Japan for Colour Travelers

About this book

Most guidebooks compete for your attention. This one is written for the eye itself. Two hundred journeys, each one a day composed around a single colour: the great gate's vermilion over a grey morning street, the indigo lengths hanging over a dye town's lane, the tea terraces' first green, the ginkgo avenue fallen gold across the pavement, the plaster town's white walls at noon, the ink town's black timber, the blossom streets in pale pink, and the wisteria weeks when a whole garden town turns purple.

The unit of the book is the journey itself — not the dye, not the viewpoint, not the plant, not the place photographed on the way. A shrine matters because of the vermilion its gate gives the morning; a dye town because of the blue hanging over its lanes; a valley because of the weeks its maples turn. Eight parts: setting out into the painted country · vermilion and red journeys through the gate-red country · indigo and blue journeys through the dyed-and-sea country · green journeys through the leaf-and-tea country · gold, yellow and harvest journeys through the gilded country · white, ink and dark-hue journeys through the pale-and-dark country · pink, purple and flower-hue journeys through the blossom country · and the colour calendar and the turn, closing with the two hundred and first journey — the reader's own street, in its own colours.

Because opening hours, closures, fares, event dates and seasonal arrangements change, the book never asserts them as current fact: every one of the 200 entries closes with its own official check — the named official source (garden, temple and shrine offices, railway, bus and ferry companies, town and prefectural tourism associations, museum and park authorities, the onsen association, the forest office) whose information settles what is current before you travel. It asserts no colour rankings, no strength claims and no health or healing effects. Colour patterns are described as patterns, which are permanent; the day's arrangements are always referred to official information. Written and created in Japan.