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Date of Issue：3 February, 2020 ・Activity 1／Sydney Lighting Survey（2019.09.19 – 2019.09.21） ・Activity 2／Tokyo Survey 　Tsukuda・Tsukishima（2019.11.18） Lighting Detectives Newsletter vol.103  Download PDF Sydney Lighting Survey: How Sydney CBD glows at night 2019.09.19 – 2019.09.21　Momoko Muraoka + Sunyoung Hwang Sydney, a capital city of New South Wales is famous for its beautiful beaches and iconic Opera House. It makes it to the most populous city of Australia with more than 5.2million population. The climate of Sydney is subtropical with no extreme seasonal differences. Highly saturated clear blue sky, lush greeneries, beautiful waterscape, and iconic Opera House – Sydney is the city that has it all. It is quite a lovely place to be and usually makes it to the top rankings for the most liveable cities in the world. This time, Lighting Detectives flew to Sydney to find out how it lights up at night as a famous tourist destination. The survey focuses on the Sydney CBD (Central Business District) area. When looked down from the Sydney Observatory, the city did not have much of the façade lighting. Many of the buildings were glowing with their interior lights. There were not much of RGB lights nor media facade light except few areas of Darling Harbour and Pitt Street, the shopping district. The shot taken from North Sydney to have an overall view of Sydney CBD with iconic Opera House and Harbour Bridge shows this more clearly. Sydney seemed rather classic with a…

The largest city in Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh, has developed into the center of economic activity for the country. The city is in the mists of a huge transformation with new building wherever you turn. We will have to wait and see how the streetscape and lighting environment will be altered. Birds-eye view from the tallest building in the city at the time of survey. Lights from construction　sites all over the city are an undeniable element of the nightscape, but it won’t be long before several skyscrapers begin to dot the skyline of Ho Chi Minh. The principal user of the streets of Ho Chi Minh is the constant stream of motorbikes. Street lighting consists mainly of functional roadway pole lighting and the headlights of these motorbikes. They seem to have forgotten the sidewalks and pedestrian traffic. From restaurants along a main street to the night market and department stores, fluorescent lighting is everywhere. This is Asia before the introduction of LED`s.

2021.07.09　Tomoya Furukawa + Shinichi Sakaguchi+ Naoko Oguchi+ Hikaru Kawata+ Mutsurou Honma+ Rie UomoriYao Yuan+LIU Xinyu+GUO JIANGHAO+ Noriko Higashi　 In the middle of the Covid19 Pandemic activities are still restricted.  However, in order to make this event accessible to more members, we broke up into small groups and went to eight different locations for this city walk.   Each area was interactive with a live broadcast. As the number of those infected with covid19 continues to rise, meeting people and going out is still limited, as are Lighting Detective activities.  However, we still want many people to be able to experience a city walk, so this time we set up a live broadcast city walk. Participants in Tokyo broke up into three groups and spread out over the city to broadcast from the lastest hot spots. In Kyoto members broadcast from the timeless tourist spot, Fushimi Inari Shrine.  In China, members broadcast from three cities for a very full menu. ■Public Park Restrooms in Shibuya The image of a public park restroom is summed up with the 4K`s, Kusai (smelly), Kitanai (dirty), Kurai (dark), Kowai (scary).  Using the power of design to shake this image, The Nippon Foundation is in the middle of developing “The Tokyo Toilet” project in Shibuya Ward.  We surveyed a few locations in Shibuya. The public restrooms in Yoyogi Fukamachi Park and Haruno Ogawa Community Park have transparent walls, a totally alternative way of thinking and impractical design. …

Date of Issue: December 22, 2022・Activity 1/ City Night Survey : Tsushima Fishing Fire（2022.09.30-10.02）・Activity 2/ Night Walk in Hong Kong（2022.11.24） City Night Survey : Tsushima Fishing Fire2022.09.30-10.02　Momoko Muraoka + Hikaru Kimura + Akemi Sasamoto Squid, the local specialty of Tsushima, are caught at night. The view of fishing fire illuminating the horizon is not a planned lighting environment, but a nightscape that naturally emerges from the livelihood of local fishermen.To explore this scenery of “light from daily life,” we visited Tsushima and boarded a fishing boat to experience night fishing. Under a sky full of stars, we documented the striking contrast between the vast shadowed sea and the line of fishing fires along the horizon.The interplay of starlight, fishing fire, and their faint reflections on the water revealed a beauty entirely different from that of urban lighting design. Through this survey, we were able to appreciate not only the outcome of the fishing itself, but also how light is deeply intertwined with the culture and daily life of the region. ■Boarding the Squid Fishing Boat Night fishing with lights (called “yodaki”) is a traditional fishing method that makes use of the phototactic nature of fish—their instinct to gather toward light. Its origin dates back to ancient times, and while the light sources themselves have changed over the centuries, the practice of kindling lights at sea remains the same. The nightscape of fishing fires has thus continued as a scenery born…

2022.10.01-10.03 Shunichi Ikeda + Genki Watanabe Koyasan (Wakayama Prefecture), a sacred site of Japanese Buddhism with a history of 1,200 years, was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2004 and again in 2016, and is one of the world’s most renowned religious cities. It is also a popular tourist destination, attracting many international visitors prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Through the distinctive light environment created by the numerous temples and shrines, as well as through the experience of staying at temple lodgings (shukubō), we conducted an investigation into this extraordinary lighting culture from the perspective of the Lighting Detectives. Koyasan is a town situated in a mountain basin at an altitude of 800 meters, surrounded by peaks of around 1,000 meters in northern Wakayama Prefecture. It was founded about 1,200 years ago, in the early Heian period, by the Buddhist monk Kōbō Daishi (Kūkai) as a sacred site of Japanese Buddhism, with Danjō Garan serving as the central temple complex of this religious city.Originally, the entire area of Koyasan was considered part of the grounds of Kongōbu-ji Temple.For us, this was the first time to focus on a religious city in an urban lighting survey. We wanted to examine what the nightscape of this temple town looks like and how the lighting culture of Japan and Buddhism manifests itself in various aspects. ■Okunoin, Kongōbu-ji, Head Temple of Koyasan Shingon Buddhism Okunoin is an expansive cemetery stretching about 2…