for Vimeo and YouTube to process the HDR part.

See my sample video on YouTube and Vimeo. See, for example, how much brighter the whites in the video are than the white of the web page if you are viewing on an HDR compatible display. (Embedding HDR didn’t seem to work for me.)

If you instead would like to post as a normal video without HDR…

Ensure your Sequence’s color space is set to Rec. 709 and that Auto Tone Map Media is set on.

Then make sure that you select Rec. 709 in the Export settings.

Enjoy!

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Joi Ito's Web

Joi Ito's conversation with the living web.

Morning Thick Tea and Yuen »

Categories:

Ikezu stickers of Kyoto people with a hidden side »

Categories:

Credits

True North Between the Dragons »

Categories:

No mud, no lotus »

Categories:

Using High Dynamic Range (HDR) iPhone Footage in Premiere Pro 2.3.2 »

tl;dr

More detail followed by a How-To with images:

How To Post iPhone HDR Videos to YouTube or Vimeo

If you instead would like to post as a normal video without HDR…

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tl;dr

More detail followed by a How-To with images:

How To Post iPhone HDR Videos to YouTube or Vimeo

If you instead would like to post as a normal video without HDR…

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