Visual Diary: Kamakura

First week in Japan. Jet lag still doing its thing. I’d planned a day trip down to Kamakura mostly to answer one question: is this place worth staying longer when I circle back to Tokyo later in the trip?

The weather had other ideas. Moody. Rain, overcast, that cool dank that clings to you. I walked around the temple grounds and the beach with my camera out, the greedy photographer in me scanning for light that wasn’t there. The Great Buddha sat there in grey nothingness. The beach was a strip of wet sand under a sky that gave you nothing. I shot it anyway. But everything felt like I was photographing through a layer of cotton wool. Still, I enjoyed what I found in that moody day.

I remember thinking: yeah, there’s something here, but I can’t see it properly. It was like trying to judge a room with the curtains down.

Three weeks later I came back. This time I gave it a few days, not a few hours. And the light was there.

Same beach. Same streets. I got lost in backstreets this time, following train tracks, and never made it back to the temple. The trains and backstreets were the best part. The Enoden line cuts through Kamakura at street level. Old wooden houses pressed up against newer concrete. Wires overhead, cats on doorsteps. I stood at a crossing one afternoon. The bell started. The barrier came down. The train slid past, then the barrier lifted and the street was just a street again. Chaos to Calm.

The tricky part of writing this a year later is trusting the photos more than my memory. Which is probably the point. A visual diary should not be a travel guide. It should be a record of what stuck, and the photos are usually better judges of that than I am.

What I remember most clearly from both visits is the difference light makes. Not just to the photographs. To the place itself. The first Kamakura was a question. The second Kamakura was the answer. Both important lessons.