松風荘
My hometown newspaper has a blogger who’s writing about dealing with being laid off in the current economy, and she recommends that people who need to scrimp on travel and entertainment go to the Japanese House and Garden at Fairmount Park in Philadelphia. I second that, for those from the Lehigh Valley who haven’t gone. If memory serves, the sightlines are pretty much uninterrupted to the horizon, which actually makes it very unlike modern Japan. (In Tokyo, even when you’re at the Inner Pond at the Meiji Shrine, you can look up and see buildings way off; in the rest of Japan, it’s usually electric-cable pylons hemming you in.) But it’s beautifully kept up. I wanted to take Atsushi there when I brought him home to meet my parents five years ago, but we never had the time. His taste of Japan PA-style was restricted to the “Japanese” steak house in the South Mall, which he fortunately found amusing.
The Japanese name of the facility, BTW, means something on the order of “pine-wind villa.” The first two characters are read, in other contexts, as matsukaze. It’s the name of one of the most famous Noh classics.
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