Japan October, 1996 A Trip Log by Mark Leeper 10/06/96 Departure 10/07/96 Arrival 10/08/96 Tokyo: Museums: Japan Explaining Itself to Itself 10/09/96 Tokyo: The Palace and the Military: Japan and Honor 10/10/96 Kamakura: Late Religious Foundations 10/11/96 Tokyo: Stores, Offices, Entertainment; Japan's Economy 10/12/96 Tokyo: Feeding the Nation: Tsukiji and the Kitchen Supply 10/13/96 Tokyo: Modernization and Modernity 10/14/96 The Railways 10/15/96 Matsumoto: Feudal Castle I 10/16/96 Arrival in Kyoto 10/17/96 Hiroshima and Miya-jima: War and Peace 10/18/96 Himeji: Feudal Castle II 10/19/96 Nara: Foundations of Buddhism 10/20/96 Hikone and Nagoya: Disappointing Feudal Castles 10/21/96 Kyoto: Variants on Buddhism 10/22/96 Kyoto: The Feudal Past Creating the Present 10/23/96 Kyoto: Haunts of the Past, Ghosts of the Present 10/24/96 Kyoto Temple Walking Tour 10/25/96 Kyoto: A Temple Too Far 10/26/96 Kyoto: Artifacts and Eels 10/27/96 Osaka and Trip home 10/06/96 Departure You can always tell the late-night DJs on the classical radio station. I would like to pretend it is 6:50 PM since that is really what it is in Japanese time. Unfortunately I have the radio on and the disk jockey is describing in deep and sepulchral tones the music he is playing. For him it is 5:50 AM. I am going to try as much as possible give myself the illusion that it is Tokyo time until it is no longer an illusion. Hey wouldn't it be nice if when you held a fantasy for long enough it became true. Maybe it does when your party is elected. So why are we going to Japan? I think it is fair to say that the first foreign country about which I felt a real curiosity was Japan. Why Japan? Well like much else in my life it came out of my interest in science fiction. When I was seven-years-old my father took my brother and me to see a double feature of RODAN, THE FLYING MONSTER and THE RETURN OF DRACULA. I must have seen other monster movies at that time, and from them it was natural to me that monster movies took place in the U.S. What few I had seen took place in not very exotic places. It seemed odd that RODAN would take place in another country and the characters would all be from that country. I probably commented on this and was told that the film was Japanese. It was made in Japan. Now this started to bother me. I now knew there were monster movies I might never see because they were being made in other countries and I could not see them and would not understand them if I did since didn't know the language. Somewhere near where I lived I had heard that there was a Polish movie theater that showed only Polish movies. This started to prey on my mind. There were probably people watching Polish monster movies and I would never get to see these films because of the culture barrier. I decided all counties must make monster movies for their own people and I was missing something really good. That was how my young mind worked. I know now that many countries do make good films for their own people. Perhaps they are not monster movies, but some of the best films I know of are foreign films. But from about the age of seven or eight I have felt that there must be real treasures in Japanese culture, if only you can get by the language barrier. For a long time after seeing RODAN, THE FLYING MONSTER and a little later THE MYSTERIANS when I heard Japan the first thing I thought of is that this is a country that makes science fiction and monster movies. There must be more interesting over there. Not that I heard very much about Japan in school. We learned about the continents, but very little about Japan. Perhaps a little more about China, but generally our education about Asia was weak. That may have been for the best. What you learn about in school is forever a dull chore. Every few years I discovered a new fascination that had its origin in Japan. I was about ten when I discovered origami. I had experimented with paper airplanes before, but this was the first I realized there was a whole art of paper-folding. I must have been about 12-years-old, maybe as much as 15, when I was in an art museum and I saw something very unexpected. I saw a suit of armor, at least it looked like armor, and it had a face-plate. And coming out of the face-plate was a brushy mustache. I thought of suits of armor in very functional terms. It seemed strange to me that anybody would bother to put a face on a suit of armor, much less put a mustache on the face. But there it was looking at me. Well, this turned out to be samurai armor. And sometimes there was a face on the armor. Maybe there was more of interest about Japan than just monster movies and paper-folding. Years later when TV broadcast SHOGUN a lot of people suddenly discovered that samurai stories were pretty nifty. I think by that point I has seen a few samurai films like THE SEVEN SAMURAI. Again I was a little ahead of the pack in recognizing that Japanese films could be interesting to people outside of Japan. As I got older I found more and more that was fascinating and enigmatic about Japanese culture. In college I discovered netsuke. Japanese culture seems so different from any other culture. The European cultures I have seen are different from each other, but in many ways they are also similar. These days it seems that Japan has picked up a lot from Western culture. At least superficially and on a high level the Japanese have a much more comprehensible culture than, say, the Chinese or the Indians. Still they have a society that is full of cultural assumptions different from those in the West and that is the best reason to travel to a place. So this year we are finally going to travel to Japan. We have tried packaged tours twice before only to have the canceled. This year we are just going to plan the trip on our own and guide ourselves. Our limousine came at about 6 AM local time. In my usual way to fight jet lag, I have kept myself up so that when I hit that plane I am exhausted. That makes the flight seem shorter (and when you are flying almost half way around the world that is no minor consideration). It also helps fight jet lag for me. As long as I keep moving I don't really feel tired. Of course if I get too comfortable it is all over. I used this on our trip to Amsterdam and we got there early in the day. We filled out the day going to the Reichsmuseum. While I was walking around I was perfectly alert. Every time we sat down for a rest I nodded off. I am now going to convert to Japan time. We were picked up by the limousine 7 PM on the 6th. We got to the airport at about 7:35 PM for a 10 PM flight. We are standing in the check-in line and I am desperately trying to ignore the fact that the sky is getting lighter behind me. This whole flight the sun will be up. From 8 PM Sunday to about 4:15 PM Monday, and the sun will always be overhead. Of course it is moving in the same direction we are and even a little faster. That means we are really traveling west to east, but the ground under us is doing it even faster. Generally the worst moment of the trip are just as we leave the house. This is when I start to torture myself with everything I could have left behind. And did I lock the door? Now I have a fairly foolproof method for making sure at least I take everything I need. I have a checklist that I update pretty much every trip. I collect what I will pack in a laundry basket and leave it in the middle of the floor in the den. I pack there. And leave the bags there until I am ready to leave. Anything that is to go with me stays where it is in the way. If I have to take something out of my bag, it goes on the den floor. If I want to know if everything I wanted to pack has really been packed, I just look at that patch of floor. So as I was in the limousine I suddenly asked myself why wasn't my pocket knife in my pocket. By pure logic I knew it could not have been left behind, but I could not find it. Then I remembered it was made of metal. You see I find going through security checks a real pain. There is always this business of taking all the metal out of your pockets. I try to do that but when I walk under the security gateway that buzzer always goes off making rude noises. Then some guy comes along with this detector device --It looks like an electric fly-swatter, and starts running it around my body and it starts making rude noises. Well I cheat. I take all the metal out of my pockets, put it in a sandwich sized ziplock, and drop it into my luggage. Until I am in the gate area and past security. I feel somehow that I am cheating and that if they catch me with all that metal in my bag I will be in big trouble. I am not sure with whom, but you better believe it is big and horrible. I developed this technique on Indian domestic flights. There if they catch you with batteries you are in big trouble. In India you pretty much have to bend over and take ten of the best. I had big problems with my palmtop. Oh, yes. That is metal I do hand around. But my palmtop computer is like an extension of my arm and I cannot bear to be without it. For the record it is an HP 200LX Palmtop computer. There is little chance of leaving it behind, but if I did I would go back. In fact, that is what I am writing on right now at the airport. I have that and this trip I am carrying a new piece of technology, something called a Voiceit. It is a lot like a tape recorder, but its memory is on a chip, not tape. That makes it a lot smaller. It is about 3"x2"x1/4". It is not a versatile as a palmtop, but it makes it really easy to take a quick note. That I can be without long enough to put in my luggage. This line is long due to people checking luggage. We won't be doing that. I have a suitcase with knapsack straps and a small vinyl bag we got with the tour going to China. Any luggage that doesn't hang on to me gets left behind next time. This way I can be writing in my trip log even as I walk between gates. Well we sat by the gate and I alternately wrote in may log, snoozed, and tried myself on some Japanese flashcards I had made. It is the best way I know of getting a bit of the language down before you get to the country. While we were waiting the flight next to us got canceled. It seems like that is what usually happens to us on a trip. Bad luck seems to follow us. Already we are at the airport and we have had nothing worse happen to us that having to stand in a line. Uh, they called our flight and as I was putting on my knapsack my watch fell off my wrist. That is not supposed to happen. The pin that holds the watchband on slipped out. I slipped it back into place and got into line. The pin shot out of my watch and the watch fell off again. Now I saw what happened, the whole assembly cracked and the pin won't stay in place again. Well so much for us not having bad luck. I have stuck the remaining band into a zippered pocket on my photographer's vest with the watch hanging out. It hangs upside down, but that is convenient since I am looking down at the face so I see it right side up. We got on the plane and we were told by the Captain's PA system that the plane would land a little ahead of schedule. That sounded too good to be true. A few minutes later he came back on and said the ground crew found a little leakage on the ground and that our flight would leave about 45 minutes late. Good news doesn't last long around us. I wonder what we are leaking. After a while the captain was back and said what was wrong was part of our skid breaking system. There is no word on how long it will take to fix. And thank you for flying United. It is now 10:45 PM and the plane is sitting on the ground. Somewhere a few rows back is a baby who has just discovered vocalization and the ability to make noises loud enough for a plane full of people to hear. She is not happy, we are not happy, ain't nobody happy. 11:05 PM (Tokyo time, this is 10:05 AM Newark time) the Captain has said the fluid is dripping from a switch and the switch is being replaced. There is no word on how long this will take. What kind of a brake switch has fluid to leak? Estimated time of departure is now 1 hour and 45 minutes late. While our flight continues on to Japan, we do have an equipment change, which means we change to another plane. That was to be after two hours in San Francisco. So we are in the peculiar position of possibly having the second half of a single flight leave before the first half can get there. OK, our plane will leave two and a half hours late. Connections may be screwed up, but not the second part of this flight. We just will be delayed a few hours. The plane took off about three hours late. For the people on the plane it is now past noon, but we are going to be served breakfast because that is what was loaded. I spent the extra three hours with the Japanese flashcards. It was boring and I found myself nodding off. Evelyn may have spent the time more wisely talking to other passengers in the kind of camaraderie that forms quickly between travelers who share inconvenience. Luck of Leeper has given her plenty of opportunity to meet people under similar conditions over the years. I would say that it is probable that most people run into similar luck when they travel, but we do seem to have even worse luck than most. 10/07/96 Arrival I think this is about the point that I should go to a new day. It s 5:30 AM by destination time and we are about 40% done with the travel a I estimate it from door to door. Because of the lateness of the flight they gave us free earphones to hear the movie. The movie was DRAGONHEART which was a decent film to see once in the theater but was not worth the effort to try to watch in a plane with a really obstructed view of the screen. I pretty much ignored the film. My dinner was apple pancakes, some fruit, and a Sara Lee muffin. They had Starbuck's decaf and vile, bitter stuff it was. Hey Starbucks's, if this is the best you can do for decaf, I am not going to ever go to one of your outlets. And if your excuse is that this is not the real Starbuck's, you should not let United defame you in this way. The time was that you had generic food on airlines. Now the airlines have taken a cue from bad movies and have decided there is money to be made with product placements. The video program is solid ads, the food that comes had brand names all over it. Evelyn thinks that gives you some confidence in the food, but I get tired of the barrage. I slept a little and went through my flashcards again. More than most other languages I am having trouble picking up the words and phrases. They do not come from Western root and there are a lot of syllables to remember. I am not picking up the pattern of what words end in "su" and what ends in "sen". I may see a pattern in some, but it is still too early. For example "Gomen Kudasai" is "excuse me (in the hello sense)" rather than "excuse me (in the I'm sorry sense)." But if you want to say "I want some X" you say "X o kudasai." It is the same word but I cannot figure out what its literal meaning is. So there is a lot of rote memorization. And as I get older my memory is not as good. Evelyn woke up and I asked her how she slept. She said she had trouble and her head kept slipping to the side. That's not what I was asking. I really wanted to know how she slept so I could try the same technique myself. I was able to sleep a little. I brought along a sleeping mask. The infant in back still keeps screaming with a sound a lot like you get from abusing a rubber balloon. Breakfast was a roast beef sandwich and a bag of brand name corn and wheat chips. It is now 6 AM and we just flew over Yosemite. We will soon be descending into San Francisco. I have slipped off my shoes in the Japanese style and will soon have to locate them again. Let's see. If it is about 6 AM in Tokyo is about 5 PM in New Jersey, so it must be about 2 PM here. I was wrong about them holding the continuation of this flight. Supposedly they may not hold the continuation of this flight if we cannot get from gate 81 to 58 in time to check in. They are not holding that plane for us. That plane is leaving at 45 minutes after the hour and it is now 10 minutes after. Naturally we are a little tense. Just what makes that a continuation of this flight is not clear. 7:01:39 am OK, now I have something of a minor adventure to relate. The flight crew was giving us contradictory information as to whether the next connection would be held. We knew the gate to go to and the flight magazine said it was all the way on the other side of the terminal. Somebody would take us over as a group. The last we heard the plane would be held. The landing is often beautiful coming in over the water of San Francisco bay. But of course we were worried about our connection. We landed and we sat. There were planes sitting in the "alley" the plane needed to go down it to get to our gate. More delay. That took about 10 minutes. We Looked at a map of the airport in the flight magazine and the gates were at opposite ends of the terminal. It was going to be a mess. True to their word there was a guy in a red jacket who was there to take us to the right place and was hurrying us up. There was a Chinese couple with canes and their daughter. They were going to have a hard time keeping up. Evelyn suggested I walk with them and she would make sure the plane did not leave without me. I at first decided this was a bad idea because the couple would be a lot slower than the rest of the group and I would end up missing the plane. Almost as immediately I realized that I was being selfish and these people needed help they might not otherwise get. They would likely miss the plane without my help. The attendant was not paying attention to them, he was just trying to get his 15 or so people to the plane, or as many as could go. I took it upon myself to make sure the rear end of the group made it. When I could manage it I walked with the three. When the group got too far ahead to see I went ahead far enough to see both the group and the three at the back. With four people out of 15 being left behind the attendant had to stop and get the group at least in sight of each other. When we got to security I let the Chinese ahead of me, then I got pulled aside for a check. The daughter thanked me an then thanked Evelyn when the three caught up to her. She waited for me. So did the plane. The plane was something like 85 degrees and after the exhausting run we were really sweating. It was tough to find a place to put my luggage, but a flight attendant from the plane helped. We got off the ground about two hours late at about 7:30 AM. This is a 747 suffering from impacted passengers. The movies will be TWISTER and MOLL FLANDERS. I made the mistake of seeing TWISTER in a theater. I have not seen MOLL FLANDERS, but was not anxious. Apparently the filmmakers wanted there to be a great classic of English literature about a strong-willed courageous woman. There wasn't one that fit their needs so they used only a title in much the same way the Bond films do. Dinner at 9 AM was chicken and powdered whipped potatoes with solid potato pieces added to simulate lumps. As with diamonds, mashed potatoes are supposed to have minor flaws. It they are too perfect they are obviously artificial. In this case the flaws in the artificial potatoes were added to give the impression of reality. The trays that dinner were served on clearly had a problem. They had some sort of protuberances underneath so they did no lie flat. It made it very difficult to cut the chicken. At home the sunrise we saw has given way to sunset and darkness. Still it is light outside the plane. There seem to be a lot of Japanese teens on this flight, walking the aisle and talking to each other. You don't see nearly as many American teens. I guess the Japanese economy is pretty good. You keep hearing that there are signs that the Japanese economy will falter, but I have not seen any signs that is any time soon. These teens seem a lot like American teens and certainly are from a first world country. It is hard to see much left of the great traditions of samurai chivalry (or lack thereof). I wonder if we will find any who cling to the old traditions. It sure seems like Yukio Mishima lost. Perhaps something should be said about Yukio Mishima, who is perhaps for us in the West the most enigmatic Japanese in modern times (with the possible exception of Emperor Hirohito). He was born Hiraoka Kimitake in 1925 Tokyo. He went to Tokyo University and became a civil servant before turning to writing. Mishima was predominantly a writer of novels, writing 40 though also he was an actor, an artist, a poet, a playwright of Kabuki and Noh, and a politician who because of his militaristic philosophy brought himself to a spectacular end. There is a certain sameness to many of Mishima's novels, at least from the viewpoint of Westerners. They seem to portray characters, usually under powerful emotional stress, who resist action until finally the pressure becomes unbearable and they release it in a melodramatic and an almost orgasmic explosion of violence. Yukio Mishima probably would have enjoyed the Godfather films. When a country with a warrior tradition is forced to be peaceable and non-militaristic as Japan was at the close of W.W.II, there has to be an outlet somewhere. There were many people, old and young, who longed for the chivalry and romanticism of the past with a powerful militaristic government and Mishima became the focus for them. He organized the Shield Society, a private army of about 100 youths dedicated to returning Japan to its previous glory. Then it all ended in melodrama like the stories that Mishima wrote. On November 25, 1970 he and some of his followers broke into the Ichigaya army base and from a balcony he told all who would listen that the time had come to throw off the government and return to the old values. He got little reaction from the soldiers present and it is not clear if he expected it or not. However, when his coup failed he committed suicide by the time-honored method of seppuku. His followers tried the same method of suicide, but could not do it correctly. Mishima's opinions still remain controversial today. Many still feel like caged lions and look wistfully at this possible alternate course their country might have taken. 1:46:34 PM I watched the end of TWISTER but I was walking around and missed the beginning of MOLL FLANDERS. Just as well since this version is probably cut and it will soon turn up on cable. They keep bringing around water and fruit juice. Evelyn an I got up to use facilities and we talked to a woman going to China and told her about our trip there. One thing she told us was that this plane had been held up for a missing part as well as waiting for us. I wonder if whenever there is a delay they just say it is mechanical failure since it makes them sound conscientious rather than poorly organized. One of the many airplane ads disguised as entertainment is a look at special effects created by Silicon Graphics. They did effects for films like INDEPENDENCE DAY and TWISTER. They showed a piece from SPACE JAM, a new film combining Warner Brothers cartoon characters with live-action basketball players defending the earth against basketball players from outer space. According to them this is the future of film-making." I have been feeling somewhat depressed since I heard that. I am really afraid that with falling educational standards in this country he may well be right. It would be nice for Holywood to get back to films where the interesting effects are in the writing just like it would be nice to get back to music where the effects are created by the composer and not the technology, but I see neither in the offing. There is both a falling supply and a falling demand for good writing and composing. It is easy to decide we want another SPACE JAM and turn the crank to get it. You cannot say next year we will have another film like A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS. If you try to turn the crank for that you will fail miserably. 4:30:00 PM Dinner was a light meal of roast beef. Probably the last we will have at least until the trip home. Beef is very expensive in Japan and quite possibly is a real treat for the Japanese passengers. Given the choice of red meat or chicken I will almost always take chicken. It bothers me that a fellow mammal died for my meal. On the other hand I am willing to eat the meat if it is served to me since if the steer had to die, it seems more ethical to eat than to go hungry and eat more chicken as a result. I know that is weird. I guess that I feel that humans have a right to eat meat, having descended from meat-eaters but it is better to do it as ethically as possible and if you have the strength to be a vegetarian, that is a higher level of virtue. This is a fairly common religious argument I have. Anyone who is going to try to convert me to their religion will have to show me that their religion says that it is better to be a vegetarian than a meat-eater. And I say this as a meat eater. But thent I don't believe that meat-eating is a sin. It is interesting that most religions seem to think of virtue as a lack of sin. It is just easier for them to deal only with the negative. That may seem obscure, but if you deal only in the negative you don't have the moral compass to say it is better to give 20% of your salary to charity than to give 10%. There is nothing wrong with giving 10% but it is better to give 20%. It is not a sin to eat meat, but it is morally better not to. That is my point of view. Hey, you gonna read my log, you are going to read about my experience and some of that is going to be my thinking about theology. I guess I am an agnostic myself, but that doesn't mean I don't think about religion and ethics a lot. Well we will land in about 40 minutes. We will have been in the process of travel for 22 hours. I would expect that we should be to Kimi Ryokan by 9 PM. That is just a guess on how long it will take us once we are on the ground and probably a high guess at that. 26 hours of travel should suffice. It must be something like 17 hours in the air. The sun that has been up for about 21 and a half hours is finally setting. Our first view of the Land of the Rising Sun will be with the sun setting. Real soon now the pre-defined part of our trip will end and we have to start navigating. Well, we landed. We chose the slowest of the three queues at immigration. I switched to another queue and we got through a little faster. Customs was a wave-through. Evelyn exchanged our limit at the ATM and we exchanged a little more at a window. The rate is about 110 yen to the dollar. That makes it relatively easy to figure prices since a yen is a bit less than a penny. There was a stiff breeze from inside the office and Evelyn had a travelers cheque blown onto the floor. We got tickets for the Keisei line, a train much like New York's subways but much cleaner and with velveteen seats. The floor is not spotless, but there is no litter and it is a good two paces between specs of dirt. It is very different from New York's. It makes you wonder how barbaric and dirty New York must look to these people. Across the way two teen-aged girls are talking. One has bought stuffed animals of Tigger and Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh. We are in the last car which we just barely made. At one end of the car is, I guess you would call him an engineer in a uniform. White gloves and a cap with a flat top. We get views of the streets with neon signs at first, then we get into neighborhoods where there are not many lights. This will be more interesting in the daylight. There seem to be more readers here than in a New York subway. We will be on this train nearly an hour, then another one, then we have to stop at a police station to ask for a map. This is not a fast form of transport. We are some distance out but we found a place that is reasonable in price, not easy to do. Most places would be $100/night and up. We are staying at the Kimi Ryokan in Ikebukuro. There were recommendations on the net. It is surprising how busy everything is, even at night in Tokyo. We arrived in Tokyo and bought a ticket for the train to Ikebukuro. Here it is 8 at night and we are fighting a flood of people running in the other direction to make a train. I mean a lot of them literally running. You don't generally see Americans putting that much effort in. A seller on the side is playing Elvis Presley singing "I Can't Help Falling In Love With You." There seems to be a chain of kiosks in the train stations called "Let's Kiosk." It features brands of gum like "Black Black" and "Etiquette." The local trains have silent TV screens with pictures of nature, weather reports, and, of course, ads. The train in from Narita had paper ads like our subways, but no TV screens. I wish I could read more of the language. One ad featured pictures of stone dolls. It may have been an ad for family planning. The stone dolls apparently are commemoratives of stillborn children and aborted fetuses. To the religions of the world there are three kinds of souls. There are the Born, the Stillborn, and the Born Again. People on the trains were helpful in volunteering information, unasked, trying to help us find our destination. Even with instruction we had trouble finding police station where we were told to ask about how to find the Ryokan. There were maps left by the Kimi people with explicit instructions. We found the Kimi and checked in. It is a bit of an exaggeration for the Kimi to call itself a Ryokan. A Ryokan is generally a small and expensive inn in the country featuring beautiful scenery. Kimi does not ffer food, and food and tea service are very much a part of the Ryokan experience. It does offer free green tea at any time of the day. The room is a traditional tatami room, but with not much in it but a tatami (a woven straw mat covering the floor) and two futons (basic bed rolls) and one wooden table. The room is tiny and has space for perhaps one more futon. (That is, the futons take up 2/3 of the room). You don't get much for 7500 yen a night. At the current rate of exchange that is about $68. You leave your shoes on a shelf by the door and you are given on loan one small towel and a bathrobe. There is a plastic stick on the key and you must put that in a slot or the one light, a ceiling fluorescent, will not come on. Hence, if you take the keys with you the light has been turned off. There is a traditional Japanese bath available, though most people will probably use the showers on the floor. There is one toilet shared by the eight or so rooms on the floor. The toilet is Western-style. The room has no wastebasket and no mirror. Evelyn went to sleep about 10, I stayed up organizing and writing till about 11:30. 10/08/96 Tokyo: Museums: Japan Explaining Itself to Itself I woke up once, fully rested, and looked at my watch. 1:24 AM. I went back to sleep. The second time I woke up was 5:18. That is a little earlier than home, not much. I brought a short-wave, but early morning it is hard to find much. There were two AM stations, no FM at all, Even on the short-wave bands there is not much. (P.S. I later found out this was not greatly different any time of day. Japan just is not very big on radio stations. There is American Armed Forces radio with a lot of rock music, and all the other stations seem to be in Japanese and are only talk.) You get one towel per person when you check in and it is small, about 8"x24". The bathroom is tiny, a urinal and a claustrophobic stall and there is no lock on the outer door. The toilet is much like one we would have at home but the seat is thin plastic and the tank has a sort of basin at the top. Our toilets fill with the water source on the inside, this one fills from the outside with an inverted U shaped faucet like we used to have in chemistry lab. So when You flush the toilet you actually see the water go into the tank. I suppose this could be to clean your hands. The toilet paper is not as bad as I had read, but it does tend to tear at unfortunate moments. It is unperforated, by the way. You are not supposed to let your feet touch the floor of a bathroom. With a traditional toilet that is more important, but the precaution is also applied here. There are a pair of slippers on the floor, several sizes too big for anyone and they become small and portable clean flooring. Almost the same idea was used in the Walkman. A Walkman is a sound system that is made cheap, small, and portable by making it for one. Bathroom slippers are carpeting that is made cheap, small, and portable by making it for one. Of course being seen wearing these specially marked slippers out of the bathroom is a major social faux pas. Our first day in Japan is rainy and a little ugly. We will carry umbrellas and go to museums today. One of the common features of Ryokans are green tea. The real Ryokans have a maid to serve it. Kimi has made the accommodation to have a room with a tea dispenser. In this room various people, meet and talk. It is sort of the recreation room. We stopped in and talked for a while with a man who had come here many times since W.W.II, though usually he avoids Tokyo and stays with friends. He recommended a place to stay in Kyoto that is along similar lines as the Kimi. According to him, finding a place as inexpensive and clean as the Kimi is very rare. The hotel situation here must be ruinous for a lot of travelers. He seems to think that we will likely see a lot of rain but not much at any one time. Today is the first real rainy day in weeks. Our informant tells us that it rains frequently, but it is usually just a bit a day. He was able to pass on a recommendation for a place to stay in Kyoto. He said that he had recommended it to someone else and they had found it in their tour book. We decided to see if it was in the Lonely Planet book. (Lonely Planet is a series of popular guidebooks.) Well it turned out he had not known about the Lonely Planet books, but that was the book where he'd seen the place mentioned. So we found it and may well reserve it. After having the tea and talk we headed out to Ueno Park to see the museums. Now let me make this clear. What we saw at the train station was the tail end of rush hour. It was probably mild compared to the height of rush hour and probably minor compared to other stations. It still was a fairly impressive tide of people. I have seen places where you took your life in your hands crossing traffic where that traffic was cars, I have seen it where it was bicycles, this was the fist time I have seen my life threatened by pedestrians. This was a real flood of people. It is hard to believe what a populous place this really is, but when You get his many people rushing to work you have a formidable force. If you have to cross this tide of people, good luck to you. The train, these are really elevated trains where we are. They are crowded by US standards but not as bad as the ones you see pictures of where there are hired people to shove people inside so the doors can close. Of course these are elevated because otherwise they would have been out of reach and could not dangle from Gojira's mouth in the famous poster. (Gojira is the real name of Godzilla, just in case you are asked.) Anyway those really crowded trains are in Shinjuku. We are a little ways north of all that in Toshima-ku. But we still get a piece of the same action. This train did not have the TVs with the ads, but it did have paper ads up. The ads are in Japanese with English mixed in when they mix English in with words like "Netscape Navigator 3.0". Hey I can read that and I even know what the product is. We got off the train in Ueno station which is where visitors from Northern Japan come to the big city. This is where they have a concentration of museums, shrines, a zoo, and a park. They also have shopping centers, department stores, bars and restaurants. As we walked on to Ueno park we passed several restaurants with the plastic food out front. In America many restaurants show you photographs of the food on their menu, but in Japan they seem to feel that even more enticing are plastic models of their dishes. Restaurants spend a great deal of money on plastic models of their dishes. Well it does seem to entice customers and can be really artistically done. A photograph of the dish as they make it might be more accurate but the artistry in these plastic models is good enough that it actually makes people hungry. We still have not seen the sun in this Land of the Rising Sun. We have a sort of miserable rainy day. It was raining when we got up and decided that we would do a day we had planned that was heavy on museum-going. That was the day in Ueno. (It rhymes with "bueno", by the way.) I hope that we get some decent days of sunshine. There are precedents for us having entire vacations of rain. Our trip to Spain was like that. Rain every day. They had their worst flooding on 50 years. I am hoping that does not get repeated. The first thing you see in Ueno Park is a statue of a samurai walking his dog. This is Saigo Takemori, born in 1827. He fought against the Shogun for the Imperial forces of the Meiji government helping to restore the Emperor. However when he found out the government wanted to curtail the powers of the military class and withdrew his right to wear a sword he changed his mind, fomented a revolt, fought the imperial forces. (P.S. For more on what was going on you can see the short biography of the Emperor Meiji in the October 13 entry.) He lost and committed Seppuku. He stands here looking rather jolly and plump with his dog. The dog remained loyal to Saigo in spite of Saigo giving him no political power at all from the very beginning. And they both share a statue here. And the military that fought loyal to the Shogun against Saigo in the early days, they have a shrine just behind his statue. So what lesson can we draw from all this? Perhaps just that the Japanese are a complex people. Perhaps they liked that period and wanted to commemorate everything they could from it, including the dog. Perhaps they like to commemorate loyalty. If that is the case perhaps Saigo is getting a free ride and they are commemorating the loyalty of the dog. Following that we were obviously a little befuddled and saw some Shinto shrines, when we thought we were seeing the Toshogu Shrine. There were a set of shrines together in a little compound. We were there mostly looking for the shrine to Tokugowa Ieyasu. (That name is pronounced ee-ay-ya-su.) It looked like it might be there beyond a series a bright red Torii Gates. Every Shinto shrine has at least on Torii Gate, usually either black or red and it is the way to distinguish a Shinto Shrine from a Buddhist one. It has two round columns and two crossbeams. The symbolism is the mouth of the cave into which the Sun Goddess hid, hiding her light from the world. A rooster's crowing fooled her and brought her back out, saving the world from whatever horrible fate happens to worlds whose suns disappear into caves. I should remember who it was who convinced the rooster to crow but right here at the Kimi Ryokan I don't have my sources. How is that for gratitude? This guy probably saved my life and I don't even remember who it was. We finally did find the Toshogu shrine to Tokugawa Ieyasu. If you don't know who he is, try yourself on George Washington. Ieyasu may have been the greatest name in Japanese History. The person was no slouch either. If you read or saw SHOGUN he was Toronaga. (James Clavell changed all the names but his plot was purest plagiarism from history. I was always a little bothered by his ridiculous plot device of having a Westerner in Toronaga's court as the Shogun's personal confident. How believable is that? Turns out Blackthorne was a real person, only his name was Will Able. But I digress.) Anyway Ieyasu was the third of three generals who unified Japan. They are Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu. Each took over the fight when the previous one died. Ieyasu won his final victory at the battle of Sekigahara--well, sort of. On the way in I saw the biggest crow I think I have ever seen, 18 inches long I would guess. The shrine has statues, original armor, artwork, and mournful wailing music. There is a place for people to leave prayers on little wood plaques. The deal that is usually true, I believe, is that the local monks pray twice a month that the prayers on the plaques are fulfilled. Hence if you buy a plaque and write a prayer on it, it gets prayed for automatically twice a month, at least until the plaque is taken down. The Buddhists and Shintoists are very big on automated prayer. That is the idea behind prayer wheels. One plaque that caught my eye was "May Christ, Gautama, Mohammed, and the Sun Goddess sit beneath the cherry trees of Ueno one day and share a pot of tea." It is a nice thought. Of course their followers may be tearing each other apart, but it would be nice to have a sort of religious Yalta. Continuing on there was an incongruous totem pole. It was even more incongruous to have an elephant as one of the totems. It was supplied by the local Lions Club. We continued on to the Tokyo National Museum. We bought our ticket and went in. We started to go into an exhibit hall and were turned away. It seems that in Japan you don't just go to the halls that interest you. There is a specific route through the museum and everyone is supposed to follow it. The special exhibit was "Horyu-ji Treasures from Shotoku Taishi." OK who was Taishi? As the Grolier Encyclopedia puts it: "In the 6th century the centralized control of the Yamato court began to break down. At the end of the century, however, the regent Prince Shotoku Taishi reasserted court authority. He promulgated (604) a 17-article constitution based on the Chinese political theory of centralized imperial government, redefining the sovereign's position in Chinese terms." Basically he was a reformer. His reforms lasted only until 645, but he is still remembered fondly. This exhibit are the treasures of his court. The exhibit had some English, mainly just a description of what each item was, plus one longer description per hall. But there was a lot more in Japanese. It certainly is better than what we do to foreign visitors to our country. How many museums do you see Japanese descriptions of the exhibits? They had more English than we would give Japanese, but still not as much as was needed. They showed calligraphy, they showed furniture and ink dishes. There was a lot of Buddhist materials since he was an ardent Buddhist. We saw Buddhist demon masks with enormous noses. The Japanese are fascinated with nose size, perhaps going back to these Buddhist influences. When Admiral Matthew Perry arrived the Japanese were fascinated with the size of Westerners' noses. Perry was depicted by Japanese artists as having a huge nose. There is a lot of Buddhist art around the museum. We see Buddhas in standard positions, standing and sitting all over. There are Amidas, apparently here a sort of a Buddhist trinity. We saw screens, and more calligraphy. Not knowing Japanese well enough we really do not know what to appreciate in the calligraphy. In part this exhibit was a commemoration of an older exhibition in 1842 of Shotoku's treasures and they showed artifacts from the efforts to put on that exhibit. From there we went on to other exhibits. At first I thought that the museum had a surprisingly small collection. Actually one of the books says that they have a huge collection, but only a small part is on display at any time. They keep rotating the stock so whenever you come you see a fair amount that you have not seen before. Another odd note, there are few banisters on stairs. There was another visitor who attracted my attention. She was wearing a very traditional kimono, was reading everything in great detail, and had a constant, enigmatic smile on her face. We ran into her several times. Hard to tell what was behind that smile but she seemed very intelligent. Other articles included interesting quail-shaped incense burners, an articulated snake (it looks and acts like modern toy but looked fat more realistic. There were collections of armor and swords. I was fascinated by the netsuke. What is netsuke? Well Kimonos did not have pockets. People had to carry things so they had lacquer boxes, about the size and shape as Prince Albert cans of pipe tobacco. These boxes were suspended from the belts by cords. A toggle was put at the other end of the cord. Originally the toggle was plain and simple affair, but soon they started decorating them and then carving them. You get a set of very small and beautiful carvings, most only about an inch and a half high. Many are very beautiful. The subject can be anything. My favorite is a puppy looking in amazement at a fly that has landed on his haunches. Another I have seen is a demon head mask and inside you see a little smiling man inside. This museum had fewer than 40 on display. Among them were a devil face, one nice piece of monkeys, another had a demon howling. One was a kind of menagerie of rat, dragon, and puppy. The strangest had men seeing a toad on a small horse. Because you are probably getting bored I will just list some more of what interested me: -- landscape paintings -- turtle dragons -- more calligraphy--still hard to get much from -- lot of mirrors (Chinese and Japanese have the same mirror shapes, a disk with a lump at the center. At first I thought it looked like a shield, but it may be that the lump is a place to install on a stand?) The Archeology Museum pots, swords, mirrors, bronze helmets, terra-cotta faces a LOT like Meso-American terra-cotta statues, stone carvings and engraved stones. Lunch was at the museum restaurant. I had Katsuiyu (pork cutlet and fried egg over rice) and Evelyn had curried rice. MUSEUM OF ASIAN ART Gandharan and Indian art, Syrian green glazed jar with surprisingly bright color, Chinese mirrors the same shape as the Japanese, fierce looking sculptures as Chinese tomb guardians. On our way out of the museum we shared an elevator with a woman from Portugal. We asked how she was enjoying Japan. She said that she was finding it very strange and us being Americans we were probably finding even stranger. I thought it was an odd comment. I guess I am expecting some culture shock and I am not finding it as strange as I had hoped. But the trip is young. Americans like the belief that we humans are all basically similar. It is true. We all breathe oxygen. Go one step beyond that and we are probably as much different as we are alike. There is a real danger that we will jump to the conclusion that the Iraqis or the Chinese are really like us and completely misunderstand them. And that can be dangerous. We jump to the conclusion that they will do what we would do or think what we would think. It is a terrific simplifying assumption for those who are lazy that you understand someone else just by understanding yourself. Travel is a great way to remind yourself that other people think differently from you. It may be the only way. So I don't know if the Japanese are strange, but they sure are different. Each building has umbrella check machines. It must rain a lot. It is sort of a mechanical equivalent of a check desk, much on the same principle as check box lockers. When you lock an umbrella in it frees up a tag with a number on it the same as the position. Each tag is different. You need to stick the tag back in to free up the umbrella. Our last museum was not from that complex. The Shitamachi Museum was a memorial to the middle-class merchant neighborhood destroyed by the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923. On one floor they have a recreation of a merchant house, a shop house, and a coppersmith's workshop. The second floor is dedicated to Japanese popular culture. They have records, film memorabilia, toys and puzzles. They have a stand with four topological puzzles. It was the sort of thing where you have two blocks tied with cord and there are wooden beads on the cord and the question is whether you can get the beads on the same loop of cord. I seemed to be the only one who could solve the puzzles and I solved three of the four. We walked back on a sort of market street that had all kinds of stalls selling watches, toys, fish (including an odd looking striped fish and squid). We also looked in on a Pachinko palace, but Evelyn thought it was too loud. Pachinko is like pinball played with hundreds of balls. From there it was back to the room to work on the logs. We intended to go out for dinner at some point but between nodding off and log-writing we never managed it. The weather forecast says the rain should end tomorrow sometime. I sure hope so, it put a damper on the whole day. There is something I don't understand going on with the radio. We get only one or two AM stations and no FM. Even the short-wave does not pick up anything. Talk about your fringe reception areas. 10/09/96 Tokyo: The Palace and the Military: Japan and Honor We both woke up at about 5:30 this morning and decided to head out as early as we could for Tsukiji (pronounced skee-ji). This is supposed to be an early morning trip. It is the biggest fish market in the world by two or three times. It is supposed to be quite something to see. The catches come in, there are auctions of fish where the right fish can go for $30,000, there are fish restaurants, there are... Well I will be in a better position to say later, obviously. You have to give credit to a place where a even a fish market is of interest. I am not sure what you have to give a people whose ads are in two different languages (shifting back and forth) and even their own language will have be written in two or three different alphabets because one is not enough. In their writing if they can write in Kanji they do. Kanji is pictograms from the Chinese and it is the most efficient way of writing. It also has advantages over phonetic writing since the word is really a picture of something like what it means. If you know Greek and Latin roots, you can do the same thing with English, but not many people really know the roots. For a phonetic alphabet there are two, one with the letters written with a lot of curves, that's hirigana, one with simplified letters, that catakana. If a word is not one of the core of commonly used words it is spelled out in catakana. There are only about forty or so such symbols and they are a consonant sound and a vowel. Godzilla is go-ji-ra. Vanilla is va-ni-ra. There is no L-sound which is why a popular password in the Pacific was lollapalooza. The Japanese have a hard time even hearing a difference between an R and an L sound. I really like using the trains here. Or perhaps I just hate it in New York. Things are so well-labeled here. If you want to walk from one train line to another you just have to follow the color codes and the path marks are every few feet. Each different line each its own color that is easy to follow. Some trains even have a map of the line and when you are at a stop it lights up on the map and an arrow lights up showing which is the next stop coming up. The New York subway system has saved itself a lot of trouble in not making things clear and as a result hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people have been confused by the system. Some bargain. We got to Tsukiji and the walking tour took us first to the local Buddhist temple. We saw it for a little while then went on to Tsukiji Market, having heard that it opens really early. We saw what could well be a large market and went there. It was a ghost town. We wandered around for a little while and could find almost no activity. OK somebody was cutting up a fish here and someone was cleaning up a counter there, but there was none of the famous action. Eventually we hooked up with some other tourists who were equally surprised. I went to a police box to ask what was going on. I was having some problems communicating. Luckily the other tourist spoke Japanese. Tsukiji was closed for a holiday. First of all the holiday was not the 9th but the 10th, national fitness and sports day, and Tsukiji had closed a day early. Probably because the markets would be closed and there would be nobody buying fish the next day. So our whole plan for the day had been thrown off. It never occurred to us that Tsukiji would close a day earlier for a holiday. Luck of Leeper strikes again. We had to quickly reformulate plans. Today would me a good day to see the Imperial Palace. We grabbed a train. On the way back I took pictures of a cigaret vending machine with the a big sign ad that said in English "Today I'll smoke." Either the people who put up this sign or I don't understand smokers. Perhaps it is just Japanese smokers. We came out on the streets near the palace. As we walked I saw an awning that said Toho Twin Towers. I wondered if it was the film company. Toho is the major Japanese studio. They are best known for some of the best samurai films as well as the major monster films. As we walked on I looked across the street and there was a statue of Godzilla. I told Evelyn that I wanted to cross the street without telling her why. Yes, sure enough at least two feet high, there was a statue of what Americans chose as one of the two most famous Japanese people. The other was Yoko Ono. I forget which came in first. Godzilla deserves it more. I believe GOJIRA was the first Japanese film to actually make an impact on the international market. In typical Japanese fashion they imitated something made elsewhere and in some ways did not do as well with it and in many ways did it better. They were imitating the film THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS and turned it into a serious and important allegory. I think it was Joseph E. Levine, but someone saw it and decided it could do well in the US with some deletions and cutting in an American actor. The new cut, re-titled GODZILLA, KING OF THE MONSTERS was a cut below the original GOJIRA but still had some of the impact. One or two of the sequels were fun, but they never tried to be intelligent films. The statue was in front of a movie theater, probably one associated with Toho. I was a little surprised movies cost more than $16 American. That is a pretty high price. We continued on to the Palace. In a city as cramped as Tokyo I was a bit surprised at how much land was given over to the palace and grounds. It is a huge tract of land right in the middle of city. You get there and you can only see the palace somewhat obliquely. The immediate grounds are marked with a cable that has a sign that says "Off Limits". It is interesting that they use the military wording rather than the more common "No Trespassing." Perhaps that is an artifact of the American Military Occupation which outside of Okinawa was not much of an occupation. The castle looks nice, but it is so hard to see by the people who give it its power. On the other hand people can just walk right into The White House. That seems kind of funny too. We walked around the palace grounds, there were one or two nice photographs, but in general not much to see. I stopped to see some ducks and swans in the mote and it turned out to be where the loyal staff were feeding carp. These were pretty big carp, at least a foot long. There were black and red carp. The red carp are more commonly called goldfish. I think most people don't realize that a goldfish is a carp. We got to the East gardens of the Imperial Palace just beyond where the fish were feeding and found that it too was closed. It claimed to be closed only on Mondays and Fridays and even then it was open on national holidays, but here it was closed. Another couple was similarly disappointed. I they said the national holiday was tomorrow and the sign said it would be open on all national holidays. A guard came out. "Closed?" "Yes." "Why?" "We open at 9." I was 8:49. That's right, we were here very early. Near the entrance we went in there is a tiny museum housing a few pieces of the art collection, one small room from Emperor Showa's private collection, donated to the country on his death. Most people will not know that there was an Emperor Showa. Apparently Emperors change their name when they take office. For some reason most people knew the Emperor Showa by his birth name, Hirohito. Maybe that was because by the time most people knew of him, most of us in the West did not want to grant him any respect. On the other hand the Emperor Heisei is getting the same treatment of being known by his birth-name of Akihito. The museum is one small room with a writing desk, a screen with calligraphy, some scrolls, a painting or two. You can see it in about 15 minutes. Following that we continued into the park through a canyon with 20 foot walls of set stone. We climbed a hill that took us over the walls of the castle and gave an impressive view of the city. Evelyn pointed out what a dull-looking city Tokyo was. Most cities show a sort of personality, the sum total of the architects who built there. New York has a lot of interesting buildings, Chicago has even more. San Francisco has some creative buildings, the most characteristic of which is the TransAmerica Building. Tokyo has little of similar interest. The buildings are almost all fairly boxy and functional. None are ugly, but only about one in 100 is really attractive or interesting. They just are. Most large buildings are technically rectangular prisms. (An exception is West Shinjuku, but it is only one small area.) The city went through a major earthquake in 1923 and then was partially destroyed by the war. Then they were rebuilt quickly and functionally but not interestingly. There is some character of old Edo but it is hard to find. The far end of this park is the Tokugawa castle remnant, what remains of Ieyasu's Castle. Today it just looks like a mound with stone sides. There were a few lines of explanation in Japanese. Our next stop on our walking tour was a museum of Japanese Modern Art. We asked ourselves if this would teach us anything about Japan and decided that it was not the attraction we were looking for. It didn't help that there was a painting on their poster and there was nothing particularly Japanese about it. So we started for Yusukuni Jinja shrine but decide to look for a place to eat, having not eaten for 20 hours. We had intended to have dinner the night before after we got back to the room but an exhausted and jet-lagged Evelyn had fallen asleep. We had intended to eat at Tsukiji, but everything was closed. We had looked around in the area where we saw Toho and there was not much there either. Now Evelyn who had something in her stomach from a soda she had bought at Tsukiji was suggesting another site before we eat and I got a little utsy. I don't think I said anything nasty, but I did think it. (OK, if Jimmy Carter can admit to committing lust in his heart, I can admit to making nasty comments in my heart.) We looked for someplace to eat. There wasn't much, a takeout sushi, but didn't want to stand on a street eating. A few places that had small pieces of food. It looked very frustrating. We decided to cut into a back alleyway and there was a noodle shop. That sure looked good. We had some problems making ourselves understood but Evelyn got a soba and I a jumbo soba for 800 yen total, huge bowls, very filling. Each has a big piece of tempura with vegetables and some shrimp. Oh, was that bowl welcome and was it good. Even at the weird time of 10:30 AM. The one problem is that we had been on our feet all morning and it was a stand-up restaurant. We continued on to the Yusukuni Jinja Shrine, starting with two huge Torii gates, the largest in the world. I would guess they are thirty or forty feet high. In the days before and during W.W.II this shrine was an important nationalistic site. It commemorates and some say houses the souls of 2.5 million war dead, now called a peace park. Well, it depends on how you look at it. Both hawks and doves revere the dead. Hawks blame the enemy for causing the war, doves blame war and the enemies who cause it. The two points-of-view are not even mutually exclusive. The two will often act exactly alike and explain their reasons a little differently. Near the shrine is the Yushukan Museum of military past dedicated to war dead. It is a small museum by American standards with uniforms, samurai armor, and commemoration of the Kamikaze. The museum is, of course, dedicated to the war dead. The term "Kamikaze" is never actually used. They are the Jinrai Butai, the divine thunderbolt. Similar suicide mission volunteers have different names. They are called "Tokubetsu Kogekitai," and are commemorated for the sacrifices they made and "the indelible impression [they left] on peoples of the world." They have a Jinrai Batai suicide plane, basically a glider with three minutes of fuel, and a 1200 kilo bomb charge in the nose. It clearly had exactly one usage and was used at most once. It was a quick and dirty guided missile with a human being doing the guiding. They also had a captured mini-sub that was "generously" loaned by the United States military. They are not treated so well in other parts of the museum. Nobody looked at us strangely, but I did feel a little funny with all the older people who probably fought in the war milling around. Actually they refer to W.W.II as being two different pieces. There was the "Chinese Incident." and the "East Asian War." Elsewhere (a documentary called "Japan: The Electronic Tribe") I have seen a Japanese film suggesting that the Japanese army and the Chinese got along fairly well. A Chinese farmer and the Japanese army are depicted as being almost overly kind to each other. Somehow this is not how the Chinese depict the same incursions. I will probably talk more about this later. Well we had an early start. We had done about a days worth of things to do and it was only about 12:30. What we really desperately needed was a place to sit. We sat down for ten minutes in the museum, very unusual for us but we are getting older. But again we were well and truly exhausted. We sat down on wet bench seats (the predicted clearing never came) and planned what to do next. We decided to see Ginza. I guess I had thought of Ginza as being a big neon forest. An odd variation on our shopping areas. It turned out to be a lot more like our Fifth Avenue than I was expecting. Fancy clothing shops an less of real interest than I was hoping. It was a little strange to see people dressed very chic, men and women in suits, riding bicycles. Still there was not a lot of intrinsic interest. We thought we would check out the Sony building. Evelyn followed the direction and got on the block, but then could not find it. She was leading me and just appeared confused. I did not know that was what she was looking for. When she told me I remembered seeing the skyscraper with the Sony name so I walked a few feet away from the buildings and simply looked up. Evelyn's comment was one I say jokingly occasionally, if it was a snake it would have bitten her. Major companies take out buildings as ads for their products. Sony is typical. You go the building has demonstrations of their products and directions their products may go in the future. The top floor was game-players. I tried one in which I was supposed to be through the magic of electronics kicking and punching some big guy. I found the interface a little hard to use and with a great theme like could I be a good kicker and puncher, I was not highly motivated. I think there was a floor with cameras and camera technology, one with PCs and access to Netscape. Of course the PCs did not have keyboards so there was not much I could do with Netscape. The first floor had a wall of TVs and a sort of personal TV you watched by putting a thing on your head and seeing two TV screen in goggles. That gives it a capability to have 3D images, but curiously they did not demonstrate this. Apparently the thing is a real product for sale called Sony Glasstron. We tried a bookstore whose third floor was supposed to have Foreign language books. American books go for a little over twice cover price. From there we took the train back, and found it packed even at 3:50 PM. Instead of going directly back we went around the full circle and got a free look at many parts of Tokyo. It was a little hard to see because we had our backs to the window, but if there were seats available we would take them because we were both exhausted. This may be in part the result of going 20 hours without eating. I don't have a lot to share with you about what we saw of Tokyo because it is mostly big boxy buildings, in big centers with a lot of neon. There are a few traditional looking buildings, but not many. It seems like a very functional urban city. But it is at one end of a spectrum and a city like Prague is at the other. Prague has character everywhere you look. On the other hand I like the food here a lot more than I did in Prague. All cities have advantages and disadvantages. I saw a Salaryman reading a manga. He put it in an interoffice envelope so it would look like work. You rarely see Salarymen reading manga. I guess it is not good for the business. I should explain the terms Salaryman and manga. There are so many businessmen in business suits in Japan that they have made them almost a separate class of people like the samurai. And just like you can find books explaining to Westerners the way of the Samurai, there are books explaining the way of the Salaryman. And in ways they are similar. Both consider loyalty to their master very important. It is a little strange seeing them make take a class of people who get no special attention in other parts of the world and making them a separate class. Score one point for the woman from Portugal. This I do find strange. A manga is sort of the Japanese equivalent of our comic book, but there are important differences. They are very popular. A manga is printed on cheap newspaper and is generally about an inch thick so you get a lot more. There is no color in the art other than the bright and sometimes garish cover and maybe a couple of inset pages. However they are printed on lightly colored paper stock. Typically the first third, the second, and the third will each have its own color, and I think they will change color in the middle of a story. They are inexpensive compared with comics, a lot of story for about $2 an issue. There are also more subtle differences in how they handle time in the stories. A serious manga will do things like devote more time to setting mood, slowly moving in on a figure over several frames. In some ways they are more cinematic. They also can be brutally violent and have what would be for us shocking scenes of rape. Others are written more to a younger audience. Much of the media has heavy, uncensored violence in Japan. Yet it is a fairly peaceful country with a low crime rate. The example of Japan is a constant thorn in the side to advocates of censorship since they are trying to censor the very things that are free in Japan and the excuse they give is to avoid the very things that the Japanese avoid very effectively. On the other hand Japan is a very different society from ours in a lot of other ways. From Samurai times it has instilled a very heavy respect for authority that we do not have. That is probably what checks the crime and violence. In any case, there were a lot of different people on the train reading mangas and most seemed to be reading the same one. I would really think that there would be a market in our country. It is certainly a cost-effective form of entertainment. Here for the cost of a film you can get a four-inch thick stack of manga. I have a few times gotten up to give my seat to an older person, but as time goes by there are fewer of those. Certainly Japanese teens don't give up a seat to their elders. it seems to be a courtesy of the older generation only. I will say that the Japanese like music. Their traffic lights make music. Some seem to play a melody when it is OK to walk. Also when the train stops there is a little piece of melody then a voice announces the station. The melody is not the same each time. I haven't figured if it was chosen at random, if each station has its own theme, or if there is some other meaning. The Shinjuku station handles two million commuters each rush hour and the train is packed densely with commuters. We got back to Ikebikuro and started to look for dinner. We got sushi really cheap from a grocery. 1200 yen made for a good dinner of sushi. For those who have been keeping track we have had two great meals today and we have spent a little over $18. This illustrates my thesis that Japan is an expensive place to buck the tide what the Salaryman eats. You can afford to do that once in a while because You can eat fairly cheaply and well by eating like a Salaryman. I could live in my three weeks very nicely off of noodle shops for lunch and sushi for dinner. We get an interesting group of people meeting in our lounge. We talked for about travel for about an hour with a man from Bath, England. After dinner it was back to the room to write and nod off a bit. Just for safety's sake we decided to get our reservations in for Kyoto. This meant trying to use the phones. The Japanese pay-phones are huge. They are bigger than ice buckets. You have to put in what you think is enough money and if you run out of coins it dies. Since you can't tell how much you will need to talk you can only make a guess as to how many coins to have on hand. Then if you do not know the code of gongs you can easily not put in enough money. Nevertheless with Evelyn's help I got a reservation made for the five night from the 16th to the 20th. 10/10/96 Kamakura: Late Religious Foundations True story: A rabbi in Japan had a Japanese person come to him and ask to be converted to Judaism. This is a fairly unusual request in Japan and the rabbi asked, as the rule tell him to, why the man wanted to be Jewish. "Jews are successful and I want to be successful." The man would probably not have wanted to be Jewish if he realized that would have to be his only religion. Nor would he have ever realized, as many of us in the US seem not to, that a religion represents opinions on some deep metaphysical issues. Japan's view of religion is one of most unusual of any country. My understanding is that many and perhaps most Japanese simply do not commit to a single religion. They bounce back and forth between Shinto and Buddhism, but Christmas is fun so in late December many are Christian. And every now and then there's Tao and Zen. Now that is absolutely marvelous. Can you imagine how that must drive missionaries crazy? (And anything that drives missionaries crazy is fine by me.) What must the average Japanese think of the fact that nations go to war and people die in the thousands over questions like does wine turn into blood during communion literally or symbolically. A one-time conversion by the sword is one thing, having to watch people every moment because they are going to be something else if you don't is another matter entirely. Imagine if the Jewish population of a country was drastically different on Purim than it was on Yom Kippur. I love the idea of offering passive resistance to proselytizers and evangelists. Anyway, today we look at the roots of religion in Japan. This morning we got up early, skipped breakfast, and by 7 AM were headed for Kamakura. We lucked out on the train. We wanted a seat to just ourselves for a while. There was a Salaryman sleeping in one pair of facing seats. You see people sleeping on the trains a lot, probably partially due to the lower crime rate. Anyway we sat down next to the sleeping man. He woke up and looked at us and closed his eyes again. Then looked at the doorway, jumped up, and ran out just before the door closed. He almost missed his stop, I guess. It is a good thing we picked that seat. If you want a good feel for the environs of Tokyo, particularly near the train lines, you can get that in GODZILLA, KING OF THE MONSTERS. (Yes, I am on about that again, but for good purpose. There are ways in which that film is to me a treasure trove of Japanese post-war society. I wonder if we recognize how much information is really packed into one of our films.) That seems to show electrical trains and a lot of wires everywhere as power for the trains and as electrical wires, and as power for street-light and traffic lights. That is pretty accurate. It almost looks like some huge spider has built webs everywhere. (West Shinjuku is an exception.) They are very functional but a little ugly. That seems to be the Tokyo philosophy. Put up with a little ugliness for functionality. (We somewhat stand out however because that is how we are dressing this trip and most Japanese are very style-conscious.) Anyway, the wire situation may explain some of why radio reception is so bad. When you are driving and go under power lines you lose reception. There may be power-lines just about everywhere. The radio situation is better at night than in the day, but not very good either time. Most frequencies seem like they are pulling in signal and the little light on the short-wave indicating signal lights up, but what you get is buzz. The ride into Kamakura is fairly quick but we get to see a little more of the surrounding countryside. There is clearly more poverty in Japan than we had thought and a lot of people live in ramshackle houses just outside of the big city. Houses made of rusty corrugated steel are not uncommon. And everywhere you look are power lines. We arrived in Kamakura and went to see temples. In 1159 The Fujiwara and Minimoto Clans were fighting for supreme control. In 1159 was their final battle and the Fujiwara, led by Taira Kiyomori, became the rulers of Japan. They ruled from Kyoto. But the third son of the commander of the Minamoto forces managed to survive. Yoritomo set up his base in Kamakura and prepared to retake control. He succeeded and became Shogun at Kamakura in 1192. He did not leave an heir who could take control and his wife's family, the Hojo Clan took control on his death. They defended the island from two invasions by the Mongols only to lose power in 1333 and Kyoto once again became the capital. Engaku Temple is really a whole complex of buildings. It was founded in 1282 when the Mongols were invading and trying to seize the home islands. Zen Monks first built a temple here as a safe place. There was some sort of gathering to celebrate the national holiday and there were a bunch of children's events. It is peculiar to hear a Buddhist temple blaring When You Wish Upon a Star, and music from BEAUTY AND THE BEAST and ALADDIN, all to make little Buddhists into better Buddhists. It strikes me that Japanese Buddhist temples are very different from those in Thailand. We found the temples in Northern Thailand to be full of carvings of demons fighting and of Naga snakes. These are nice but have much less representational art other than depicting the Buddhas themselves. We had intended next to go to Kencho Temple. It is the most important Zen temple in Kamakura. At the time our guide book was written it also had the heftiest admission of 200 yen, but it seems reasonable. Recently they decided that tourists would consider no visit to Kamakura complete without visiting them so they raised the admission to 1500 yen. And they didn't bother to throw in balloons, lunch, or a stage show. I decided that my visit would be more than complete without visiting them. Jochi-Ji is a smaller temple. Sorry, there just is not much to say about it except that their handout was only in Japanese. A lot of these temples are very similar. This one had only three or four buildings plus a modern house where a family seemed to live with a dog who barked at visitors. At most of these temples you do not go in but stand outside and look at an image of the Buddha in a dark room. Am I missing something? Tsurugoaka Hachiman is another big complex, more a shrine than a temple. It is more colorful with a huge box where prayers threw their coins rather than a small box in front of where they prayed. It almost looked like a carnival game. This one had free admission and was the most interesting complex we saw. It also had the most lively atmosphere with venders setting up on the walk away. This is not Zen but Shinto, but that is mostly noticeable from the Torii gates. It was time for lunch and we were on the main drag, which offered quite a profusion. This is a tourist town and prices are somewhat elevated in the restaurants, but still really not bad for what you get. We found a noodle shop where the big bowls of soup were 650 yen. That is a lot more than we paid the day before, but still not bad for a filling lunch. The day before we had real problems explaining which dish we had chosen since the plastic reproductions were outside the restaurant. This time I was smarter. I pulled out a pad of paper and copied the Japanese names for the dishes and the price. I don't know Japanese but it is still easy enough to copy. The woman read my writing with no trouble. I also got an order of gyoza, (the Japanese equivalent of Chinese fried dumplings sometimes called pot stickers). Evelyn had figured a worst case of $80 a day for meals and we are getting filling good meals for $15 for the two of us. We may want to get some more variety, but it is not expensive to eat what the Japanese eat. Next we wanted to head out toward the Great Buddha. The center of town had a sight (and sound) we were finding very familiar. Apparently they have some political voting coming up (I think). But wherever we go there are loudspeaker cars or trucks and someone yelling rhetoric to the crowds. This one had a car with speakers hooks up and along with the speaker there was a woman in the car waving to the crowds. It seemed incongruous. The local ticket machines have a little cartoon clerk figure bowing to the patron about to buy a ticket. I wonder how hard up for respect you have to be before you get some sort of charge from seeing a machine programmed to respect you. We started to walk out toward the Buddha. Evelyn asked directions from a couple coming in the other direction holding a map. We had no language in common but each made themselves understood. We continued on. About five minutes later we stopped and were looking at the odd beverages in a vending machine. The couple came running up. They had omitted telling us there was a turn we had to make and had chased after us to make sure we didn't get lost. OK, that is my best story about the Japanese. My worst is coming up in a couple paragraphs. They do have odd things in vending machines. We have seen beer and saki vending machines as we went. The strangest we saw was a machine for vending big sacks of rice. Actually the country seems to have lots and lots of vending machines wherever you go. It is apparently an efficient way to distribute goods. On person can maintain many vending machines. Also that person may not have to pay the huge real estate costs that having a store would entail. Particularly in the city you see vending machines all over. I have been curious to try a beverage you see a lot called Poccari Sweat. Perhaps it is like Gatorade. As we walked the neighborhood seemed to get a little more downbeat and tattered. We passed a woman openly drinking something alcoholic on the street. The shops seemed a little dingier and we passed two shoe shops relatively near each other. Also a leather-goods store. "The ghetto," I said to Evelyn. She chuckled as if I had mad a joke. "I am serious, we have just passed two shoe-shops" What is this all about? Well, it seems most societies have their untouchable class. Even the Japanese who have such a cohesive society have their equivalent of the Jews in the European Middle Ages, the Untouchables of India, Blacks in America, etc. It is rarely talked about in print, but I think these were the Burakumin. They are always the last to be hired and the first to be fired, from what I have heard. They get very few opportunities to marry outside of their numbers and when they do the spouse becomes Burakumin. There is no equivalent of Affirmative Action or any sort of domestic help or even sympathy. The rest rarely talk about them. The symbol used is four fingers held together like the legs of an animal. These are the people in unclean professions like the leather trade and the descendants of such people. They are thought of as unclean. I could be wrong about he neighborhood, but it seemed likely. We continued walking and eventually things got upscale and touristy again. We knew we must be getting near the Great Buddha. We even saw ice cream stands, which you are starting to see in Japan, but they are rare. Finally we got to the grounds, washed our hands as is the tradition, and went to see the Buddha. It is a magnificent statue, even if he looks to have a sort of sour look on his face as if he had smelled something unpleasant. We paid and went inside. The Buddha is hollow and for a nominal fee you can go inside. There are even two windows in the Buddha's back that look very incongruous. They cite the following statistics: age: 720 yr. weight: 274428 lb. height: 44 ft face: 7.7 ft eye: 3.3 ft ear: 6.6 ft mouth: 2.8 ft knee to eye: 30 ft round of thumb: 2.8 ft I take these specifications with a grain of salt. I estimated the total height including the base at under 40 feet. The technique is to find a point that looks like it is halfway down, then find a point halfway down from that point, etc. Until you get to a height you can estimate because there is something near you can use as a reference. With three cuts it was down to a height shorter than a man next to the statue. Maybe 4 1/2 or 5 feet. I guessed the total height at 36 or 38 feet. Lonely Planet says 11.4 meters. That is about 37 feet. We walked back amongst some of the usual souvenir shops. I told Evelyn that building the Buddha must have been a godsend to these souvenir shops. Nearby is Hase-dera Temple. The first thing you find of interest is row upon row of stone dolls, the Statues of Jizo. The Lonely Planet refers to these as statues of departed children, but the truth is, I believe, that these children never arrived. The TV documentary JAPAN: THE ELECTRONIC TRIBE said that these were statues to stillborn and more recently also aborted children. Parents dress the dolls up and try to make up to the children in a life the children never saw. It seems like an intelligent outlet for the pain. There are more Buddhas to see including one Buddha 24 feet high. Another room has a giant prayer wheel. There is a wooden device on a pivot and it is maybe ten feet in diameter. People come in, grab a spoke, and walk it around in a circle. One turn equals one prayer. If you are mute you can still pray. Still it gives a new meaning to mechanical repetition of prayer. There is also a cave of 1000 Buddhas, mostly small, but there quite probably are 1000 in there. Through most of that walk you must be stooped down to avoid the low ceiling. (For those who follow such things, the choice of our chachka, our cheap souvenir that a local would buy for himself, was really easy in Japan. I was planning to get statues of the Seven Happy Gods, but they are not as commonly sold as they once were, I guess. We got a prayer plaque of the sort people buy, write a prayer on, they tie up at a temple. Most of the local temples seem to have them and the plaques are popular, though they are not bought to be kept the way we are.) It felt like a long walk back to the train and it felt good to sit down and rest our feet. We had one more temple to find, but that was in Tokyo. This we only had a map reference for and finding it was difficult. When we did it was already dark and the temple was locked up. There were souvenir shops, but no English anywhere. The Japanese probably thought that it would be meaningful to the Japanese but not to tourists. Most Japanese would need to hear only one number and know which temple it was and what its significance was. The number is 47. At this temple 47 Ronin committed suicide in a historical event chronicled in a book called Chushingura. Before I can write about Chushingura I should write about Samurais and Bushido. This is a good place then to have a discussion of Bushido. The Japanese seem very peculiar to Americans. I have to say that I do not find the Japanese peculiar at all. But I look at the Japanese from the point of view that everything is explained by Bushido. The problem with trying to understand the Japanese without Bushido is that they make no sense at all. The problem with using Bushido is that that it is too powerful. Suddenly the Japanese become too straightforward. It has to be an over-simplification. When all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail. When all you have is Bushido to explain the Japanese character, everything looks like a straightforward manifestation of Bushido. How can the Japanese have committed such cruelty in W.W.II and still feel they have done no wrong? By Bushido they really have done no wrong. The soldiers were the Samurai of the 40s. How can the Japanese make such a big thing of the Salaryman, this huge class of people who dress all alike? The Salaryman is the new Samurai. They dress all alike because there is a right way for the Salaryman to dress just like the Samurai had a right way to dress and everything else was wrong. The code of Bushido, as long as we are simplifying, is simply this. Loyalty is not just important to a Samurai, it is the ONLY thing that is important. It is the ONLY virtue. Besides someone of nobility, the highest rank you can achieve in society is to be a Samurai. A Samurai is the muscle of the master. And the master was put in place by Divine Will. If a commoner does not get out of the way of a Samurai, the Samurai can kill him with impunity. There is nothing disloyal to the master in killing a commoner. And certainly nothing bad you can do to an enemy that is in itself disloyalty to the master. If the master has told you to be kind to the enemy, for whatever reason, then it would be wrong. But lacking such orders from the master you can do what you want with the enemy. How can the Japanese have been so cruel to their captives in the Pacific War? Their leaders wanted them to win and do everything they could to achieve that end. That was the only virtue. That was the right thing to do. And many Japanese still feel they did no wrong in W.W.II. Why? Because by Bushido they did exactly what they were supposed to do. Far more than the Germans, they still believe they were just following orders and that was the right thing to do. So of course some are indignant that for doing the right thing they had the atomic bomb dropped on them. But that is mostly civilians and the lower ranks. Ask the higher military if Japan had had the Bomb would they have used it and the response (and this is a quote, as well as I can remember it, from a New York Times article last year) "Of course, it was wartime and that is what you do in a war." The Japanese actually were working to create their own super-weapons including biological warfare experiments in Manchuria. (All this was from the same article.) There is a tremendous nostalgia for the simplicity of following a Master. That is a neat and uncomplicated lifestyle and it is one of austere virtue. Yukio Mishima was one of the most famous advocates of this romantic and simple lifestyle. And the real shocker is that Western Society has its own Bushido. We had it long before the Japanese and it still is powerful today. But instead of serving a human master we say we serve God. And the only virtue is obeying God. If God tells us to rise up and retake the Holy Land, that is exactly where virtue lies. If we kill a lot of people along the way, well, it is still virtue. We are obeying God. The big difference is that in Bushido the master is a human and can clarify what his wishes are. In the West and in the Middle East Westerners and the Moslems need religious people to tell us what God really meant and the clerics wield incredible power in doing that. Anyone who fights for his religion is a Samurai. Suicide bombers are cut from the same cloth as the Kamikaze and the Samurai who dies for his master. We have our own Yukio Mishimas wanting to return to less complicated time when a master rules. In our society it is Christ or Mohammed or the Chief Rabbinate. And we have our Samurais willing to die for that ideal. The classic story of Bushido and studies of kinds of loyalty is CHUSHINGURA or THE 47 RONIN. This is a classic study of kinds of loyalty. Asano is coming to court and has to know the proper rules of etiquette and manners. It is Kira's responsibility to teach these to Asano. But Kira has a conflict of interest. He really does not want to see Asano succeed at court so intentionally is derelict. Asano is a horrible failure and commits suicide. Asano's samurai now could be masterless, but they think that an injustice has been done to their master and decide they must be loyal to him even in death. But the time is not yet right. Led by the noble Oishi, they go into other professions and bide their time until the time is right to take their revenge. When the time comes one very cold winter day there are 47 of them left. Kira has long since stopped expecting any retaliation. Suddenly he has 47 angry samurai breaking down his door with a huge mallet (a very popular theme for Japanese art). Unprepared, Kira's guard is quickly dispatched. Next Kira is killed for his killing of Asano by dereliction of duty. Now the 47 samurai have discharged their duty to their master and really are masterless. They go to Shenga-Kuji temple and, proud of themselves, commit seppuku. This was Shenga-Kuji. Totally washed out from walking we went back to the Ryokan, picking up sushi at the grocery. 10/11/96 Tokyo: Stores, Offices, Entertainment; Japan's Economy I have to say as far as weather, this one is starting out the nicest day so far. No sun, but there are patches of blue. There is a potential for sunshine. We were somewhat washed out from yesterday so we stayed late in the room, until about 10. They came to change the linens, which they must do about once a week. The first thing we did was get a JapanRail pass for the next Monday to Sunday. Today for the second time when we went to the train station someone was handing out packages of facial tissue with an advertisement on the wrapper. This is actually very commonly done in Japan, in large part because many of the bathrooms do not have towels. It is a cheap way to get people to carry around your ad in their pocket. Of course the ad is mostly in Japanese. Some people handing out tissues will not hand them to gaijin. Some will hand two packs. It depends on if they are trying to get rid of them. Also it has to do with loyalty. They probably should not be handing to people who cannot read the ads. The problem with tissue products is that they tend to fall apart in use. Facial tissue is not where it is the biggest problem, however. We wanted to see the food department in the basement of Tobu, the local department store. They had individually wrapped pieces of sushi and if we were interpreting the prices correctly it was even considerably cheaper than we had been getting at the grocery. After looking all over the floor and finding many delicacies we decided that sushi was still what we wanted. This was quite a selection of sushi, all terrific, and we paid under 1300 yen and had a meal that would have cost at least twice that at home. I think our days of grocery store sushi are over at least while we stay at the Kimi. The Japanese consider beef to be something of a gourmet product and they charge pretty heavily for it. At home we feel the same about sushi. Here go to a good sushi restaurant here and you can lay down a lot of money, but you can also get it very economically if you want to serve it yourself. It also is not the highbrow food we think of it in the U.S.. If we were looking for an equivalent degree of highbrow-ness of American food with a hot dog as low and oysters Rockefeller as high, the Japanese would probably put sushi about where we would put pastrami. Next we walked the streets of Ikebekuro just looking at shops and shopping. There was a huge poster for THE ROCK. It showed an obvious Sean Connery and Nicholas Cage and a third person who looked like a balding Carl Malden. It was entirely in Japanese and I was trying to think who the third actor was. I told Evelyn I thought it was Ed Harris, who was much younger than the man in the picture. Well, it turned out it was just an absolutely terrible rendering of Ed Harris. Other posters looked more like him but this one was ridiculously bad. Films are a little cheaper here, 1200-1500 yen for a film. That is still pretty steep. We went to a department store to see what it was like. I ended up looking at film posters, hopefully for some Toho science fiction films. We saw a really nice poster on the street for the upcoming film MOSURA or as we will rename it MOTHRA. They have posters for U.S. and British films but no Japanese films. That seems peculiar. I guess there is sort of a mystique over foreign films. One of the stops recommended in this area is the Toyota Amlux. This is a lot like a permanent World's Fair pavilion. Sure it is an ad, but it is an entertaining ad. They have a movie that you enter by climbing into what looks like a big spherical mirrored spaceship. The movie is not great, but it is not just an ad for Toyota. It is an entertaining little film which has a lot of product placement. It could be worse. It is supposed to have aroma control as well as stereo, etc. I did not notice any special aromas. They also take you through a section that explains how a car in made. You move among the chapters. One will be on a video wall, one will use 3D models, one will be photographed in 3D. Of course they have you go through several floor where you see Toyota's new models. Evelyn was very interested to see a floor demonstrating handicap access. The very top floor has model cars and seems to have little to do with Toyotas. We walked the streets for a little while, then headed out to see a computer exhibition we had heard about in the NS building in West Shinjuku. West Shinjuku is a very exclusive set of very fancy and formidable-looking business buildings. On the way we saw some students in uniforms. For some reason the school uniforms here are based on Navy uniforms. We saw pretty much the same thing in Helsinki, Finland and the students there were all in what looked like Navy caps. Are high schools run on a metaphor of the Navy, the way Starfleet is in Star Trek or what is it that is going on? The must be some explanation. It is much more common here to see people sleeping on subways than it is in New York. It must be that it is a lot safer. And also with the pressure it is a lot more necessary. We got off the subway at Shinjuku and walked to West Shinjuku. It is impressive. I think the most profitable companies in Japan were trying to out-Manhattan Manhattan. Everything in the NS building is meant to negate the image of tiny Japan. The building is 30 floors high and has a glassed-in top. It has a huge atrium that goes up the whole height of the building. There is a Seiko clock that must be six stories high itself. There is nothing miniature about this building. The computer exhibit, called for some reason the OA exhibit, was there on the fifth floor, we had been told. I was there in my photovest, Evelyn in blue jeans. A high mucki-muck Japanese businessman in a three-piece suit got on the same elevator. Physics says that heat is actually the energy of moving molecules. Supposedly you can radiate heat, but you cannot radiate a chill. Of course few physicists have worn photojackets and shared an elevator with a Japanese, high mucki-muck businessman. It is done with a very subtle tensing of the muscles of the face, but it really works. One thing that does not work is going to the fifth floor to find the OA exhibit. It isn't there. We went back down to the ground floor. It was not easy making ourselves understood but we did and the woman looked up the exhibit in a book. It had moved to the Sumitomo building. OK, we headed out with a sigh of relief. The Sumitomo Building is another fabulously expensive building across the way, perhaps just a little less impressive than the NS building. Walking to the Sumitomo Building we passed a sale of giant carp. This is really a status fish. You know you have really made it when your personal pond has a foot-long carp or better yet several. The Emperor's pond had enough giant carp to have gridlock, but then, he IS the Emperor. Anyway the biggest we 20,000 yen though you could get some for as little as 5000 yen. These fish do not have to worry about ending up on vinegared rice. Inside we went. But now we had no idea where to look. There was an information desk, of course. Again we had a hard to making ourselves understood. "Away exhibit?" "OA! Computer." Blank stare. Then Evelyn did what I was afraid she might. She showed the listing to the woman. "Oh, that is NS Building. This Sumitomo Building." "They sent us here." "Exhibit is in NS Building. This Sumitomo Building." "Can you look to see if there is an OA exhibit." "What company?" "Many companies." "NEC?" "That might be one." "NEC on seventh floor." We tried the seventh floor. We asked on person who looked at us like we were nuts. I decided he was right. We went up to the observatory floor, took some pictures and decided to leave before we annoyed more suits. From there we went to see the entertainment district of East Shinjuku. It took us a long time just to figure out how to get to the other side of the train station during the incredible rush hour when supposedly two million people go through. We did eventually find our way. On the way we passed a bunch of homeless people living under a bridge. A friend had said most of the poor and the beggars were Caucasians. I am not sure where he was looking, but I have seen a few of the poor and homeless, but not one was Caucasian. What I was picturing as Ginza is East Shinjuku, a jungle of bright lights and neon. It is mostly stores outside the entertainment district. The entertainment district is not like the red light district anywhere else. It does have the sex shows and massage parlors, but there are more restaurants, and there are Pachinko palaces. We walked around taking things in, looking at the bright neon. The whole place seemed less unwholesome than we thought. And as far as the sex stuff, it seems to be treated much more openly in Japan than in the U.S. It always seems to be a covert sort of enterprise at home. And more so than ever. We now have this coalition of the religious right and the feminist left trying to suppress pornography and the sex industry. (On my last visit to the Science Fiction Shop in New York I notice that they have gotten rid of all this material written for men: Gor novels, racy French comics, etc., but they still very openly have a shelf of erotica written for women. Nobody seems to be going after that. We are nurturing a real double standard in the name of justice. And people find Japanese society strange. It is not that I would be greatly bothered if the pornography all disappeared on its own, but it is a very disturbing trend toward censorship and double standards in our society.) Then we went to a music store outside of the entertainment district where I paid a heavy price but got some hard to find Japanese film music. Then it was back to the entertainment district for dinner. I found it hard to find a place to eat since most were sushi shops. I was sure there were a lot of good places to eat just an hour or so earlier when we were first just strolling through. And I thought we had a better selection the first time. We passed a Mister Donut shop that claimed to have Chinese steamed buns. Throwing caution to the winds, we entered. That part is one floor down. OK. We went down and found the whole lower level had a super-exaggerated 1950s decor. Hey, it works for the Hard Rock Cafe. The music playing was a constant stream of Elvis songs. The food seemed to feature shu mi, steamed pork bun, and shrimp dumpling with either noodle soup or a noodle dish. How did they attempt to tie together 50s decor and steamed pork buns? Was this how Americans ate in the 50s? This was supposed to be San Francisco's Chinatown in the 50s. Never mind that a Chinatown restaurant would almost never play Presley music, that was the theme. Oh, and as for the quality of the dumplings and the rest of the food--just slightly the low end of mediocre. But that was about what we expected. Heading back to the train station we passed Jumbo, a Pachinko parlor all lit up Las Vegas style with an incredible amount of red neon. So much red neon you can feel the heat radiating off of it on your face from across the street. This was now past 7 PM and Shinjuku was still an incredible mob of people. (P.S. Actually at 10 PM it would still be the same story. Perhaps later. The city never sleeps.) I commented to Evelyn that it was good the rush hour was over. (It loses something. You should have seen the mob of people.) They really need ticket machines in Shinjuku. There are long lines of people buying tickets well into the evening with enough machines the wait is not too bad. The train was crowded and we had to stand. I stood facing an ad for something featuring the three tenors, Domingo, Pavarotti, and Carreras. I didn't know they were popular in Japan. In Ikebukuro we had to pass the usual gauntlet of miniskirted women and young guys handing out ads for local girlie shows. For good or bad reasons they hand them only to Japanese, not to gaijin. "Gaijin" is Japanese for "gringo." There is some question as to whether it is a derogatory term. Gaijin is short for the word for foreigner "gaikokujin." Is it a negative word? Not taken literally. There are people at home who refer to a "black gentleman" and use "gentleman" in a derogatory manner. Any word for someone else can be used in a negative way. And any time you hear a word you don't know being used to refer to you, it is natural to feel a little paranoia. There is the old joke that the Lone Ranger killed Tonto because he found out that "kimosabe" means "asshole." All you can say is that gaijin may be negative or may not depending on context. 10/12/96 Tokyo: Feeding the Nation: Tsukiji and the Kitchen Supply District Well, it was time to try Tsukiji again. This is the giant fish market, biggest in the world. Luck of Leeper said the last time we tried I, it was closed for a holiday the next day. I had already been up early and working on my log before the appointed 5:30 wake-up time for the trip. By 6 we were out and headed for the market area between Ginza and Tokyo Bay. We grabbed a train and were at the market area by 6:30. By that point most of the tuna auctions were over, but there was only so much we were willing to do. Last time we were really not sure how to find the market and were wandering around. I told Evelyn that this time that would not be necessary. We could just follow the people on either side of us. How did I know they were going to Tsukiji, she asked. They are wearing boots. The tour books tell you to wear old shoes since Tsukiji is not neat. In any case it took us back to the area where we has been before. There is an outer market, really a bunch of stalls along the street. But what we wanted is the trading area. It is set back a five minute walk from the road, but you cannot miss it because there are vehicles of all sizes from little pull wagons to vans maneuvering around. In fact, just getting to the main building can be a little daunting. Evelyn asked how we should do it. I said just pick someone who look like he knows what he is doing and is going in and follow him. And keep alert. This is by a factor of two or three the largest fish market in the world. Fishing boats come in from all over the world to sell their fish. The Japanese eat a lot of seafood, about 80 pounds per person per year. In an average day about 1800 tons of fish, 200 of tuna alone, will be sold here and about 15 million dollars will change hands. All this under one roof in a market of 55.6 acres. We were threading among all sorts of vehicles taking out fish, and dodging fork lifts. I got some pictures of tuna and one of a man with a fisherman band around his head. The band is about the smallest headgear that can be called headgear and my guess its purpose is to collect sweat. It is like a role of cloth with a circular cross-section. It may be a half inch in circumference. Then this band is tied around the head. The tuna have a characteristic look also. Each is still frozen, so it is white. The tails have been cut off so buyers can see the fat content. Also there will be an cut toward the base of the neck for an inspection at that end. They are something like three or four feet long and are about 18 inches in diameter at the widest. On the side of the white fish will be painted something in red. It is probably the symbol of the company. You see buyers going around looking at the neck cut with a special tool. But that is just one kind of seafood sold here in the raw. You see live octopus squirming and dead octopus. You see plastic hampers of fish still squirming. There are live shrimp and things that have long segments like shrimp but are not. There are oysters looking like rocks and giant clams with feet an inch and a half wide and four inches long. There is some sort of bright red fish you see a lot of, with eyes two inches in diameter and with eerily reflective eyes that change as you walk past. There are live crabs packed in sawdust twitching but looking like they have been breaded in sawdust and fried. Fish are being cut with jigsaws, with knives, with hatchets, and frozen fish are being cut like firewood with axes. The fish is stood up and then cut in quarters or slices the long way like you would split a log. It takes 15 minutes to cross the floor the long way. Curiously there is very little fish smell. What we think of as the small of fish is really the smell of decaying fish. This is all fresh fish. There is no unpleasant smell in the largest fish market in the world. Toward the front there are some prepackaged goods, toward the back it is mostly raw fish of the boats. If you count dead fish, most of the fish I have seen in my life I saw today. It is a lot of fish. After that we wanted a restaurant meal, I guess we wanted fish, though toward the end the thought of having fish was not an unalloyed joy. We found a stall and got a rice bowl of maguro, the good part of the tuna, for 700 yen. The bowl was a lot like sushi ingredients served in a different configuration. All this raw fish must be being inspected for parasites by someone before it is served, but we don't see that part of the process. One thing you have to love, if the menu says 700 yen, you pay 700 yen. Period. Which is very civilized of the Japanese. In New Jersey If you get something that says $7, you better have $8.47 in your pocket. Here tax and tip is 0% except in fancy restaurants. From there we continued our tour past the Asahi Shimbun offices. This is one of the major newspapers of Japan with a circulation of seven million. We were headed to take a boat to Asakusa (pronounced "Asaksa"). We were going to go by boat, but access is via a park and garden, the Hama Rikyu Garden. A big sign was up saying that the garden was not open today. This would have put a real crimp in our plans, but one Japanese man was waiting and was waiting to get in and also seemed to have a passion for helping tourists. We saw a lot of him over the next hour or so. The first thing he told us was that the garden would open at 9. It was about 8:45. He had little English, I had almost no Japanese so we used English. He was very helpful and very nice. He suggested a number of day trips that would be good for us to take. At 9 we went in and found the garden to be delightful in ways that I hadn't realized I appreciated Japanese gardens. It was just a beautiful spot with lots of large birds, cranes and ducks among them, flying overhead. There were fish to see and in general it just gave a feeling of real peace. The garden used to be used for duck hunting by the Tokugawa Shoguns. U. S. Grant met with the Meiji emperor here also. You see a lot of building over the tops of the trees, but it is still quite nice. Water fountains are somewhat hard to use if you are used to American ones. The stream comes up vertically and you control how much comes out. This means if you are not careful you get a shower. Also the water breaks up and goes in all directions. There was a pavilion in the middle of a pond that we visited. All very nice. Finally the sun came out. At about 10:15 we took the boat for Asakusa. Waiting we ran into the gentleman who was helping us before and tried to hold a conversation. I used to complain in my log about boorish Americans who come to a come to a country without memorizing a bit of the vocabulary. Now I have become one. I really tried, but my memory has gotten worse or there are too few cues in the language, but I retain the Japanese I memorized only for a few minutes. Certainly I cannot recall most of what I need in time to use even the phrases I have memorized. I still remember a bit but not enough and I feel very rude and ignorant. On the boat our friend acted as guide, pointing out landmarks on each side of the river. I would have liked to do something for his kindness other than to just say arigato, but I was not sure what to do. An article I had read said that if we carried around something inexpensive and American to give out that would be appreciated. I brought a bunch of Star Trek keyrings (how we got them is another story) but was too self-conscious to offer one. I had to settle for an "arigato" when we got to Asakusa. The Senso Temple in Asakusa is a bit unusual to American eyes mostly for the carnival atmosphere around temple. We had been to shrines that had concession stands outside, but nothing like this. It was a block long pavilion of people selling toys, souvenirs, cookies, candy, shirts, Japanese bathrobes, and who know what all. There is a carnival next to the Temple on one side and a Shinto shrine on the other. The temple is supposed to have been founded 1300 years ago, by legend when two fishermen found a golden statue of Kannon in their nets. We visited the main building where people tossed coins into a collection box. There are also many getting their fortune told. Getting your fortune told is a mechanical process. You give 100 yen to the temple and shake a box that is filled with sticks and one stick falls out. It has a number corresponding to a numbered drawer. You get a fortune on a slip of paper in the drawer with the same number. It all works like a semi-automated version of casting the I Ching. But if you don't like the fortune you have gotten you can leave it tied to a tree and then the fortune blows away. Actually they usually provide a rack for the purpose of tying fortunes to. You see them there like bows on a braid. A side yard had someone entertaining the crowd, but whether it was for political reason, to see them something, or what I could not tell. From a vendor we bought and shared a chocolate covered banana. Evelyn found a listing that Kappabashi-dougugal-dori was supposed to be a street famous for the plastic food that restaurants use in their displays. This dates back to the Meiji Restoration when wax anatomical models were used. A Nara businessman decided that the methods for making anatomical wax models of organs for medical education could be made of food being sold in a restaurant and could entice people into restaurants. Over the years the artistic style has improved and the models now are startlingly real. One food they never try to portray realistically: a cup of coffee is always shown as a cup of coffee beans. Plastic food has also become a sort of pop art outside of Japan. In spite of the tour book claiming that the plastic food could be found in many shops, we saw it in only two. I guess if you make a special dish, you have to commission special facsimiles to be made. Generally you get a standard model and have to learn to make the dish to look like it. The street has become more general restaurant supply. It also has become a sort of tourist attraction. It is funny to walk the street and hear from loudspeakers Glenn Miller's "In the Mood." It is doubly funny because this was a wartime hit with American troops in the Pacific, if I remember correctly. I suppose it is no stranger than us playing "Lili Marlene." They also played Hank Williams's "On the Bayou." I wonder how many bayous there are in Japan. By this point it was 2:30 and there was not much time to left to go to a museum so we went back to the Ryokan, stopping at the post office to get stamps for postage back home. We did necessary sorts of things: logs and laundry. For dinner we tried a Chinese restaurant not far from the Ryokan. I think we accidentally ordered appetizers only since the meal was rather small. At the next table were a group of about six salarymen and two salarywoman. They were dressed casually or semi-casually and the obvious boss was in a three-piece suit. The boss was being magnanimous and buying a bottle of wine and pouring it for the others at the table. I assume they had all been working on a Saturday and the boss was rewarding everyone with a good meal, perhaps treating or just seeing everybody socially. Everyone at the table was good-looking and trying to be a hale fellow, well-met. This is, after all how a team is forged. Work hard and consider your work buddies your second family. There are, after all, no real off-hours. There is just an important job to be done. Earlier today we talked to an American working for one of these sorts of companies. He often does not come home till one or two in the morning. In any case the whole scene in the restaurant gave me the willies. It is a hell of a price to pay for success. After dinner we went walking and ended up at Tokyo Metropolitan Art Space, This is a big concert hall and arts theater. It also is nicely spacious, but it is not all that special. It is noted for its towering escalator ride, but there are escalators as big in the subway. Coming out it was raining again, darn. We returned to the room. This was probably our most laid-back and do-little day of the trip. Well, I guess we need a little rest now and then. We generally push ourselves pretty hard on vacations. Even when we should be resting we are writing in our logs. And writing really is hard work also. 10/13/96 Tokyo: Modernization and Modernity We had less that we planned today than other days so we worked on our logs in the morning. We left at 9:20 to partly cloudy skies. I guess that is not really an incredibly late start. Because they have the key interlock for the power in the room we lose the station memory programming from the short-wave and radio each day. It is a bit of an inconvenience that we cannot have any power to our room when we are not actually in it. We have been skipping breakfast for reasons of time. Then we have been feeling pretty hollow by lunch-time. Today I stopped by our local grocery (where we originally bought sushi before we found better sources) and got two steamed pork buns for breakfast for us. They are certainly cheap enough, about 80 cents a piece. I may keep that as part of the act. That takes me back to Thailand and buying steamed pork buns through the window of a train. That was a great trip. Part of what made that trip good was that it was a good group and part was that Southeast Asia is was a great selection of countries. Japan is a real eye-opening country, but it just isn't as openly exotic. It has bought too much into Western values. Also it is too hard to find the old pre-quake Japan. The plan for the first part of the day is to walk around Shibuya and later Harajuku. These are the fashion centers of Tokyo, perhaps the most fashion-conscious city I have ever seen. We get off the train in Hachiko Square, so named because it has the Hachiko statue. Hachiko is the Japanese Greyfriars Bobby. Hachiko was a college professor's dog who would wait for his master at this very square. The professor died in the mid-20s, but the faithful dog would still come to the square every day to wait in case the professor returned. For a decade the dog waited every day. When the dog died national contributions paid for a statue. I believe that Greyfriars Bobby was buried with is master. If you think that is sad, consider Hachiko. His little body was taxidermized and he still stands in the National Science Museum for all to see. In Japan that passes for a real honor. It is a truly Japanese end for the dog. Our first stop was The Loft, supposedly a typical department store. Yup, I'd say it was a pretty typical department store. NHK is the Japanese Broadcast Company. (You were expecting JBC, maybe?) It is from here that 1500 TV and radio broadcasts are produced each week. Of course we have no TV and we can't pick anything up on the radio and even if we did they charge for admission and everything is in Japanese. Word on the street is that this is not much of a tour really. You are taken through a mock studio with people pretending to broadcast a show. Anything real is behind soundproof glass. It is more a mock tour and definitely not worth the price. We did get a chance to visit their souvenir store and discovered a whole bunch of souvenirs for that popular Japanese program Sesame Street. I guess it is useful for teaching Romanji, but it seems fairly English language oriented. If they broadcast so much radio, how come we can't pick any up? Part of their exhibit is a set of PCs with Netscape looking at their own pages. TEPCO is only moderately more English-friendly. That is the Tokyo Electric Power Company. And the acronym TEPCO for Tokyo Electric Power Company indicates they are thinking in English. They have a seven-floor exhibit showing what is electric power, how it is generated, what is its future, etc. Included are educational PC games and a carousel stage presentation. They give out a brochure in English, but the presentation is almost entirely in Japanese. One thing they do talk about is their efforts putting electrical lines underground. They still have a lot to do in this regard. But I do get the feeling that they are bullish on the future of Japan. In America we are afraid to teach kids that nuclear energy is great because we don't really think it is any more. Three Mile Island has scared us. Using energy is thought to be unpatriotic. It takes a certain amount of courage to bring about a future that is not just an echo of the past. The Japanese feel the problems can be licked, Americans are not so certain and hence have a good excuse for failing. If any county has reason to fear nuclear power it is the Japanese, but they don't. We need more Americans who are willing to take a bite out of the future and to think long term for the species rather than short term for personal profit. After that we walked. We saw some Krishnas doing their thing, trying to win converts to their religion. It probably won't do them much good. The Japanese don't stay faithful to one religion generally. We stopped at a noodle shop for lunch and chose our dishes from the plastic food. I copied down the names and prices. The waitress really liked my writing down what dishes I wanted. It saves the trouble of a lot of communications problems. I had a salad, beef dunburi, and a big bowl of ramen. Filling. Much of this walking tour takes you to store selling fashions, which we totally ignored. We did stop into a toy store and saw what was available there. They have some fun ideas. I think they don't do nearly enough to capitalize off of the Gojira-potential. They sell rubber Gojiras and have Gojira trading cards, but there is so much more they could be doing. Gojira really is a national icon of Japan. The Meiji Shrine is a tribute to the emperor who took Japan from feudalism to a modern culture. The emperor was probably the single most important figure in Japanese history. The other contender being Tokugawa Ieyasu. Meiji was emperor 1867-1912 taking over when the Tokugawa shogunate fell. While he was emperor, Japan decided to itself become an imperialist nation. This was the beginning of Japan looking at how other countries did things and then forming their own version. To do this Meiji had to take power from the samurai. His biggest threat here was from the Saigo Uprising. (See the October 8 entry.) Japan wanted to be "rich nation and strong military." Western ways and Westerners flooded into the country. They accomplished industrialization under Meiji and accomplished military victories first over China in the Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895) and a stunning victory over Russia in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905). The shrine to the Emperor Meiji was burned in W.W.II, but was reconstructed in 1958, "supported by all loyal Japanese" as the signs and the brochure say. Now this is rather ominous wording. Had they said "supported by loyal Japanese everywhere" it would have been more tactful. This way it seems they are saying that any Japanese who did not support the reconstruction were not really loyal. Something should be said about etiquette for shrine visits. You should first of all dress in a respectful matter. The Dancing Elvises, who are not far away, would not be welcome. Before coming in you should wash your hands using the water and dipper provided. Make sure that the water from your hands goes into the gutter around the water trough, not back into the trough itself. When you approach the shrine bow twice. Then with hands parallel, clap twice, then bow once more. I pass this along in case the reader finds it useful, I have not done it myself since I do not want to go through the motions of Shinto without accepting more of the religion. I would probably be willing to dress the part as I have in mosques, but not to go through the action without adopting the religion. The shrine is set a long walk from the busy street. In a country that has so little space, space is lavished is on the Emperor and the royalty. The reason the NS building has so much space may be that space shows power and wealth. Where we might lavish gold and jewelry, the Japanese lavish space. The shrine has at least two Torii gates we passed. One had cracks in the wood and passersby had stuffed the cracks with 10 yen pieces. The shrine itself had a big courtyard and there were a least two weddings going on. One was having wedding photographs taken, the other had a procession going through. Also in the courtyard is a collection of toys donated probably for some charity. Overall this is certainly more sedate and dignified than some Shinto shrines we have seen. It is a long walk back to the street and there are no hawkers along the way. No doubt this is for respect for the great emperor. Shinto, meaning "the way of the gods," is a religion actually invented in Japan and there are not a lot of advocates I have ever heard of outside Japan. It bears some relation to paganism in the one really worships nature itself. In Shinto there are many kami, what we call gods, including the emperor. That doesn't leave much room for separation of religion and state. It also explains why the Japanese resisted American efforts to have Emperor Hirohito renounce his godhood. Shinto does not get involved in ethics the way Western religions tend to. There are some concession stands out toward the street when you have passed the outermost Torii gate. At this point you also start hearing loud rock and roll music. At least you do on a Sunday afternoon. The music is coming from Yayogi park and one of the strangest sights in Japan. The 1950s were a hard time in Japan. It was the post-war era and Japan was building its economy with hard work. The Japanese were borrowing work methods from other countries but not methods of play. There was little time for that. Japan missed the Rock and Roll years and now they seem to have a fascination with the teen revolution of those days. Friday night we were to the Elvis Presley Chinese Pork Bun Mr. Donut. (Boy, where else in the world would that juxtaposition of words make sense?) The park has another 50s thing. Rock and roll clubs come each week to dress up as rebellious 50s rock and rollers and dance in the style of GREASE. They have names like The Strangers and The Dancing Elvises. They dress in black leather and wear T-shirts or nothing above the waist, show off their pompadours and their tattoos, play cassette players, and dance an energetic rock and roll style. Not all the moves are as smooth as they might be, but they overall do a pretty good job. They probably do a better job than the originals, but then Japanese baseball is also supposedly better than ours. We get our revenge through Akibono, the American champion sumo wrestler. The originals in the 50s were anti-establishment, but these guys and women just want to be seen and there is not a drop of real defiance in what they do. This is not war dance it is strutting and mating ritual. They put in extra energy if there is a pretty girl with a camera in the audience, but nobody with a camera is unwelcome, apparently. Nor is anyone who just wants to watch. The bigger the crowd the better they like it. They remind me of the crowds of kids at THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW. Well, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and these people like American culture. Initially the Japanese felt threatened by this form of rebellion, but in truth it is fairly innocent. These people are here to put on a show and to get some exercise. Both the show and the exercise are pretty good. The thought of dancing like this for five hours straight gives me a pain in the side just thinking about it. To me this look a lot more positive than learning martial arts. Further on you see lots of people just enjoying the Sunday afternoon, sitting in rings in the park. And then there is a different sound, a sort of twanging. People are playing badminton with plastic rackets that give a resounding twang when the birdie is hit. The noise is probably actually a selling point. Further on there are fountains and couple sit together. At the other end of the walk is a pond with ducks and we watch as one man throws bread to the birds. On the way back we sit by the fountain and I write about the rock and roll dancers. It now is starting to get dark and we head back We pass a place where a woman is doing an abstract beatnik sort of dance to the music of a band. I guess this is a more artist version of London's Hyde Park. We stop in Tobu, the department store, and pick up $10 worth of sushi. Give us this day our daily sushi. We pick up Coke at the grocery and have another good sushi dinner. In the room we write. Towards 11 PM there is a new batch of guests making a lot of noise. They sound like Americans but in the morning they have left around a Canadian flag as well as empty beer cans. If they are going to leave the beer cans, at least they left the flag so Americans don't get the blame. Not that American visitors might not be worse. Eventually someone from another room comes out to complain. That stops most of the shouting, but there are still frequent door slams. Pity more people are not quiet and polite like me. 10/14/96 The Railways I was looking at some of the prices on a Dunkin Donut handout. A standard doughnut is 120 yen, a brownie 180 yen. If you want to eat like an American, you are going to pay for the privilege. We are getting by nicely on $15 or so a day. It would be hard to eat that cheaply back home. Of course we have to suffer our way through a lot of sushi. Today we are going to Hokone. We have a choice of doing that today or tomorrow. There is some sunshine in the morning so we figure to go while we can. As we travel it gets cloudy and ugly but almost nobody carries umbrellas so we figure rain has not been forecast. We get on the train and experience a genuine shove commute. That is my name for it and not theirs, but it is accurate. This is a commute in which we are not just in tight, but people pushing into the door have actually compacted us. For one stop I cannot even turn my head enough to see Evelyn. Many people can not even get to straps and are held in place by the density of the packing of people. Shoving is not considered rude amongst a very polite people because it has the practical result of getting more people on the train and to work. This is really an economy of shortages. Most of the Japanese grew up with great shortages and the philosophy is still to make a little go a long way. There are all sorts of surprising concessions to practicality and shoving to make the trains carry more people is one of them. This is our first trip on the JapanRail pass and we are still figuring out the rules. We showed out pass to get on the train in Ikebukuro. Well we picked a bad day. It is cloudy and starting to rain. (I have been running a day or so late on writing my log, but due to less activity to write up on the weekends and the train ride as catch-up time, at this moment I am caught up.) I wonder if Japan is going to be another of these countries like Spain that we will remember only the rain from. We have to be a statistical anomaly with all the bad luck we have with weather. We have had moments of sunshine but not one sunny day here and I am suspecting we won't actually see one. We arrived at the tail end of a sunny stretch and as soon as we arrive it ends. Well, perhaps yesterday almost qualifies as a nice day. But it looks like we will not get much of a view of Fujiama. We got off at Hokone but the weather was like it had been the previous Tuesday. Certainly not a day to plan to be outside. Well we had guessed wrong. We really need a better way to get weather forecasts. The town is a good deal less modern looking than Tokyo but it is well kept up, at least the part we saw. We looked at out options as we walked and decided to go to Nikko after all. We might go late in the day, but at least I was caught up in my log and we could use the whole day sightseeing. And it gave us a chance to ride the Bullet Train which would also save us time. We got to the station about 25 minutes early. While we waited we planned our time. A woman next to me offers me a piece of candy. The Japanese can be a very solicitous and friendly people. We have to rush across the platform to get to an unreserved car. The first class cars are labeled green, second class is blue. When the train left from the window I saw a mix of modern and traditional buildings with swept up roofs. The homes are very close together. There is no great feeling of speed or of the landscape going by quickly. The steel towers right next to the track do go by in a blur, but it is hard to judge speed from what I am seeing. The train looks faster and sleeker from the outside than inside. At each end there is an engine that looks a lot like the nose of a passenger jet. In stark contrast to a lot of their cracker-box trains with the diamond-shaped frames to pick up electrical power from lines overhead, this really looks like a sort of land-jet. Inside the Bullet train (or Shinkansen) looks and feels a lot like airplane coach section, but without the seatbelts. And there is a lot more leg room. The major difference is the amount of smoking. The regular trains do not allow smoking, the Shinkansen does have smoking and non-smoking cars, and the Japanese take advantage of the smoking cars in large numbers. We are in a smoking car. A woman across the aisle from me drops a ticket on the ground lighting her cigarette. Later I see her looking though her wallet for something and pick up the ticket and hand it to her. Maybe improve the image of Americans a little. Americans probably do not have a very good image since three servicemen from Okinawa raped a schoolgirl a little while back. Then their commanding officer told the press that it was inexcusable and they should have gone to a prostitute instead. I think someone in the Navy must like them strong and stupid if this is the caliber of the commanders or the men. The Japanese don't want Americans like this posted to their country. Presumably they realize we don't want them back in the U.S. either. Also there was an incident of a football team from the U.S. who was over here and was caught shoplifting. On the news the mother of one of the players was complaining bitterly that the Japanese shop-owner was making a big thing over it. There seems to be a strong antagonism growing between blacks and Asians, particularly in the inner cities of the U.S. The seats on the train recline, but by moving the seat forward. In this way you don't end up putting your seat-back in the lap of the person behind you. I napped a bit on the train and we were quickly into Tokyo station. In Tokyo station we made reservations for the next train, and then went to a lunch at a place called Express Early. I had soba with something like bacon in it. Another possibility would have been to buy a train lunchbox. These "ekiben" boxes are sold in all the major stations and it is a divided box with a lot of different kinds of food in it. At first I thought it was wasteful that all these lunches came in nice wooden boxes that are then thrown away. They look like balsa wood. It turns out they are made of Styrofoam that just looks like wood. I should have known that the Japanese would not be so wasteful. It is standard to buy these ekibens and eat them on the train. In general the term "bento" means "lunchbox." It is a divided box with a lot of different things in its compartments. At my local Japanese restaurant, my favorite dish to buy is the bento that has two kinds of pickled vegetables, some beef, rice, fried chicken, gayoza dumplings, six sushi maki-rolls, and three or four pieces of sashimi. (Sashimi is like sushi, but it is just raw fish.) We stopped at a bookstore then headed for the next Shinkansen. Through the window I could see people on the rain, most eating their lunches. Presumably this is a service on the train. We board and within minutes are moving. The trains run to the minute here like they do in all really civilized countries. All but the U.S. Does the U.S. count as civilized? From the window I see mostly factories and apartment houses go by. Occasionally there is a sports stadium. Again things are a bit dingy. Of course the day does not help. We have to switch trains in Utsunomiya. That is as close as the Shinkansen gets to Nikko. We ran into another American, one from San Jose. He is Doug Hill from San Jose, a fellow Stanford alumni. I was from the math department and he is from the computer science department. He is on a multi-year recess from his computer work to see some of the world. After Japan he is going to China and India. We talked to him about our experiences in each place. Actually what was most interesting was what he was working on. He was looking at a device that would listen to music and transcribe it into written notation. Effectively it would hear a performance and write sheet music. Some questions immediately come to mind. If you transcribed Seiji Ozawa's version of Beethoven's 5th Symphony, would you get precisely what Beethoven wrote? If not, where would the differences be? If you transcribed Ozawa doing the 5th two consecutive nights, would you get precisely the same thing? If not, where would the differences be? What are acceptable variations? Presumably you could use this to record impromptu music, like jazz. I wonder if you could make an intermediate piece of software that would translate from player piano rolls to sheet music. Charlie Chaplin is credited with writing the music for his films. In fact he had an assistant to whom he gave much of the credit. He hummed the music and the assistant wrote it down. This was a very easy way for Chaplin to write the music. He could almost go from thinking how he wanted the music to sound to having it written down. With Hill's device this may be how music is composed in the future. In any case Doug was interesting to talk to. We gave him advice about India and told him about our China trip. The train left us at the Nikko station and we took a bus to the area of the shrine. Darn few shrines are on level ground and when they are they are always steps to climb up. Worship requires sacrifice, I guess. We came to see the Tosho-gu Shrine and it is up a hill. There are multiple shrines on the hill, but this is one of the major shrines of Japan. And for good reason. I will get to that. As we pass the policebox we notice that even here there are wanted posters up. There seem to be wanted posters wherever there are police. Or even where they aren't. You see them in the subways. The police in Kamakura had a creative approach. The put the faces of wanted criminals on wooden bodies. Of course this holds wanted, but un-convicted criminals up to public ridicule. We could not do that back home. The signs pointing to Tosho-gu Shrine seem to all be in Japanese, but I memorized the three pictograms of "Tosho-gu Shrine" and the signs become easy to read. It requires more hill climbing but we find Tosho-gu shrine, among other things the burial place of Tokugawa Ieyasu. At the start of the 16th century Japan was in chaos with several warring feudal generals. In the years from 1560 to 1600 the chaos came to an end. At this time there were three great generals (or daimyo): Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu all sharing a dream of a single government for Japan. Each would try in turn to unify the country. Oda Nobunaga was a great general who took it on himself to educate his groom, Toyotomi Hideyoshi. In the years from 1560 to 1568 Nobunaga won the victories to hold central Japan and especially Kyoto. He was, however, killed in a rebellion in 1582. Nobunaga was assassinated by one of his own generals for the sacrilege of building a temple to himself and for a mortal insult to the general. By this point Hideyoshi already was a great general and became Shogun in Nobunaga's place. Hideyoshi helped to advance his son-in-law Tokugawa Ieyasu. (Incidentally the Japanese family name comes first in the name, traditionally. And great people are referred to by their first name. So he is called Tokugawa Ieyasu or just Ieyasu, but his son would be Tokugawa something. Hideyoshi had picked up where Nobunaga left off and brought the whole country under control by 1590. He wanted to extend his control to Korea and China, but Hideyoshi died in 1598, his dream realized only as far as Japan itself and with many internal enemies. He made Ieyasu promise to make his son, Ieyasu's brother-in-law, the Shogun. Tokugawa Ieyasu, in some ways a competitor to his father-in-law with a similar dream, took on the same internal enemies and in 1600 defeated them in Japan's most important battle Sekigahara. In 1603 he was appointed shogun. He kept the office for only two years and then turned the office over to his son. From that point he worked to give his family power succeeding and founding the Tokugawa Shogunate. Hideyoshi's son, cheated of the Shogunate, tried to foment revolt for years, but was never successful. The Tokugawa family ruled Japan until the 1860s. The Tokugawa Shogunate had its faults but brought a much-needed stability to Japan. Many would choose Ieyasu as Japan's greatest leader. I would he only continued what Nobunaga and Hideyoshi began and was the one who was around to win the final prize. His victories were indeed great, but he stood on the shoulders of those who came before and then it was his family who ruled. The shrine sports a hefty entrance fee of 1250 yen, however it is probably the most ornate shrine we have seen. As you enter you pass a five-story pagoda. You then pay and enter through a gate that is incredibly ornate. It was designed so that wherever you look you see something else unexpected. There are dragons and lions, sages and birds. More than could be seen in an hour. Once inside there is another gate, guarded (or not guarded) by a sleeping cat, to the right and another long climb to the actual tomb of Ieyasu. The tomb itself is simple, And there is a shrine in front of it for praying. At the level of the gates are several buildings worth seeing. There seem to be people to explain what you are seeing, but in Japanese only. If you are not Japanese consider your admission the price to see things without the explanation. About this time the rain started again and we walked back to town and the bus. We got back to the main train station and discovered it was not where we wanted to be. There is a second station for Japan Rail shown almost adjoining on the Lonely Planet map, it is really a good distance down the street. We got there after some confusion and discovered that we had just missed by five minutes the returning train and while they run fairly close together during the day, there is a break at dinner time and there would not be another train for about 45 minutes. We were cold and wet, but we sat down and wrote. There were plenty of vending machines but the only hot beverages were coffee and tea. There are many kinds of each, but I am not much of a coffee or tea drinker. In both cases they are in cans, but you can get them hot or cold, even from the same machine. The prices are listed on a red strip if they are hot and a blue strip if they are cold. All the vending machines seem to follow this convention. The trip back was much like the one out. We switch to the Shinkansen in Utsunomiya. We also grabbed food from a kiosk, since we were hungry. I looked for the strange, being me. I got something that looked like a log of fish-cake with cheese filling. At home there is a brand of pretzels that has cheese filling and this looks much the same. The other thing I get is some dried, prepared squid. This is a common food even in Asian groceries in the U.S. In China it is eaten in movie theaters the way we eat popcorn. Evelyn got a more prosaic crackers and almonds mix. We got back to Ikebukuro the department store was closed and we had to settle for what we could get at the grocery. I got orange juice or orange drink, I still am not sure which, and a doughnut. The doughnut was not very good. It serves me right for getting American food. We tried to get a weather forecast, but could not find it on TV. We asked at the desk and the clerk said that there is no newspaper on Monday. 10/15/96 Matsumoto: Feudal Castle I When we woke up we had to do a fast rethinking of what to do today. We were not sure of nice weather so did not want to risk Hokone again. I suggested we use the rail-pass to go somewhere outside of Tokyo. We tried a number of places and settled on Matsumoto. We grabbed some pork buns at the grocery and headed out for the train. Some general comments. One of the books commented that the Japanese think they are better with English than they really are. Occasionally it is a problem, though not often. I was impressed in a visit to Chicago once that people on the street seemed very well-dressed. They have nothing on the Japanese who have to be the most uniformly well-dressed people on earth. When you see them on the street women seem to be always dressed with a great deal of taste. Men are dressed well too, but unimaginatively in business suits. But the Japanese, at least in Tokyo, are far more fashion-conscious than we are at home. The one difference in taste is their predilection for the miniskirt. And many of the Japanese young women wear the miniskirt very well. One of the books claims the Japanese think of themselves as an unattractive people. Actually a lot of Japanese are quite attractive. Our second shove commute was not as bad as yesterday, but it is still surprising to find it acceptable to really push getting off train. Many people do not get straps to hold and are held in place by solid block of people. I was surprised at how many people crowded on to the Matsumoto train. We missed getting window seats, which is disappointing because some of the views are very nice. We guessed wrong on the day again which turn out to have a fair amount of sunshine. The train climbs its way into cloud-shrouded hills. You would thing this would be fairly rural, but we still see a lot of densely packed towns. Small square-ish houses with peaked, shiny tile roofs are common. There are some rural areas in which some crop hangs cascaded over racks. It may rice since it usually seems to be over wet, muddy areas that might be paddies The train arrived at the station on time to the minute, 11:55. The first order of business was making reservations for the return trip, at 18:49. That should give us time to have a nice dinner. Matsumoto seems like a nice town, though it is fairly densely populated. Our first order of business was lunch. They have a sort of restaurant row on the way to the local castle. We walked looking at food displays and finally settled on a restaurant I had thought looked good early on. We copied the names of two good-looking dishes. Basically they are again noodle soup with big pieces of meat. I am getting one with a pork cutlet, Evelyn got some sort of dunburi. The dishes are 800 yen. That works out to $7.26. I am not sure the rules for sitting at tables here. We sat a table with some other people. You do that in at least some restaurants. They quickly cleared another table for us. My meal was quite good. Ramen with a port cutlet. Evelyn's dish was the worst thing we have had in Japan, meaning it was decent but not exciting. It was sort of like vegetables in a white sauce (like one gets in a Cantonese restaurant). Every meal comes with a little plastic vial of some very tasty fruit drink. I though at first it was a yogurt drink because of the color, but it tasted richer and not yogurt-y. Matsumoto is not a small town, but it is rather charming. It may well be the nicest place we have visited. It is kind of a cross between Tokyo and Springfield, Massachusetts, two places that I happen to have been. It is a small city but certainly too big to be called a town. It seems like it is trying to build tourism. It has a lot of restaurants, but I does not seem to be crowded with visitors. It has nice hills in the distance and that is always nice. The city seems modern. One building has an outside elevator designed to look like a space shuttle taking off. It indicates a sort of playfulness missing in Americans and that I think is indicative of intelligence. Way back when Rubik's Cube was popular there was an incident that frankly scared me a little. I could solve the cube in about three minutes. I think we were meeting a friend in a Manhattan hotel. I was sitting in the lobby waiting and while I was waiting I was solving the cube to pass the time. I looked up and there was a ring of Japanese businessmen watching how I was doing it. Of course I was pleased. But at the same time I knew that American business could hardly compete with these people. I am sure when American businessmen have a few extra minutes they go into the bar and get a drink. The Japanese will spend the time learning how someone solves Rubik's Cube. For the sake of our economy I wish it was the other way around. Also three different people came up to me to say hello today. It may be that the Japanese even beat the Dutch for being friendly, at least some are. Perhaps it is the ones who do not work in the NS Building in West Shinjuku. The central attraction of Matsumoto is Matsumoto Castle, formerly Fukashi Castle, of the Ogasawara family. This is a spectacular feudal castle built just five or six years before Sekigahara by allies of Ieyasu. The nickname for the castle is the Black Crow for its black sides. It is five stories high. In fact, our guide may have said it was Toyotomi, which was the family of Hideyoshi. But I am getting ahead of myself. We got to the castle and there were the usual carp in the mote. Carp appear to beg food from humans. They will stick their mouths out of the water and open them as if asking for food. Most of these places you can buy fish-food. And the fish think of humans as big walking feeders. Inside we paid for our tickets, a very reasonable 500 yen, and the cashier held up at sheet of paper (upside-down) saying that English speakers would be given a guided tour free of charge, ask at the information desk. We went in and had to ask some American tourists where the information desk was. It as a desk right there but un-staffed. After about a ten-minute wait an elderly man did come up and sit at the desk, reading a piece of paper in Hebrew. Hebrew is one language I did not expect to see in Japan. I asked if we could get a guided tour of the castle and he said he would take us. As we walked I asked about the Hebrew. He is studying it for scholarly reasons, he said, and explained he was not Christian. He told us a little about himself. He was a self-made scholar (my term, not his) learning other languages. In the war he was sent to China. He may have been willing to talk about this, but I felt a little funny. Still it might have been interesting to hear what he had to say about the China campaign. His English was OK, though it was a little hard to talk to him, another reason I did not pursue the China campaign. But I have a great deal of respect for these people who continue to study all their lives. My father-in-law is in many ways similar. Taking up Hebrew at 72 is not easy. If I understand correctly he ran a sort of language association and their way to practice foreign language was to give tours of the local castle. We later met a student who also was in his association and acted as a guide. While European castles were places of residence, Japanese castles were purely strategic devices, almost like fortified bunkers. In time of battle only they were manned. The lord lived in a nearby palace which burned in 1727. Interesting features of this castle were a hidden floor for arranging ambushes, and a Seppuku room. The latter was for the lord if the battle did not go in his favor. I wonder if this was the lord's idea or if it was forced on him.) This particular castle, impressive as it is, was never tested in battle so no seppuku was necessary. Our guide insisted on calling it Hari-Kari, though that really is a vulgar name meaning belly-cutting. Evelyn tells me that into the 20s all students in grade school were taught the proper way to perform Seppuku. (Or is the proper term to "commit" Seppuku. I suppose it is more than a performance and really is a commitment.) Actually, as to the castle never having been tested in battle, I think that few feudal castles were. There was considerably less fighting after 1600 and Sekigahara. Currently the castle is a museum including guns of the samurai and even a few grenades. One display shows a print of Nagashino, a battle between Nobunaga, using guns, against the troops of Shingen Tekeda, not using guns. Shingen was already dead at this time, I believe. I knew of the battle because it was dramatized at the end of the film KAGEMUSHA by Akira Kurosawa. One of the feature of the castle is a moon-viewing room. The Lord could come there and see three types of moon: the moon in the sky, the moon reflected in the mote, and the moon reflected in a cup of sake. Stairways had been put in the castle where there were originally just ladders that could be pulled up. Some of the stairways were as steep as ladders. The same admission that gets you into the castle includes a folklore museum. The name is something of a misnomer. Folklore is really only the subject on one floor and even there it is more a history museum than anything else. This seems to be more a catch-all museum. The first major thing you see is a dragon boat, sort of the Japanese equivalent of our view of a Viking ship, only not so large. They then have displays of pottery, going back to 2200 BC. They quickly get into swords, samurai armor, and guns. The upper floor starts out as natural history, stuffed birds, eggs, other stuffed animals, including two stuffed serows. (What is a serow? It is a new animal to me that looks like a sheep or a goat. It is stocky like a sheep.) Someone who I later saw was a custodian came up to me to ask where I was from and to say "You are welcome, American." Americans should do the same for foreign visitors. The largest collection in the folklore museum is one of clocks. They must have 100 clocks. One will be fashioned to look like a Rolls Royce and the caption will say "Rolls Royce Type Clock." They had an incense burning timekeeper in shape of dragon, pocket sundials with compasses, and a cannon with a magnifying glass. In another collection they had Omera--large wooden phallic symbols maybe four foot long and equally proportioned. The same custodian talked to various visitors about objects. There was some English but not much so it was nice to have him. The big sections of the museum were temporarily closed for special exhibits that required separate admission. After that we walked around the castle grounds taking pictures of the castle and were again met by a man from Kobe wanting to know about us. He was hoping we would visit Kobe, but it was not in our plans currently. Perhaps if there is time on the JR pass. Then we had to look for dinner before boarding the train back. We were not hungry enough for a big meal. We decided to buy from a convenience store. I got sushi and Evelyn got a box of cold cereal, sort of the local equivalent of Frosted Flakes. To drink we shared a liter of Coke. I read the box of cereal. It was decorated with Peanuts characters. I guess they must carry the strip here. Shultz must make a fortune. Anyway they have to explain on the cereal box that cereal actually makes a good "balanced" breakfast. It is apparently not a typical Japanese breakfast. Fish is standard, I think. McDonalds finds their most popular breakfast, by far, is the fish sandwich. And in defense of their own product the cereal-maker says "Calbee's Brown Sugar Cereal. Our tastes are changing, and today's health conscious family wants less sugar in their food. Calbee uses the healthier, less refined brown sugar to add just a touch of natural sweetness." I think they are intentionally confusing the customer. Brown, unrefined rice is healthier. I have never heard of any health benefits of brown, unrefined sugar. We took our bag of groceries to the train platform and ate it there and on the train. It is funny to hear the trains arriving. While the announcements are usually straightforward and businesslike, perhaps with a chime. Here there is a voice that sings out Matsumotoooo Matsumotoooo Matsumoto. We had reserved seats on the train. It was well after dark so we ate a little, slept a little, and wrote in our logs. The usual prompt trains let us down and came in to Shinjuku Station twenty minutes late. Even at 10 at night it is impossible to get a seat on a train. Back at the room we went to bed early. 10/16/96 Arrival in Kyoto Part of what they give you with the room at the Kimi, and I think this is standard at Japanese hotels, is a robe. Here if you are going to the shower or W.C. on the floor, which takes you into public territory, you can wear the robe. The problem is that it is really tough to control a robe. The tail will always get wet from something if you wear it to the shower. Maybe the Japanese have a better idea how to handle the robe. I have taken to using sweatpants for exactly the same purpose and that works very well. Plus you don't really have to remove them going to the W.C. which is very, very cramped. Also they have pockets. I thought I would mind having just one W.C. for the floor, but it is less of an inconvenience than I was expecting because I have gotten into my same routine I have at home, which is waking at about 5:30 or earlier. I will nap in the evening (easy to do if on the JR and not out of place on the trains or in the evening if we are in). I go to sleep between 11 and 12:30, then I wake up early. I can hit the plumbing without much competition. I dress and put fresh film in my photovest. I have a whole routine worked out for handling film. I generally take the length of the trip, subtract two days and multiply by 5/4 rolls/day. I take that in a sealable freezerbag and put a second empty freezerbag inside. I take out three rolls of film and put a cardboard tag in each and put them in my photovest. I load the camera with a fourth roll. When I finish a roll of film, I pull an unused roll out of my vest, put the tag in my pants pocket. I put the used roll in the newly freed up canister and put it in a different pocket. I then load the new film into the camera. At the end of the day, when I empty my pockets I have tags for the number of rolls I have used. I take the used rolls out of my vest and put them in the inner freezerbag. I take that number of rolls out of the outer bag, put a tag in each, and put them into the supply pocket in my photovest. It sound complicated but it works really well to make sure I have three fresh rolls every day and the fresh rolls are segregated from the exposed rolls. Listening to American Armed Forces Radio has convinced me that our military has lousy taste in music. It is an unfortunate choice for the only station that really comes in where we are. Well, we are leaving today. We can quickly pack, since we travel light. We pack and prepare to leave To-Kyo for Kyo-To. (Actually I am told the name "Tokyo" really means "East Kyoto.") Leaving the bags in the room we stop at the local grocery and get steamed rolls. There was a little film poster for LEON: INTEGRAL VERSION. LEON played in our country under the title THE PROFESSIONAL. It is about an assassin who befriends a young girl. Gary Oldman played the villain. A French actor, Jean Reno, played Leon, the assassin. Now you see his picture here on cigaret ads. Apparently the film was a big hit over here and there is a special edition coming out. Today the filling of the rolls is in a tomato sauce. They tend to vary the contents. We take them back to the Kimi and have them with hot green tea. Then we check out. They ask us to go back to the room and get the robes and towels. I think they just want to be sure we have not stolen them. As it is starting out this is the first really nice day. Our first order of business is changing money. With our heavy luggage on our back we clump into the bank and are sent upstairs. The bank clerk looked mystified, then asked another clerk and they both laughed. We really had no idea what the joke was and that did not make us feel really good. Then they said it was OK. They asked for Evelyn's passport, showed her picture and said "copy." "Copy," he repeated. "Where?" asked Evelyn. Then he ran off to copy it. When he returned he had Evelyn fill out a form. Then he gave Evelyn a number and sent her downstairs. There was a long wait, probably 15 or 20 minutes while they counted and prepared the money. We still don't know what the big joke was. We probably never will. The train to Tokyo station was crowded but eventually we got seats. People read books on the train, but most have non-descript book covers put on at the bookstore at the time of purchase. Perhaps that is so people will not know what they are reading. If you are a dignified and important businessman you probably don't want people to know you are reading "Meter Maids in Bondage." We got to the train station and found where to board our car. It is amazing but they stop the train on a dot within an inch or two of the same spot each time. They can tell You exactly where to stand in front of where the door of the train will be. There were a bunch of Americans in front of where our train was stopping. I was concerned they put us on some sort of gaijin car. Well, it was, but for an earlier train. There was a tour group going to Hiroshima. Our car was Japanese. We asked our conductor for Fuji time and he told us 11:53. We were up then minutes early in the passage between cars to film Fuji. When we pass another Shinkansen, you are really jounced. 11:53 came and I would not have seen Fuji if I had not known to look then. The local town throws up a haze of smog. I could just make out the left slope. Near Tokyo they really had houses packed closely together. Some houses were as close together as 18 inches. Out on the countryside you see some houses with yards. And some are still packed together. Right on schedule we arrived in Kyoto at 1:39 PM and got off the train along with a flood of people. As we were being washed along in a flood of humanity I commented to Evelyn that so far Kyoto was a lot like Tokyo. Our first task was finding the tourist office. We went outside to try to walk around the train station like we had done in Shinjuku, but quickly discovered this would not do us much good since it was leading us way off in the wrong direction. We returned to the train station to get directions and eventually found our way, though by this point I was about two inches shorter due to the effect of carrying around all my luggage. We picked up some information and then took the bus to the River Side Takase. If I thought I had seen leather shops around the Great Buddha, we saw a lot more from the bus. This is sort of a depressed area. Even when we got off the bus we had a hard time finding our way to the hotel. We were supposed to cross a river and we expected a long walk. Luckily as we were trying to puzzle our way with a map a woman came up on a bicycle. She suggested we go down the street we were on and cross the bridge, then turn left. The river at this point was only about six feet wide, which was why we had not realized how close we were. There is a little bridge over it and two armed guards in bullet-proof vests. I am not sure if they are police or soldiers (actually they van is just white without any markings, leading me to believe they may be neither) and they seem prepared for a riot. They have four or five riot shields for the two of them. It really looks as if trouble is expected or as if there is something of military value to guard. But it cannot be the latter since we very freely cross the bridge. What the heck is that all about? The hotel is more like a private house that has rented out their upper floor. When we first arrived the host was showing us where the WC and shower were. I did not have time to take off my backpack so walked down the hall with it. Then when she was done I tried to turn around and discovered it was impossible, the hall as so narrow. I had to back up to get to the room and to let the host get by. The room is larger than at the Kimi, Still no mirrors in the room. There is some water damage on one of the doors. There are tea bags for green tea in the room and the host drops off an insulated thermos/pitcher of water each day. There is a TV with a coinbox. 100 yen for two hours. The rules of sandals are really hard to get used to. You leave your shoes at the door, but you pick up sandals. These are worn around the hallways, but not into the room. You leave them outside your door. You wear the sandals everywhere outside your room but inside the W.C. As you go into the W.C. you leave your sandals outside and wear a separate pair of sandals provided for the W.C. So if you are passing by your hotel and decide to stop to use the bathroom, expect to change your footwear four times. The River Side is not really as clean as the Kimi either. Nor is it going to be as easy to find restaurants. By this point we wanted to get lunch and went out to find it. We saw some other tourists from Germany or Austria and asked them. They were staying in the neighborhood but had not eaten there. They said we were a 20 minute walk to Gion, the fanciest section of Kyoto. We headed off looking for it. It was more than 20 minutes but we found it. It looked nice. We tried looking for lunch at a department store, but we found it to be rather expensive. We looked around the Gion until we found a mall area that had some restaurants. I found one that looked decent and we ordered by writing down. I had an egg and shrimp donburi and a strange soup almost a custard with eel and other interesting seafood. Evelyn had udon noodle soup with eel. Eel, it should be noted is a rather tasty delicacy we learned to like with sushi. We decided to do some exploring after dinner and after looking at some shops we went to the geisha neighborhood on Hanami-koji. On this street things still look much as they did in the 17th century. It is very much a taste of the old Japan. There is nothing similar in Tokyo because of the earthquake and the bombing. Kyoto was spared both. All the modernization has been voluntary. The buildings are all made out of wood and set very close together with no spaces in between. It is little wonder these neighborhoods were so vulnerable to fire. The whole neighborhood is a tinderbox. It seems like each building is made of varying shades of brown wood. There are a few hinged doors now but at the time they were all sliding doors and most still slide. They are traditionally wood frame and paper where we would have glass. The paper lets through light but maintains privacy. Of course it is terrible insulation. I just keep remembering the paper lanterns with candles inside, the paper windows, the wood frames, and the fact that the houses are all one long block. This place is a Fire Marshall's nightmare. They had to have continuous fire watches over the city and even then they had some real disasters. Most of the lanterns have been replaced by electric lights, but there are still some lanterns around. Each building had two stories and was topped by a tile roof. Most have wood grating or a fence in front. Very common is a vertical grillwork in front. There will be narrow strips of garden maybe a foot wide in front with trees or a bush. Incongruous touches are air conditioners, TV antennae, wires, that sort of thing. Also there are modern colorful posters for kabuki. As we walk through we can almost feel it is the 1600s. Then a dog we passed starts barking at bicycle brakes that squeal too loudly. Also there is the sound of traditional wooden sandals clopping through the street. We saw one geisha and two maiko coming to work. The difference is rank. Maiko are still just learning the trade. The maiko were posing for some passersby photos in four inch thick wooden platform shoes. The geisha sat in a fancy car. She was being driven around like a piece of firewood, and that was pretty much the attitude she presented. Her drivers got out of the car to make some arrangements, got back in, and drove off. In all that time, ten or fifteen minutes, the geisha did not appear to move a muscle. She stared straight ahead fixedly, even when sitting alone in the back seat of the car, her snow white painted face vacant of any expression. There is still a lot of confusion about what a geisha actually does. That is mostly because it will almost never be done for non-Japanese. But it is nothing that the Legion of Decency would not approve of. She is sort of a cultured mistress of ceremonies at a party. She sings, she plays traditional musical instruments like the biwa. Her main stock and trade is high-class Japanese charm. It is sort of like if you could hire Audrey Hepburn to host and run your dinner party. If they are suspect for anything it is for making a living just renting youthful charm to rich businessmen. Yes, there are prostitutes who call themselves geisha just like there are prostitutes who call themselves masseuses in our country. But that is not what a real masseuse does. Well it had gotten dark and we had to find our way back to the room. We got a little lost, but eventually found our way. The radio gave us a lot more choice than Tokyo did, maybe four stations to choose from. One seemed to have a classical recital of singing. Back home I would not have listened, but here I was a little more desperate. Japanese falls somewhere between Italian and German for being a good language for singing. What do I mean by that? Well, German and Hebrew are really guttural languages. They have a lot of really hard sounds. That doesn't mean an opera like MEISTERSINGER can't have nice music, but it the singing just never quite sounds musical to my ear. Italian and Spanish, languages heavily based on Latin, sound better sung. English and Japanese fall in between. Later the music turned to more popular styles. There was one station that had a male disk jockey who spoke English and a female who spoke Japanese. She would rattle off a string of Japanese and then the guy would say "You know, that's really true..." and then he would talk for a while. Japanese radio stations have been criticized for being too much talk and not enough music. That is probably accurate. I wrote in my log till after Evelyn went to sleep, then I went to sleep also. The room does not get very dark. 10/17/96 Hiroshima and Miya-jima: War and Peace The room was fairly cold over night. I woke up at 5-ish and wrote in my log. Once Evelyn woke up I went to take a shower. There was not a lot of hot water, but I take a short shower. I realized after the fact that I broke a house rule. There are no showers before 7 AM. I didn't have a lot of choice today since we had to catch an early train to Hiroshima. We left the Takase before 7 AM and hoped to pass a grocery or restaurant on the way. Kyoto was just waking up. We crossed the little bridge. The guards were in a van. There is some sort of tension in this neighborhood I do not understand. I don't know if it has something to do with my perception that this is or is near a Burakumin neighborhood. Even in the early morning the streets were fairly noisy with trucks. Tokyo never seemed this noisy. It could be a difference in restrictions on noise mufflers or just because we were not in the areas that get this sort of traffic, but the trucks are real thunderers. You find some pretty strange things in vending machines here. I have yet to see a candy vending machine but I have seen machines that sold bags of rice, as I have said. We passed a bookstore that had a pornographic magazine vending machine. In this way the magazines are available 24 hours a day and also a certain anonymity is offered to the purchaser. We did not pass any restaurants or groceries on the way to the train station. We will wait in eat in Hiroshima. We were too late at the station to get reservations for the 9:42 to Hiroshima. The next train with reservations was 10:40-something. We decided to go unreserved. We ended in a smoking car and for the first stretch could not even sit together. But at least we got seats. It seems strange to see people standing in the aisles of a super-modern train. The trip is just exactly two hours. As we get to Western Honshu we are among hills. We are not in mountains the way we seemed to be in Nikko, but there is a nice hilly look to the area. There are small homes in little valleys. Unfortunately the train is mostly in tunnels. It must have been an incredible engineering feat to dig all these tunnels for the Shinkansen. We got to the city. It is bigger and more metropolitan than I was expecting. By the map it was only about a mile to the Peace Memorial, but of course that assumes we can find our way. We did a little wandering with compass and map. We stopped in a noodle shop and had a bowl of noodles each and some gyoza. One very popular snack in Japan is roasted chestnuts. You frequently see chestnuts for sale on street. You even see people roasting chestnuts on the street. You rarely see it in the U.S. On we went to the Peace Memorial. Entering it there were a few little shrines but the first really notable site is the Hiroshima Prefecture Industrial Promotion Hall. This a building that was very close to the hypocenter of the blast, yet amazingly it was left partially standing. It is most notable for its dome whose metal framework was left reasonably intact. It has become a sort of symbol of the blast. The word "hypocenter" is one rarely-used. We here epicenter, but not hypocenter. Epicenter is the point directly above the center. The Hiroshima bomb was detonated in air so one talks about the hypocenter. Actually technically the building is not in the Peace Park, but it is made to look like it is part of the park, and that is good enough for me. At another memorial. A sort of upside-down pagoda, a local engaged us in conversation for about ten minutes. What did we think of Japan? I asked him if he had traveled and what did he want to know about the US. Apparently he had heard that Americans had real problems with crime and with lawyers. Both I said were concerns, but were not as bad as they appeared from the outside. Most people's lives are rarely touched by crime or by lawyers. Our next stop was the memorial to Sadako, the little girl who had come to symbolize the bomb victims. She had been a bomb survivor at age two, but at age 12 she developed leukemia. In an attempt to preserve her life she attempted to fold 1000 origami cranes. How many she did fold is a subject of some controversy. Some say she folded more than 1000, some say it was only 644 and friends folded the rest. But she died and now school children from all over the country fold cranes and they are piled at the memorial in long chains of tutti-fruiti strands. At one end of the park is the A-bomb Museum. It is really in two pieces and there is a lot of redundancy in its message so Evelyn thinks it might have been two similar museums combined into one. It begins with the history of city culminating with Hiroshima going to war. This one sees going around the outer rim. Then in the center there is a section telling what happened in blast. Then going around the rim there is a piece on the immediate effects, then a section on long-term effects, and finally an exhibit on the need for peace and the banning nuclear weapons. There were some muted references to Japan having been warlike itself. And there was a quote from Truman announcing the atomic bomb that referred to Japan as the nation who had brought war to Asia. However, their description of the United States coming into the war just said that a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor pulled Japan into war with the US. It was like the attack was a chance event. Many of the displays had TV's next to them. You could press any of about 14 button to choose a language for an explanation. However since the explanations were only about three paragraphs, it seemed like a waste of technology. They could have just written the message in the 14 languages and plastered it on the wall. Between the two buildings there is a bridge and a section where you can choose to see short films about the subject. We watched a short animated film about a little girl who comes to the peace memorial by herself, is frightened by the exhibits, and how by folding a crane she met the spirit of Sadako. The second half of the museum concentrated on the immediate and long-term effects of the blast. This was some really nightmarish stuff. There was a diorama of victims walking with their skin falling off, there were exhibits of the clothing of those killed. There were bottles melted by the heat and shadows etched into stone. Parts recreated the ruins of city. A 3-D map of city showed the hypo-center and how high the bomb was when it exploded. There were watches stopped at time of bomb. A piece of concrete had glass shards buried in it. Then there were exhibits about the diseases caused by the radiation and finally a section of eyewitness accounts. When we first entered the building there were not many people present, but there were a huge number of schoolchildren around in groups that had come on field trips from school. Just as we were getting to the interesting part of the museum the dam broke and the museum filled up with noisy schoolchildren. Many took the subject seriously, but many more were just running around, not taking anything seriously. Next came a visit to Hiroshima Castle. Actually it is Ri Castle, or a reconstruction thereof after it had been in large part dismantled in the Meiji restoration and then totally destroyed in the atomic blast. It was rebuilt in 1958. For a while it had a display inside and a 300 yen admission. Both went away. Now you can walk around inside and see what it looked like, but only the look is authentic. And it has a sort of plywood feel. It is only one story in any case. It is wide but not high. We explored, but there was not much to see but a nice look on the outside. We decided to head out for Miya-jima Island. Crossing busy streets in strange towns I often follow what I tell Evelyn is the Jason method. When Jason had to get the Argo through the clashing rocks he noticed that the birds who fly through the rocks have the timing down just about right. They fly through the rocks with no problems. So he just released a bird and followed it. I figure a local knows the timing of the streets and from where to OK for traffic, so I just follow a local. Walking we passed a computer store and saw a large number of books on UNIX in Japanese. I suppose it looked a bit strange to us, but I am not sure why that would be. Just somehow it seems the language of UNIX is English. We had to take a train and a ferry to get to Miya-jima Island. On the way we talked to some Mexicans who were in Japan working for their company, the Ritz-Carlton hotel chain. Then we kept running into them all afternoon. Miya-jima is a Shinto shrine with a Torii gate incongruously placed in the water off the island. Foreigners were not allowed on the island but could visit the shrine by boat. Hence the Torii gate out in the water. The island itself is beautiful. Its chief inhabitants are deer. The island suffers from Galapagos Photographers' Folly. That is when you first get to the island you see a deer 30 feet away and quietly take a picture. Then you see one actually 20 feet and you take another. The next might be seven feet and you feel proud of yourself. Then you realize these are special deer. They were raised not to fear humans. They think of humans as sources of handouts and nothing else. They constantly are looking for food and if they are not getting food from the people they are raiding the trash bins in the hopes of finding something edible. I saw a whole family who had turned savage. They had brought down and killed a shopping bag and each was eating a different part. Mamma was having a hard time getting down the plastic handles. Some tourists were filming this, but eventually they got bored and went away--the tourists, not the deer. The deer stood their ground oblivious to the presence of humans. Another reason the deer let the people get so close is also purely greed. They have a really good reason for wanting the humans coming and being happy. The deer hold a majority of the stock in the island. This could be bad news for the Shintoists, but the deer, being only deer, have not yet figured how to vote as a block. Well, I may be exaggerating a bit, but there are a lot of deer and they have no fear of humans. There are signs up warning you that the males may butt people with their antlers. The females have no defense at all. It looks like just another sexist society. Most of the males have their antlers sawed off in any case indicating that there has been some attempt to create justice and equality among the sexes. The point of the whole island was, of course, at one time the shrine. But like a lot of shrines concessions were put up on the way in to catch visitors. Now it is sort of a tourist island with shops and hotels. The shrine is still there if you want to visit it, certainly. The specialty of the island seems to be maple leaf shaped cookies that are about an inch thick. A large number of shops have in their windows the same machine that bakes these cookies. The machine is a marvel of automation that in the back is pouring cookie batter and in the front is putting fully backed cookies on a conveyer belt. Many of the shops have the same machine in their window. it is fascinating to watch, as automation often is. When the time came we headed back to the ferry and on it back to the mainland (which is just another island). We had some time for dinner so after checking the time at the train station we went to a restaurant which turned out to be the equivalent of a bar. People were drinking mostly beer and sake (which is beer also, by the way, not wine). I had squid and yakatori. The former was pretty good. There was a fair amount of squid. It was a piece about four inches long and an inch and a half wide cut into rings. The yakatori was not very good. On skewers there was scallion, gristly meat, sausage, and fat of some sort (bacon?). It turned out to be expensive also since there was a 200 yen service charge for each of us that added a fair percent to a bill that was going to be only about 1200 yen anyway. I was in the mood for some dessert and getting on the train I got an ice cream bar from a machine for 100 yen. That turned out to be the best bargain of the day. It was good ice cream and it had almond pieces in the coating. It would have cost more at home, and that usually is not true for Western style food. I guess there is not that much demand for dairy products. They are not naturally used much in East Asia. I am told when Matthew Perry arrived the Japanese wanted to see his ships. "Oh, you have cows on your boat." "Yes, that way we can have dairy products." "Oh!... What are dairy products?" Perry's men told them. The Japanese turned a lovely shade of green and asked to be excused. They no doubt went back to their homes for lovely meal of squid. Now Americans often find the concept of eating squid disgusting. It is actually quite good. The Soviets used to laugh at Americans for eating corn which they fed only to livestock. At home we take the glandular secretions of a cow, separate out the fatty portions, let them congeal, and call it "fresh cremery butter." And when you eat honey you are eating something an insect had in its mouth. Speaking of differences, the Japanese never had kissing until they saw Westerners doing it. On the train a man sat down with us reading a book in Japanese about Netscape and Java. The Shinkansen back to Kyoto was uneventful except for a group of drunken Americans (possibly from Louisiana, certainly from the South) who had reservations on our car. We were treated to overhearing stories about being met by their guide and seeing their golf clubs he was quoted as thinking "Ah so! We gonna play SOME GOLF!" My suspicion is that was not what was going through the guide's mind. Americans can be pretty embarrassing. Later in the trip they were trying to open a bottle of sake. They said they wished they had a corkscrew. Evelyn offered them one. Of course sake does not come in corked bottles so it did them no good, but they got it open (I think it was a screw-off--and they were also) and after handing the bottle around and drinking from the bottle one of them came back and offered Evelyn a swig. She politely refused. We were a little late getting back. I was thirsty and got myself a can of a soft drink called "Poccari Sweat." I was intrigued by the name. I think it was like Gaterade. It did not taste very good but it was thirst quenching. From there we made reservations for the train to Himeji. Then took the bus back to the hotel. Evelyn had found an abandoned manga on the train so I got a chance to see it. It was in general stories aimed at female readers, but even so there was on story that featured female nudity. The mangas are really somewhat course entertainment. Whatever sells. The ones that sell to men seem to have both sex and violence. To women they sell mostly just the sex. 10/18/96 Himeji: Feudal Castle II The semi-Classical radio station was playing what sounded like hunting music with bird sounds. They also played some light classics like "Funeral March of the Marionette." Most Americans think of that as the Alfred Hitchcock theme. Walking to the train station we passed a Lawson's and stopped to try to find breakfast. The cash registers here have big rectangular displays that list all your items at one time, almost like seeing a spreadsheet. When no in use they carry advertising complete with pictures. It seems like a smart idea. There is no reason we could not do that back home. We just don't because we are not ready to do it yet. We know how to do it, but the time is not right for us. We don't want to invest this soon. The Japanese seem to have the attitude that it can be done now and it is a better way to do things so it probably should. I have heard that McDonalds changed some of their basic formulae for Japan. The Japanese like hamburger meat to taste a little sweeter than we like it in the U.S. I wondered where this taste came from. Well as it seems to me now the Japanese have had hamburgers here all along. Steamed buns are really just sort of sealed hamburgers. When the Japanese prefer the inside sweeter, they are probably just imitating steamed buns, which often have a sweet-ish sauce. The differences are really small. A steamed bun completely surrounds the filling, a hamburger bun does but has a crack allowing the halves to be separated. A burger holds together by itself usually, a steamed bun has more small pieces. Beyond that, they are pretty similar. I had two buns, both which had meat and small crunchy vegetables, one had a very spicy curry sauce. We ate them on the train to Himeji. The weather was clouding up again. I was expecting Himeji to be just a small town. There are some small towns in Japan but you cannot prove it by my experience. Every town we visit ends up looking like some urban center. This is really a very densely populated island. We got into Himeji and made sure we left by the north exit. Pretty much as soon as we hit the street we could see the castle. Himeji Castle is a second castle built (or in this case extended from a previous castle) by Toyotomi Hideyoshi. The castle in Matsumoto was called the Black Crow and this one is the White Egret or the White Crane. I believe it is the largest of the Medieval castles still in Japan and certainly the largest that is still the same shape it was in the late 1500s. The original castle dates back to the 1300s, but it was extended by Hideyoshi's order in 1581. It has a main tower five stories high and three supporting towers. From a distance it was impressive. It would be even more so up close. Himeji was heavily bombed in the war so besides the castle, there is not a lot of character to the town. They partially make up for it with some sculpted statues going up the main street. Included are several nude figures the strangest of which is a nude man marching with a saxophone. There are, however, several nice statues on either side of the main street. When we got to the end of the main street the castle still loomed well ahead and high above us. There is a park and we had to walk around it (clockwise) to get to the entrance. When you get the ticket, again there is a sign that says if you want an English language guide, you can ask. We did and got another elderly man, plus there was a younger woman. The sign said the tour was an hour and a half. The guide warned us that it might be closer to two hours. Fine, as long as it takes. The guide said that he wanted to take six minutes and explain a little about the history of the feudal period. Fine by me. He talked about who Hideyoshi was and Ieyasu. To give him feedback. He would mention a battle and I would say something like "Sekigahara." He clearly was pleased that this American actually knew a little Japanese history. But he talked as if Toyotomi and Tokugawa were actually enemies. I thought of them as being allies and friends. He said they were not. Actually they were a little of both and there must have been a misunderstanding between them. Toyotomi Hideyoshi was Ieyasu Tokugawa's father-in-law and initially he gave Ieyasu his opportunities. He did not live to see it, but Ieyasu betrayed the Toyotomis and Hideyoshi's son was really Ieyasu's enemy. But I had to do a little more research to realize that. But I think he was impressed that I was conversant with who these figures were. He told us that the castle had five stories and I asked if like pagodas they are always an odd number of stories. The castles were built by Buddhists and Buddhists consider that odd numbers are lucky, even unlucky. He was not sure if it was always true, but he thought it might be. Later he showed us some paintings one of the lords had made of carp. I asked what was the special symbolism of carp. Well, a carp swims up waterfalls and it is a symbol of courage. But he seemed surprised that I knew that carp had to be symbolic. He asked how did I know so much about Japan. I told him well, we'd been in Japan for a week already. But then I told him I had always had a special interest in Japan going back to being a small boy interested in Gojira. More to the point I got interested in samurai films. They asked me which ones and I named KAGEMUSHA, SEPPUKU, and the Zatoichi films. The latter brought a smile. They said that they really liked Zatoichi also. However there would be no more since the actor got in trouble with the law. Zatoichi is a continuing character, a masseur and like most masseurs were in Japan, he is blind. However, he had hone his hearing skills to get around and was a master swordsman. Most of the stories have complex plots, and that is really what makes the story good. Samurai films have much the same appeal as Westerns about gunfighters, but they generally are done like very good Westerns. Samurai had much the same position in Japanese society they a gunfighter had in ours. In a society excessively rule-bound, they were law unto themselves. Some of the better known samurai films are remade in the West, usually as Westerns. SEVEN SAMURAI became THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS, and SEVEN MAGNIFICENT GLADIATORS. YOJIMBO was remade as A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS, some weak sorcery film with David Carradine, and most recently THE LAST MAN STANDING. Clint Eastwood really became a big star for playing a character very much based on Sanjuro, a Samurai character played in several films by Toshiro Mifune. I used to wonder if Clint Eastwood knew how much he owed to Mifune and to Akira Kurosawa whose films created Sanjuro. The answer apparently is merely yes. I think one of the cable stations ran a program of actors listing their favorite films. Eastwood recommended the Sanjuro films and freely admitted the debt. The most popular Samurai characters have some impediment to overcome that makes them unlikely. Sanjuro is a obviously poor and a slob to boot, always scratching his beard. In the remake they dressed Eastwood in the cheapest clothing of the West, a Mexican poncho. They gave him a cheap cigar and a growth of beard. The appeal is that they are both men who just don't care. Zatoichi (whose name means Blind One) had an obvious impediment. Another popular samurai has a baby he must care for and wheels around a babycart. The reason the Japanese like their samurai heroes with impediments is that they can replay over and over a favorite scene. Samurai looks to be helpless peasant and bullies come along to pick on him. Samurai refuses to be drawn in. Bullies persist thinking that samurai resists from fear. Samurai still resists. Tension builds. Bullies start to attack samurai. Samurai whips his sword in an effortless arc. Everyone just freezes motionless. One bully falls, mortally wounded. Then another. Each bully has been killed for having underestimated the hero. East and West we all have the same fantasy of really being good and being underestimated by people around us until in a show of virtuosity we prove ourselves to be far better than we appear. If the above scene sounds silly look how often it is repeated in our own films. Our guides said that they thought I looked a little like Zatoichi. They may have meant it as a compliment. The inside of a Japanese castle is remarkably like any wood frame building. There are holes to allow shooting muskets and arrows at the enemy. But it is a lot like touring a large house. They are more impressive looking from the outside, not unlike the Shinkansen. There was a display of the Princess San's room where she plays a game with clam shells. The way it was described it sounded almost like a card game and used the fact that you cannot see what is painted inside a clamshell when it is face down. We also saw racks for guns. I asked about whether using guns was dishonorable. As it is often portrayed in films like SEPPUKU. What the guide said was that the film SEPPUKU was not realistic, but he did not specificly answer my question. There was considerable language barrier between us and a lot of what he said was hard to understand. We got up to the top of the castle and looked around. The top of a five story castle at the top of the only hill around does indeed have an impressive view. At the other end the base of the castle had stones taken from cemeteries. There was even a stone coffin he pointed out. This castle also had a seppuku room at the very top. It also had a room toward the bottom labeled Hara-kiri room, but he said that was just PR. It was for defense, but to get people to see it they gave it a sensational label. The grounds of the castle are vaguely set up in a spiral form and the way in has hairpin turns to make it harder for an army to storm the castle. To protect the castle from fire, a kind of tree was planted known for its high moisture content. Basically it was a fireproof tree. Tokugawa tried to throw Christianity out of Japan. In 1603 it had been in the country only for 50 years and yet many of the important lords (daimyo) were Christian. I asked why it had success so quickly. It was a time of chaos and insecurity and people were looking for change. The Jesuits represented change and new ways in the minds of the people. The tour that we were warned might go on for two hours went to almost three hours. Needless to say we really appreciated the effort. Our guide wanted to know about us. At various points he would ask what we did. I think he was expecting to hear that we taught. I told him I was a mathematician working with computers for the phone company and it clearly was not what he was expecting. They asked about the computers we were taking notes on and what company made them. They thought it might be for the military. I wonder if they were confusing Hewlett Packard with Packard Bell. At the end of the tour we exchanged business cards. The Hyogo Prefectural Museum of History is a museum tracing history of Japanese culture. The entrance id usually 200 yen but they had a special exhibit that made it 800 yen. The special exhibit was entirely in Japanese and seemed to be a rehash of what we had seen at the National museum. We saw a lot of what looked like the same mirrors, rusted swords, and pots. There was a nice diorama of fishing boats. The main museum also covered prehistory and history in various parts of Japan. Probably the most interesting was also of special local interest. It was a display of models of the samurai castles of Japan showing among other things the relative size as well as the comparative design. A floor above it there was a display on castles and how they were built. Again this suffers the problems of many museums, the collection on display seems small. It certainly was not worth 800 yen. We had a long search for what to have for lunch. Eventually we found a place where I had pork cutlet and udon soup. Originally we planned to go on to Kobe, but we spent so long in Himeji that there was not much point in going to Kobe. We went back to the train station and I suggested to Evelyn that we get ice cream. The ice cream looked good. Now I had pretty much promised myself I would not get American food in Japan. Evelyn got some chocolate flavor, but I decide to at least try to something I could not get at home. Ogura cream ice cream seemed to fill the bill: sweet bean paste ice cream. It was pretty good too. You see them selling cakes filled with ogura. We took the train back. At the room I worked on my log. The room had a TV with a coinbox that had a note on it that there were bilingual movies Friday, Saturday, and Sunday at 9 PM. No such luck. There was nothing bilingual and I ended up turning it off. 10/19/96 Nara: Foundations of Buddhism We left the Takase at about 7:30. We passed the usual sign that said "Put off your shoes." I am not sure where they got the wording but it seems needlessly Biblical. It strikes me Kyoto does not seem as clean as Tokyo, but then I have not seen that much of either. It could well be we were seeing a clean neighborhood of Tokyo and a less clean portion of Kyoto. It is interesting who they pick to put into advertising. There is a Japanese actor with a craggy face smoking a cigaret from one actor. Another cigaret has as its poster boy Jean Reno, the actor who plays Leon the assassin in THE PROFESSIONAL, which is currently playing in Japan. These appear to be people who are much in the samurai mold. They are self-sufficient loners who seem to be very good at what they do. There is some other ad with Quentin Tarantino. I guess he does not have to make movies as long as he is a cult figure. He made two violent films and since he has not done a whole lot. He has made some short films, he has had small roles in films. But in Japan in general his image is sort of punky. He was a video store clerk and that is pretty much what he looks like. An odd person to make a hero. For a different sort of breakfast we stopped in a bakery at the train station. We got a green muffin with sweet beans in it. I guess they are oguro. The flavor was supposed to be green tea. There was what turned out to be a bran muffin with raisins. And there was a wedge of something yellow. It was about an inch thick and was a right triangle who short edges were about two inches and three inches. It basically is white bread coated in a thin yellow, slightly sweet covering. At the center is custard. We ate them on the train. There were a bunch of kids in student uniforms. Odd for a Saturday morning. It is odd to see the boys with earrings. One even has a ring at the corner of his mouth. It does not seem to be in keeping with the uniform. Also they have different kinds of shoes. The dress code does not seem to apply to footwear or jewelry. Nara is one of the few places we have gone to that is not big and citified. It has the feel of a small town, though we are probably on the outskirts. In some ways it like Kamakura with Buddhist temples. Well, we thought we were getting away from the Presidential race in the US by coming to Japan. We have fallen into the middle of their elections and keep running into politicians with loudspeakers on the street haranguing the crowds. Many have attractive young women in white gloves waving at the crowd. I thought our politics was screwed up and our politicians underestimated the public. Just how convincing a political argument do people find a woman in white gloves waving? Well, I guess it is a tradition. On the main drag of Nara we stopped at a 100 Yen store. Everything in the store was 100 yen. I got two caps and a flashlight. The cap I have been wearing this trip is getting a bit threadbare. The first stop is the Kofuku Temple. This was the main temple of local bigshots called the Fujiwara family. Fujiwara-no-Kamatari was born Natatomi-no-Kamatari but changed his name. He became politically powerful. In large part this was through intermarrying with people who were in government so that people ruing were close relatives. Finally the family ruled the government in the Heian period. That is 794 to 1185. The pagoda I at the end of a park ruled over by semi-tame deer. The deer are not like those in Miya-jima. There they watch people and begged. Here they are more assertive. Vendor's sell "Deer's Cooky" in 150 yen packages. The visitor may be tempted to try feeding a pack to the deer. This is a big mistake. The deer have the point of view that they have a right to the cookies and it is the humans standing in the way. I bought a pack and was immediately set upon by aggressive deer. My photovest was a similar color to the biscuits and it was chewed. Males with antlers butted me. None bit the hand that fed them, but then I was careful. We think of deer as quiet and timid, but separating biscuits from humans is what these animals do for a living, and there is no attempt to appear polite or standoffish. If you want to get the feel of what happens, see the play "Suddenly Last Summer" by Tennessee Williams. It wasn't deer there, but otherwise it is essentially accurate. This area is the only one I know of where when the deer see the people they hush each other and try to sneak up on them. If you see them coming, throw down any food an back away. The deer see you as standing between them and sustenance. They don't care that you had to pay for the privilege. As Eli Wallach said in THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, sooner or later you have to pay for every good deed. Our next stop was supposed to be the Nara National Museum, but it was closed preparing for a special exhibit. Just as well the exhibit had not started. They would just have increased the admission. As we walked to the next site we passed a vendor selling hot yams on the street. That is something we would not see at home. Pretty much wherever we went we had deer roaming and mugging the unwary. They keep the males from being really dangerous with deer wrangles on Sunday in October. It is sort of a local rodeo to cut antlers. From the pictures they get a really big turnout at 500 yen a head. And that's per tourist head, not per deer head. Todai Temple is the largest wooden building in the world. It houses a huge bronze Buddha 16 meters high. The statue is bronze but looks like ebony, from the oxidation I suppose. It is the largest bronze statue in the world by one account and certainly one of the largest. It stands there with a huge upraised palm in a symbolic position. There seems to be even less variation in Buddhist art than in that of other religions. This is because each position has a symbolic meaning and there are only a very limited number of these. When Buddha has to be in a pre-defined position, it stifles creativity, I suppose. There just is not a lot of variation we are seeing in Buddhist art. I guess it is because the Buddha is more a symbol than a representation of a human. There is not much interesting variation in crucifixes either. To the right and around the back of the Buddha is a pillar with a hole cut through it. It is said that if you can fit through the hole you will attain enlightenment. Many people try, but it is mostly children who succeed. I thought it was a natural for Evelyn who is small, thin, and definitely in need of enlightenment. She started to try to fit through the hole but chickened out. I guess she is not as supple as she used to be. Near the temple are rickshaws and the tourists get rides. Something goes against my grain about having another human pull me. The Chinese were right to ban them. Of course I feel guilty riding an elephant. We headed off for the next temple. On the way I got a cold milk cocoa out of a machine. We are used to cocoa being hot, but you can find it either way in machines here. I had tried making cold cocoa at home, inspired by cappuccino and found it to be very refreshing that way. And you don't have to worry about burning your tongue. We continued on to the Kasuga-Taisha Shrine. This shrine was every 20 years from the time the shrine was founded by the Fujiwaras before 800 AD up to the 19th century. That's a lot of rebuilding. What the shrine is best known for today--besides gangs of deer chasing tourists--are the stone lanterns numbering probably more than a thousand. The shrines are starting to all look pretty similar to me, I am afraid. This one has a nice woodsy setting. On the way out we saw a man urinating on a tree pretty much in public. This is one thing the Japanese have in common with the people of some other Asian countries we have visited, notably India. But the Japanese enjoy a reputation for being fastidious. This one habit seems like an ironic exception. I guess it is just one little piece of culture shock. You see telephone cards for sale with thematic pictures. At a tourist site there will be a vending machine selling phone cards with pictures of some aspect of the site. It seems a good idea. It makes the phone cards have souvenir value. We headed back to the train station. For lunch we stopped into a restaurant and ordered from plastic food in the window. We had curry udon; soba with soy sauce, onions, and wasabi; and soba soup. On the way we see two girls hauling a box of facial tissue with ads. That seems to be a thriving industry. We had to take a train to Horyu-ju station and then a bus through narrow streets to get to Horyu Temple. Horyu Temple is the oldest temple in Japan, dating to 607 AD and founded by Prince Shotoku who instituted Buddhism as the state religion. Shotoku fought the decline of the Yamoto court by giving the people a constitution, but at the same time reserved the right to declare an official state religion. It was Prince Shotoku's articacts we saw at the National Museum on October 8th. And they came from here. The temple had survived several fires and reconstructions. It has some of the oldest wooden buildings in the world and is a World Heritage Site. It is divided into a west and east temple complex. It is reached by a tree-lined walk that could be well-appreciated by people who had not been on their feet all day as well as fighting off ravening temple deer, of whom this temple is mercifully free. They are many temples for which the visitor is allowed not to enter but to look in windows. What is seen is not very much since the buildings are dark inside. But one can make out old statues and other religious relics. There are things that manifest a self-evident greatness. I would class in this category Niagara Falls and the Pyramids of Giza. There are other things that one has to accept on faith that they are great in some way that someone else understands. In this class I would put fossilized ferns, most religious relics, and Marilyn Monroe's film performances. These temple are full of great religious relics that nonetheless have a greatness of dubious self-evidence. There are some nice ceiling paintings of dragons and some interesting roof gargoyles, but the really great artifacts show Buddha in various unnatural positions. And even those are hard to see. These are, I am sure, really important to Buddhists, but to those not versed in Buddhism the value of the site is moot. Much of what is to be seen is poorly lit and repetitious. For myself, I have determined I must learn more about Buddhism or see fewer Buddhist sites. Following the visit we went to the bus station looking for bus which would take us to the train station. We asked a attendant in a uniform if this was the proper place to wait and after he looked at a table told us no, we should wait across the street and some distance down at a bus stop. OK, so over we went. After about 10 minutes sitting there we saw the same guy running down the street motioning us over. Apparently he had misdirected us. He said that a bus in the station would take us. Well at least he wanted to make good on his error. We came running back. Part of the problem was that getting across the street takes a long time. Traffic lights seem to take a long time to cycle. We were delayed just a few minutes getting to the train station, but that meant missing a train and the problem propagated to one from train to the next at Nara. It was dark by the time we pulled out of Nara. I wrote a little on the train and napped a bit. When we got to Kyoto I suggested we have dinner before retreating to the room. In the center of Kyoto it is difficult finding someplace quick and cheap. We settled on a little Chinese place where we effectively ate in the kitchen. I had gayoza and raman. Evelyn had Mar Po Dofu. I had a hard time communicating to them that I wanted to order a second order of gayoza. I asked for a second order and they thought I was saying I had not gotten the first. Eventually the guy behind the counter got the idea and put "1 + 1" on the check. Back at the room I wrote. At 9 PM I tried for what was supposed to be a bilingual movie. There was none, but they had on a dubbed into Japanese version of RUMBLE IN THE BRONX. (In Japan it is called RED BRONX.) It just played in theaters in the US within the past year and Evelyn of all people wanted to see it. I don't always understand her taste but I guess she likes Jackie Chan. Chan is an incredible daredevil, but stunts do not make a film for me. I didn't care for the film then. She decided to watch it again. The problem with these dubbed American films is they do such a bad job of dubbing. The words never fit the lips. 10/20/96 Hikone and Nagoya: Disappointing Feudal Castles We played it a little laid back on a Sunday morning. We did not leave until 8 AM. We stopped at both the Lawson's for pork buns and at the bakery. Well, I was hungry, what can I say? I got two pork buns, one curried. Evelyn preferred the bakery and I gave in to temptation and also got what I thought to be a Katsuiyu bun. It turned out to be more a falafel bun, like a big patty of falafel, wrapped in bread with tomato sauce. It was very strange as a type of pastry. We got our reservation on the Bullet train for the first part of the trip to Hikone. On the train I see a see a woman apparently praying. She has her legs folded under her on the seat and who sits with her eyes tightly closed holding the pole that people use to steady themselves when the train starts up. I wonder if she is just taking the moment to pray or if she is terrified of train travel. We have to change trains and there is some confusion but we get to Hikone. Again the castle is high on the main street so you can almost see it majestically commanding the town from the train station. People are playing Pachinko at 10 am on Sunday morning. I knew the game was popular, but it seems to be like gambling in Nevada. The Pachinko parlors must be hugely popular and profitable. I think the way it works is that you cannot win money with Pachinko, you can only win prizes. But then you can sell your prizes and get hard cash for them. At night you can pass a town on a train and easily pick out the Pachinko parlor which is lit like a Las Vegas casino in a town that otherwise looks like a sleepy little hamlet. Or perhaps the inside of a coal mine. As we get to the castle we can tell that there is something special today. A lot of people are showing up. One group carries TV station video cameras. It turns out to be a bicycle race and the track is around the grounds of Hikone Castle. There are green dividers all around the track the bicyclists will follow. We will be walking along peacefully and a motorcycle will come barreling down the track followed by twenty or thirty 10-speed bicycles and another motorcycle brings up the rear. As I get the ticket the woman shows me the route we should follow in looking at the castle. In her broken English she reassured me that only the main tower was closed. (Gee, thanks!) I understand only about every third word of her English. My ear is not as good as Evelyn's at understanding heavily accented and even malformed English. I am a little more intrepid in trying to express myself in other languages, she is better at understanding the response. There actually may be some biological basis to this I know. Women perceive by recognizing patterns, men by seeing movement. If a bird in a tree is standing still a woman will see it faster if it is still, a man will recognize it faster if it is moving. Evelyn and I have very similar minds, but I tell her it is like she has Word for Windows and I have Word for the Mac. On the service they are very similar, but underneath they are very different. Other people are like Framemaker (a product that competes with Word and behaves quite differently). Evelyn and I have similar minds, but perceive things with different hardware. Vive la difference. A little history of Hikone Castle. Naomasa Ii, a top general of Tokugawa at Sekigahara, was given Mitsunari Ishida's castle, spoils of war. The castle was located elsewhere and his son Naotsugu moved the castle here. I wonder what is involved in moving a whole castle? I guess this is an island of scarce resources. When you want a castle in a location you don't think of just building it, you ask yourself from what that is already standing do I get the materials. In this case the materials came from another castle. In any case the castle was completed in the new location in 1622. We took the walk slowly, since the castle is on a steep hill. We went into a small museum room with models of the castle and artifacts like round tiles with family emblems. Somehow they have not maintained the feel of a castle inside. They have a place that says please come inside and join us for green tea and a sweetcake. 500 yen. The main tower is indeed under renovation with scaffolding all around. It is a pity because it would have had a beautiful view of the lake. Actually though the real loss is not being able to see the castle from the outside without all the scaffolding. Inside there is really not that much to see. At least there is a cliff lookout with a railing. There is a building that has photos of all the major feudal castles. There are a couple of nice ones I would not mind seeing. However the labels are in Japanese. I ask a man "doko?" pointing to one of the castles. "Fukuyama." Well perhaps we can get there. Somehow this castle is short on period feel on the inside. None of the rooms are in the original form. We walk the grounds, which takes a little longer than it usually would with the race track set up. I do get some pictures of racers. The ticket includes admission to the garden on the side. Unfortunately we end up taking the garden route in reverse order. Normally it would not matter but there is a natural progression here. We pass a monument to a novel. THE LIFE OF A CHERRY BLOSSOM is the story of Tairo Naosuke Ii who opened Japan to the world when the American first arrived. The novel was popular and done on their public television. It seems that Ii was born here. The Americans showed up and demanded the right to trade with Japan. (Now that in itself is interesting. Trade is an agreement between consenting parties. This was an expression of seclusionism, the term given to Japan's desire to shut out the outside world. The Tokugawas were fat and happy ruling the country, the samurai were like lords with little to do in time of peace. Along come the Americans saying you must let us sell to your people who consent and the ruling class was afraid this would rock the boat. Of course the US was also demanding access to ports to make this trade possible.) Ii was a high official and he signed a treaty without the consent of his government saying that the new ideas could come in. Noasuke signed the treaty with Perry in June 1858. He was assassinated by seclusionists in 1860 at age of 46. But by then new ideas had entered the country. These days the Japanese cannot get ideas from other countries fast enough. Yamamoto said after Pearl Harbor that he feared that Japan had awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with terrible resolve. The US did much the same thing almost a century earlier. For the most part it is a pleasant garden walk. There are carp that come begging for food, mouths open. Supposedly you can buy food for them. But they are much nicer than the deer, they don't mug the tourists. When we were done we walked back to the station looking for a place to have lunch. We found one and had soba noodles and ramen. We had a little trouble finding Hikone, we had no such problems with Nagoya. Nagoya is a big city almost with a Tokyo feel and it is easy to get to. Our JapanRail pass ends today. It certainly was worth getting. We wanted to see a lot of Japan and at $524 for the two of us. We would have spent much more than twice that had we bought individual tickets. We saved on the order of $800. Of course even so over the same week we must have spent $200 for food and $524 for transport. We got to Nagoya and instead of being able to see the castle from the train station we had to take a subway. The castle area has a sort of park atmosphere. There are a lot of school children. There is a man dressed up in a samurai armor. They are playing this castle up as Samurailand. We get into the castle and what do we find? Inside is an elevator to the top floor, marble walls, and fluorescent lighting. Outside it looked like a real castle, but that was not the interior they had. They have gummed up their own national history with a kitsch castle. Of course a little of the fault goes to Americans who totally destroyed the castle bombing the city in W.W.II. I guess if they were going to rebuild it they would do it with modern materials and modern conveniences. Himeji Castle had black screen put over the walls to hide the castle from the bombers. It sounds like the bombers were intentionally trying to destroy the castles the Japanese. What a loss. It also sounds rather stupid. If anything it would fill the Japanese with the determination to fight on. Inside of the castle they had a little museum of medieval life with portraits of Japan's feudal castles with Fujicolor, the usual samurai armor, tiles with family crests, a samurai sword, a matchlock, and mostly things we had seen in other castles. One thing that was interesting to see was portraits of Oda Nobunaga, Toyatomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu. On the top floor there was an observatory. It is amazing what a great view a five story castle gives from the top of a hill. On the way out I stopped at the gentlemen's convenience and discovered that the whole inside could be conveniently observed by someone going into the ladies' convenience. In some ways this is a very laid back society. We decided to walk back to the train and perhaps see a little of downtown Nagoya, perhaps find a place to eat. Think again. This is a fancy neighborhood. As we pass by hotels the doormen look at us like walking fungus. We pass City Hall with its tile roof that looks out of place on a modern office building. It is sort of a traditional roof. As we walk I think about why Japan works so well. Part of it is that you don't see the pessimism of the US. At home we know that the big cities have failed, that we have serious crime problems, that our problems are impossible and it will all fail. The Japanese see the future as a place of endless possibility. The Japanese have decided that the future works, we have decided that it doesn't. And perhaps for that very reason it will work for them and fail for us. The belief that things cannot work is a convenient excuse for not making them work. There may not be much I agree with Newt Gingrich about, but I think we are both sick of pessimism. We pass a store called American Drug Store, but it mostly sells souvenirs. Eventually we decide that this long walk is pointless and take a subway to return to the train station. Before we take the Shinkansen we decide to get dinner. We go out on the street and look for a restaurant. Here are plenty, but their menus are in Japanese. Finally I decide that this is silly. I have yet to get any Japanese food I have not liked. So I just copy two specials off a menu and decide this is what we are getting. The meal turns out to be beef and bean sprouts, fish, eggplant, Japanese veggies, tea, and pickles. That is the union of two meals. Evelyn and I share. When we are done there is not much left but fishbones. When we first entered the owner was trying to show us what we were getting because we might not like it. Guess again. With the ride back to Kyoto we saw the end of our JR pass. Now we are mostly stuck in Kyoto. When we get back to Kyoto we were going to take the bus back because we were both bushed. But it would have been a 15-minute wait. We decide to walk. We go back for our last night at the River Side Takase. The winds blow cold. Winter is certainly coming on. At the room we wrote and tried to listen to the radio. The music stations are somewhat frustrating to listen to. Nothing is done in English and talk to music ratio is a lot higher than in the US. You feel like telling these guys to shut up and get on with the records. I guess in Japan there is a lot more emphasis on personality on the radio. One thing I find interesting is that official things are in often in English, less formal in Japanese. The news will come on and it will say "The National News from the Asahi Shinbun." Then the news reader will come on and speak entirely in Japanese. Then they will come back and say "Traffic Watch" and then lapse back into Japanese. They seem to have accepted English as the proper language to use in conjunction with ideas they got from abroad. Maybe it is not so strange. I call wasabi "wasabi" and not "mustard." 10/21/96 Kyoto: Variants on Buddhism We were in no great hurry to leave in the morning. We worked on logs and packed, leaving at 8:45. It took us a little while to find the Ryokan we were moving to. The River Side Takase could put us up only for five nights so we had to get another hotel, Ryokan Seiki, just a few blocks away. We found it with an entrance in a small alley. It did not look all that clean on the outside. Compared to the last place, however, this one looks a little cleaner, but the room is also the smallest so far. It has room for two little futons and a strip beside that much smaller than a futon. The cupboard is over this space and is only half-length with a space underneath it with a TV. Free TV in this room, I think. But we will have to roll the futons in the morning. Because we leave our shoes we get to see what tourists wear. My recommendation to potential tourists: don't make the mistake I made. Wear a running shoe, not a loafer. Loafers are easier if you are visiting temples, but you really need foot support for all the walking. Evelyn wanted to go back to the tourist information center so that was the first stop. Along the way we decided to pick up breakfast. There was a bakery across the street from the Lawson's where I had been buying buns in the morning. Evelyn got two pieces at the bakery and I got one. We then crossed the street to get steamed buns, but there were none left. What I got from the bakery turned out to be a bread roll with a thin sweet coating. Evelyn got what turned out to be a banana muffin and what looked like a fruit pastry, but turned out to be meat-filled, probably liver. This she shared because I did not get buns and I think the concept of liver in the morning bothered her. I have a cast-iron constitution. I was a picky eater when I was growing up, but that is all out of my system now. Variety is much more important to me than familiarity in food. If someone else likes it, I at least want to give it a try. A lot of stores seem to have automatic sliding doors. This might not be a problem, but some are very slow. You get so that you forget to look and stand in front of a glass door you are supposed to push. Or you push on a door and it starts sliding to the side. It is strange in the train station where in any crowd there are a few Japanese running. This is a people often in a big hurry. We got some maps and tourist information at the info center. One thing we found out is about a film festival for non-Japanese nationals who wanted to try subtitled Japanese films. I think for once we qualify. The only real drawback is that it runs from 2 PM to 4 PM, prime sightseeing time. We crossed the street to the train and bus station. Like just about every other form of transport, the bus has electric displays to tell passengers what stop is coming up in Japanese and English. We could do the same, but the Americans are slow to change in their ways. We believe in big jumps in style, the Japanese in continuous small improvements. We will get a new bus in 10 years that will have digital displays and a lot of there changes. But for the time being our buses are perfectly good. The Japanese say if we can make this tiny improvement, do it as soon as possible. It is an intelligent policy. It means each improvement can be fine-tuned. Change comes in small packages and is never overwhelming. It forces them to reuse what was already developed, and that keeps expenses down. Competition with the Japanese has in many ways been good for the county which had gotten complacent. I remember noodle soup when I was growing up, as much as I would like to forget it. You didn't get much in the way of noodles, but you got more than enough, such as they were. They were a sort of soggy mush. But they were more expensive than the broth so you did not get very much. Then some country, probably Japan, started exporting ramen to us. Suddenly noodle soup started being mostly noodles. It could have been all along, but there was no incentive to improve the noodles in noodle soup. Suddenly we have brands like Oodles of Noodles making it sound like it was a new idea to put a lot of noodles in soup. Our first stop was Kinkaku Temple. As we approached there were already a large number of tour busses there. It clearly was a popular site. It was built in Kamakura as the estate of Kintsune Saionji, an artist. Yoshimitsu, who was the third and most powerful of the Ashikaga Shoguns. When he retired and abdicated his throne in 1394 he retired here and devoted himself to making Kinkaku a stunning site. He created the Golden Pavilion, one of the most famous sites in Japan. In his will he left it to be made into a Zen temple. It was restored during Tokugawa period. A mad student obsessed with the Golden Pavilion burned it down in 1950, but it was once again restored 1955. Yukio Mishima wrote a novel THE TEMPLE OF THE GOLDEN PAVILION as a fictionalized story of the student who burned the pavilion. The entire building was at one time covered with gold leaf. Now just the upper two of the three stories are gold. Admission is 400 yen and you are rushed through rather quickly with a one-way path that also shows you the pond and the garden. When we were near the exit we swam upstream, against considerable traffic, to get a closer look at the pavilion that we were expecting to get by the end of the visit. Nice looking building. We headed out on foot looking for the next temple, and looking for lunch. We settled on a Chinese restaurant. I wrote down the name of the bento in the window and a bowl of ramen for Evelyn. (Well, Evelyn picked the dish. I didn't choose it for her.) All the times I have been writing down what I wanted, it has been understood every single time. I don't have a record that good with my English handwriting. My bento had fried chicken, beef teriyaki, over-breaded shrimp, gayoza, rice, pickled veggie. Remember a bento is a box with compartments and many different sorts of food in it. Generally it is a good way to sample many different dishes. The shrimp had about a quarter inch of breading coating. Fried chicken has taken Japan by storm. It is very popular. I am told it is most popular on Christmas day. Somehow the Japanese have become convinced that fried chicken is somehow traditionally connected with Christmas. It is news to me. The Fourth of July, maybe, but at least in my house Indian food is traditional for Christmas. Indian restaurants seem to be the only ones open where we are. Ah, there is nothing like a plump Christmas thali. But in Japan you cannot get into a Kentucky Fried Chicken place on Christmas Day, I have heard. After the big meal it was a little hard to walk up the hills to the next site. For about the third or fourth time I saw a giant spiderweb with a very large yellow and black spider at the center. They have a spider with about a three-inch leg-span. Scary little sucker. Ryoan-ji was an aristocrat's country villa, but it became a Rinzai Zen temple in 1450 under the lord Katsumoto Hosokawa. He was a man with a great appreciation for peace and tranquillity. He also liked war, apparently because he started a decade long civil war, the War of Onin: 1467-1477. The war started as a feud between him and another daimyo Yamana Souzen. I will say more about them later. Neither lived to see the end of the war they started. The rock garden dates from the mid-15th century and is considered ultimate in dry landscape. It seems to suggest a sea with stony islands jutting out. The raked stones give the impression of waves. As we sat watching a large number of men came and started appreciating along with us. We were all sitting on the steps of the tunnel when a recorded voice came out of the wooden steps under us explaining the site. I think it was more for their benefit than for mine since it was in Japanese. I am not sure why this particular setting of stones is so aesthetic to the Japanese. Something about this particular setting is really exciting to them, albeit quietly. The visit includes a walk around the premises which includes a walk around Kyoyochi Pond. This is a man-made pond that used to attract mandarin ducks. Of late there have not been so many ducks. We saw only two and the picture in the brochure also shows two ducks.. I think they may have been pinioned and are permanent features of the pond. The Japanese seem to love things in English, though they don't always come up with a combination of words that makes sense or does not express the idea they think they are expressing. We saw a truck with the name "Big Beans." A department store has the slogan "Be Bridal." There is the Grand-Back big and tall shop. A vending machine is called "Stevia." There is a store called "Today Discount--Big Off." There is a brand of canned coffee called "Coffee Boss." A women's fashion store is called "Nice Claup." A sweatshirt bears the legend "MAKE in a choice--recommendation." A tee shirt says "GET OR LOST--yellow blood line." The pitcher in our room that keeps water warm says "TEXTURE This gives rise to quite a luxurious emotion in your mind." There is a type of chocolate labeled "Mild." I suppose that is in contrast to the harsh chocolate you would get otherwise. A sweatshirt bears the message "Tier off. Not just on down all." As long as a phrase sounds like English to the Japanese, it doesn't matter that it is verbal fruit cocktail. On the bus we talked to an Indonesian businessman. We didn't know he was Indonesian when he started talking to us. As he said himself he looks Japanese to the Japanese. He had just come from visiting his mother in Edison, New Jersey. That is not very far from where we live. He actually lives in Sacramento, California and runs an Asian gift shop. We talked about American politics and welfare, which he thinks is out of hand. He may well be right. He suggested that there is a particularly good place to see the parade for the festival, to go behind the palace. He seemed to be a very bright and motivated person. You meet some interesting people when you travel. I mean you meet interesting people at home too, but it is a very different set who regularly travels the world. I tend to give my seat to older people on the bus. The Indonesian said that really is not done any more in Japan. The young don't have much respect for the older the way they used to. Also there used to be a convention that women gave up their seat for men, but that is ignored these days. He said he had seen a fight between an older woman and a man over a seat on a bus. I guess in Japan territory is power. There was a long walk through the long narrow streets of Kyoto to get to our next site. It is, however, not an uninteresting one. You pass by food shops and see fruits and vegetables for sale. We are always on the look out for what might good places to eat. Now if you thought that it was impressive that someone would fold 1000 cranes, where each crane takes maybe three minutes consider the temple of Sanjusangendo, dating to 1164 AD, where they have 1001 nearly identical statues of Juichimen-Senju-Kannon, each with 11 faces. They each have one main face and ten little heads sticking out of the top of the main head like growths. They also are supposed to have 1000 arms. Here the artist of the original statue was at something of a loss. It is just really tough to put 1000 arms on a statue. Ah, but faith came to the rescue. If each has 40 arms and each arm saves 25 worlds, that makes each count as 25 arms so there would be 1000 arms in all. This may make it seem to make sense to work in the other direction and say the artist should put 25,000 arms on each statue, but given the choice of having to sculpt 40 or 25,000 arms, the artist opted for 40. An arm counts as 25 if it saves 25 worlds. [The opinions expressed are those of the temple and do not necessarily represent those of the log-writer or his wife.] I am not sure where they find all these worlds. In any case there are these 1000 statues in 10 rows of 100 in one long hall. And it turns out to be a baker's 1000 since there is one statue at the back facing the other way. It must have taken a lot of faith to complete this task. It also takes a lot of faith on the part of the advocates to recognize that this effort was a worthwhile task. I think you have to be really into multiplicity. There are also 28 attending spirits represented by statues. These are often fierce faced Nijuhachibushu. like garuda, the bird-headed. In Thailand they are also bird-bodied, but not here. The rows are staggered so that each Buddha has a view of the front. They stack up in rows going back diagonally but not straight back. We did not have time to see the whole temple ground since the temple closed at 5 PM. It was getting cold so I took off my photovest and handed it to Evelyn to hold while I put on my sweater. A Japanese tourist flashed a picture of the proceedings then gave me a thumbs up sign. I am not sure what he found of interest, but it is a very different society. We took a roundabout route back to the room. We stopped at a Lawson's not far from the room and got some sushi, some soba noodles with sauce, some raisin buns and a little chocolate. This we ate in the room while we worked on our logs. We watched a Japanese language cartoon. It seemed to be full of all sorts of ultimate battles and huge explosions. A steady diet of the ultimate must get dull. Boy the room is cramped. The Japanese must be bumping into each other all the time. Evelyn did a wash. She found an hour in the drier left the clothing very wet. She hung it around the room and even this morning it was damp. So we left with our underwear hanging the room. The maid will see it, but then people see a lot more in Japanese society. 10/22/96 Kyoto: The Feudal Past Creating the Present Our room is right next to the sinks an toilets. About the first thing we heard in the morning was the sound of someone choking and spitting into a sink just outside our door. I tell you that is the way to start the day right! It is amazing how much noise some people make. I thought this hotel looked nice at the beginning, but in some ways it is the least convenient of the three. For some reason it is impossible to get a room that is dark at night. At least all three of our rooms have let a great deal of light in that was not celestial in origin. And there is not much privacy. The dollar does not go very far for hotels here. This place costs over 72 dollars a night and it is laughably inconvenient. A Motel 6 in the states would cost a little more than half of that and would be by comparison a palace of great luxury. I suppose the difference is the cost of real estate. The cost of labor is not all that much different here, I believe. Space is at a premium in Japan and real estate is very expensive compared with that in he US, even in places like Manhattan. Owning land in Japan is expensive and it adds to the price of everything else. I told Evelyn yesterday I thought the room was small and she did not think it was. Now she is complaining how small the room is. Our first was eight tatami, this one is six. A tatami is about two feet by four feet. So this room is about six feet by eight feet. And not all that is useable because of the cupboard. For breakfast Evelyn had a roll in the room. I wanted to wait and get a hot steamed bun. We got to the local Lawson's and found it was out already. It is strange seeing Lawson's here. When I was growing up we used to visit my grandmother in Akron, Ohio. At the end of the street there was a Lawson's milk store. I had not seen a Lawson's for years and years. It is surprising enough to see a store named for a bran of milk here. But it is even stranger that it be Lawson's. I think I will bring a pair of Lawson's chopsticks for my parents to see. Chopsticks are different for Chinese and Japanese. The Chines do not see to have disposable chopsticks. They tend to have the more permanent bamboo ones (as well as ones more fancy). There are fancy reusable chopsticks here, but they also have the kind we find in Japanese restaurants at home. The come as one solid piece and you break them apart. We grabbed the bus. The busses here have recorded voice announcements. That is impressive enough, but they have them in Japanese and in English. The English stop announcements are made in a woman's voice with a very prim and precise British accent. I really like the Japanese attitude that they have the technology to have announcements so they go ahead and do it. It is odd to look down from the bus and see a car with a Buddhist monk. He was gesticulating wildly to the driver. We stopped at a 7-Eleven and they had steamed buns. Very good ones, in fact. I had a sweet bean paste bun and my favorite, a spicy curry bun. For those who have not seen these, they are buns about the size of a hamburger bun. They look like white bread without the pores or crust. The center packs a payload of meat and sauce. Generally the filling is generous. At their best, which they were this morning, they are hot and steamy. You have flavor here a pancake can't touch. It was a fifteen minute walk to where you apply for permission to visit the palace. "Applying" for permission means just that. To go on the tour you fill out a form complete with passport numbers. Once you do that, it is pretty much a rubber stamp that you get in (at least for foreign visitors), but you must be at the waiting area at least ten minutes prior to the tour. I think that if you could just walk in, you would not treat it with the proper respect. I have heard the Japanese have a place where you can buy coffee at two prices. One cup is at $2 and one at $100. Either way you get the same cup of coffee, but when you pay $100, you savor it much, much more. With that in mind, they make it more difficult for you to get into the palace to make it better appreciated. Actually I am told that Japanese do not find it s easy to get a tour of the Imperial Palace. It is really a rubber stamp only for foreigners. Our guide had a very difficult accent to understand. Indeed I was not always sure when she was speaking Japanese and when English. Her l's were pronounced as r's. Japanese who have a good pronunciation of English are quite rare. The palace was first built in 794 AD and has burned down many times and has been rebuilt many times. Most recently it was rebuilt in 1855. Until better standards came along fairly recently for buildings, Japanese buildings all seem to have died by fire. When you read the history of a temple or a palace you read about when it burned down and was rebuilt. You see on many building that they have been rebuilt--sometimes two and three times--after having burned down. The Imperial family lives in the Tokyo Palace, but the most important ceremonies are carried out here at the Kyoto Gosho when a new emperor ascends the throne. The tour shows only a little of 220 acres of the palace, gates, waiting rooms, and gardens. The palace has nightingale floors which is a poetic way of saying they intentionally squeak. There was the building where the emperor goes through a ceremony and becomes a god. Hirohito went through the ceremony, but then renounced his godhood as part of the settlement at the end of W.W.II. However his son went through the ceremony on schedule and is, in theory, a god. What does the emperor really think of all this? Does he think of this luxurious palace as just his place? Or does he think of it as more something to impress the people while he retreats to his private office. What about his godhood? How does it affect his mind? What is it like to wake up one day and say to yourself, "Well, today I am a god, and I'm still hungry for breakfast." What does his wife think knowing he is a god and that he drools on his pillow in his sleep? Only the emperor's lady was allowed to touch him. But what did she think when he got pimples on his neck? If he is a god, it is not in any sense that is meaningful in our culture. It might have made sense in ancient Rome, but not any more. I suppose there is some question how mortals can elevate someone to godhood. President is something you become by consent of the people. Even king is just an office. But there is a qualitative difference between a human and a god. Of course this may be just to us. I had a very religious person--of the sort we get in the US and that I hope the Japanese are free of--explain to me that the Chinese dragons in my office were symbols of evil and really should not be put up in my office. This guy was a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories. I had to explain to him that even if he was right about Western dragons (and I tactfully avoided telling him he was a flipping loony on this subject) the Chinese do not think of the same thing when they see a dragon. The Chinese mythical beast is called a "dragon" only as a sort of visual pun because they looked similar to Western dragons. These were different creatures symbolic of erudition. Perhaps the Japanese have a different concept that might really mean something like "Most high ruler and really something special" that by analogy to what we in the West consider gods we inaccurately just call "god." The former is something you really could become by mortal means with a ceremony, but since we don't have anything really analogous in the West we say, perhaps inaccurately, that is being a "god." God is a concept we have in the West. And when we tell the Japanese they cannot put someone in this office, it would be like them telling us we can no longer make someone President. In any case there was a lot of ill-feeling when we made Hirohito renounce this office and it seems likely to me that it was over a misunderstanding. Of course maybe all Hirohito did was say he wasn't a god in the Western sense of that word. And that would have been a true statement. The problem is our vocabulary is not rich enough to have a term for his office and there was a good deal of ill-will generated over what comes down to a problem in translation. In a nutshell we first tell the Japanese the Western word for this high office is "god." Then we turn around and say "that's ridiculous, you CANNOT make someone a god. Renounce your office." On the tour we had met a couple of men visiting from San Francisco. They were Ward and Warren. After the tour we went with them to see the parade for the festival. Warren knew all about the split of AT&T into three companies and realized we must work for Lucent Technologies. Evelyn was not wearing her pin. She brought a pin with the Lucent logo and has been wearing it frequently, but not today. There is an annual festival, the Jidai Matsuri, celebrating the founding of Kyoto and there is a parade of people in traditional costumes marching from the Imperial Palace to the Heian-Jingu Shrine. We had heard that the parade route was crowded, but that there were much better viewing opportunities behind the palace where the parade assembles. That was pretty accurate. People dressed as samurai, as peasants, as soldiers, and as a bunch of things I don't have the words for. There was a fair percentage of the horses who would not cooperate. They were less than keen to be in show business. A horse that will not behave they walk in a circle. Apparently they cannot fuss and walk at the same time. I had taken off my shoes to get some pictures on some platforms that had been set up for spectators. The shoes were out of my sight. I wish I could say that I came back to the shoes and they were right like I left them. They weren't. They were moved a few inches under a platform and put neatly together. The line of people passing seemed to go on and on. This was definitely a burn-film event. As people moved around I eventually got a front row seat. I had a really good seat for a lot of the colorful costumes from Japan's past. It is hard for me to judge how many people were in the parade, but it must have been two thousand. There were lots of colorful costumes. As the parade was winding down I made my way back to the side Evelyn was on. She had gotten separated from Ward and Warren and was talking with Abby, a student from Kyoto U. originally from Boston, but soon to be moving to Australia. Evelyn had hooked up with her and she was telling Evelyn that the figures in the parade represented specific people from Japan's history. Abby teaches college students and had interviewed several of the people in the parade as well as filming them for the undergrad classes she teaches. So Evelyn may have been getting more out of the parade after all. Abby says the problems with the horses I had seen is common. These horses are not used to the riders or the handlers. The riders are more likely to be local officials than anyone who know anything at all about riding horses. The horse does not have any idea what is going on, but certainly knows that he does not like it. There is no Japanese equivalent to the ASPCA. As for the incident with the shoes, she fully agrees. If you take off you shoes you have to watch them every moment or somebody Japanese will "organize" them. They will still be there but much better than you left them. I am reminded of the scene in THE TIME MACHINE where the Time Traveler recovers his machine which had been moved by the Morlocks. He discovered that they had taken it apart, oiled it, and put it back together in perfect working order. Specific people in the parade were supposed to be Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Ieyasu. Also the parade ran in reverse chronological order. The figures you see at the beginning are from the Meiji and they work back to the beginnings of unification. To me they just looked like characters you might see in Japanese historical films. Many looked to me just to be types. After a couple hours we set off to find lunch. On the way out of the palace grounds we looked for parade programs. Abby had recommended them to Evelyn. Unfortunately, they were all gone. The one or two sellers we found were all sold out. It took longer than we expected but eventually we found an inexpensive place for lunch. We had gayoza, ramen with omelet, and vegetables in white sauce. Evelyn ordered the latter but was disappointed with it. I traded and threw some vinegar in and it was fine. I should say something about water. Most restaurants seem to get their water from an electric unit that looks almost like a coffee dispenser. The water comes out quite cold. In the US, very often the water you get in restaurants is not all that cold. Some restaurants prepare pitchers of water with ice before hand, some do not. These electric dispensers seem to perform the same function. We took the bus to the train station and from there walked to the Higashi Honganji Temple. It is a temple to the Ontani branch of Shin sect of Buddhism. The area started as a mausoleum built in 1272. Nobunaga had built another temple, the Honganji Temple. To check Nobunaga's power, Hideyoshi built this temple. Legend has it that to move the heavy timbers ordinary ropes were not strong enough and many women donated their hair to make 53 ropes strong enough. One hall has calligraphy and the poems of great Buddhist poets. One such poem read: The faults of others we all know too well. It's the faults of our own person that we tend to overlook. Rennyo, 15th century Buddhist leader There was another hall that was about a high lookout. Evelyn said that she didn't have the strength to climb it. I wanted to see it, so I went through the effort. It was a long climb and the steps all took two paces so I was lifting myself with my right leg. I got to the top and there was a flood of boy students coming out. I stood to one side and let them pass. It took something like ten minutes for them all to pass, but I figured I would be polite and not fight the tide. At the end of their line was a man who said "OK, we are closing now." I was less than pleased. I got back to the bottom and Evelyn and I had to leave. Walking around I got a cramp in my right leg. I had to bend over and grab it. I explained to Evelyn that it was just a temporary cramp. Walking down the front steps I got a worse cramp and almost fell over. Luckily Evelyn did not see that one since she was a few paces ahead. In fact, she may never know about it if she doesn't read this log. It is dangerous to make a climb without knowing there is something waiting for you. They say there is the carcass of a leopard near the peak of Kilamanjaro. He climbed all the way up there and found nothing. Nobody knows what he was looking for either. Luckily my leg problem was probably just a temporary fatigue from the climb. I didn't have any more problems I didn't have with the other leg. Both were very tired, but Evelyn and I have both been feeling exhausted at the end of the day. I guess age takes its toll at last. We stopped at a 7-Eleven for a cool drink. Evelyn got a Cafe au Lait and I got a grapefruit juice. The place was full of school kids pouring over the mangas. One was photocopying parts of one. There are a strange collection of magazines. I saw the cover of one aimed at teenage boys called GIRLS: SUPER DYNAMIC PHOTO MAGAZINE. It had just pictures of (dressed) girls, apparently. On the way back to the room we picked up some baked rolls from the grocery. Our evening has been marked by exceptional fatigue. It is hard for us to pull ourselves off of our folded futons. 10/23/96 Kyoto: Haunts of the Past, Ghosts of the Present One of the things that make it noisy here is the size of the hall slippers. To make them one-size-fits-all, they are very large. That means people have to shuffle down the hall to keep them from falling off their feet. I wonder what is the basis of all this slipper-changing? Perhaps at one time the streets were pretty dirty, but shoes now seem to be treated as untouchable parts of the anatomy. Calling the Seiki a Ryokan is a bit of an exaggeration. It is like calling a ferry a cruise ship. Ryokan are traditional inns in which the service is flawless. In a real Ryokan a traditional dinner is included and breakfast in your room. Each room has a personal maid. They generally overlook gardens. We would neither have wanted nor would we have wanted to pay for the service of a real Ryokan. That is not the way the cheap Leepers travel. The Kimi was not really a Ryokan either, but it was a lot closer. They paid lip-service to some of the traditions of the Ryokan. Each room is supposed to have a shelf with calligraphy. While it surprises me to say it now, the Kimi was the best of the places that we stayed. The same company has a branch here where Ward and Warren are staying. It would have been a better choice than the Ryokan Seiki. My right leg is still a little sore, but serviceable. (You can tell when I am caught up in my log, I lapse into the present tense.) The main site for today is Nijo Castle. The murder of the archbishop of Canterbury by Henry II's men was over the fact that the King and the Archbishop were both masters of England at the same time, neither with allegiance to the other. The same was true in Japan, but here it was the Shogun and the Emperor. ("Shogun" actually is short for a title that means "Commander-in-chief for quelling the barbarians.") Each basically ruled Japan in competition with the other. Nijo Castle was Tokugawa Ieyasu's show of strength to the Emperor. It was a warning to the Emperor not to mess with the Shogun. It was not really necessary. The emperors were weakening at this time, the shoguns becoming the main show. The Emperor ruled the country, but the shogun ruled the military and that was where the real power lay. The Shogun kept the Emperor on a tight leash. The Shogun just had to keep the barbarians at bay, and the barbarians were not trying to enter the country until 1853 when Perry arrived with his Black Ships. Then one after another European countries came demanding trade concessions. In a battle in 1864 the Shogunate had proved itself incompetent to throw the foreigners out of Japan. Samurai methods were really good against an enemy who used samurai methods. And those were the methods that were used in Japan during the Tokugawa Shogunate. Japan closed its eyes to the rest of the world and missed the fact that methods of warfare were advancing in Europe. Suddenly Japan had to fight mid-19th century armies who had things like good, reliable artillery. It wasn't much of a battle and the samurais quickly decided to side against the outmoded shogunate whose policies obviously were useless. The barbarian was going to be in the country whether the commander-in-chief for quelling him had power or not. Guess what happened to the power of the Shogunate. Suddenly by default the Emperor started to sound good again. In 1867 the Shogun Yoshinobu resigned in Nijo Castle. The same castle that had been used 264 years earlier to show the Emperor he had no power. That Castle is our goal for the morning. On the street you often find people wearing surgical style masks on the street. In Japan, when you have a cold it is considered good manners to wear a surgical mask. Americans are not so altruistic. I have not mentioned the weather in a while because after the first week it has been pretty good. We get to the castle and we see hordes of schoolchildren. That is the one problem with coming in October. All of the school children are on field trips. The Kyoto Imperial Palace was built 1603 by Ieyasu and expanded and renovated 1626 by his grandson Iemitsu. The donjon was struck by lightning and burned down in 1750. The inner palace was destroyed in a city-wide fire In 1788. In 1867 the palace was the site where Tokugawa Yoshinobu signed a declaration restoring the power to the Emperor. Then it was a young man named Meiji. His rule transformed the country. The Ninomaru Palace is a collection of buildings totaling 3300 square meters. Not only is photography not allowed, neither is sketching. There was a tour group that came in about the same time and spoke English getting a tour and with the narrow halls it was tough to pass them so we got some of the tour lecture ourselves. There was some discussion of the nightingale floors, designed to squeak when trod upon. These were specifically used to protect against ninja assassins that might be sent against the Shogun. Motifs that are used in the decor are paintings of tigers and of pine trees. (the pine tree is a longevity symbol). Later there is also a peacock motif. In one of the rooms is a recreation of feudal lords meeting with the shogun. We passed by the room in which last shogun gave up control to Meiji 1867. We were told the Shogun could have as many ladies as he wanted, but only one legal wife. The Shogun's ladies had to be faithful to the Shogun. One of the woman complained that women couldn't be Shogun's. Of course there were women samurai, not many but some. But human are a lot alike in some ways. Give someone ultimate power as Caesar, Shogun, or Rev. Jim Jones and they will turn it into the right to reproduce. One of the women we overheard in the palace said that this is really the only castle they have been inside of. That probably makes sense. I would guess that tour groups don't go through castles much. Most castles were plain and practical military defenses. Frequently the lord did not live there, he only retreated there under attack. So other than displays of guns and swords, there might not be a lot to show a tour group. In addition it must be a real pain to take an older group of people through a castle. The castles are set up with a single route to get through the castle to see everything. That includes some very steep steps. The students go up them like mountain goats, but older visitors might have problems. It is one thing for this castle that is all on one level and has some ornate decoration to be seen. I personally find the castles the most rewarding sites to visit, but if I were a tour manager I would certainly avoid them. The grounds are quite big with many buildings and many gates. There is a Zen rock garden much like we had seen at Ryoan-Ji. When our visit was over we set out to find lunch and head for the Japan Foundation. We stopped to walk through a two-block-long arcade. In Japan they don't seem to have malls so much as arcades. Basically it is just small shops that build a roof overhead to make it a little more pleasant to walk down. I think they should not let people drive and ride bicycles down center, but some do. This one did and it made it a lot harder for pedestrians. We stopped for lunch at about 11:20 at a place we saw at one end of the arcade. I had Kutsuiya and rice. Evelyn had tempura udon. From the restaurant we walked to the Japan Foundation. We had a movie there at 2 PM. We got to the Japan Foundation about 100 minutes before the film. We clearly needed a place to sit down. I looked at the map and looked for a green area, which would indicate a park or a temple. We found a temple that was nearby and bought some drinks from a ending machine. I figured at least it would be a place to sit. Actually we did not have to partake of Buddhist hospitality since there were some benches there. We sat down outside a small shop and open the cans we had gotten. Evelyn had gotten coffee and I got what I thought was orange soda. It turned out to be very tart orange juice. The flavor was between orange juice and grapefruit juice. People were bringing out scrolls from a shop and apparently drying them with hair dryers on a workbench that was in front of the shop. I think this was a calligraphy store. You bring them something you want said and the man inside writes it for you in beautiful Japanese brush-writing. But then it is still wet. You can make it dry faster by bringing it out and drying it with the hair dryers. We sat down for a drink and to write our logs. People were coming and feeding pidgeons near us and quite a mob of pidgeons turned out. They would jump on the woman feeding them and she would push them away. As soon as she did another group would jump on her. The Japan Foundation seemed to be a nice office with small library and newspapers in English. If anything they were a sort of foreign aid office to make things nicer for visitors to Japan, sort of a Travelers' Aid society, though they did also offer information about Japan. And Wednesday afternoons they seem to offer films subtitled in English. It was about time. With nothing bilingual on TV I was going into cinema withdrawal. About 25 people attended, many of whom seem to know each other. I think we were about the oldest. Most of the others seemed to be in their 20s at the oldest. They were dressed more or less like Americans, not like the fashion-conscious Japanese. I think they may have been college students. Particularly notable was one British woman about 6'6" who seemed to know a fair number of the people there and spoke in a loud voice. The movie was THE GHOST OF APRIL, A 1988 Japanese film. (Review at the end of today's log.) After the film we walked back to the Ryokan, stopping at two department stores on the way to check out the sushi selection in their basement food departments. We got ourselves a good sushi dinner. We also stopped at a bakery and picked up desert (though we didn't actually eat it with dinner). On the way back we noted a poster with a big picture of Anne Frank. We don't know if they are showing the recent film ANNE FRANK REMEMBERED or if they are doing a version of the play, but the cost is 2000 yen and it is a two-night event. In the room we had a sushi dinner and wrote. At 8 PM we tried to watch the X-Files, but it was dubbed into Japanese. They do not seem to have any English language programming on TV or radio. SHI-GATSU KAIDAN (THE GHOST OF APRIL) CAPSULE: This 1988 Japanese film seems to be an IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE aimed at teenagers. A rather too average high school girl hovers between life and death, wanting to die, but discovers the value of life and of being herself. The film is a little light in approach, but is quite watchable. Rating: +1 (-4 to +4) The ghost story is a staple of Japanese cinema. Such films as KWAIDAN and THE GHOST OF YOTSUYA are popular examples. But almost all of the ghost stories we see coming out of Japan are first period pieces and ghost stories only second. Whether there are many contemporary ghost stories made in Japan that we do not see in the United States I do not know. THE GHOST OF APRIL is a film I saw at the Japan Foundation Kyoto Office and it is radically different from the Japanese ghost stories that have come to my country. Many of these are morality tales of wronged people coming back for revenge. This 1988 film is about a contemporary teenager and seems to be aimed at teens in Japan. The plot is at once reminiscent of IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE, HERE COMES MR. JORDAN, and A CHRISTMAS CAROL. As the film opens Hatsuko (played by Nakajima Tomoko) seems to be in a mysterious state of half life and half death. She walks barefoot through misty landscapes and floats in clouds. She does not know how she has gotten in this state until a guardian comes along to explain to her. Gennojo (Yanagiba Toshiro) tells her he is like her. He is dead but is not yet ready to pass on to the next world where all memories of the past life are erased. Gennojo has been in this state since early this century when he was killed by a balloon of his own devising. Hatsuko is shown her last day when she rebuffed the school geek Natsuyama (Tsunoda Eisuke) who claims to be able to see ghosts. She also was spoken to by her heartthrob Tsudanuma. Then on her way home she followed the whimper of a puppy into an abandoned factory where she was killed by a falling girder. But there is a complication. She is in this half state because she accepted death even as the girder was falling. The girder missed her and she was hit by only a bento lunchbox. That would not have been fatal, but for her acceptance of death. This means Hatsuko has the choice of life and death. But she prefers death with Gennojo to her unhappy life. Gennojo wants her to review her life. This is a film of uneven production quality. Konaka Kazuya who directs and co-wrote the screenplay with Seki Kenji has some nice images, but he let some sloppiness sneak into the production. In one scene the puppy who fits into the plot seems to be staring at the camera rather than at anything in the scene. The plot loses some credibility when one of the characters invents a ghost detector. The viewer suspends some disbelief just to accept that ghosts exist. Asking the acceptance of a second far-fetched premise is a mistake. The last few minutes of the film also seem to weaken the story with familiar cliche. On the other hand there is a very effective scene involving the souls of dead birds and the climax is nicely done. It is not easy to judge acting in a language you do not understand. Mis-delivered lines may go completely unnoticed. Still the actors do a reasonable job. Yanagiba is most notable as the otherworldly balloonist. This is not a film about or engendering deep emotions, but it is a reasonable film for a young audience. THE GHOST OF APRIL (April is the month, not a character) is a different sort of Japanese ghost story aimed at teens but watchable for adults. I give it a +1 on the -4 to +4 scale. 10/24/96 Kyoto Temple Walking Tour We were both up, at least momentarily, at 4:30. But once this place quiets down we can almost get the room dark. Not that it really matters to me. In India someone we met recommended traveling with a sleeping mask and I find it a good idea. We have a light right outside our room and there is a window in the door. We have taken to draping a towel over the door top to get rid of the window. The best of the FM stations, the one that plays some classical, was playing Gregorian chants. We ate our cakes from the bakery the night before. My chocolate cake had only a little chocolate flavor, But it did have a chocolate cream in the center. What Evelyn thought was a green tea pastry filled with red bean paste was actually filled with non-descript purple fruit jelly. We are toward the end of the trip and are taking a laid-back view of getting up and running around Kyoto. It is 8:24 and we are leaving the Ryokan. There is a junior high just around the corner and we have to fight the tide of kids coming in the other direction. Boy, do the Japanese have a lot of children! A woman lets her dog poop on the sidewalk, then wraps a plastic bag around her hand and picks it up. Cities and dogs don't really mix. There are a lot of tour busses taking school children on field trips. Our walk takes us through what may be the largest and densest graveyard I remember ever seeing. From the map I think it is the Nishi-Otani Cemetery. At first it does not look all that big, but as you walk through it you keep seeing fields of densely placed plots. Inside there are concessions for materials to decorate the graves. All this was just a few blocks from out Ryokan. As we approach the first temple of the day, there are mobs of children on field trips and the inevitable group photos. Class leaders carry numbered flags. There are signs up complaining about a proposed high-rise building that would destroy this temple's hilltop view of the city. A cartoon shows a high-rise next to the sphinx, the acropolis, and the pagoda. I cannot translate, but have an idea what it says. The Kiyomizu-dera Temple was begun early in the Heian period in 798 AD when a monk enshrined an image of Kannon here. He picked a place near a scenic waterfall in the hopes of getting better attendance. Well, it couldn't hurt. The waterfall these days has been channeled into three little trickles with people lining up to drink the water, collecting it in bamboo dippers. This is a large temple complex of buildings crowned with tile or thatched roofs. The centerpiece is the pagoda. You cannot enter the pagoda, however. It is here just as you enter. Further on there are some iron items that visitors try to lift. The meaning of this action is shrouded in a foreign language--probably Japanese. There are a pair of iron sandals and what looks like two iron pikes. I tell Evelyn that whoever lifts the iron pike will be the rightful ruler of Britain. Just try to convince the British. This is a big pavilion with a lot of halls. We pass a rack of prayer plaques. Most are in Japanese, but I find one in English. Someone has written the prayer "I hope God will give me all I wished." What a sentiment! What a touching thought! There is another pagoda off in the woods and we go looking for it. We find it too. It is not in very good repair. But then getting there is the real fun. This is a nice natural wooded setting for the temple. There is a lot of hill climbing and stair climbing we will feel at the end of the day. Toward the end of the visit we come on the Jishu shrine which has a sort of carnival atmosphere--they have fortune telling stones to help you with your love life. They have care removers. You write about something that worries you on special paper and drop the paper into a tub of water. This is the water soluble paper that actually was developed for the CIA within the last 20 years. Just what it has to do with this 1200-year-old temple, I am sure I don't know. There is a special wishing stone. There are love stones that if you can walk from one to another with your eyes closed supposedly you will be lucky in love, and there are good luck charms for sale. Japanese Buddhism is indeed an odd religion. I wonder how much of this fortune-telling is really taken seriously by the Buddhists. Do the monks really believe that your fortune can be shaken from a box of sticks? Afterwards we walked down Kiyomizu-dera, a row of souvenir shops. We probably have to start thinking of souvenirs to bring people. We hardly even bring souvenirs for ourselves. So far we have spent 500 yen on a prayer plaque for ourselves. We neither want to pack much nor spend a lot. And things are pretty expensive here. Even a nice item looks fairly plain and simple unless you really spend a fortune. Things look like they cost a lot less than they actually do. Kodai Temple was established in 1605 by a noblewoman, Kita no Mandokoro in memory of her late husband. She was Mrs. Toytomi Hideyoshi. The construction was financed by Tokugawa Ieyasu. Like nearly every other historical site in Japan, it has been ravaged by fires. Only recently has it been opened to the public. There are many things to see including a bridge hat supposedly looks like a dragon's back. One of the halls has a ceiling taken from Hideyoshi's own boat. The tour takes the visitor through a bamboo grove, the first I have seen. The souvenir store sells books about an apparent public television series about Hideyoshi. This really is one area where I get the experience like I had in Thailand that you go down the streets and there are these fascinating temples all around you. They are different from Thailand, but the experience is similar. (And I think I have a slight preference for the style of the temples in Thailand.) I guess that makes it easy to create walking tours. From there we walked through Maruyama Park. Itself of little historical interest I was a nice place to walk. There were vendors selling hot dogs on sticks. I told myself I would not get any American food, but they certainly know the art of making a hot-dog look tempting. Instead we passed by a vendor selling something I did not recognize for 400 yen. It looked Japanese and I have not been served anything I have not liked in Japan so I figured go for it. We got ten balls each about an inch in diameter, pasted with a dark brown sauce that looked like Chinese hoisin. Then they were sprinkled with some herb. I can only guess what the balls were but I think they were rice pounded to the consistency of bread dough and laced with tidbits of shrimp and octopus. Evelyn did not care for it and ate only two of the balls. The first one was hotter than she expected and she had a hard time with it. I found it great... big surprise! It reminded me of Low Bock Go, Chinese turnip cake you get off the fry cart in dim sum restaurants. The park is swarming with kids. Probably on lunch break from a field trip. Kids love sushi here I guess. Also there are a lot of little bento boxes. As we continued walking we saw at a distance a huge orange Torii gate. Supposedly the largest Torii gates in the world are in Tokyo but this must be pretty close in size and is a bright orange-red to boot. This is the Torii gate of the Heian-Jingu shrine, dedicated to founder of Kyoto, Emperor Kanmu (or Kammu), and built in 1895. Yes this bright orange shrine is fairly recent as these things go. Kamnu chose the site for the city, called it Heian-Kyo and immediately had a Buddhist monk, Seicho, build a temple to protect the city from evil spirits. He built the temple on Mt. Hiei. It grew into a whole temple complex with its own army. In 1571 Nobunaga invaded angry of the monks interference in politics. He said of the monks "If I do not take them away now this trouble will go on forever. These priests break their vows, eat fish and stinking vegetables, keep concubines and never even open the sacred books. How can they fight evil and do what is right? Surround their dens, burn them down, and let none of them be left alive." He burned down every temple and executed every monk. It was eventually rebuilt, but not till the 1700s and it never returned to the power it once had. This is where the Jidai Matsuri parade of a couple days before ends up. Evelyn had wanted to get a program of that festival parade and I suggested she look here. Indeed they had the program. The shrine was majestic but at only 101 years of age, it really was just barely historical. They had two nice fountains, one with a panther sculpture, the other with a dragon. Leaving we bought a gift for one of our godchildren, then bought from a machine some really good ice cream for 100 yen. We had gifts to get and tried the Kyoto Handicrafts Center. Every floor somebody greeted you as you entered. We started on the sixth floor of a seven floor building and found first that there was very little that you or I would call handicrafts. It was all priced considerably higher than I would have expected. (A machine produced replica of two samurai swords in a rack cost $120, on sale from $140). Even some of the ornamentation was plastic. The service was great, very attentive, which led me to believe that this was a really high-profit center. The place was supposedly full of handicrafts and on one of the floors they had three little craftsmen working on goods. Just how stupid do they think we are? Do they think Americans don't know the difference between factory goods and handicrafts? Generally the Japanese are pretty honest and I guess this place is not really dishonest by mixing factory goods with handicrafts, but it is certainly a misrepresentation. My recommendation, you will find better quality at lower prices in the department stores with sales people as friendly and helpful. Don't go to a tourist trap. If you go to a place that caters to foreigners, be it a restaurant or a store, you will pay for the catering. You may save a bit of time, but you will lose in every other regard. We left without buying anything and headed to Kawaramachi Street. It is still unusual to be walking on a sidewalk, hear a bicycle bell behind you, and see that it is a man in his 70s pedaling past. We stopped at an arcade shopped and found even here the prices were better than the handicrafts store. It is strange that souvenirs are sold with images from Coffee Boss, but since they don't have the rights to reproduce the label, they have some fun and take some liberties. One has the boss look much the same but be a woman. We stop and have our usual lunch, noodles. Evelyn has ramen with pork, I have soba with several interesting things including an egg and some tempura. We see a full Buddhist temple in the middle of an arcade. Weird uses of English continue. We see restaurant called Mr. Young Men. We finally get to Takashimaya and do some shopping there. Afterwards we go to the basement and pick up sushi. They have the best selection we have seen in Kyoto though they are not up to Tobu in Tokyo. There is a constant mob around the sushi in feeding frenzy. We take the bus back to the area we are staying in and work on our logs in the room. There is a quiz show on television that seems to have the participants in amusement park rides. If they lose they get dropped in a free-fall ride, that sort of thing. At 8 PM there is a samurai drama on and we eat dinner and watch the drama. In some ways they do not play fair. One character wears a mask to look like another. The mask looks like something that is applied to the face and was not a technology that was around 20 years ago, much less in the time of the samurai. These samurai dramas are a common staple of Japanese TV the way that Westerns used to be of ours. They are in Japanese, of course, but the action scenes need no subtitles. And they do have a nice period feel. In the US, samurai films are considered semi-art films. People go into New York to see them in special showings at the Japan Society. The Japanese take them more as day-to-day mass entertainment. It is a lot like sushi, treated matter-of-factly in Japan, considered special in the US. Samurai stories run on TV and are little better or worse than our GUNSMOKE. In fact the samurai films were much influenced by American Western TV shows. It strikes me as odd that so few Japanese speak English very well. With all the Englishisms mixed into their language, still most Japanese dealing with Americans have real problems speaking English. More Croatians seem to speak English reasonably well than Japanese do. Evelyn went to sleep early and I have put Madame Butterfly on the cassette player and I am working on the log. Our trip is fast winding down. I now have all the rest of my film in my photovest. I may run just a little bit short. I used to get depressed at the end of a trip that I would have to go back to work. I guess I am getting older and trips like this are pretty exhausting. Also these days I am enjoying my works a lot more. I want to get back to it. Evelyn seems to be more exhausted than I am. We come dragging back at the end of a day and just flop down. 10/25/96 Kyoto: A Temple Too Far Last night I went to sleep listening to POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE on the radio. It is picking up a TV frequency and that was being broadcast in English with Japanese subtitles. I have yet to actually see a program broadcast in English, but they obviously have them. The morning music program is again Gregorian Chants. it must come on about 6 AM. I woke at 5 and tried to get them, listening with an earphone. There was only one station on at that hour and the music was not to my liking. I guess it was like our top 40 stations. We were out at about 8:30 having had a small breakfast on the remaining piece of cake from the bakery two days ago. We got off the bus and I had a steamed bun to balance my breakfast. I also bought some snacks for the room. I got some sugar-coated peanuts and a dried squid packaged as snack food. I shall miss steamed buns when I am drinking Ultra-Slimfast next Monday morning. We pass a drinking place called Bath Room. The sign also bears the name Sopporo Beer. I guess Sopporo Beer ends up in the bath room anyway you look at it. Ginkakuji Temple means Silver Pavilion. Kinkakuji Temple, which we visited already means Golden Pavilion and this was sort of a copy. OK, time for a bit of a history lesson. We have discussed here how Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Ieyasu unified Japan. The reason it needed unifying is that it was in a heck of a mess before then. The Ashikaga family had tried to rule, but they were not really the right people to rule Japan and the country ended up in civil war and chaos. No small amount of this chaos was added by the Shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa. As Shogun he was a complete washout. Basically he said, "I need a successor and have no son. Just as a formality I'm going to name my younger brother Yoshimi as the next Shogun. But you know, I always wanted a son to rule after me. So me and the wifey are gonna keep trying." Can you guess what happened? Yoshimasa had no heir, so he named his brother as the shogun to replace him. Then he had a son the following year. Now his wife (a real Lady Macbeth type--and there are lots in Japanese history) wanted the son to be Shogun. She went to influential daimyo Yamana Souzen for help, but Yoshimasa's brother had powerful backers also including eventually Katsumoto Hosokawa who with Yamana Souzen made this one of the issues of the Onin War. (Remember Katsumoto? He was the guy with the Zen rock garden who loved peace and hated Souzen. Well, he took sides supporting Yoshimasa's brother Yoshimi. This is probably because Souzen supported the son. Souzen and Katsumoto made sure never to agree on any issue of substance. It is sort of like the US and the USSR during the Cold War.) Going to Souzen created more mess and it was all about a little family disagreement. I guess when you rule a country your worst enemies are your closest relatives. This was just one of several issues that divided the country and civil war raged. Yoshimasa responded to the mess he had created by retreating to the outskirts of Kyoto in 1482 and building himself a nice house where he lived in a separate peace while all around was war. The house was the Silver Pavilion, a sort of me-too to the Golden Pavilion built 85 years earlier by his grandfather. He had intended it to be covered in silver leaf, but it never was. He devoted himself to aesthetics, art, staying out of mischief, and Zen--becoming a Zen monk. When he died the Silver Pavilion became a temple. Well that's the way it is with these fancy houses. First they become temples, then they burn down. The Silver Pavilion looks a lot like the Golden Pavilion, but without the fancy wrapper. Also it is only two stories. Supposedly there are 1000 statues of Jizo, guardian of children downstairs. He probably needs them since he made his own child the focus of a civil war. Following the path around takes you up a hill where you get a nice view not only of the whole temple grounds but of the Kyoto Valley. Any of these sites we go to are mobbed with children and they frequently say "hello" to show they know some English. You really can respond in one of three ways. You can respond in Japanese with proper greeting for the time of day, you can respond in English saying "hello" back, or you can give them a hearty "Three dogs west upside-orange." The latter gets some of the most quizzical looks. Of course a week later you will see it on a sweatshirt. On our way in I found a Kabuki mask for a reasonable price and got it as a souvenir. Leaving I got a little Daruma. It had both eyes painted in already, but that is fine. It is a Japanese custom that when you start an enterprise like a new store, you buy a Daruma and paint in one eye. Then you wait to see if your enterprise is a success. When it is you paint in the other eye. This way you have Daruma, an important Buddhist icon, pulling for you to be a success. Most of the souvenir shops seem to have as much food as objects. They will have gift boxes of little filled cakes and cookies. Evelyn suggest that the reason may be that space is really at a premium in Japan. A food gift does not take up valuable permanent space. It gets eaten and it is gone. It would make sense. Japan is really a country that is very tight on space. Space may well be their most valuable commodity. Putting a lot of space in a building is like giving it solid gold fittings. Next we took the Walk of Philosophers. This is a walk along the canal. It is a very pleasant walk under low-hanging cherry trees. As we walked two old women saw us came up to us talking to us in Japanese and started doing what appeared to be a blessing. It took about 90 seconds but they blessed us. I was expecting some sort of request for payment, but that never happened. They just blessed us and thanked us and we thanked them and we each went our way. Evelyn and I were mystified but it was kind of nice. A vending machines on the path was selling a can of carrot juice. That was a new one on me. We got a little lost but eventually fount our next site. Eikando Temple was founded in 855. Another monk enshrined another image. The name it eventually got means "eternal view." It adapted the Seizan School as of Kamakura period. Then it was burned to the ground in Onin War. But of course it was rebuilt. It was 300 yen admission. We would have thought that would be sufficient, but the halls are connected and you see only the outside for the entrance fee. You must pay an additional 500 yen to see the inside of the halls. This was way overpriced considering the meager historical significance of the temple. Of course we had seen the interiors of several temples already and did not feel really disappointed at not seeing these. We walked the grounds for a little while but Evelyn was irritated at not seeing the interiors and felt just a bit cheated. We left in a less than sanguine mood. We have seen a lot temples and shrines over the last three weeks. We are not really seeing enough differences to make seeing one more all that exciting. Perhaps we are getting "templed out." They are all running together in our memories. The next order of business was lunch. We wandered around for quite a while just looking for a restaurant. We ran into another group of Americans who were lost. We at least could tell them what was the way to town. Eventually they found a fancier restaurant than we wanted. We went into a sort of workingman's noodle shop. There was no apparent English, but we figured we would order by pointing. No problem, they did have an English menu after all. They just don't make it obvious from the outside. I had soba soup with a herring, Evelyn had cold soba with soy sauce. I had seen this (or plastic facsimiles of it) in windows for a while. Evelyn though to would be a problem eating because of the bones. I said it might not have bones, but Evelyn figured if they removed the bones they would have removed the skin also. Actually it was filleted. It was boneless but not skinless. I liked what I got. We discovered we were very close to the Heian-Jingu shrine with its huge orange Torii gate. So we were near to town after all. Well we could have gone to more temples, but we were are really starting to overdose. Instead we went to Kawaramachi Street to shop a little. Out front of Maruzen Bookstore I found them selling film publicity materials for films released in Japan. There were 8-1/2 by 11 film ads laminated for 200 or 300 yen. I decided they would make interesting room decorations. We had to look through a huge collection but we got some interesting ones. Then we went inside to see the bookstore and there were a lot more to go through. And Evelyn got a book on the Salaryman from the English book section. That done, we were not really sure what we wanted to do. Finding a place amid the hustle and bustle where we could just work on our logs seemed like a good idea. We had still eaten too recently to have dinner, but we could scout restaurants for when we were hungry. Evelyn had read about an African restaurant called the Couscous. We found it, but considering the price we are probably better off eating Japanese. This was along a side road and there were some good restaurants. One seemed to have the food in the form of a pancake, a local specialty. We found a place to sit and work on our logs at the arcade on Kawaramachi Street. There were a lot of teens, many dressed in counter-culture ways meeting at the arcade. Also there are young looking parents who are there to smoke and look after the kids. When it gets too dark to work on the logs we go for dinner at Mr. Young Men, an oddly-named place that specializes in okonomiyaki. This cuisine serves dinner up as a sort of grilled pancake. Mine had pancake of nondescript binder, seafood, noodles, ginger, onion, and a salad with a scoop of potato salad. Evelyn had their French pancake: pancake binder (still no idea what it is) corn, squid, other odd ingredients with a 1000 Island dressing. What makes this French is anybody's guess. The food is tasty, mine perhaps better than Evelyn's. The claim that this is really international food is as fraudulent a our claim that French fries and French dressing are French. Or that Chop Suey is Chinese. Of course there is one popular Japanese dish that was originally supposed to be what Westerners eat. That is Sukiyaki (actually pronounced "skeeyaki"). It is a good dish in itself, but it is fraudulent as an import. We walk back to the room, about a 20 minute walk. A sure sign of cinema withdrawal symptoms is my running a movie in my mind as I walk. As I walked back I "watched" exerpts of THE OUTLAW JOSIE WALES. I find that when I get back to the room at the end of the day I am always in a rush to get to plumbing. It seemed much more so on this trip than on previous trips and I was concerned. I finally realized that I was having two or three sodas each day, and lunch was a big bowl of soup with several glasses of water. This trip is probably bad for my blood pressure--lots of sodium--but great for my kidneys. At the room I work on my log. At 10 I turn on the TV and they are running SANJURO by Akira Kurosawa with Toshiro Mifune as Sanjuro. It is a favorite Samurai film. Of course there are no subtitles, but it is still fun to watch. I guess it is like listening to opera without a libretto. An interesting note on SANJURO is that after it was made it became a sequel to YOJIMBO. Kurosawa had used a similar characterization for Mifune and had used the name the same name "Sanjuro" for the character, but he was not intended to be the same person. When people started calling this a sequel, he realized there was no good reason for it not to be. So the two Sanjuros became the same samurai. Of course the style is quite different. YOJIMBO is a grim film, SANJURO is really a light action comedy. Hey, why are these things called Samurai films? They are almost invariably about Ronins. Japanese TV seems to have more commercials than American TV. Of course I am not really used to sitting through commercials. I almost never watch commercial TV as it is being broadcast. I watch it on tape and fastscan commercials. One thing I am sure about Japanese TV, there are a lot more programs about food preparation. They even have contest programs about food preparation. I cannot figure out the rules but three different chefs are racing to make recipes with chestnuts on the program I am watching. Why am I watching this? I am hoping another movie will come on one of the eight stations we get. One last check and then I go to sleep. 11:45:49 PM No movie. Good night. 10/26/96 Kyoto: Artifacts and Eels Here is something to note about the Ryokan Seiki. I was up at about 1:45 AM No doubt it was too much Coca-Cola. There were definite playful noises in the wall. It is an outside wall so it may not even be in the building but I suspect there are rodents somewhere nearby. I think they wait until things are quiet. I watch a little of a fantasy cartoon on television. Japanese fantasy cartoons have become really popular at home. There are adds from a pizza chain for Funky Egg. It looks like it is scrambled eggs with meat. Our pizza restaurants don't serve funky scrambled eggs for some reason. Japan is an amazing mirror of our society, picking so much up but putting a different emphasis and twist on it we would not expect. We are left saying, "wait a minute, this isn't how it was supposed to be." It is a misunderstanding like cargo cults but much more creative. The weather has returned to what it was the first week, gray and perhaps rainy. this is kind of a laid back, end of trip sort of day. We may go to our third festival in three weeks. Evelyn has found there is a local festival of blessing eels. I am not sure the significance of eels. but I like the concept of an eel festival. Maybe there will be concessions serving eel dishes from around the world. From Italy we might have Eel Duce. Then there is Eel d'France. The shrine may not be just a house of worship, from the custom of blessing eels it may also be a house of eel repute. On our way down from the street from the hotel I stop and pay 80 yen for a red pepper chopstick rest. We stopped by the Lawson's to get snacks for the room including another dried squid. Evelyn got a chocolate pastry and I got my usual buns. They put in some mustard in a tiny pack. Whoa! That was good mustard. From the folks who brought you wasabi. Powerful stuff. We also got some snack for the room. One is six packs of an assortment of Japanese crackers: soy crackers, cracker coated peanuts, tubes of something, fried peas, but the prize inside is little whole fried fish. They are maybe an inch long. They are sort of salty and sweet. Very tasty and not something you would see in the US. I didn't eat any right then, of course. We headed then to the Kyoto National Museum. We stopped dead when we saw a sign that said the main hall was closed. We figured that was probably most of the museum. We had to do a quick refigure on what to do for the day. While we were sitting there the ticket-seller came over and gave us a map of the museum. It seems that the main exhibit is not in the main hall. The main hall was just for special exhibits. That was the information we needed. We bought a ticket from a machine and went in. The ticket taker took our ticket and put it on a scanner. It read a bar-code off the back. Apparently it remembers what tickets it has seen and which it hasn't. It is a good way to keep their pretty ticket undamaged. It is a nice ticket that can be used for a souvenir. Rather then build a protected walkway between the buildings, they provide special museum umbrellas, not to be taken from the grounds. The museum is in chronological order. The start with prehistory and have obsidian spear-points, earthenware bowls, there was an earthenware fire holder with flame-like handles, the inevitable mirrors, of course. There was a model of the mysterious keyhole-shaped graves. Actually the latter make more sense. Obviously the body was put in the center of the circle and the Shiva-sitters had their seats in the other part which is perfectly shaped for an audience. There was an earthenware coffin. All this was from the Tumulus Age. As we moved on we saw a "cinerary" urn. I have to look up to see if that is a real word, but its meaning is obvious. This is an urn for ashes of the cremated. There were more of the tubular tiles that have clan symbols on castles. There was a nice stone pillar with two dragons circling around. There was a collection of Buddhist art including some now familiar Kannon statues. A ceramics room included ink blocks. A Chinese and Korean ceramics room included some Buddhist art. One familiar piece, though not from this trip necessarily was a T'ang camel in green and orange-ish-brown. Another piece just showed a Chinese woman with a Pekinese dog in her arms. What I found the most interesting was a Buddhist stele with two dragons entwined around each other. The dragons were facing in opposite direction with their bodies twisted together. Each was grabbing a front leg of the other with a hind leg. The two were absolutely symmetrical so each had its hind legs off the ground. It was a great concept. There was a room of Kannon statues with fierce and fiery looks, a Buddha with very realistic articulated hands (though Evelyn pointed out that the artist gave him webbed fingers). Also included were paintings on silk and landscapes on screens. One scroll showed people and small sheep-sized elephants. There was a silk scroll of puppies, one looking appealingly, but the artist showed the white of his eyes. I seem to remember that on a puppy the iris is so big you really don't see the whites, but I won't say that for sure until I can see a puppy again. Another scroll shows what look like chubby horses. There are rooms with calligraphy, textiles, and lacquer-ware. The metalwork room changes its exhibit every three months. We catch it at time when it has mirrors instead of armor, unfortunately. Actually in spite of no showing any armor, a major oversight, I thought that this was a fairly good museum. We got done and we thought we would get in the mood for the eel festival by seeing if we could find a restaurant that serves unagi. There was a Benihana very near the museum. But when we went there it seemed to have mostly Western-style food. There was a Curry-Rice shop across the street. I had yet to have Curry-Rice, a very popular favorite with the Japanese and one of the few that comes neither from Japan nor the US. I have a squid curry-rice and Evelyn has a cheese curry-rice. They give you a spoon to eat with. Available condiments include pickled cabbage, soy sauce, and a really hot red pepper. It is pretty good. The two of us ate for 950 yen. Not too shabby. Evelyn was concerned we might not be able to find the shrine in spite of her instructions. I told her if all eels fails we could still see more temples. The woman at the desk at our hotel said that Mishima-jinja is just north of the of the museum. We went and nothing seemed to be happening. Eventually Evelyn asked me to ask. (She does most of the navigating and most of the planning.) We got another set of instructions, with an X on our map. More wandering. It was about a 20 minute walk but we still had about 45. On the street I almost asked an American woman on a bicycle, but on second thought what were the chances. So I just ended up smiling at her and she smiled back. We passed by a shrine that looked wrong, it was too small, but I suggested we should ask directions. Neither of us wanted to make fools of ourselves. There was a big temple at the top of the hill and I decided that was it. Evelyn pointed out there was no Torii gate. Now what? Let's go back to the little shrine. There was a priest (if that is the right word) out front. "Mishima-jinja doko?" [Where is Mishima-jinja?] "Mishima-jinja koko." [This is Mishima-jinja. Have a cup of cocoa?] Actually it turned out to be tea, not cocoa, for the visitors. It was on some red, low tables. There were some seats nearby in the shrine. I took the tea and down. A monk motioned me back to the table. But there was no place to sit at the table. We sort of stooped on the ground. The monk invited us to sit on the table. Well it really was a sort of platform, not unlike the ones we sat on to watch the parade. Well, it looked like a table with the tray of dishes and the hot-pot of tea. It was now about 1:50 and still no other guests had shown up for this blessing of the eels. I have always said that if you want to feel really strange the way to do it is to sit by yourself in a Shinto shrine with nobody else around but monks, hoping that other people will show up to get their eels blessed. To my tremendous relief another American showed up. It was the bicycled woman we had seen in the street. Her name, I found out later, was Sonya. She is from Virginia just outside of Washington (MacLean?) And she had been in Japan for six years. She was soon to go back to the US so she could return to Japan where she wanted to settle. She teaches English and has decided she wants to live in Japan permanently. She too read about the festival of the blessing of the eels and wanted to see it. It is apparently an annual event, but this time they gave it a little publicity. We sat there drinking hot tea. A few more Americans or Europeans showed up and some Japanese, mostly businessmen in suits. It should be explained that eels have a very delicate meat called "unagi" used for sushi, donburi, and other seafood delicacies. I take it that by contributing an eel to the shrine and getting it blessed, it helps the whole years crop of eels. The ceremony started late by a few minutes. The priest motioned us into the shrine. The priestly robes are fairly unique for Shinto. Actually not the robes, but the shoes are like shiny black wooden clogs with particularly bulbous toes. The headgear, is also large and black. It stands tall on the head looking like a flattened cylinder with a crease at the front and the back. The hat extends two inches behind the back of the head. At least some of these hats look to be made of plastic these days. Three Americans came in ten minutes into the service. One of them kept taking sips from a can of tea. The priest came out and waved some sort of fronds over people to bless them. There was a sort of chanting in Japanese to the tune of mournful-sounding Japanese music. This sort of thing went on for about half an hour. There was sort of a ceremony in front with an eel in a glass case. At some point various people in the audience dropped eels into a pool to the left of the shrine. There was also something were various members of the congregation bowed and clapped at the alter then took what looked like pieces of wood from their pockets and burned them off to the right in a fire under a Torii gate. The fire really looked like it might take the Torii gate and I began to understand (better) why so many shrines had burned down. Eventually the ceremony ended and the priest and one of the attendees made speeches. According to Sonya the speeches referred to the gaijin whom the attendees were stepping over. Finally the service was over and as each gaijin left he was handed a short bag with handles. Only Evelyn did not get one and that because she left last and they probably ran out. Some of the gaijin left but Sonya, Evelyn, a French woman, and I remained in the street and discussed the ceremony. People also opened the bags to find... three packets of green tea, a book explaining some of the history of Shinto in Japanese, and a wrapped box. Someone opened their box to discover it had sweet bean pastries. Sonya said she thought they had said something about sweet bean pastries in the speeches but was not sure why they mentioned it. She loves the pastries. I forget he name she gave them. I had really wanted to try them myself. I was not expecting such nice hospitality. The Japanese are noted for this sort of thing, gifts to guests. Uh... The same etiquette says you should not open the gifts until you get home, but I didn't want to tell the others not to open theirs. I did go back to the shrine and put 500 yen in the offering box and Sonya put in 200. I guess I thought someone should pay them back for their kindness. I asked Sonya about the barrels in front of the shrine. Many shrines seem to have white barrels. She said they were for sake. We talked to Sonya about Japan. She likes it better in Japan than in the US. They really accept her as much as a gaijin can be accepted. There is much less back-stabbing and politics at work. People are less aggressive at work. They can be assertive but are not aggressive. It was now about four in the afternoon, but we did not have a lot to do so went back to the room to work on logs and rest. I told Evelyn I would take her out to a nice dinner. I napped a little and at about 6:30 we went out for dinner. We decided to walk around the neighborhood and pick the place that looked the best. In fact we found only one place that looked any good at all and it was just mediocre Chinese. Evelyn had Marpo Dofu. I had gyoza and vegetables with white sauce. This cost about 2100 yen. 300 yen went for a bowl of rice alone. I was a little disgruntled so we bought some chocolate with peanuts to take back to the room. At 8 PM there was a samurai program on which I watched and then went to sleep. 10/27/96 Osaka and Trip home Let's see now. It is about 6 AM Sunday morning in Kyoto. That makes it 5 PM Saturday afternoon in Old Bridge. So I should start thinking of it as 5 PM. But this is the day they change the clocks. (It's "Spring forward, fall back.") so by the time I get home it will be effectively as if it was 4 PM in Old Bridge. Boy! This stuff wasn't already confusing enough. Now are we on or off Daylight Savings Time? I think we are coming off of it. Well, that won't matter much. Well it means that I have to start thinking of the time as 4 PM. I didn't keep myself up all night since I have a big day ahead of me. I will just have to adjust with what sleep I can do on the plane. Now maybe the thing to do is try to stay awake on the plane. That is never very hard anyway. Sleeping on a plane is what is tough. Maybe I will pull my all nighter there. That makes for a long and very boring flight. But I don't have a lot of choice. I have to get caught up on my log, but then it is not very far behind anyway. I am up to looking for the eel shrine. Luckily since I started entering my long on the palmtop I have been able to enter some information out of order. That is why I am able to type this in real time while I still have not completed yesterday's entry. Let's see. This is the 27th. At least here it is. That means that Evelyn gets breakfast in bed. It is our monoversary. That is like an anniversary but it works with months. Evelyn gets breakfast in bed on our monoversary. A little hard to arrange here. Let's see. I can give her green tea and ogura pastry. Not much. I should have gotten something from the bakery, but then it would not have been a surprise. Well I made the breakfast. Now imagine what these pastries are like. Take something the consistency of marshmallow, but not sticky on the outside. It is not sweet however. That is what you get with beaten rice, mashed much, much more than you would do with potatoes. That is the outside of these chestnut-sized (but flat on the bottom) pastries. I think they powder the outside so it is not sticky. The inside is oguro. That is like the refried beans you get in a Mexican restaurant, But it is not quite so thin in consistency. The flavor is much the same but it is sweet like chocolate. Then on the top of the pastry there is something beige, perhaps a mix of the two ingredients. And there are black sesame seeds, three or four. That is what these pastries are. Anyway it is an elegant breakfast for our last day. Arigato, Mishima-jinja. Well we got up. And packed up. I have my heavy pack on my back. And I have a big travel bag on my chest. And I am setting out on the first step of the trip back in a space too narrow to turn around. And I am thinking to myself, that's one small step for Man, one giant leap for Mankind. We make it to the bus stop. The bus shows up at 8:20. I am fine until the bus starts up, then I realize I have a lot of mass on me. Tough to keep my balance. I find a seat and take a double seat. Well, at least there was nobody standing. I got off the bus near the train station and took my last view of Kyoto. I shall miss it. We spent a little under an hour on the train to Osaka. We were not going to have enough time to see Osaka. But then Osaka Castle, which is what we would have really wanted to see, was undergoing renovation. We could have gone to see the Panasonic industrial exhibit but that hardly seemed worthwhile. We decided to just walk around, see the sights, and have the nice meal we did not have the night before. As you approach Osaka you see a remarkable side-by-side pair of skyscrapers with a bridge connecting them at the top. There is supposedly a garden in the bridging section. Certainly here are more interesting buildings here than most of what we saw in Tokyo. We arrived in Osaka and looked for the tourist information center which we found just inside the southeast corner of the train station. Looking around Osaka, it really looks like the Japanese have fastened on to the idea of the American Dream an implemented it here. Not just in Osaka, but all over Japan. But looking at the skyscrapers of Osaka it looks like a country that is making it. There has been so much construction here over the course of 50 years, there are so many beautiful cities where the average person is not afraid of crime and has a chance to make something of himself, it is just amazing. This is a country that is doing something very right. It is time for the US to start emulating what Japan has done. This seems to be a place where ideas can be implemented. In some ways Japan is to the US as US is to Canada. No offense, Canada. The US has the reputation of somehow being more vital than Canada and also a bit nuttier. Japan seems more vital and more nutty than the US. (I wonder if vitality and nuttiness go hand-in-hand.) Like the US on a Sunday morning, most things were closed as we walked. But that is because we were on the surface. Osaka has built a huge mall underground and away from the elements. There are at least two levels below ground. We went down and while it was still mostly closed, there was a lot more happening. Most of the stores had sliding doors down. What is open is a bunch of video-game arcades and Pachinko parlors. From a distance it sounds like there are a lot of people at these but when you actually pass by them you see that at least the arcades seem to run on autopilot. There are all sorts of fights and races going on there with or without people to play the games. The machines apparently don't need people in order to have fun. I am picturing a city devastated by biological warfare and everyone is dead but the video arcade games continue to run and have fights and races without people to play. There is a department store called Hanshin's and we go into the basement. Here there are people. Lot's of them buying and selling food at what is literally many acres of counters. There is nothing like the department store basements in the US. Just walk around and you see meats prepared and unprepared, pastry and baked goods, salads, ribs, buns, fish in all stages of preparation from raw to sushi to prepared. There is a counter that has 40 different fried foods. You pick the ones you want and they wrap them. Another counter has just broad cut French fries. Then there is candy. Nowhere that I know is the American economy this healthy. Even Hong Kong's economy at its height never produced anything like this food display. This underground mall is one end of a spectrum. We would see in Tokyo (and many other cities) where they would have underground walkways and someone would get the bright idea to put in some stores. This is the other end of the spectrum. Where the walkways lead is unimportant. The stores have taken over. Nobody cares where the walkways go. We decide to go for lunch. There are places to eat in the mall, but we decide to try to wander the streets to the southeast of the train station. We find what looks like a good place to eat. I think we are both in the mood for eel and are really looking for a place that serves an unagi dunburi. We find it and have a nice lunch, though it turns out we had found the dish considerably cheaper in the mall. But I tell you that eel was tastEEE! Near the restaurant is a cafe called "Cafe, isn't it?". The streets are cluttered with electrical lines going everywhere. I tell Evelyn it looks like the back of our friend Kate's VCR rack. I think they cannot put electrical lines underground without a lot of work because they would have to untangle each first. We go back into the underground mall. We pass a place called "Manhattan Massaje from New York." It is funny that after all that time in New York they didn't know how to spell "massage." It is also strange how they idolize America. It is like if it comes from the US it is authentic and real. Maybe it is like we have French Toast, French Dressing, and French Fries. They can't idolize America for long. Japan has a greater vitality. The underground seems to have just one electronic arcade after another. We go into a Pachinko Parlor and take some pictures. One wall in he underground is decorated with about ten different reliefs of musical instruments. Each has little metal plates over the keys or strings. You touch the metal plate and it makes the sound of the instrument. You can play a tune on the piano. Well finally we have had enough of the underground. We come out near a travel agent who offers an Audrey Hepburn tour. You go to the places where Audrey Hepburn movies were filmed. I guess Hepburn is very popular here. I had heard Marilyn Monroe is. We have about an hour wait for the train to the airport. We are really killing time now. Back in the underground once again, I find a Daruma at a good price. Finally we just sit down to write. At 2:30 PM local time we pick ourselves up and begin the long journey home. It is 12:30 AM Sunday in New Jersey and we expect it to take us the next 23 hours to travel. I took some pictures on the way to the airport. I had finished my roll and there were shots on Evelyn's so was using that. I dozed a bit on the train. Osaka has a very fancy new airport, only about two years old. It has a lot of clever designs. It has push carts for luggage and they are designed to work on the escalators. They straddle multiple steps and in doing so sit back on their own rubber heels so they don't go bouncing down the steps. Only problem, it is not obvious that the carts are designed this way. They have to put someone at each escalator to show people how to push the carts on. The line for check in is very slow. We are standing in line behind a guy with a buzzcut haircut. He has odd glasses that don't curve down over his ears. The stems of his glasses put dents into his head. Boy these Americans are strange looking. There is a Marine with a tee-shirt that says, "It's not that we have an attitude." In back it says "It's just that we're THAT GOOD. Marine Corps, Okinawa." Ummm. Yes. One problem with the new airport is the acoustics. You can hear the screams of children echoing over airport. But the guy at the desk can just run the passport through a scanner to get the info he needs. They are into mechanical solutions to problems. They have an airport tax of 2600 yen (wow!). They handle it like the train ticket machines. You start slinging money into it press buttons to get tickets saying you have paid your airport tax. They also have a machine that you put your boarding pass into and it takes the part it needs and hands you back a stub. They have to free up people, I guess, to tell you how to wheel your cart onto the escalator. We change money and wait. The waiting area has several wide screen TVs, each with a company name provided as advertising. We wait at the gate. There are fifteen straight minutes of every minute or so announcing the last call for the flight to Manila. My guess is that somebody checked a bag then did not get on the plane. They didn't want to find the bag and remove it for convenience reasons. They didn't want to fly with the bag and not the passenger for security reasons. What they most wanted was to fly with the passenger on board. But he was probably having a leisurely drink somewhere. They must have found him to the great relief of everyone waiting for that plane or others. We boarded the United Airlines flight. We went through the usual announcements. They said they had three "language-speaking" attendants. Two that spoke Japanese, one that spoke Spanish. I guess we English-speakers were sort of out of luck. The other attendants must have spoken only in grunts. The plane had smoking and non-smoking sections. For the benefit of smokers in non-smoking seats there were two seats reserved for smoking. Please limit yourselves to 15 minutes in the shared smoking seats. How about putting them out on the wing? Evelyn complained to the attendant that she still was smelling and breathing smoke. The attendant was quite nice about it and explained it was coming from the smoking section. The attendant said she looked forward to the day there was no smoking on the plane. I noticed from the passport of the guy next to me that he is a Peruvian. Over dinner I talk to him in Spanish. My Spanish is not so good, but he is a teacher of history at a university in Lima. I tell him about our visit to Peru. Dinner is Teriyaki chicken, salad, and chocolate cake. I ask for lemon tea when they come around with tea. They give me tea with three little shavings of lemon peel like you would put in some alcoholic drink. The first of the two in-flight movies was MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE which was better than the first time I had seen it since I knew more of the plot and could figure out some of what I had missed on the first viewing. It featured Jean Reno, the actor whose face is plastered all over Japan in cigaret ads and in movie posters for LEON: INTEGRAL VERSION. I slept a little. We have had darkness and light and the date has not changed. On the way out it was constantly sunny and the date changed. Ah, international travel. Breakfast is orange juice, a little fruit, and a greasy raisin pastry. The policy on how much food to give must have changed. On the way out they could not feed you too much. Now on the way back they can't feed you too much. We talked to the wife of a serviceman whose family was returning to the US after having lived basically all their lives in Japan. As we were getting off the plane one of the kids mentioned that the front compartment got better service. Another said that they had paid better money. The mother corrected they had paid more money. "Well," said the daughter "more and better are the same thing." I beamed in "She'll LOVE American restaurants." We landed at Los Angeles. Customs was the wave-through we get at Newark, but seemed friendlier. It was about a two-hour wait on the ground, then we had our last leg on a B-757, a narrow plane packed with six seats across. This makes the aisle less than 18 inches wide. This is not what they call at science fiction conventions "size friendly." The crew cannot get a cart down the aisle so hand-delivers everything. The movie comes on, but I am not interested enough to pay the $4 or whatever to see MULTIPLICITY. The woman who has the window seat tries to pull down the shade and it jams. It cannot be moved either up or down. Dinner was a choice of Sesame Chicken (Evelyn's choice) or Tortelini (my choice). It was OK. Dessert was a brownie. Well, I have gotten pretty well caught up in my log writing, leaving me somewhat at loose ends. I had brought the novel MUSASHI by Yoshikawa Eiji, or at least the first fifth of it, but Evelyn has started it and I won't try to red it at the same time. Instead I will finally get around to reading A TRIP AROUND THE MOON by Jules Verne. I have had it on my palmtop since I read FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON last year on the trip to Scotland. I got about half read, but it is one long expository lump, at least in the first half. FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON was at least exciting for the engineering task. This one is just a list of what Verne thought were the things he thought not obvious about cannons and space travel turned into novel with seemingly endless dialog. Finally we arrived and were back in New Jersey. And I cannot say we were really happy to be back. [Postscript I went to bed about midnight, my usual time, and woke up once at about 3:15 to notice Evelyn gone. I was thinking it was 3:15 when I looked at the clock again and it said 6:10. Not an unusual time for me to get up, so I guess there is no sign of jet lag. While I was up at 3:15 I had my disorientation episode. I get that the first night after a long trip when half asleep I look around wonder where I am. I was expecting it and quickly remembered, but it struck me as odd how high off the ground I was in this bed (having slept on futons for three weeks). Also the house seemed huge compared to the tiny rooms that had been my home. Not a bad place to live, really.] Hmmm! It sounds like I am coming up on the time to summarize. Japan has a unique position in world history. They really closed out the outside world for a long time. Ironically this may have meant they were better adapted to the modern world. The late start meant they had a lot of catching up to do in a very short period of time. They got used to rapid change at a time when changes were not so rapid for the rest of us. They learned not to depend on the traditions of the past to answer modern problems much sooner than the rest of us did. They looked at the world with fresh eyes and learned it is better to puzzle things out for yourself than to apply dogmatic approaches to problems. This leads them to come up with tremendously different approaches to problem solving. Some of the solutions, like the multiple pairs of slippers, seem cumbersome by our standards, but most work just fine. The result is a vibrant economy. That has enriched many of themselves and a fund of new ideas and approaches that has enriched the world. Now a lot of their conclusions are down and out weird. But figuring out how they think is more puzzling and more rewarding than with any other people I know of. I think if I were to pick a foreign country to live in, of all the places I have visited, in spite of the inconvenience Japan would probably be it. Whether I could figure out the language is another matter but life in Japan would be the most intellectually challenging and exciting.