Narrow staircase leads up the scaffolding

マンションの入り口の隣に、狭い足場の入り口もあります。

Next to the building’s front door, there is also now the entrance to the scaffolding. It’s narrow and partially hidden.

View from front door is all rubble and heavy labor

玄関から、瓦礫と働く人が見えます。

Western style home from the 1970s also getting scraped

二番目に取り壊される家は洋風です。玄関の上に、古風な機械が置いてあります。

The second house seems somewhat more recent and more Western in style, with lots of fancy metal work and a mix of brick and concrete. During the demolition, archaic machines were perched above the front entry.

Front door decorations made by hand celebrate the new year

マンションのドアに、手作りのしめ飾りを飾っています。萩原さんのワークショップで作りました。楽しかったです。

Here is the new year’s decoration (shimekazari) I created at Shiho studio for our front door. Although there’s a common look to commercial ones, including these at Muji, there’s a lot of variety in terms of shape and materials.

Below is Kuge sensei’s lovely arrangement at the entrance to her studio. The tiny black ball with three colorful petals is a traditional toy played with a badminton-like shuttlecock.  Longtime Shiho studio student Hagiwara-san led the workshop and provided these amazing materials, including red berries, pine, paper, and seed pods.

Giant peonies

With the recent warm weather, these giant pink peonies went quickly from bud to giant pink balls. On one of the lanes I take from my apartment to the JR, I pass this humble apartment whose front garden spills in pots from the tiny patio onto the small street. 

I often see an older woman and sometimes her daughter working in the garden they have created from recycled styrofoam containers and assorted plastic pots. Cymbidium orchids, tulips, geraniums, peonies, and soon roses create a wonderful distraction for passers-by. The owner is at once extremely humble and pleased to get some attention.

To get a sense of the background of the flowers, here’s a photo from further away. You can see the patio flowers share space with the laundry machine and a simple structure for hanging the clothes to dry. The flowers provide a small buffer between street and front door, and soften the hard edges of concrete, asphalt and tile.