Japan Autumn Photography Tour Workshop

The best time of year to visit and photograph these natural wonders is in the autumn, but spring is also a great time to view them, and next week our workshop leaders will start the JapanDreamscapes annual cross country cherry blossom photo tour, and they are hopeful that the highland roads will be open allowing access to view the sea of clouds in the valley of the dragons.  On a side note if you do a web search for ‘the valley of the dragons’, you will find a science fiction film from 1961, the movie is based on Jules Verne’s fantastic works, which take the reader on the adventure of a lifetime!  On another side note, Japan is over 75% unpopulated wilderness, with an abundance of wildlife, across Japan there are over one hundred and twenty thousand snow monkeys.  And even more interesting, and mysterious is across Japan, there are over one hundred and sixty thousand Kofun tombs and villages associated with them, and on my workshops we visit a few.  The Kofun period of Japan spanned from about 250 C.E. to 538 C.E.  Egypt has the pyramids Japan has the Kofun mounds.   And as an amateur historian, one of our workshop leaders has a concrete theory who built the Kofun mounds and villages, partly from Ainu stories handed down though generations, and from folklore of ancient craftspersons who built Japans ancient Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines, that some of these ancient temples and shrines were built over Kofun burial sites and villages.  Join us for a Japan photo workshop and hear his theories!