かやぶき屋根の民家

In the old days, the prefecture of Niigata (新潟） was referred to as Echigo (越後). I lived for many years in Nagano (as you may know if you read my other posts) which is directly adjacent to Niigata. I also spent two years studying at the International University of Japan (IUJ, or 国際大学 as it is known in Japanese), which gave me even more opportunity to get to explore and photograph the landscape of this fascinating  area. It is famous for it koshihikari rice, hotsprings, and beautiful mountain and coastal scenery. (Coming from British Columbia with the mountains and ocean, Niigata feels familiar.) Niigata has traditionally had an image as one of the isolated back-country regions of Japan (uranihon, 裏日本）. It is incorrect, actually, to think of Niigata as having been somehow cut off from  ”civilization”; it, along with other supposed isolated areas such as the Noto peninsula (能登半島） had much mercantile and cultural contact with other regions in Japan and mainland Asia due to the sea trade routes.

Niigata is also historically known as “snow country” (雪国) due to the massive amount of snow the cold winds from Siberia bring down onit. Dealing with the snow has had a strong influence on the people of Niigata — on their character and their lifestyle. One interesting physical manifestation of this is how the traditional homes were built — with doors on two stories, one for the summer on the ground floor and one on the second floor for access when the snow piled 2 or 3 metres high (it does — I have dug myself out of it).

The tiny thatched roof house or kayabukiyane no minka (かやぶき屋根の民家) in this scene is to be found in the charming mountain village of Matsunoyama (松之山）, which  these days is known for being one of the few remaining areas with a high concentration of thatched-roof dwellings. Throughout the country, such traditional thatched-roof dwellings are fast disappearing, either being covered in metal or being torn down and rebuilt entirely. It is a shame, because these farmhouses (the design of which is distinctive to each region of Japan) are one of the most charming aspects of the man-made landscape.

This picture was taken on a brilliant morning while driving from Nagano to Yamato-machi; after a heavy overnight snow fall, I knew taking a slight diversion through Matsunoyama would afford some great picture opportunities. I had passed by this scene several times before during different times of day during different seasons. This was the first time to see it blanketed in snow. The composition with my 180 lens was pretty straightforward. I took a few shots with the camera tilted a little lower but I prefer this framing, with a little bit of the top of the mountain showing to provide context.

The trickiest part of this shot was the exposure. Snow at the best of times can be difficult because of the reflection; however, this shot was complicated by the top-back-side light. I took reflective reading off several parts of the scene and calculated an average. I compared this average to a reading based on the incident light meter held at and angle to to simulate the angle of the sun. With the Sekonic 308, you can retract the white hemisphere into the unit, so I took another reading to simulate the shadow incident reading. After taking all these readings, I found a kind of overall average and then adjusted for gut-feeling. Aperture was at f16, and shutter speed at 1/60.

I did not use any filters. The blue cast is mainly from the high colour temperature of the light in the shadows. I find the blue cast from Kodak Ektachrome the most pleasing of all the films, and usually only use Ektachrome in the winter, as opposed to Fuji Velvia the other seasons.

As a postscript, I am sad to say when I visited this scene again not too long ago in the spring I found that the farmhouse had been ripped down. I remember when I first started taking pictures of this scene, I would often see a single elderly lady tending to the adjacent garden. Winter on her own must have been very difficult, having to deal with clearing the roof of snow. Many of the elderly are vacating such dwellings to live in more convenient communal dwellings closer to towns. I don’t blame them. But it is a waste that the dwellings are torn down. I know of several foreigners that make a living renovating such farmhouses into attractive homes. For some reason, the Japanese seem  to be less interested in keeping this part of their cultural heritage alive.

The scene is in early May, which is suggested by the recently planted rice seedlings just breaking through the surface of the water. The silhouette on the far edge of to the paddy is what the harvested rice is hung on to dry in the fall. It is late in the day while driving between Wajima and Monzen (門前) — probably the best time to be driving along the west coast if you enjoy sunset and silhouette imagery, because scenes like this pop out at you endlessly. It is almost impossible to concentrate on the road; luckily the area is very remote so there is almost no traffic, and you can crawl along and take it all in.

If you roll your cursor over the image, you will see that I took this picture on my Hasselblad with an 80 mm lens. I was kind of rushing when I took this (to keep going and take in other scenery before the sun slipped behind the horizon), so I quickly set up the tripod on the edge of the paddy and hastily framed the shot looking through the finder. The way I focused, however, was not looking through the finder but by stopping the lens down to f22 and aligning the infinity mark on the focusing ring with the aperture mark. This way I could focus on the light and metering the scene properly. I use this focusing technique a lot with broad compositions and when pan-focus is appropriate.

You may be tempted to think I used a filter or played around with the colour after scanning. Not at all. The original slide looks exactly like this. Given the lighting conditions and the haze in the early evening sky, I knew that I could achieve a really saturated colour by under-exposing just a little (or, to look at it from a different point of view, by exposing for the highlights). I did this by spot metering with my hand-held meter on the surface of the rice paddy half-way between the left edge of the frame and where the sun is reflecting on the water. I double-checked my reading on several other areas of the paddy and the sky to make sure everything was within an acceptable range of brightness. If there had been less haze in the sky, there would have been more contrast between the really bright areas and the really dark areas of the scene, and I could not have achieved such even colour and detail. The conditions (for me) were perfect, actually.

It was difficult to leave this spot — it wasn’t just the beautiful view, it was also the croaking of the frogs in the rice paddy, the fresh breeze coming off the ocean and the total feeling of tranquility that made it such a special place. But other parts of the coast further south beckoned, so within 10 minutes the gear was back in the car and I was off again. This is the dilemma I face doing landscape photography in Japan — sometimes I just don’t get enough time to savor it all there on the spot — there is too much to see. Luckily, during this trip to Noto, I was camping on the shore with my brother visiting from Canada. We had several days to relax and take it all in. (It’s in Japanese, but check out this site for further scenes from Noto.)