Notes from Christopher Doyle:

"I travel often; yet like most, I travel even more often in my head.

Preparing a film in Shimane prefecture on the West coast of main island Japan, we travelled from the sea to the Izumo Grand Shrine. The window had been covered in Polarizing gel. I wasn’t sure if this was a Yakuza or film star vanity foible or if some Shinto ancestor had gotten so frustrated by this grey look on the passing world that he or she breathed a hole through which I was now assimilating, photographing the intimate ,embryonic, embrace of this part of Japan.

The only thing the images still don’t explain to me is what makes Izumo a sister city to both Santa Clara in California and Dun Laoghaire in Ireland???"