TRAINS, TEMPLES, AND HORDES—GOZAIMASU! (continued)

 

Bruce David Wilner
July 2001

 

May 2001

Sun

Mon

Tue

Wed

Thu

Fri

Sat

 

15

fly to Tokyo

16

Tokyo

17

Tokyo

18

Tokyo

19

Tokyo / Kamakura

20

Kyoto / Nara

21

Kyoto / Himeji

22

Kyoto

23

fly home

 

closing thoughts

 

Sun 20 May     Back to top

Today we head for Kyoto. I’m awake at 2:00AM after a short dream. Walking to the am pm mart at 3:00AM while Cheryl still sleeps, the only thing on the street is the occasional taxi—or so I think, until I see a guy buying two 2-liter plastic bottles of Kirin beer. Even here there are problems with alcoholism. Beer is also vended on the street, but you must be twenty to buy it (though this isn’t enforced by the machine), and, as we will be taught a few days later, sales cease at 11:00PM (which is enforced by the machine). I look through the large collection of Japanese comics at the am pm, hoping to find a Tetsujin 28-go ("Iron Man 28" —we used to call him Gigantor when he played on American TV in the 1960s), but I strike out. Since we know that the shinkansen platforms won’t open until 5:30AM, we content ourselves with our old friend Shihab Rattansi on CNN news (at least it’s in English; the other choices are French news and German news). I also watch a Japanese chemistry ("change study" —peculiarly enough, not "change science" —but akin to the "ancient study" that means "archaeology") lesson on channel 4, an evident game show on another station, and photos of old Japanese rural life—set to hokey music—on yet another.

We schlep our luggage to the Yamanote station and then ride to Tokyo station—which, we have been told, sees 3600 trains in and out daily. (We can see how the station could intimidate people who didn’t grow up in New York or London, but is it really worth it to pay the several hundred dollars extra that the tour companies charge to lead you through the station by the hand and bundle you onto the train like a three-year-old—especially when the place is littered with English signs?) We still haven’t seen the fabled subway packers who use poles to tightly pack people into trains at rush hour, costing many riders their shoes but never their lives—then again, we haven’t visited Shinjuku station, which is the most infamous for this phenomenon. We get off the Yamanote line at 5:00AM and buy a pair of bento boxes at the kiosk. The boxes hold neatly wrapped sushi, individual tiny bottles of soy sauce, and hashi (chopsticks). It’s ironic that, though the shinkansen is new (opened in 1964), we must haul our huge bags up the steps to the shinkansen platforms, as escalators are seldom to be found in this portion of the station.

Our shinkansen arrives a couple of minutes before the scheduled departure time. The sleek train is white with a horizontal blue lateral stripe—unlike our old friend, the Yamanote, which is silver with a green stripe.

The shinkansen’s seating is three on one side of the aisle, two on the other.

The signs identify the seating choices as "aisle" (actually, simply "path" ), "center" , and "window" (literally, "side" —the character makes no reference to glass). There is no carpet. The seats recline, and entire racks of seats can be rotated to form conversational groups for four or six persons. The luggage racks overhead ingeniously slope downward toward the walls so that luggage won’t spill when the train lists. Cheryl was careful to choose seats that are in the last row of the car (behind which there is a generous area for our large suite of luggage) and on the Mount Fuji side (hoping for a view thereof). There are entrances at both the front and rear of each car, and markings on the platform indicate precisely where each set of doors will open. Every other car has washrooms (both Japanese and Western) and a urinal with a peculiar see-through window. I wonder about the first-class "green car" but don’t get to see it yet.

We pull out precisely on time, and the conductor presently marches past. Now, on Amtrak, the guy takes your tickets and sticks them into a slot above your seat so that he can remember who’s been vetted and who hasn’t. The Japanese do not require that, perhaps because they all have the memory of Kreskin: the conductor checks only once, gives us back our tickets, and never bothers us again.


Diversion on Japanese language: Why does every other directional sign say "square face" ? The answer is that square + face means "direction" or "toward." The washrooms are marked "harmonious style" (literally, "rice-in-mouth style")—meaning simply "Japanese style"—or "Western style" (literally, "Atlantic style" ). Something tells me that wa (harmonious) derives from the name Showa—Hirohito’s reign—during which era the trains were built. (Actually, I later learn that the use of wa derives from an archaic name for Japan, yamato ["big harmony" ], which obviously no longer matches the modern pronunciation of those characters [daiwa] and therefore properly requires furigana to annotate it. Kanji like these that are used only for their meaning—their standard pronunciation being totally ignored—are called ateji; this term also refers to the converse situation where the kanji are used solely for their sound without regard for their meaning.) Next linguistic diversion or previous


Looking at the conductor, I realize that it is difficult to tell the socioeconomic classes apart here. He is probably highly educated even though he’s a train conductor: indeed, he looks distinguished. Nearly everyone is dignified and spotless and has excellent posture. They are Japanese, man, and that means pride. I’d be willing to bet that, should the national anthem start playing, they’d all burst into tears.

Most of the Japanese are sleeping on the train, but two businessmen are eating Western-style food. At least, it’s their version of Western-style food that, like many other perceptions of the West, is about thirty years behind the times. Specifically, the food consists of an unidentifiable sandwich on lowly white bread, from which all of the crust has been neatly trimmed—the way I insisted my mother prepare my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches when I was four. The gentleman in front of us asks us, "May I please recline my seat?" before reclining his seat. That would never happen in America. We are soon reminded of the ubiquity of smoking when the door to the next car opens and a smoky miasma that could choke a herd of elephants wafts in.

Through our windows, we get a quick survey of the overwhelmingly ugly, immense Tokyo-Yokohama conurbation. We see houses and manshon (high-rise condominiums, typically twelve to twenty stories) along the tracks. It seems peculiar to build a luxury high-rise right next to tracks where trains whiz past at 100+ mph all day and night. We are really wondering how these encyclopedia and magazine photographers manage to snap pictures of such stunning natural Japanese beauty, since we were to see no countryside at all—and not much beauty—for the entirety of our 330-mile ride from Tokyo to Kyoto. Throughout the ride, a uniformed kid with a silly hat hawked drinks, candy bars, ice cream (sweet potato or green tea flavor—never chocolate), and gift boxes of dreadful bean-based Japanese confections called wagashi. (They are indeed odd: I understand that one favorite, called kohakukan-ume, is a whole plum coated with translucent bean "jelly" and dusted with flakes of gold leaf. I put "jelly" in quotes because, to me, jelly should be based on something delicious, like strawberries or grapes. I always avoid dessert at Asian restaurants back home; now we see why!)

We are hoping for a view of Mount Fuji, or Fujisan . Is that it? I think so. No, wait a minute: I think it’s that mountain over there. All of this speculation ends abruptly when we happen upon Fuji. There can be no mistake. This magnificent snow-capped volcano fills the entire sky. Though the vistas have largely been spoiled by power lines, this isn’t the case here (probably because power lines don’t reach the 12,388-foot level). The gentleman in front of us tells us that we are quite lucky to obtain such a fine view of Fuji, since it’s usually shrouded in mists and fog. (Of course, the pictures in books show empty fields near Fuji, not suburbs. They must have been taken from the rural north of Honshu, not from the Tokaido [“Pacific Way,” literally, “Eastern Ocean Way" ] shinkansen tracks.) We chuckle at the thought of the other tourists who spent an entire day driving to Fuji and hiking up its slopes. No way on earth did they enjoy the stunning view that we did. Unfortunately, the camera does not capture subtle contrasts and shadows quite as well as the eye.

For hundreds of miles, we see continuous housing, factories, tiny farms, greenhouses, the occasional rice paddy, then a high-rise manshon, with only the roofs offering any hint of japonaiserie. People are working in the rice paddies, occasionally with flame throwers. Interestingly, we haven’t seen any livestock at all. The cyan construction equipment (it’s typically yellow at home) is an interesting twist. We also see green tea fields, snug little orchards of wasabi bushes, tiny mountainside cemeteries, and a mountaintop sign on a particularly ugly suburb—even uglier than York, Pennsylvania—that proclaims "Chrysanthemum River Ward" with the utmost pride. I sneeze, and a lady stares at me in horror. The Japanese have a real problem with other persons' emissions, but what am I supposed to do?

It is clear that there is no zoning here at all. Even in the city, you will find a rice paddy between two factories; a high-rise next to a farm; a small cemetery between two high-rises. It is absolutely bizarre. The Japanese just build, build, build without regard to any classical sense of aesthetics. They certainly cherish aesthetics, but aesthetics have had to be subjugated to the interests of practicality in this tiny country that has twelve times the average population density of the United States. Since 70% of Japan is so mountainous as to be uninhabitable, the population density of the the inhabited regions is something like forty times that of the U.S. I could ask, if the Japanese are such a nation of Einsteins, why are their islands so gravely overpopulated?

We arrive in Kyoto. Kintetsu station is immense and has an integrated eleven-story shopping plaza with many shops, but the design is rather poor—you must walk up and over and down to avoid going through train gates. Walking down the steps to the street level, I notice the distinct odor of urine, though Cheryl tells me I'm imagining things. This is not as clean as Tokyo. Coin lockers outside the station depict a mother duck and her offspring waddling along—again, evidence of the Japanese flair for most peculiar advertisements. We haul our luggage across the street to the New Miyako hotel (again, Cheryl has chosen an outstandingly convenient location: this is the nerve center of all Kyoto tours for every tour company)—while construction workers point at my wife and say shojo (beautiful girl). Our room is not yet ready at 9:30AM, so we leave our bags with the bellwoman (not a bellman!) who handles the bags with the strength of a sumo wrestler. I call her rikishi and get a big laugh.

People-watching in the station, I note that the Japanese are indeed short—though, now and then, some lanky boy reaches the six-foot-three level, which is about as stratospheric as they get here. I also see one midget in the Kyoto station, and throughout our trip we’ve already seen a handful of wheelchairs and one Down Syndrome sufferer—a sobering reminder that tragedy is everywhere and that God makes all men as He sees fit.

Cheryl had wanted to catch the opening ceremony (at 10:00AM) of a department store in Tokyo. We missed this performance in Tokyo, but we will get to catch the opening of Isetan here. At precisely 10:00AM, the doors open, and the entire staff bows and offers "irasshaimase." We are first in line, so we bear the brunt of this assault. Each time we pass another staff member, we receive another bow and another welcome. It gets borderline ridiculous when, as soon as we enter a new department, the Japanese staffers bow and scrape yet again. Testing out the free food theory anew, we discover that, just as at Mitsukoshi, only the vegetables are free: you must pay for flesh. We had read in one of our tour guides that Osakans go bust on food but Kyotoans on clothing; perhaps this is true, as we have yet to be impressed by the food here in Kyoto. The shrimp tempura that Cheryl bought at the department store is so heavily breaded—like Kentucky Fried Chicken; nay, like Long John Silver’s chicken strips—as to be nearly unacceptable. It’s harder to find our way here, since people don’t speak English as well or as often as they do in Tokyo. Also, it is crystal-clear that this city is a tourist rip-off spot: we see shoji for seventy bucks here that we could have bought for thirty in Kamakura.

Our room was ready by noon. We drew room 863 on the eighth floor. The room was larger than in Tokyo, but the toilet had only one flush mode. I was disturbed to find a hair wedged between the bathtub and the sink and (the next day) another hair—perhaps it’s mine (does that mean they didn’t change the sheets?)—between my pillow and mattress. Looking out the window, I conclude that the five-story pagoda a few blocks away to the southwest must be the Toji shrine where Cheryl wants to hunt for antique kimonos and accoutrements tomorrow morning. Though we had a view of a shinkansen track, the room was to be pretty quiet until the 3:00AM train thundered along. Like the station, our room reeks of overt tourist orientation: English signs predominate, and the Gideon bible is in English, with Japanese text an apparent afterthought. However, the décor is an attractive, subdued pink with blond wood fixtures (like in Tokyo), a minibar (like in Tokyo), and a decorative frieze with a plum/apricot/cherry blossom motif. It also includes extra pillows and rheostats on every lamp. Opening the dresser drawer, we find that the yukata here has the hotel’s name, and the toilet sandals are grandma scuffs, not grandpa cross-straps like we had in Tokyo.


Diversion on Japanese footwear: Three types of thong sandals constitute the spectrum of traditional Japanese footwear: the straw-soled unisex zori; the leather-soled men’s formal setta; and the wooden-soled unisex geta, mounted atop two horizontal crossbars that elevate the sole several inches above the ground for ease of walking in muddy terrain. Men’s sandals have black straps (except for setta, which have white straps) while women’s have colored straps. Though setta must be worn with split-toed tabi socks (foot mittens, as it were), zori and geta may be worn either with tabi or without, the latter seemingly predominant. Although we saw geta for sale, we did not see anyone wearing them, though we did see zori and setta—as well as Western-style, rubber-soled flip-flops on younger folks.


We are out on the street again but must return shortly to meet our Nara tour group. We pass a Honda (vice Acura) Vigor and a Honda (vice Acura) Legend. (Though popular in North America, Honda is not a popular brand of automobile here in Japan.) We are spending lots of time enjoying the signs (at least I am). Torturing meaning out of written Japanese is like solving a challenging blend of cryptograms and rebuses.


Diversion on Japanese language: I have seen umpteen words for "store": "house", "exchange" , "merchant place", "shop" , "market" . I have also seen several terms for city, including and . I have more fun trying to find co-significs (or apparent co-significs), which make up only 10% of the kanji. I discover that a lamp is a "fire post" and a limousine is a "people rail" (actually, "name rail" ). More context dependencies are evidenced: child means "little" in "little boy" and "little girl" but is seemingly used as an honorific in "gentlemen’s" and "ladies’" (actually, "man-little usage" and "woman-little usage" ). The to in Kyoto (which means “large city”) is pronounced “Miyako" when it appears on the side of our hotel. A bank is a "silver go" and mixed fruit (as in mixed fruit yogurt) is "fruit objects" . A newspaper is a "new hear", which seems generic enough to mean any number of things. An emergency exit—even though there is a unique word for emergency—is the most unimportant-sounding "not usual opening" . (I am at a loss to explain why the Japanese made the evident minor alteration to the Chinese version of the character signifying "not " .) Oddest of all is that "occupied" is rendered as "convenient usage middle" . The Japanese do not express thoughts the way we do. We learn words, plus rules for combining parts of speech into sentences; they learn combinations of words that express specific abstract concepts. This medium offers nothing approaching the expressive range of English. How could such a technological giant muster itself on this preposterous basis? Next linguistic diversion or previous


Back in the hotel, my suspicions that this is a hotel of, by, and for tourists are confirmed: when I ask "What’s this thing in the minibar?" (only to end up accidentally buying it) and call the front desk to cancel my twenty-dollar Chivas Regal "purchase," they already know that I withdrew a Chivas Regal—though all I told them was that I wanted to cancel an item. Studying the room more closely, I discover a "balcony" that is barely large enough to plant a single geranium. The windows open to the street with no screen, which is out of line with the safety-consciousness (fanaticism, even) that we have seen, e.g., fire extinguishers anywhere you could fit a red-armored mouse. I turn on the TV and see something uniquely Japanese: a comedy variety show whose characters include a sushi chef; a man sporting lipstick and a bra; and a policeman. They are hanging out at a waterside resort and are engaged in some zany slapstick, replete with throwing packages and dishes at one another.

Our tour leaves promptly for the temples and deer park of Nara at 1:40PM. The tour organizers give each of us a Bambi sticker to wear on our shirts. I’m getting cloyed on shrines, truth be known, but there’s a huge Buddha and the world-famous deer park, so I bite my tongue. Our female guide is Haruko. The suburbs of this city, more spacious than the (nonexistent) suburbs of the capital, have real gas stations that actually occupy land, made conspicuous by flashing red-on-black LED signs that advertise the prices of gasoline in yen per liter (three to four dollars per gallon is the average). As each car stops at the gas station, a team of three attendants lavishes care on the vehicle. We also see garden apartment complexes that are closer to American than anything we’ve seen so far. A few miles outside Kyoto, we find ourselves in honest-to-goodness countryside, with large tracts of lightly developed or undeveloped land that even include virgin bamboo forest.

Arriving first at the massive Todai-ji shrine—the world’s largest wooden building—we learn that a Buddhist shrine is never completed because there’s nowhere but downhill to go from perfection.

The entrance to the shrine is protected by Unkei’s renowned pair of giant Buddhist guardian deities (nio, or "virtuous kings" ) brilliantly sculpted in wood—one saying "ah" and one saying "om" (the first and last letters of the Sanskrit alphabet, a combination akin to A—W in Christian symbolism).

The colossal bronze Buddha in the heart of the temple is awe-inspiring. One of the wooden columns exhibits a tight slit, precisely the width of the sculpted Buddha’s nostril, through which one crawls; the slit has some vital significance or other, but I wasn’t paying attention. Again, thousands of middle school students from all over Japan make the trip nearly unbearable, since an 80°F day plus throngs of people equals a 100°F day. We try to imagine how the temple looked before all the gold leaf was weathered off. En route to the shrine, I hand ¥30 to a monk with a begging bowl; I hope he was real, not just some clever character preying on tourists. I start to wonder, since I recall that his bowl was empty except for my three coins.

Outside the Todai-ji shrine, we pet and hug the cute deer, which are called shika. They are finger-trained and supposedly will rush over to you as soon as they see you buy crackers at the omnipresent vendors’ stalls. Many bask in the sun in cliques of three to five animals. One older sweetheart has a cataract. I figure that, since deer eat apples and also the standard Todai-ji crackers, they might enjoy my Fig Newtons®, and I am not disappointed: they gobble them up (better for them than toilet paper, which they also eat—with gusto—if the bathroom doors are left unclosed) and pose for adorable photographs.

Of course, you must watch out for their feces, which is everywhere. (Speaking of feces, the bathrooms here are marked benjo ["convenience place" ]—which is considered more than marginally gauche—rather than "honorable hand-washing room" [o-tearai], which is how the signage read in Tokyo. Now, though the books say that benjo means "convenience place," I happen to know that the first character is overloaded with many meanings—not the least of which is [conveniently enough] "feces.") Thank goodness it isn’t raining today, as it’s supposed to do tomorrow, lest the deer and their "convenience" stink to high heaven!

Why are the deer so small, even smaller than the axis deer (chital) from which they’re descended? The answer is that, every autumn, the priests cut the males’ antlers amid much ritualized spectacle. This is not a good thing from the eugenic standpoint, since antlers guarantee that only the strongest, most fit males will be permitted to breed. With all males equalized antler-wise, every dorky buck gets to breed, and—since the population is limited—the hardiness of the species declines over centuries of such intervention. These deer are so small. I tell our guide that, at home, we have deer weighing over 100 kilograms that are frequently hit by suburbanites’ cars, and she can scarcely believe my testimony.

We now head to the Kasuga shrine, where we see the standard Shinto priests and a variety of very ancient trees (some 700 to 1000 years old). After our tour of Kasuga—which also takes us past a humorous sign that warns of one to avoid aggressive stags during the mating season—we end up switching buses for some reason or another to head back to Kyoto. We sit baking in traffic, passing the prefecture government complex and gawking at more peculiar cars (including the Toyota Ariel, Toyota Bluebird, and Nissan Laurel Medalist—the last of which sports an L logo that almost looks like the one on our Lexuses). We also pass a Ferrari. It dawns on me that I don’t think I’ve seen a car more than five years old. I’m not sure why: maybe cars are legislated off the road when they start to burn uncleanly; perhaps the Japanese are obsessed with owning new, shiny things; perhaps they love to blow money on status symbols; or it could be that they simply take pride in caring meticulously for their machines, whether they fit in a pocket or in a garage. (My Chinese friend tells me that the explanation is that the Japanese sell their cars to the Chinese as soon as they show any wear and tear.) All I know is that it’s a delight not to continually stumble across revolting-looking jalopies belching out black clouds, driven by Hispanics, and featuring a mismatched rear door and a trunk lid in yet a third color. Our new guide, Kazuko, is trying to embark on a lecture about the Japanese business world, but an Indian couple’s young child won’t shut up—which ruins the tour for all of these nice, patient customers who paid an arm and a leg—so I chastise the mother, calling her a sudra, and the bus is suddenly as quiet as a tomb. Here is what we learn from Kazuko:

The Japanese salary structure is narrow regardless of occupational specialty. Whether you are a university teacher, a tour guide, a bus driver (crisply uniformed and white gloved, of course), or an engineer, you will earn $50K in your prime and $90K when you retire. Nowadays, if you can earn $100K at the age of forty, you’re doing well enough to attract attention. The life of the office worker is one of patience; striving to be virtuous; and consideration. If one wishes to leave the office after only ten hours’ worth of work, one must apologize to one’s colleagues for leaving them to shoulder the burden. At least one no longer suffers the drudgery of an extra half-day’s work on Saturday: like their U.S. counterparts, Japanese professionals now enjoy a five-day workweek. The salaryman’s life is shockingly restricted, so Kazuko’s friends envy her freedom. Though food didn’t seem outrageously expensive, a small apartment rents for $2500 per month and a seat at the movies costs $15.

Kazuko turns her attention to the mysterious world of the geisha that has been popularized in recent literature. A mature geisha is a geiko, and a geisha-in-training is a maiko ("sweet little hemp clothes girl," literally, "hemp clothes little" , though the books translate it as "dance girl"—which I learn later from an airport security officer whose given name is Maiko, though subsequent research reveals that, more than likely, either her name was paronomastically homophonous or her command of Japanese etymology was weak). There are only 200 geiko now, averaging in their late fifties, and only about twenty maiko. The recession has hit hard: most men cannot afford to pay many thousands of dollars to be entertained by geisha at a traditional teahouse, or ryokan (which is not to be confused with an upscale restaurant, or ryotei). The geiko’s kimono costs ¥5,000,000, or forty thousand dollars. Ironically, it is difficult for the untrained observer to distinguish a geiko’s kimono from an ordinary well-to-do woman’s formal kimono. Nowadays, many of the maiko seen at temples are fake, as there are thirty or so studios that will doll up a young lady to look like a maiko for a quick $200. In the olden days, maiko began their training at age six on the sixth of June (666 is lucky in Japan). Since she is only permitted to visit the beauty salon weekly, the maiko must sleep on an extremely uncomfortable wooden pillow with a padded, U-shaped depression in order to preserve her gorgeous coiffure.

Kazuko said times were better when there were 360 yen to the dollar: there were far more tourists and they spent much more and tipped quite generously. The least favorable exchange rate for outsiders was 80 yen to the dollar in 1995; today the rate is 125, give or take. Another side effect of the recession is the proliferation of "hostess bars" that are replacing traditional geisha establishments. Though the tour books indicate that a hostess is often a glorified prostitute, Kazuko is quick to correct this misconception: it may take fifty visits to the hostess bar at $750 a pop before you’ll have a chance to get into the hostess’s pants. $37,500 is rather a stiff fee for a prostitute, wouldn’t you agree?

Meandering back through the city streets, we see yagi antennas and satellite dishes everywhere and conclude that there is no cable TV in Japan. This, like the absence of underground power lines, makes sense because of the extreme earthquake-proneness of the Japanese islands. We pass a McDonalds (there are reputed to be more than 2500 of them in Japan), but this one has a subdued brown sign rather than the signal red of Tokyo’s (and Washington’s!), as Kyoto imposes restrictions on the garishness of signage out of respect for the softer appearance of its traditional cityscape. We also pass a traffic accident that is being attended to by police. The police will interview the drivers and witnesses and decide which party is X% negligent and which party is (100-X)% negligent, with the insurance carriers partitioning the costs accordingly. Accidents are becoming more prevalent as incidents of road rage become more commonplace. Popular or not, we heard perhaps two horns being honked during our weeklong stay in Tokyo and Kyoto. Kazuko’s insurance premium of $700 per annum seems reasonable to an American (we pay $2400 per year for a pair of Lexuses with only one speeding ticket between the two of us in the last three years). Passing a construction zone en route to the hotel district, we again note the Japanese penchant for assigning names of juvenile simplicity to big businesses: the predominant heavy construction firm in Japan, identified by the signs flanking its work zones, is called simply Daitetsu, "Big Iron" —though I suppose one could come up with a snappier English translation, say, "Ironmax" or "Mega Metal."

We arrive at the Kyoto Hotel in the heart of downtown (“market middle" ), where Kazuko advises us to leave the bus if we want to grab a quick dinner and meet my wife's Internet "pen pal," Manabu (more about him shortly). Crossing the street, we see that the north-south "walk/don’t walk" sign chirps rhythmically in a monotone, while the sign on the cross street chirps rhythmically in two tones. This, we learn, is for the assistance of the blind.

We ate at the Musashi kaitenzushi ("revolving sushi") restaurant where the patrons sit at a counter and the food revolves on a conveyor belt of interlocking metal plates like you see at the airport luggage carousel. (The kai in kaiten , which means "revolve" in this context, can also express "repetition," "return," and even "inning" [as in baseball].)

The older version of kaitenzushi used a "sushi boat," but such bells and whistles have been done away with, presumably in order to maximize the number of mouths that can be simultaneously crammed into the joint and stuffed with squid entrails. Cheryl ate five plates of food, while I ate eight. I tried some more adventurous dishes, including the octopus (which is tender and delicious, not like at home) and some unidentifiable marine gastropods. Cheryl is, as usual, much more conservative, clinging to the shrimp and salmon choices for dear life among the dizzying assortment of headless and/or tentacled slimy things. The other customers find it bizarre when I scrape off the wasabi, but I find their lack of egos rather more bizarre. Finally, the chef laughs when I pick up the revolving Asahi beer can (it’s just an empty sample), rushing me an ice-cold beer (either 12 ounces or 375 ml, I’m not sure which) at the most unreasonable price of ¥350.

We walked over toward the subway station—where teenage boys with earrings and torn jeans are hanging out—to hunt for the statue of the bowing samurai, where Manabu told us he would meet us at 7:30PM to give us a personalized walking tour of the Gion district. In actuality, he got there at 6:50PM, just a few minutes after we did. Manabu—whose name means "study" though he is clearly no study animal—is 23 years old and recently graduated from college with a degree in the social sciences. Not surprisingly, his career options are limited with this background, and he works part-time at a convenience store, but he is taking some computer programming classes so that he can get a good job. I’m not sure whether or not this is typical, but he has no concept of the price of Japanese cars and has never in his life visited either Tokyo (330 miles away) or Himeji (75 miles away). Yet, he has been to the Netherlands. (I wonder what the Dutch connection is—I met numerous Dutch and Belgian tourists in Tokyo, and where of all countries does Manabu choose to travel! I’m sure I’ll figure it out.) Manabu is very friendly and shy and exhibits typical Japanese manners and morals: when Cheryl presents him a gift of a Japanese-language book about tourist attractions in Washington, DC, he almost faints with appreciation, and when we stop later for a drink at a convenience store, he is extremely reluctant to allow me to purchase him so much as a one-dollar bottled water.

Kyoto, Manabu tells us, lives by tourism and has suffered greatly since the depression. Despite the image that foreigners may have, only a few blocks’ worth of traditional wooden buildings remain in the historic Ponto-cho and Gion districts.

By the way, the long curtains that hang over the entrance in lieu of a door—like the brown ones, calligraphed in black, that grace the following photo—are called noren in Japanese.

The rest either burned down or were sold for the value of the land. I see lovely restaurants with outdoor verandahs and beautiful views of the canal (which used to be clean). The restaurants have melodramatic names like Ishiriki (“One Force" ) and "Chrysanthemum Plum" . By the time we emerge from the quaint side streets into the busier areas, we have not seen any geisha. Manabu cautions us to watch out for pickpockets. We are lucky to see a few interesting sights, including a protest march (duly led by a policeman) and a restaurant that charges $80 for a not-too-generous meal of shabu shabu (a sliced beef "hot pot").


Diversion on geisha: Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha (New York: Vintage Books, 1997) is an award-winning historical novel about life in the Ponto-cho and Gion sections of Kyoto. Unfortunately, according to Manabu, many of the details were concocted. Kyoko Aihara’s Geisha: A Living Tradition (London: Carlton Books, 1999) is a highly accurate, enthralling, and profusely illustrated study of the geisha tradition.


More than once, Manabu expressed embarrassment that his city is no longer as beautiful as it was in his youth. He seems to feel a deep, individual shame at this, as if he’s personally responsible for its decline. At least it’s not as hectic and unfriendly as Tokyo, he says. (We disagreed: we thought Tokyo was not so crowded, and rather friendly—though my standard of comparison is New York. Now, standard references indicate that Tokyo has nearly twice the population density of New York [36,000 versus 20,000 persons per square mile], so the only explanation I can muster is that Tokyo's relative cleanliness makes it seem so much more spacious.) There are many drunkards on the streets even though the beer vending machines shut down at 11:00PM. He says that, in general, Japan is going downhill, probably due to overexposure to the dégagé lifestyle of the West. Young Japanese no longer respect their nation’s history and often cannot properly read or write the kanji. Both Manabu and I are in agreement that it is only a matter of time before the archaic Japanese writing system is completely supplanted by romaji.

We walk past a pachinko parlor. These are not quite as plentiful as the travel guides would lead you to believe. I ventured inside for a moment to try to determine what it was all about, but the place was so loud, smoky, and offensive with brilliant neon and flashing red lights that I found myself nearly knocked backward—as if repelled by a force field. While we’re all falling asleep on our feet and walking back to our initial meeting point, we see a vendor’s truck set up on the sidewalk to offer broiled octopus to go (the truck’s awning depicts a cartoon octopus wearing a sushi chef’s hachimaki headband), but Manabu advises us to avoid this food for sanitation’s sake. He hails us a taxi, bids us a very friendly farewell, and instructs the driver to take us back to the Kintetsu station side of the New Miyako Hotel. Unfortunately, the air conditioning is not on in the taxi and the night air is quite muggy, but I don’t know enough Japanese to ask the driver to turn it on. Oh, well, what can you do?

Back at the hotel, our room is indeed comfortable; my fears that the classical muzak that was playing in the corridors would be discernible from inside our room turned out to be baseless. The thick buckwheat husk pillows are snuggly, and the air conditioning is so ice-cold—even on the low setting—that I must wake up several times to turn it now off, now back on when the humidity climbs. Oh, well, who can sleep anyway in this God-forsaken place where people are thirteen hours out of synchrony with the real world? In the old cartoons, one would dig a hole through the center of the earth and emerge in Japan, where people were walking on their heads. They weren’t that far off.

 

Mon 21 May     Back to top

I had another decent (though not great) night’s sleep, as I dreamed before awakening at 3:45AM. Today we plan to go to Himeji Castle and, perhaps, the Osaka Aquarium. Cheryl doesn’t know it yet, but our plans are subject to sudden flux. Just between you and me, I think that Himeji will be a rough hike, so I don’t really want to go to the Osaka Aquarium afterwards—since it means yet another train ride and yet another subway ride—and the 150-mile round trip to and from Himeji is strenuous enough for a day of “leisure.” Maybe we’ll go to Minachu on Nawate (the tour books told us about it) to buy me some nifty zori or geta thong sandals, or perhaps I’ll buy a new wristwatch at Isetan, since mine is mysteriously losing about twenty minutes per day.

Our first stop is the Toji shrine flea market, which is held monthly. As we will learn later from a (Caucasian) American girl on our tour whose parents live in Kobe, the Japanese flock to these “shrine sales.” After all, what more convenient place to hock discount merchandise than in God’s own precinct? Jesus would not approve. Walking through the quiet streets at 6:00AM, past the ubiquitous neighborhood dental office (labeled “tooth science), beer vending machines, a fire station, and a closed koban:

we enter the temple grounds, where merchants are just now setting up prior to the 7:00AM-8:00AM "official" opening. (Note the sign that advertises kerosene—literally, “lamp oil—for sale; the preceding characters, “sun rock,” are presumably the name of the firm.) I tried to pet one guy’s dog, but, just like the lady at Ueno Park, the guy evidently perceived me as an unwelcome intruder into his man-dog relationship. We scored a gorgeous, century-old silk kimono, stunning black with floral motifs near the bottom; an obi featuring a komainu motif; and a second obi featuring a crane motif. All three garments together cost under $120. I try to jew down one of the merchants but succeed only in drawing giggles from the shrewd grandmas as they pick through the piles of garments with their clever, bony fingers. When I ask one vendor whether the price includes tax ("tax inside" ) by scratching out those kanji in my notebook and flashing it before him, I draw a hearty laugh. Something tells me that the government does not participate in the shrine sale bounty. I stumble upon a statue that I think I recognize from one of our guidebooks as Kukai, the monk who purportedly invented the hiragana in the ninth century, and the confirmatory dialogue with an elderly man ("Kukai?” “Kukai!") tells me that I’m correct.

Trying to find the exit, we have to rely upon Cheryl’s compass, but it isn’t helping with all the metal booths everywhere. Finally escaping, we take a taxi back to the hotel in preparation for our haul by shinkansen to Himeji.

We need breakfast, and not much is open, but Mr. Donut is rocking and rolling—quite literally. While lined up to choose our donuts from the wide selection—featuring, oddly enough, the world-famous egg salad donut—the audio system is playing the Beach Boys, "The Wanderer," Neil Sedaka’s "Next Door to an Angel," and "My Boy Friend’s Back." Is this what they think of modern American culture? Whatever; we pay for our treats, receive bows and scrapes, and sit down to enjoy our "American-style" meal.

Looking at a poster in Mr. Donut, I can’t figure out what purpose the character for "sun" serves. I know that it is used to mean "day" as well as "sun." Aha! It means "Sunday" as well. The Japanese are using the Chinese designations for days of the week, putting the single character (without the equivalent of our –day suffix) in parentheses just after the numeric day:

Sunday = sun

Monday = moon

Tuesday = fire

Wednesday = water

Thursday = wood

Friday = metal

Saturday = earth

I know that English has words overloaded with multiple meanings, but they seem to make sense. You cannot convince me—no matter how hard you try—that it makes any sort of sense for "mother" to mean "each" when it appears on a Kyoto parking sign, as in, “each 30 minutes, 200 yen" .

Entering the shinkansen waiting area, we notice that a pair of uniformed attendants is giving every customer a big bow and an accompanying "Arigato gozaimasu!" but few people reciprocate with a bow. I must say that this regimented politeness becomes annoying after a while, and I have no doubt that it comes across as so automatic, so superficial, that even the older Japanese are occasionally disgusted by it. I see a fat guy on the Shin-Osaka platform—possibly the first fat person I’ve seen since our sojourn in Japan began last week (maybe he’s been eating too many egg salad donuts)—but this will change now that they have Western food, including pizza that, according to the shrine sale maven, is customarily offered with mayonnaise.

There are very few passengers on this shinkansen, and no conductor appears to check our tickets. This is the Sanyo line, not the Tokaido line, and I believe it’s operated by a different Japan National Railways subsidiary. We notice another difference: perhaps the sensor that flushes the toilet has malfunctioned, since the commode is stuffed with paper. I’m shocked to see such a thing in a public place in Japan.

The countryside is much quieter here than it was to the east. We pass the new Pearl Bridge that crosses from Honshu to Awaji-shima on the way to Shikoku. I think this is the one that charges a $27 toll, a multi-billion-dollar engineering marvel that spans several miles and was the subject of a recent documentary on the Discovery Channel.

It is drizzling when we arrive in Himeji after a fifty-minute ride, but it quickly clears up. Though the town is relatively small, there is a bustling downtown with high-rises just outside the train station. There are tons of bicycles on the main street, mostly ridden by ancient people. We pass much statuary on the main street plus the first pet store we’ve seen in Japan. The puppies inside are barking plaintively in Japanese, “Please don’t sell me to a Vietnamese restaurant!” The city abruptly ends as the storied fortress of Himeji-jo with its extensive, moated grounds looms overhead.

The castle, built in 1600, is imposing, awe-inspiring, magnificent. I can confidently declare now (and affirm it more strongly after our tour) that nothing in North America even comes close—and I’ve seen them all: Toronto’s Casa Loma, St. Augustine’s Castillo San Marcos, Québec’s Citadel, and Miami’s Vizcaya. Here's a bit more detail of the masterful wooden joinery and roofing tile structure, which conceals seven levels in what looks from the outside like five:

They illuminate the place with huge floodlights at night, which must look very dramatic, and I’m told that the titanic electric bill is actually an identifiable (i.e., non-trivial) component of the average Japanese citizen’s income tax.

We pay ¥1200 for admission for two and ask for an English-speaking guide (no signs announce their availability, so we’re fortunate that Cheryl boned up on the place). Yoshimi, a short, pudgy, cheerful lady, shows up almost instantly, and it’s apparent that we will receive a most private tour. (In retrospect, I wonder how Yoshimi could be so squat, since the amount of exercise she gets daily by marching all over this place is astonishing.) Yoshimi tells us that the tour should take ninety minutes, but we know that, with my questioning mind, she’s in for about twice that long. Just inside the entrance gate is a stunning collection of bonsai. For the next three hours, we tramp up and down hallways, up seven levels of the steepest stairs, constantly taking off shoes (relegating them to plastic bags that we carry with us, rather than leaving them on shelves) and putting on shoes so as not to damage fine wooden floors. (I'm glad I wore clogs, since they slip on and off my feet instantaneously without having to fuss with laces. The evident Japanese fixation with constantly doffing and donning shoes makes it crystal-clear why the thong sandal and its derivatives became the mainstay of the Japanese footwear armory.)

The fortress is spellbinding not only for its architecture (Japanese cypress above with skillful tenon-and-mortise joinery, stone below) and the anecdotes that it conjures up, but also for the fact that it is a living museum of constantly changing art, artifact, and textile exhibits.

The castle is ingeniously designed with dead-ends, hidden levels, slippery walls, and deadfalls, and it is set within gorgeous wooded grounds that overflow with tsutsuji (azalea) trees. Although living accommodations are crude in the donjon—since it was used for defense—the women’s quarters in the west bailey are quite pleasant by medieval Japanese standards. It is interesting to learn, upon seeing gun ports in the castle wall, that samurai did not depend exclusively on swords: indeed, the various daimyo had purchased some 200,000 muskets from the Portuguese by the early 1600s. Himeji-jo was built during a period of history in which building materials were hard to come by, so stone came from wherever. I mean literally wherever: one can descry both tombstones and kofun (cists) in the wall, rudely appropriated from cemeteries with their owners’ inscriptions still in place. There is also, clearly marked, some desperately poor old lady’s millstone. When she heard that the daimyo needed stones to build his fortress, she donated the cherished millstone—even though it left her without the wherewithal to feed herself. She received no monetary reward, but the daimyo was very grateful. (They probably recorded the deed on her tombstone, which was subsequently recycled into the castle wall!)


Diversion on Japanese language: I have been having more fun spotting kanji co-significs on signs. In particular, nail is "metal post" and pillar is "master tree" . "Guest" is "roof legs mouth" , hotel is "roof hundred men" , and "kiln" is "enclose pottery" . Gleaned from the stag aggression warning at Nara: "sex" is "heart birth" . (The left-hand radical in this character is a very streamlined version of the stand-alone character for "heart" , whichto meestablishes a striking minimalistic likeness of the human heart in only four brush strokes.) Shifting gears, "ankle" is given by "foot fruit" (viz., the round protuberance of the human foot). As was remarked earlier, however, one cannot make sense of the overwhelming majority of kanji in this fashion: no amount of creative analysis can explain, e.g., why a "nun" is a "corpse spoon" —nor will mastering that fact help you remember that "water nun" means "mud," even if the presence of the water radical reveals that the word bears some relationship to water. Next linguistic diversion or previous


We encounter more racism here. Some people on the castle steps mock us (one can detect mockery in any language), and the guide quickly puts them in their place. Later, when I offer to help an ancient lady negotiate the steep steps (and I do mean steep—perhaps 65°) to enjoy the panoramic top-floor view of the surrounding areas of Hyogo prefecture ("Soldier Garage" , viz., "Barracks"—perhaps an odd name for a major political division, but clearly no more odd than "Snowy" [= Nevada]):

she patently refuses. She would evidently rather tumble to her death than have a Caucasian assist her. Now, in Tokyo, there was some limited racism, but I was never mocked. It would appear that Kyoto and environs is rather more ethnocentric than Tokyo.


Diversion on Japanese language: I detected another, most fascinating, manifestation of Kyotoan atavism, which is a bedfellow of ethnocentrism. Japanese was long written in vertical lines of text, the reader scanning subsequent lines from right to left, but has more recently appeared as horizontal lines of text, the reader scanning subsequent lines from top to bottom—the way most European languages are read. (These styles are referred to as washiki [Japanese style, literally, "harmony style"] and yoshiki [Western style, literally, "Atlantic style," both of which were introduced in kanji earlier].) Though every sign in Tokyo was writtem yoshiki, many signs in Kyoto were written washiki. Next linguistic diversion or previous


There is a stone well on the castle grounds that has its very own Japanese ghost story. A samurai was once plotting to kill the daimyo who owned the castle. A maiden discovered the plot and informed the lord. The samurai, thinking quickly, stole a valuable dish and frivolously accused the maiden of stealing it. When she was absolved, the samurai vowed revenge, tortured her to death, and threw her body into the well. Thereafter, her ghost rose from the depths every night to count the dishes—until a small Shinto shrine was built to quiet her restless spirit. My evil mind longs for details on how the samurai tortured the maiden, but I quickly conclude that the Portuguese Jesuit missionaries surely introduced the entire arsenal of the Spanish Inquisition into Japan, so we needn’t worry about insufficient technology hampering the samurai’s sadistic creativity.

On the way out, I mention the moss garden at Saiho-ji to Yoshimi and ask why I cannot find it in any tour books. I still remember the caption of National Geographic’s photo of it in Majestic Island Worlds (R. M. Crum, ed.; 1987), which was enough to make one drool: "Twisted maples, a secluded pond, and more than 120 kinds of mosses adorn Kyoto’s Saiho-ji, or moss temple … Ornamental koi, or carp, flash in an azalea-edged pond." Yoshimi tells us that not even a Japanese person is allowed there unless he applies for permission and is accompanied by a distinguished foreign visitor, and it is strictly off-limits to tour groups—that’s why it still exhibits such paralyzing beauty. There isn’t a thing that Yoshimi forgets to tell us—other than the most obvious thing of all (that we knew anyway from the guidebook): Himeji-jo is popularly referred to as the “white egret castle because of its color and the graceful, winged profile of its eaves. It may—or may not—be coincidental that the kanji for "egret" incorporates the character for "path" that is also part of the kanji for Himeji ("princess path" ). (The fact that a "popular" name includes the word "egret" reveals how educated the Japanese are: what site in the U.S. would be referred to in slang by a word that three-fourths of the adults probably don’t know?) Egret-related omissions aside, we were so blown away by Yoshimi’s expertise and enthusiasm that we offered her a ¥2000 tip, but she declined, saying that she’s not permitted to accept it or some other pathetic excuse.

We schlep back to the train station, the better part of a mile. The gentleman next to me waiting for the shinkansen back to Kyoto gets his e-mail on his cell phone in kanji, which I find amazing. On the ride back, we see the usual farm next to factory next to high-rise next to cemetery next to convenience store in haphazard manner. Welcome to Japan. Our tickets once again won’t let us out of the station, so we must extricate our JR passes to show to the station attendant. We arrive back at Kintetsu station dead-tired at 3:00PM, just in time to see another massive school group—including two boys playing shogi readying for a train trip to God knows where. Shogi is Japanese chess, played on a 9x9 board, with all the pieces the same shape (as well as the same color!) but labeled with kanji indications of their ranks and "color." (Try to imagine playing chess with checkers that are labeled K, Q, R, and so on rather than being artfully shaped like horses and castles and such that enable one to visually grasp the position—not a pleasant prospect!)

Now, Cheryl still wants to find her kokeshi doll, so we hunt for the famous "The Cube" mall. We pass a Roy Liechtenstein poster, and I find it humorous that his name (Roi Likutensutainu) is spelled out in katakana. It turns out that "The Cube" is merely the basement level of this station complex, and the eight or so shops vend the same junky gifts as any other place—fans, scrolls, dolls, lacquer boxes, shoddy kimonos, etc. Hunting through Isetan for a kokeshi, we find an ostensible Chinese restaurant on the top floor and decide to have a leisurely early dinner. The place looks lovely—although the décor is a bit Spartan and those guys are smoking (terrific, they’re getting ready to leave)—and the menu overflows with mouth-watering photographs of the dishes. I try to order a plum wine, since I know the kanji for both "plum" and "wine," but the Japanese are evidently so memorization-oriented that, if a Westerner makes the slightest error in composing or combining characters, they just stare at the glyphs, clueless. I therefore decide to forgo the wine and instead focus on entrees. The dishes are fresh and delicious, of absolutely superb quality—mine is sautéed abalone with mushrooms; Cheryl’s is a beef and scallops medley with broccoli—but the portions are barely adequate for an elementary school luncheon, so I can’t fathom why the bill came to almost $50.


Diversion on Japanese language: Hunting for more co-significs, I find that oak is "elephant tree" (viz., the tree whose trunk is gnarled like an elephant) and that princess is "official woman" . We learned earlier that many place names and personal names are simple nature-oriented compounds, and the same is evidently true of major Japanese corporations: Honda means simply "main paddy" , while Mitsubishi means "three water chestnuts" . Next linguistic diversion or previous


We are back at the hotel, and I’m ready to collapse. The prices here are so pathetic: a piece of cheesecake peculiarly labeled "rare cheese" costs twelve dollars, while a strawberry tart the size of my big toe sets you back more than a sawbuck.

No more adventures tonight, dear. I’m so utterly exhausted that I can barely stand on my feet. At 5:30PM and 6:00PM they play Japanese cartoons. The animation is of excellent quality, but I’m unable to follow the plot, which involves what looks like a Revolutionary War hero rowing his sweetheart in a boat while three animals—including a talking camel—hike along the mountain road that follows the river just overhead. I head downstairs for a light supper, which consists of a few sweet treats from Mr. Donut plus a Diet Coke (for Cheryl) and an apple-pear-carrot juice (for me) procured from—guess what—a vending machine down the block, then it’s "lights out" at 7:30PM.

 

Onward