Sunsets in Hamamatsu...

Maybe it's because it's on the coast, but Hamamatsu frequently has some spectacular sunsets. The light quality late in the day, especially this time of year, almost always fascinates me. It does look different from what I'm used to back in the U.S.

That's something I always wondered about, back when life in a foreign country has strictly theoretical. Would the light look different? I think this has to do with being such a movie buff. Film photography has always fascinated me. I've heard it called "painting with light," and I believe it to be so. And yet many otherwise ordinary days end with the sun working pigmented magic on the canvas of the sky. Even otherwise banal vistas become cinematic.

You couldn't ask for a more boring skyline than the one outside the lobby windows of our school, unless you were overlooking a really grungy industrial wasteland, or some bombed out warzone. But then there would be some kind of nasty, ugly beauty to the blight. Hamamatsu, when you're not looking towards Act City, is about as bland a Japanese city as you're likely to find. Medium-sized office and apartment buildings.

But come sunset with a swollen, blood-red pomegranate of a sun hovering just above them, lightrays like golden bladed knives hurtling at you (and believe me, knives thrown at you tend to get your attention) and clouds turning purple or blue it takes on a kind of gorgeousness of its own. Even concrete squares painted with the right kind of light are pretty.