And this strange thing happened…

Supernatural? I’m open to interpretation

Walking along with a guide in Japan, this was the route… first by an old farmhouse (Rakushisha) where the farmer had been a student of Basho, the haiku poet, who would sometimes visit. The area near the yard had persimmons, and I took some snaps. I peered through the gate and I saw what I suppose was a recreation of a typical raincoat and hat of Basho’s era, and they hung on the outside wall.

Here’s the street view of Rakushisha, with the arrangement of the raincoat on the front wall.

I took two photos but didn’t go in. (The timestamp says 9:36am, which feels about right.

We walked further, along Ogura pond, filled with lotus in November, dying as they do this season — and all part of the magic of the lotus, its cycle of life, its rising from the mud. I waited for the occasional drop of water to fall into the otherwise still pond.

Timestamp 9:55am. We continued through a busy part of the Arashiyama bamboo forest and then up to the home and famous garden of a Japanese silent film star, Okochi Denjiro. We were heading to his gardens but I found myself killing a few minutes waiting to rejoin my guide near the house and stumbled into a little memorial-mini-museum dedicated to the actor’s life. I didn’t take any photos of it, but I found this on Google to show you:

The print is behind the pillar on the left… but i’ve seen no images of it online.

I poked around for a minute. Behind plexiglass were some drawings from that era, and one seemed to be of the farmer’s hut. But the similarity to my shot from 30 minutes earlier.. it freaked me out. I pulled out my camera and went through the images I had shot that morning, and it was identical. I snapped a picture of the drawing — 10:08am

Old drawing at left, my original uncropped snap at right.

Uncanny resemblance, right?

I can sorta imagine the objects were traditional and the scene was common, and the artist might have seen them anywhere back in the 1920s; then I realized it was more likely this drawing from the 1920s inspired the objects to be set up on the farmhouse in this way for tourists. So I can see how the scene was re-created and I stumbled across both the scene and the inspiration for the scene. Even so, the content isn’t the thing so much as the compositions.

I can only guess that my sense of composition of those objects is so classical in nature that given any way to compose the raincoat, the wall, window and door, my choices were natural.

I dunno. The entire experience was strange. To me I snapped a photo then a half hour later I saw a hundred year old drawing that looked exactly like it.