#japanese customs

• Blood and Rose, Tokyo, 1969 - Shomei Tomatsu

“Dreams, memories, the sacred–they are all alike in that they are beyond our grasp. Once we are even marginally separated from what we can touch, the object is sanctified; it acquires the beauty of the unattainable, the quality of the miraculous. Everything, really, has this quality of sacredness, but we can desecrate it at a touch. How strange man is! His touch defiles and yet he contains the source of miracles.”
- Yukio Mishima

Gosekku-zubyKakizaki Hakyō, with hagoita for the first month, peach blossoms for the third, irises for the fifth, the two lovers for the seventh, and chrysanthemum motifs for the ninth; from the collection of Hakodate City Museum (wikipedia)