Caveat lector:  This entry contains an indelicate description of my hindquarters, so the more sensitive among you may wish to skip it.

If you’re still reading, I assume you’re either titillated, or driven by an unconquerable curiosity and fearing the worst, or else a poor relative or friend of mine shaking their head in shame but dutifully reading on anyway to see just what madness I’ve been up to in these parts.  Here it comes: the event which lends its name to the title of this entry is known in English as Naked Man Festival.  Before you fear the worst (I’m talking to you, men), or get unduly excited (you know who you are, ladies), realize that the unfortunate title makes it sound slightly worse than it is.  No one’s actually naked—they wear a fundoshi, the loincloth-like garment we in the West affectionately refer to as a “sumo diaper.”  Several thousand guys wearing nothing but that and some cloth shoes run through the city streets on a February night, get sprayed with water, and climb onto a temple stage to beat the crap out of each other over a pair of sacred sticks thrown down by the temple priests, who first amuse themselves for an hour throwing more water down on the mostly-naked participants before finally tossing the sticks they’ve been clamoring and bloodying each other’s noses for.  Each stick must then be carried out the temple gates in order to claim the prize: a few thousand dollars cash and a year of fertility and good luck (this being super-superstitious Japan and all).

When a JET from Takamatsu sent me a Facebook invite to attend the event, either as a participant or a spectator (I immediately struck the first option out of consideration) I was hesitant to go, understandably, and it wasn’t until I talked to a few other friends who were going that I decided to go.  It all sounded a little gay, but at the same time I figured it would be an incomparable story to tell the folks back home about those wacky Japanese.

The night I rode to Okayama, the city just across the Seto Inland Sea where the festival takes place, I was feeling a bit under the weather with a stuffy nose, and used that as my excuse when people asked me why I wasn’t participating.  “Well, I’m a coward…and I’ve already got a bit of a cold, and if I run around in the freezing cold in less than underwear, getting splashed by water, I’m going to get really sick,” I’d say, which got them off my back.

We arrived in Okayama to find the troupes of fundoshi-clad men already jogging down the streets in lines, their arms across each other’s shoulders, yelling “Wasshoi!” over and over again to keep warm and keep from thinking, “Why in the name of all that is good am I doing this?”  Even more bizarre than this, perhaps, was the fact that the streets were lined with cheering crowds that included men, women, and children of all ages: boys and girls of three or four were standing no more than twenty feet from a bunch of bare buttcheeks, eating cookies and waving merrily. 

I think most cultures throughout human history have had some sort of wild fertility festival involving (mostly-)naked guys running around in some insane sporting event somehow connected to the gods.  One need look no further than the first act of Julius Caesar to find the feast of Lupercalia, in which the eponymous character and his buddy Marc Antony, in company with thousands of other noble Romans, are running naked through the streets, whipping the womenfolk with strips of goathide so they can successfully knock them up later.  The only difference between these old cultures and Japan is that the latter actually retains these traditions in the present day, when they seem a bit more ludicrous than they would have two thousand years ago.

Indeed, the strangest thing about it all was that these hundreds of thong-sporting men were jogging down a main street in a large city, passing under traffic lights and along parked cars and neon storefronts, right in the middle of everything; it wasn’t like it was off on some secluded temple grounds or in a forest or anything, and the contrast between these barbaric semi-naked heathens and their “civilized” surroundings was so baffling we newcomers could do naught but laugh in utter disbelief, especially as the police manning the event would shout into their megaphones (in Japanese), “Make way…naked men coming through.”

After a while, though, watching so many underdressed men began to lose its appeal, and though the ladies in our party were loving it, I was dreading the thought of being subjected to several more hours of man-ass.  At this point we ran into some gaijin who were going to participate in the event, though they were at this point still fully clothed.  They asked me if I was participating, and I said no, citing health reasons, until the strange notion of actually partaking in this madness began to grow in my mind like one of those polystyrene eggs from the 80’s you’d put in water and watch as it expanded into a full-blown dinosaur.  To continue with this dinosaur motif, what I’m saying is, just like the scientists in Jurassic Park, I started believing way too much in an absurd, dangerous idea and put all thought of the consequences behind me.  It didn’t help that there were two drunk Irishmen egging me on.  There’s a part of me that always wants to prove my Irishness when around actual Irish people, and said Irishmen, in addition, are incredibly good at persuading ordinarily rational people to do stupid things under the influence of alcohol.  (Transcript from any of a thousand clashes in Ireland, from the Irish side [WARNING: contains heavily brogued expletives, which good taste would suggest I leave out, but actual observation of young Irish people demands I leave in, as they tend to cuss in two out of three sentences]: “C’mon, laddies!  Let’s trow t’ese rocks at the fookin’ British!  Git out uv Aireland, ye fookin’ bahstards!  Tat’s it, boys, trow the rocks right at t’eir heads!  Nevermoind t’eir guns, ye pansies!  Just trow…Oh Jesus, Oi’ve been shot in me gut!  The bahstards!”)

“Ichigo ichie,” I thought to myself—an expression the Japanese are fond of using which means, “a once in a lifetime occasion”—and I agreed to join the mad Paddies and the rest of the gaijin in this most ludicrous of festivals.  I hadn’t even had much to drink—only a beer on the bus (because you can do that sort of thing in Japan)—so I have little excuse for my actions, but thinking I needed more, I swiped someone’s half-full can of Asahi and downed it for courage.

From there I was directed to the tables where fundoshi and tabi (cloth shoes with a separate compartment for your big toe) were on sale for $10 each.  I asked for a 31, my size in Japan (which never fails to amaze the kids, and which can’t be found in a regular shoe store), but was told the biggest they had was a 30, so I settled for that.  Then it was into, alas, the changing tent.  There’s a special way you have to wear the fundoshi, and being gaijin, none of us knew how to put it on ourselves, as it’s just a strip of cloth when you buy it; I don’t think the Japanese participants knew how to put it on either, but in any case, I think you’re required by tradition to have it put on by a master fundoshi dresser. 

This is a painful two-step process:

Step one:  Get totally naked, holding only the long fundoshi cloth in front of you for modesty.

Step two:  Do your best to look stoic as the fundoshi master wraps the cloth up between your legs and with a swift tug remorselessly crushes the sensitive parts of your undercarriage as he pulls the cloth tight.  Wipe the tears from your eyes as you think to yourself that the worst is over.  Then find out you’re wrong as he proceeds to wrap it around one more time and then brutally yanks the thick tail end of the cloth up between your tender cheeks.  He doesn’t speak English, so it’s okay at this point if, as happened to me, you find yourself screaming dreadful imprecations before you can stop yourself, à la Steve Carell in The 40 Year Old Virgin’s chest waxing scene.

Thoroughly mortified (in both common senses of the word), I packed my actual clothes in a $10 plastic bag you leave in the tent and ventured out into the cold with my similarly-clad gaijin brethren.  Lo and behold, there was an official photographer standing just outside the door of the tent, who snapped a picture of each of us as we emerged.  Grand.  As far as I know that’s the only picture that was taken of me that night, apart from perhaps photos from far away of the entire mob scene—in which you can barely tell if the buttocks you’re looking at belong to a honky or a native—so no, I will not be posting any pictures of myself in the evening’s savage attire.  You can all breathe a collective sigh of relief or disappointment.

So there we stood, out in the cold—though it wasn’t too cold, considering it was a February evening, thankfully—in less than underwear, in the middle of a city street, in full view of the Japanese public, who were all cheering and having the greatest time.  I think I can safely rank that as one of the ten weirdest moments of my life.  Following in the footsteps of the experienced Japanese we saw ahead of us, we did the arms-across-the-shoulders thing and took off down the street, shouting “Wasshoi!” in rhythm, our white bums exposed to the winter air and the inquisitive eyes of the spectators; I think I can safely (and proudly!) say that mine was the most hirsute among them, which may have afforded me a slightly greater protection against the cold.

That came to naught, though, when it came time to RUN THROUGH A FREEZING POOL OF WATER before entering the temple grounds.  My ever-reliable comrades had neglected to tell me of this ritual in advance, probably knowing that I would have chickened out if they brought it up.  By the time I saw the pool ahead of us and realized what I was in for, it was too late; I had already come that far, and I couldn’t very well break the human chain and turn back, so I plowed into the pool with the rest of them, shrieking all sorts of unprintables as the icy water struck my skin.  I scrambled through it and around the fountain in the middle as quickly as possible, nearly losing one of my tabi in the process.  I should mention here that though the shoes were marked as size 30, they were incredibly loose on my feet, and were held shut only with clasps in the back which came undone easily.  After emerging from the pool, we jogged on towards the main event.  The temple in Okayama has a large stage where the action takes place, and the grounds around it are nothing but sand; large concrete steps lead up from there to the stage, and bleachers for the event, set back a considerable distance from the temple, form the perimeter of the grounds.  The sand stuck to our shoes and quickly turned the white cloth brown, so completely that when I saw them on other people, I thought they had bought brown tabi somewhere.

There was already a sizable group of contestants on stage when we climbed up to join them.  The other first-timers and I didn’t really know what to expect when we got there, but as more participants joined behind us, we found ourselves in a rough sea of bodies shoving each other pointlessly and not really getting anywhere.  Everyone was told to keep their hands up to avoid accidentally hitting or shoving anyone, but with your hands up you couldn’t really brace yourself as people in front of, behind, and next to you were shoved against you, knocking you this way and that.  Most people seemed (like me) to be trying to ride it out without actually intentionally pushing anyone, but I saw at least one dirtbag with red tape on his wrists actually shoving and elbowing people around him, looking for trouble.  I was hating every minute of it, and the gaijin around me didn’t seem to be enjoying it much more than I was, but we figured there were only a few minutes left until they dropped the sticks, so we thought we’d just ride it out and then get out as quickly as possible when it was over.  I had already decided that, if by some chance I caught one of the lucky sticks, I would throw it away from me to avoid getting beaten, mauled, and/or actually murdered for it.  I told you I was a coward.

This plan of ours came to an end when, after ten minutes or so of being shoved to and fro, the priests announced that there was “only one hour remaining until the stick drop!” 

“AN HOUR?” I yelled to my friend next to me.

“Jesus.  I thought they were dropping them in like five minutes.”

“You want to get out of here?”

“Eh…”

By this time, more and more groups were packing onto the stage, and the shoving was getting more and more violent.  As I was pushed this way and that, I actually slipped out of the stupid cloth shoes, first one and then the other, and they were lost in the fray.  Other people had taped the tops of their shoes tightly around their ankles, but I was one of the last people to get my fundoshi put on (I was naturally reluctant) and by the time I was dressed the tape had been stored away somewhere.  In the surging mass of people getting thrown all over the place, feet naturally got stepped on all the time, and the tabi were little protection against it, but without them, my bare feet were taking a serious beating.  The sand stuck to other people’s shoes was getting ground into the tops of my feet every time they were stepped on, and I soon realized they were cut and bleeding.  There was no way I was going to stay on that stage for another hour of that, but I didn’t want to leave by myself, either.

Fortunately, one of my gaijin friends near me was convinced someone had just peed on his leg—there was a lot of beer consumed among the majority of the participants, and with nowhere to go, I guess someone just went and did the unthinkable—so he suddenly wanted to get the heck out of there as badly as I did.  We squeezed our way through the crowd and made our way to the bottom of the stairs, where many participants were standing out of the fracas, watching the rest of the idiots on stage thrashing each other to no purpose.  It was a bit colder down there, with none of the body heat that had kept us warm on stage, but we weren’t being shoved, urinated on, or trampled, so we were happy.  This may surprise you, but the whole thing didn’t feel gay, either.  Once you put on the loincloth and start running around, you completely forget that you’re surrounded by a bunch of almost-naked dudes, and standing shoulder to shoulder to keep warm is a mere survival instinct and not something you’re grossed out by.

We waited out there for probably another forty minutes or so, my feet slowly going numb on the cold sand, watching the action on stage get progressively rougher.  More and more people packed onto the stage, which meant more and more people started falling in droves down the concrete stairs.  The enormous team of police and EMTs swarmed in once, yelling at everyone to clear the way, but I guess it turned out to be a false alarm, because they didn’t bring anyone back out of the crowd with them.  I did see a particularly nasty-looking black eye on an old man standing near me, though.  Most of the gaijin had left the stage by this time and were waiting on the edge of the crowd with us, but there were a few tenacious (read: stupid) foreigners who kept marching right up the stairs every time they were thrown down, only to get thrown down again a minute or two later.

Finally, they dropped the two sticks, but I only really saw one, though I heard afterwards that they also dropped about ten decoy sticks which were worth nothing.  It was impossible to make out what was going on in the crowd, so my friends and I figured it would be best to just get out ahead of the mass of still-fighting people and get real clothes on again.  We had stayed out there long enough and it was practically all over anyway, so no one could say we hadn’t done it; we had donned the fundoshi, scrabbled for a bit on stage, and stood out in the cold until the end, and survived.  We changed into warm clothes and real shoes and rejoined the civilized world, though we still saw some stragglers wandering about the streets in their loincloths hours later.

I met up with the spectators I had come with, caught the bus back to Okayama station, and realized that, as expected, we had missed the last train back to Kanonji.  We walked around looking for a cheap hotel, but finding that every place was either booked or far too expensive for a five-hour stay (we wanted to catch the first train in the morning), we decided to sleep in the train station.  We found a warm underground section that wasn’t locked, so we propped ourselves against the wall and tried mostly in vain to catch a few hours of shut-eye before the trains started running again.  Either it got colder as the night went on, or the cold just slowly sank in after hours of sitting in it, but either way by 5am we were shivering.  We slept through the first departure but woke up for the second one, and when I got back it was just in time to play soccer with the Japanese guys I’ve been playing with every Sunday at 9.  I didn’t sleep after that, figuring that if I slept in the middle of the day I would never get to sleep that night and then my whole week’s sleep schedule would be off.  So with only two hours of sleep I plodded on with my day until I crashed around 8:30.  Naturally, In fulfillment of my predictions, I woke up the next day with a sore throat which only got worse as the week went on.  See?  I wasn’t just being a coward at the outset.  As anyone could have told you, running about in a loincloth in the cold, soaking wet, will get you sick, though honestly I think it was more the night spent in the train station that did it.

Still—and this may surprise you—I have no regrets about participating in the infamous Naked Man Festival.  It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.  If you do it more than once, there’s something wrong with you.

I hadn’t really given much thought to traveling outside of Japan during my stay here, but two weeks ago I got to add Korea to the short list of countries I’ve been to (previously only the US, Canada, and Japan, for those keeping track).  Back in December, my friend Tye suggested the trip—which would take place mid-February when we had a national holiday and could tack some vacation days onto it—and told me that I should buy a ticket immediately if I wanted to go, as they were only $250 round-trip but were sure to increase in price or sell out as time passed.  Thinking it sounded like a good deal, I snatched one up, and then gave little thought to the trip until about a week before, when I suddenly remembered I needed to buy a re-entry permit in Takamatsu in order to get back into Japan after leaving.  After acquiring this, I printed out a sheet of Korean phrases which I never bothered to learn (the pronunciation seemed hard so I quit after mastering, “Hello,” figuring I had enough on my plate with Japanese), and then scrambled to do some research online to make a plan for the trip about three days before we had to leave; I relied pretty heavily on Wikitravel, but in the end it proved okay.

THE DAY BEFORE THE TRIP, calamity struck.  Somehow I dropped my wallet on the way to school without realizing it until it was second period and time for me to teach; the school let me leave immediately to try to find it, but when I retraced my bike route all the way home, it was nowhere to be found.  All my important cards (gaijin card, US driver’s license, credit card, debit card, Japanese ATM card, AAA card), my two apartment key(card)s, and the $550 (in yen) I had withdrawn for the trip, coupled with a US $100 bill I was going to exchange since I’d finally be able to get to a bank during their working hours.  My school contacted the police to let them know it was missing, and my IC drove me to the station after school to make a formal report, but it hadn’t yet been found (it still hasn’t, but that’s a disillusioned entry for another day).  It was a big punch to the gut, and by eight that night (when I was supposed to be on my way to Danny’s in Takamatsu so we could catch the bus to Kansai early the next morning), having not heard from the police, I had given up on the Korea trip. I figured I should just cut my losses there and not withdraw any more money for the trip, and besides there was a note on my E-ticket saying I would need to present the credit card I had used to purchase the ticket when I was to board the flight; this credit card was in the lost wallet, and I didn’t want to go all the way out to Kansai the next day only to be turned away.  Tye called me and managed to convince me I should go, and that I could probably scrape by on about $200 on the trip (excluding transport to and from Kansai airport in Japan), and that the credit card thing shouldn’t be a big deal.  I was sold, and my neighbor Naoko called the airline to explain my credit card situation, then drove me to the train station and gave me train fare, as I had absolutely no money on me and no way of getting any that night.  She was a pal.

2/10/10

The next day the people at the airport didn’t even ask Danny for his credit card but they remembered my name when they looked at the E-Ticket and furrowed their brows for awhile over the credit card statement I had printed out the previous night at their request.  Finally they let me through and we were free to go.  We landed in Busan, which was dreary and a bit rainy and nearly impossible to see through the foggy windows of the bus which took us from the airport to our far-off hostel on the other side of the city.  We stayed at a place called Indy House, which is basically a big apartment the eponymous Indy converted into a dorm.  He’s a really nice guy: he picked us up from the subway station, suggested some places to check out nearby, and then wrote out an explanation in Korean detailing what I could and couldn’t eat, which I could show to restaurant staff.

I ended up putting it to use at a cheap bibimbap place Indy recommended, where the waitress showed me the one vegan option on the menu: a bowl full of rice and vegetables to which you add a chili sauce and then mix it all together; the old lady who brought the food out was pretty adamant about my mixing everything rigorously, and ended up taking the spoon from me to whirl the contents about herself until she was satisfied with it.  This vegetable bibimbap ended up becoming my staple food on the trip which I sought out whenever I was at a loss for something definitely vegan to eat.  It’s a decent meal, but I wouldn’t rave about it; it’s also a little on the small side.

That night Danny and I went from bar to bar, ordering non-alcoholic drinks as neither of us is a big drinker, and we were sure Tye would want to drink when he arrived the next day and met up with us in Gyeongju.  Most of the bars were nearly empty, and not a whole lot of fun, and I had my first real experience with anti-foreigner prejudice: we went to this bar called Ghetto, but there was a guy in front of the closed door charging admission, and when we asked him if it was busy, he didn’t seem to understand, but refused to let us even peek our heads in to see if anyone was in there and if it would be worth going in.  While Danny was trying to haggle with the guy, I noticed a huge sign hanging on the door we wanted to get through which read (this is quoted as exactly as I could remember it at the end of the night when I jotted it down in my journal): “Hey FOREIGNERS!  This isn’t a playground for little kids!  If you think so you should just turn around right now AND LEAVE!  If you want to wait for friends, don’t come in here, do it outside!  If you come in you’d better be-have [sic]!”  It said something else like, “You can’t have… [something—I think it was “a tab”]—locals and regulars can!”  Screw this place, I thought, and finally convinced Danny we shouldn’t waste our time with such a terrible bar.  We ended up in a live jazz club later on which was far better than I expected it to be.  I’ve never really been a big fan of jazz—I don’t hate it like I do twangy country or standard radio garbage, but aside from Django Reinhardt and this documentary on Woody Allen playing in Europe it’s always kind of bored me.  I think it’s one of those things that—if you’re not already into it—you need to experience live to appreciate.  I really got into the band (5^th Avenue) that was playing that night at the club and had a thoroughly good time; they worked well as a unit and their solos were frequently both virtuosic and moving, and it didn’t hurt that the singer was really cute.  I went back to the hostel and crashed after that, as I was thoroughly worn out from traveling.

2/11/10

The next morning we got up early to explore Busan during the day.  It was raining and the wet streets and bleak sky only further confirmed my initial impression that Busan was an ugly city like many others in Asia (and much of the modern world).  It looks for the most part like the less spectacular parts of New York, or even dingy Matsuyama in Shikoku; the area we walked around that morning also stank of sewage, which made an even more unappealing impression on me.  We wandered out to some ugly harbor before we realized we were going the wrong way, and then found our way to the markets in Nampo-Dong which we had been looking for (yes, “Dong” is a common suffix in Korean place names meaning “neighborhood” or something, so get all the laughter out of your system now in case I happen to refer to another Dong later).  Any markets in Korea involving food hold little appeal for a vegetarian, or even a squeamish carnivore.  You’re likely to see fish gasping out painful breaths in a bucket on the sidewalk, or octopus sold to be eaten alive—yes, people eat live octopus in Korea, and although some of them occasionally die from tentacles strangling them on the way down their throat, the percentage of deaths isn’t nearly as high as I’d like it to be (100%), unfortunately.

With head down and breath held, I made it through the terrible food part of the market onto slightly more interesting wares.  There were a lot of secondhand clothes shops that didn’t sell much more than Cosby sweaters and other shapeless drab garments for old Asian people, and we actually got dragged into one by an old man who spoke a rapid-fire dialect of English he seemed to have invented himself.  “You are to America?  I to America to ten years.  You look to clothes, you like?  To cheap, yes, to the cheap,” is about as close as I can come to approximating his idiosyncratic brand of English, as I recall it.  It was weird but I could follow it easily, and he was the only person who really approached us speaking English, so it was welcome.

The thing that was maybe hardest about Korea was the fact that it sent me back to square one as a gaijin.  Here, I essentially lost all the street cred I had gained in Japan by speaking some Japanese; I understood nothing in Korean and could only communicate through English, which wasn’t widely spoken by the locals.  I managed to learn most of hangul, the extremely well-designed Korean alphabet system, while riding the bus, but being able to kind of pronounce the things written on signs still didn’t give me any clue as to what they meant.  I was, to all appearances, just a dumb, white, ignorant American tourist.  That stung a bit.  “Look, I admit I don’t know much about Korea, but I’ve learned a lot about that little string of islands across the water over there—that’s got to count for something, right?” I wanted to say, but couldn’t, and perhaps it was just as well, because my next sentence would have been, “Oh, right.  You guys hate the Japanese, so saying this to you has kind of backfired completely, hasn’t it.  Forgive me as I bow in deep and humble regret.  Oh, you guys don’t bow?  Is that a Japanese convention?  It appears I’ve blown it again.”

It took us a day to realize that our habit of bowing to salespeople and anyone who helped us, ingrained in us during our long stay in Japan, was not being reciprocated in Korea.  I had assumed it was a commonality between the big three Far East countries—Japan, China, and Korea—but I appear to have been mistaken, although an internet search has just told me that bowing is still a custom in Korea.  Maybe in the big city it’s less of a practice?  Or is only reserved for business meetings?  I don’t know.  But it didn’t seem to be getting us anywhere.

Nor did this market seem to be leading to anywhere spectacular.  There were a couple souvenir shops which were interesting, but otherwise we were just walking past food I wasn’t going to eat and clothes we didn’t want (largely targeted at old people, young women, and young men wanting to cop American hip-hop trends—incidentally, everywhere we went we saw young Koreans in American baseball hats, often for teams that aren’t even very good, and are probably more of a fashion statement than a vote of support for said team).  By the time we came upon the area where each block of stores would all be selling the same thing, whether it was electronics, furniture, clothes, or linens, we gave up.  This business clustering was apparently the way business was done in the old days in Japan and Korea, and Tokyo is still similarly divided, with Akihabara being the home of computer equipment, while Kanda contains hundreds of used book stores.

We did find one great market area, far away from the rest of it, where vendors sold fresh spices in staggering portions.  In America, a little spice bottle of small cinnamon sticks is probably going to cost you a few bucks, but here they were giving away plastic bags filled with whole logs of cinnamon for about five dollars.  One of the sellers broke off some pieces of the cinnamon bark and gave it to us to chew on.  They also sold ginseng in huge quantities, which would be extremely expensive anywhere else.

By mid-afternoon, after eating some traditional Korean porridge (pumpkin flavor),  it was time to catch a bus to Gyeongju, the ancient capital of Korea an hour north of Busan, where we met up with Tye.  We stayed at the Hanjin Hostel, operated by a family but mainly by the son, I think; his eighty-something father and mother were frequently to be found sleeping in front of the TV behind the reception desk.  The old man is a master calligrapher and his son speaks fluent Japanese and English in addition to Korean, so they’re an interesting bunch.  The son called a temple food restaurant for me and placed an order so it’d be ready when I got there, and then called us a taxi to take us there.  Needless to say, the staff in Korean hostels are extremely helpful.

This restaurant, Bara, was my only real “treat” on the trip in terms of vegetarian cuisine, as I failed to find any of the vegetarian places in Busan listed on Wikitravel; Bara more than made up for that, though.  It served seemingly endless courses of vegan temple food like the monks eat, which was all pretty good and in the end quite filling, after the sixth round of dishes had been brought out.  They even gave Tye and Danny some fruit and tea gratis since the two of them weren’t eating; they had some mess of meat and cabbage lined up for them at some other restaurant later where we were meeting some local gaijin they had found on the internet.  I had wanted to try temple food with Christine in Nara or Kyoto, but we failed to find the restaurants I had read about, and it’s said to be terribly expensive in Japan anyway; the sumptuous feast that cost me $10 in Korea would probably have cost $50 in Japan.

Prices in Korea in general are wonderfully cheap, especially for people like us getting a good exchange rate from the yen or the dollar.  We traveled everywhere by bus or subway, which generally only cost a dollar per ride; you could even catch a bus to Seoul, on the opposite side of the country, for only $20.  A full meal is generally only $4-8 dollars, and our accommodations were $20 apiece per night, on average. 

After leaving the temple food restaurant (note that it was not a temple, just a place that served temple food) we caught a taxi (also cheap) over to the downtown area where we met up with some gaijin at that restaurant where I didn’t eat anything and then went out for drinks.  We met a travel writer living in Hong Kong who had actually been to North Korea, which, as I had discovered the day before while perusing the books at Indy House, has a large section devoted to it in the Lonely Planet: Korea travel guide.  You can get in on an authorized tour, but it’s expensive, and you’re flanked by two government men at all times who will tell you not to look in certain directions, or at people, and will take your cameras when you leave to delete any photos they don’t approve of before giving it back to you.  He says it’s about as crazy as you’d expect.  I’m kind of morbidly curious and kind of want to go one day.

2/12/10

The next day was my favorite day of the trip, by far.  The rain of the previous day had turned to snow, and it fell all day.  It was absolutely beautiful.  It had been a year since I’d experienced real snow—any flurries in Kagawa were during school hours and each flake disappeared the second it hit the ground.  In Korea it was refreshingly cold without being brutal, and the snowflakes fell gently and continuously, without ever turning into a blinding blizzard, and piled up just a little on the ground, the hills, and the rooftops.  The scenery just wouldn’t have been the same without it; it was perfect weather for the day we had.  Korea shall forever be associated in my memory with snow, and beautiful snow at that.

We got up early and walked to the mound tombs in Southern Gyeongju, where the emperors were buried in ancient times.  These hillock-sized mounds stretch out over a wide expanse in a nicely preserved park in the middle of the city bordered by lovely wrought iron railings.  Being February, the grass was all dead—I’m just realizing now that there’s almost no grass in Japan, at least not where I am, as it’s all rice fields—but its light tan was complemented perfectly with the powdery white falling upon it, and perhaps it looked even nicer,  in a way, than it would in summer.  I’m not sure I ever appreciated winter landscapes enough before this trip.

The mound area and the other natural and historical parts of Gyeongju are so well-preserved and kept free of ugly modern clutter I could have wept for joy.  The open ground stretches out before you way out into the distance without a power line in sight, which I have never seen in Japan outside of Nara (more on the unforgivable atrocity of power lines in Japan in a later entry).  Nor are there any vending machines, nor lines of concrete running through the fields.  The simple absence of these things is like the sweet balm of Gilead to the wounded heart of a foreigner living in Japan.

From the tombs we went on to Anapji Pond, which used to be the site of a palace which until burned down, just like every palace in Japan, and if you ask the Koreans, I’m sure they’ll tell you the Japanese were responsible for it.  There were some traditional-style pavilions still standing around the pond, though, from which you could watch the ducks at play, circling in the air through the snow and landing on the water amidst the floating leaves.  The pond was magnificently laid out with pine-strewn islands standing in the middle of it and on a quiet winter day it was so still and peaceful it was hard to leave.

Though we would have been happy to walk around Gyeongju awhile longer, we decided to grab tea at a café called Mario del Monaco—which had pictures of said Spanish opera star all over the walls and appeared to be owned by a Korean opera performer—and then catch a bus to Bulguksa Temple forty minutes away on the outskirts of Gyeongju.

Korean temples are far more brightly colored than the Japanese ones I’ve seen, with the exception of Kiyomizudera in Kyoto, which could give them a run for their money; in contrast to the stately blacks, browns, whites, and verdigrises of Japan, Korean temples are an explosion of bright blue, green, orange, and red, with playful arabesque patterns swirling about every post and beam.  Bulguksa, the oldest temple in Korea (though naturally a reconstruction, as the Japanese burnt down the real one ages ago) is no exception.  Even the guardians of the gate (called Nio in Japanese—I’m not sure if the ones in Korean are supposed to be exactly the same gods) are painted in these joyous hues.

The sprawling temple, which went back further than any of us thought and surprised us with a new view around each corner and up each set of old stone stairs, was terrifically landscaped (as is often the case in either country), welcoming visitors with ponds at the entrance and manicured trees surrounding the walls of the temple courtyard; in addition, the temple was backed by snow-covered mountains whose effect on the overall spirit of the place is indescribable.  It was all so perfect I bought a painting the gift shop was selling of a mountain snow scene because I needed to keep a memento of that snowy day at that wondrous mountain temple with me for all time. 

Unfortunately we had to leave Gyeonju after that (picking up our bags at the Hanjin Hostel which was nice enough to hold them for us while we traveled) and head back to Busan, which Tye had yet to see.  We managed to get a room at a seedy “love hotel” (a good place for cheap lodging) with two beds for $40 and I won the rock-paper-scissors game for the single bed, so I was happy.  They also had a VHS player in the room which I somehow managed to get working so we could watch the so-bad-it’s-still-bad-but-really-funny Battlefield Earth, which we had heard so many terrible things about.  If you’ve not seen it, I can tell you it definitely is as bad as they say.

2/13/10

We headed out to Yonggungsa, a seaside temple in the hinterlands of Busan, early the next morning.  This was another brilliantly colored temple with a spectacular location, and had it not been for the wonderful day in Gyeongju the day before, it could easily have been the highlight of my trip.  It’s built on craggy rocks overlooking the blue-green sea, with pine trees blowing in the ocean breezes behind it, and a Buddha statue right at the land’s edge with it’s back to the sea.  A statue of the goddess Kwannon stands behind the temple and looms over it all.  In addition to being brightly painted in general, one temple building here had actual paintings that wrapped around it which seemed to tell a story; I circled it several times marveling at them.

There was a red bridge there which crossed over a little chasm into which the waves crashed and shot up billows of spray.  There was also a little underground chamber accessible by a flight of stone stairs which led to a little shrine with a pool of water which you were supposed to use either for ablutions or perhaps to splash the Buddha there, as I had seen done in a temple in Osaka.  Only the pictures can really do the whole temple justice so be sure to check them out.

Afterwards, we took a bus back into Busan, towards Haeundae Beach, where we had already booked another love hotel; this one was a bit classier and slightly more expensive, though we were able to haggle it down a bit, and they let us leave our stuff there all day so it was worth it.  We checked out the beach area, which seemed like it would be pretty nice in the summer, though it was too cold to properly enjoy just now; a crowd of people was feeding seagulls and getting attacked for their pains.  At this point we parted ways; Tye and Danny were off to the raw fish market which was the last place on earth I’d ever want to be, so I went and ate at some Mexican bar called the Fuzzy Navel that served vegetarian burritos.  Then, with a lot of time on my hands until I was supposed to meet up with them, I went wandering around the Haeundae area, finally spotting a temple up on a hill which I decided to climb to.

A long flight of marble-white stairs led up the hill to the temple, which looked out over Busan and confirmed my impression that, for the most part, it is not a beautiful city.  It has beautiful parts, like the beach, Yonggungsa Temple, and the temple where I was standing at that moment, but for the most part it’s an ugly gray and brown concrete mess.  There are some parts that are worse than others, like these stacks of identical, tall, ugly buildings packed so closely together they look like rock formations and are nearly 2-D from a distance.  There are other, more historic areas of Busan that I would have liked to visit, which seemed like they would have been a welcome respite from the city, but because of time constraints I couldn’t make it to them.

These were all marked on a tourist map we were given when we landed at the airport, and the more notable ones had short blurbs written about them, all of which proved one thing: Korea is insanely nationalistic, even in its tourist industry.  In Japan it’s, “See Todaiji, the largest wooden building in the world, holding the Daibutsu which measures 18 meters tall and was carved in 978—It’s a World Culture Heritage Site!” (I’m making these measurements and dates up because I don’t feel like looking them up now), or “Make your path between the love stones at this shrine behind Kiyomizudera (A UNESCO World Heritage Site) and you’ll marry your true love,” or “Climb the 754 steps of Konpira-san (soon to be a UNESCO World Heritage Site!) and buy some expensive good luck charms” (if I haven’t mentioned it before, Japanese people are nutty for charms and anything promising good luck in general—see forthcoming entry!).  In Korea, tourist maps invite you in (or scare you away) with [these are actual quotes]: “Geumjeongsanseong Fortress—The patriotic souls and spirits of Korea’s forefathers are rooted in the 18.8 km-long walls of this fortress,” or “Chungryeol Shrine—This is a sacred shrine where the patriotic martyrs in the Busan region, such as Chungryoel Song San Hyeon and Chungjanggong Jung Bal are enshrined.  These men bravely fought against the Japanese troops in battles during the Japanese Invasion of 1592, and died heroic deaths.”  In addition, there are signs detailing the nasty deeds of the Japanese at almost any historic place you visit.  Considering that the Japanese comprise the largest number of foreign tourists for Korea, I wonder if the Japanese-language tourism guides say the same things the English ones do.

Anyhow, this temple I ended up at wasn’t a blurb on any map, but I’m glad I stumbled upon it.  The city below may not have been much to look at, but the temple itself was nice.  A splendid cool breeze was blowing that day which somehow reminded me of my childhood, and even though I’d never before been to Korea, it felt like I was somehow reliving something.  From a note I wrote in my journal while sitting on a temple bench: “There is a benign, heart-fortifying power in these cold-but-not-cold invigorating Korean winds that speak of the old days and bring them back again for a while, as if they’ve missed you as you have missed them, and want to stay with you for a time and get to know you again, and restore you to the you you used to be when you spent many happy days together.”

Oh youth.  Oh sweet winds.  Oh dear world.

This temple, like the others, was nicely landscaped with rocks and a pool and sand a trees, and had paintings on several of the temple buildings which were even more extensive than the ones at the more famous Yonggungsa.  Again they wrapped around the buildings and told a story of sorts, and they were beautiful and sad and masterfully done.

After a pleasant hour alone at this temple I headed towards (ugh) The World’s Largest Department Store, where the other two wanted to check out Spa Land.  I was there at the right time, but didn’t see them even after waiting around for a while and being told by one of the ladies at the check-in that no, she hadn’t seen two white guys in winter hats come in.  I gave up and left, wandering over to the nearby Olympic Park which seemed like it might have been nice had I not been the only person around; it was a bit too isolated and creepy for me, and although it ordinarily probably wouldn’t have bothered me, after losing my wallet a few days before, I didn’t feel like chancing anything.  I didn’t feel like actually exploring The World’s Largest Department Store because the fact that such a thing actually exists depresses me and seems like a giant consumerist blight on the face of the earth, so I went back to the hotel to relax for a bit and wait for the other two to show up.  When they finally did arrive, they said they had been running late and didn’t get to Spa Land until after I’d already left.  I didn’t really care either way, as Spa Land was more their interest than mine.  We went out to dinner together, only to find it was a place that literally only served meat, so I struck out alone again to find some vegetable bibimbap elsewhere.

It took me awhile to find a place that served it, and after I had eaten I realized I didn’t know the way back, so got lost for awhile before finally finding the restaurant where I had left them.  We then joined up with the foreigners we had met in Gyeongju two nights before, who were staying in Busan for the weekend.  We went to a bar right near the beach, played some darts, went to some other place where Danny started dancing with these wacky Korean guys, and then called it a night.  The flight back the next day was uneventful but with the bus and train afterwards I didn’t get home until kind of late, and then didn’t feel at all like going to school the next day, even though I had to.  It was a nice trip, a little too short, unfortunately, but the great parts of it have made a lasting impression on me. 

Here are the pictures: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2130352&id=24800641&l=17e3df0c7e

In the morning we got up, repacked, and bid farewell to our beloved little room just minutes before the inn’s early check-out time of 10:00.  Even with all our heavy luggage, the trip from Kyoto to Tokyo was more painless than I had expected.  We had a long Shinkansen ride in the smoking section of the train, which was a little unpleasant, but we listened to some good tunes and dozed part of the way.  I think we were the only people not smoking, except for this cute little kid who looked to be about ten, whose grandparents had seen him off at one of the stations we stopped at.  He was waving goodbye to them through the window from the opposite side of the train and it was adorable.  Then he was looking out the window the whole ride, watching the scenery go by, while some twenty-something girl dozed next to him with a cigarette in her hand.  Smoking is huge in Japan, if I’ve never mentioned that before.  And unlike the US, where kids hear in health class from kindergarten onward, “DON’T SMOKE.  IT WILL KILL YOU.  SMOKING IS REALLY, REALLY STUPID, AND BAD FOR YOU,” in Japan the message is “DON’T SMOKE…until you’re 20 and you can do it legally.”

Once we got off the train, we had to make two subway transfers, but it was far less frenetic than I’d thought it would be.  I had this vision in my head of Tokyo being a round-the-clock madhouse where hundreds of suited businessmen and trendy-looking young people in their ridiculous hats were continually smashed into tiny subway cars, lined up to be smashed into tiny subway cars, or powerwalking through the streets, trampling the elderly and the infirm, on their way to be crammed into tiny subway cars.  Maybe it was because it was a holiday, and many people had already left the city, but the Tokyo subways were not like this at all.  They were still more crowded than anywhere in Shikoku, but so is Walmart at 9am on a Sunday back in the States.

We found our hotel easily, and were blown away by the “foreignness” of it (and I mean foreign from a Japanese perspective).  There was a big group of Europeans checking in ahead of us, and another group of Indians milling around, and all the Japanese people at the check-in desk spoke perfect English.  I’m so used to thanking the employees everywhere I go in Japanese that I felt a bit weird hearing, “Arigatou gozaimashita” come out of my mouth after they had just given us a detailed rundown of the hotel procedures entirely in English; I face the same dilemma in Indian restaurants here, where I know they deal mostly with Japanese people so they have to be fluent in Japanese, but there’s a good chance they speak English, too, so I’m always worrying that they think I’m putting on airs when I speak in Japanese, or that I’m just a lazy, ignorant foreigner when I speak in English, and I never know which language to use (though I usually find myself sticking with Japanese).

After a pleasant check-in, we dumped our stuff in the room—whose bathroom (and the toilet inside it) directly faced the bed, so that even with the door shut you always felt as if someone were watching you do your business—and headed out to find one of the many vegetarian restaurants in Tokyo listed in the guidebook; the ever-helpful hotel staff at The Hotel Asia Center of Japan printed us out a map from Google and told us how to get there.  We found where the restaurant should have been easily enough, only…it wasn’t there.  The building that should have housed it looked like it contained mostly offices (all closed), a restaurant of a different name (closed), and a steel rolling door pulled over one storefront with no sign.  The guidebook was last revised about three years ago, so I guess it’s possible this tofu restaurant closed since then.

As luck would have it, though the restaurant was nowhere to be found and our bellies were rumbling, this latest wild goose chase had brought us very close to a shrine (I believe it was Hikawa-jinja), which we decided to check out since we were right there.  We were already tired from walking, but decided to take the tall flight of stairs anyway, rather than the escalator (this is all outdoors, by the way), which we had never seen at an ancient religious site before, and which seemed mildly blasphemous.  When we reached the top, we found a Shinto ceremony underway, and stayed to watch, intrigued.  We had no idea what was going on, but it was interesting to watch; I’ve always been drawn to the mysterious ritual elements of religion, like the priests swinging the censer at church or sprinkling holy water with a branch, so the ceremony here held a great appeal for me.  There were about twenty Shinto priests conducting the ceremony, the old ones in front and the young ones in back, with the help of six or seven “altar boys” and about eight high-school-aged girls in kimonos.  At one point, the priests distributed small pieces of paper before putting them to their lips and then tearing them up, casting the pieces to the wind which had just kicked up.  They later threw more pieces into a fire which that same wind kept blowing out.  There was live music as part of the ceremony, which pleased me to no end; previously I had only seen recorded music used during Shinto dances at Chosa festivals, and thought it would be much better if the priests were actually playing the instruments—and it was.  Just like at church, there was a lot of standing up and sitting down, but even more bowing of the head; at one point everyone kept their heads bowed for about five minutes while one of the old priests read a prayer aloud (barely audibly) before the altar.  At the end of it all, the priests and the onlookers (it was pretty crowded) formed a procession and marched through a giant hoop made of what I think was rice straw; the laity walking through it would rip out a handful and fashion it into a little hoop of their own, which reminded  me of Palm Sunday.  The procession was very long, and we had been standing there in the cold for probably about forty minutes during the ceremony, so after we had all walked through the rice hoop twice, with the priests at the front looking to make another round, Christine and I discreetly snuck out the back, in the wake of an old couple doing the same thing.  We had no idea how many times they were going to keep walking through that hoop„ and we still hadn’t eaten—plus, we aren’t even Shinto followers, and plenty of people had come and gone before the procession even started—so we didn’t feel too terrible about skipping out a little early.

We headed back the way we came, looking for an Italian place we had seen on our way there, but somehow we passed it without seeing it, maybe distracted by a nearby store called “The Liquor Cave” or something like that.  We turned around again and found it this time, only a short distance from the shrine, and saw that there were apparently vegetarian things on the menu so we went in.

We ordered the “Garlic, red pepper, and basil pasta,” adding eggplant and potatoes for an extra charge, and then sat around for what felt like a long time, waiting for the meal.  When it finally came, the pasta was covered in pieces of ham, which was mentioned nowhere on the menu.  We fell to cursing under our breath and picking it all out of the pasta, figuring it would be futile to ask them to remake it, as it would probably take another hour and they’d most likely still screw it up, damn them.

We stopped at a grocery store on the way home to buy some New Year’s snacks and a six-pack of Kirin, then headed back to the hotel for a nap.  We were both really tired, and seeing as Christine hadn’t been able to stay awake past 11 any night since Christmas, we figured a nap was in order if we were going to make it through the New Year’s Eve festivities at nearby Zozoji Temple.  We had been biking and walking all over creation the last six days, so it’s no surprise we were pretty beat by that point.

Moaning and groaning, I managed to drag Christine out of bed by 10pm so we could make it to the New Year’s Eve celebration.  We stupidly drank a beer before we left the hotel room, making us even more tired then we were.  We drank the next one on the subway, just because drinking in public is legal in Japan and I insisted on taking advantage of it.  The other four beers remained in their box for the remainder of our trip together, and two of them are still sitting on the floor of my hallway as I’m typing this, as it’s so cold out there I don’t need to bother putting them in the refrigerator.  (For those of you doing the math, I drank one during my one night at a capsule hotel because it was a miserable little place that could only get better under the influence, and I drank another when I was mad at my bike with its troublesome flat tire).  I guess we overestimated how much we actually drink.

We had expected to find the New Year’s celebration just by following the sounds of revelry, which we had thought we’d be able to hear from miles off; it was quiet upon exiting the subway station, though, and we had to follow signs for the temple, which was located within Shiba Park.  Even as we walked around the walled perimeter of the park, we couldn’t hear anything coming from inside, and we wondered if we were even in the right place, or if there was a festival going on at all.  We passed the Tokyo tower, “2009” spelled out on it in bright bulbs in addition to its usually night lights, and eventually found a steady stream of people entering the park gates, whom we assumed were going to the countdown party, which meant that the countdown party did indeed exist and we could stop worrying. 

Once we arrived at the temple, we found we weren’t really sure what we were supposed to be doing there.  There were stands selling fried octopus and other stomach-turning Japanese delicacies, but that wasn’t for us; there were also two hobo-style fires in trash cans where people were huddled for warmth, but we weren’t yet cold.  The crowd looked a little sparse, for Tokyo, until we realized that most of them were around the corner on line for balloons which would be released at midnight with wishes for the new year attached to them.  We had arrived too late to get one of the “wish cards,” though, and so we weren’t given balloons.  That was all right with us, though—that’s two sea turtles’ deaths that aren’t on our hands.

The countdown clock indicated that there was still an hour and a half remaining, so we made our way to the back of the crowd facing toward the temple gate, which was located several flights of stairs down, on the street, next to a glowing display that said “2009.”  There was a Japanese couple in front of us, probably about our age or a little older, the back of whose heads we became rather familiar with after standing there until midnight.  We felt a bond with these two, not just because they were a couple, but because we could tell they were as exasperated as we were with some of the members of the crowd.  For some reason, many people in the crowd decided the best place to see—well, whatever it is they thought there was to see down below—was between the heads of this couple, so from time to time they would stick their head practically between the two, or casually thrust a camera between the two of them to take a picture.  Each time, the male half of the couple would slowly turn his head around and just stare at them in disbelief in a way that made Christine and I crack up every time.  There was also the bizarre couple of Mrs. Doubtfire and the Most Hated Elf at the North Pole who squeezed through the crowd to take up a place right next to us with about an hour left to go before midnight.  The two of them spent the time intruding egregiously on the Japanese couple’s space, playing loud games of “I Spy” (“I spy something—it’s two words: the first starts with a P and the second starts with B.  P B.”  “STATUE!  No, wait…”), and recounting the other places they had spent New Year’s in the past: “LAST YEAR WAS UGANDA, THE YEAR BEFORE THAT WAS UGANDA, THEN THE YEAR BEFORE THAT WAS SWITZERLAND…”  Apparently they haven’t yet hit upon the idea of staying home for New Year’s and not bothering anybody.

At long last 11:59 came and the countdown began; everyone turned towards the temple to count down with the timer posted there.  When it struck midnight, the Tokyo Tower turned from orange to a beautiful blue, all the signs saying “2009” changed to “2010,” and the crowd at the temple sent their balloons inscribed with New Year’s wishes into the night sky, where they glowed in the light of the full moon like slowly vanishing stars.  

For a moment all was stillness and wonder, with a palpable sense of hope and renewal flickering brightly in the hearts of the crowd.  Then they all surged towards the temple for the traditional New Year’s visit (consisting of a small donation and a prayer), shoving everyone ruthlessly forward ahead of them.  We were carried along in the surge, nolens volens,taking a momentary respite from the shoving only when the police halted the crowd at intervals to try to allow some people to leave the temple before letting another group stampede in.  If I had been claustrophobic, I would have died of fear out there, hemmed in by people on all sides, their heavy bodies squishing us on all sides like the jaws of that trash compactor in Star Wars.  I fought the urge to throw some elbows, only because I know it wasn’t the fault of the people directly around us, as they were probably being shoved ahead too by the brutes in the back.  Finally we got into the temple, close enough to the donation trough where we could pitch in some yen, say a quick prayer, and get out of there as quickly as possible.  There was an old lady in a walker next to us having a worse time of it than we were; she was nearly trampled.  Night air never tasted as sweet as it did in that moment when we breached the doors and got free of the crowd, able to stretch and walk at our own pace towards the subway without any elbows in our ribs.  Free of the crush of the crowd, that is, until it came time to actually get on the subway car.  It looked rather full as it pulled up to where we stood, and there was a whole mess of people at our station who had just come from the temple, and were now tired and wanted to go home (ourselves included), and weren’t waiting around another half-hour for the next car.  So everyone crammed themselves in and we all sucked in our gut for the proverbial sardine-tin ride back.  Fortunately, the people in front of us (we were crushed against the back wall) were nice enough to get out and let us through when we said “Sumimasen!” (“Excuse me/I’m sorry,” which you hear everywhere), letting them know that we had arrived at our stop and needed to get off, restoring a bit of my faith in the essential politeness of the Japanese.

1/1/10

We got up late the next day, having gone to bed late, and being a bit run-down from all our non-stop travel.  Aside from going out for New Year’s, we didn’t have much of a game plan for Tokyo, unlike Nara and Kyoto, which we had planned out thoroughly in advance.  Eventually we decided to check out Tokyo Bayside, which is a pretty modern area of Tokyo, being constructed on landfill in what used to be the Bay; in addition to checking out some of the crazy architecture recommending it the guidebook, we hoped to get some souvenirs at some of the shopping areas there for people back home.

The Tokyo Bayside area is connected to the rest of Tokyo by a monorail, which, needless to say, provides a much more scenic view than the subways we had to take the rest of the trip.  You still have to go to a subway station to access it, and we ended up walking all the way from one station to another, underground the whole way and more or less lost.  The subway lines in Tokyo are owned by a number of different companies, which means the stations are often spaced far apart, and can be a bit hard to figure out, as well; most of the subway maps you find posted on the wall are for a specific company’s lines, and you may find yourself looking at it for five minutes, trying to figure out why you can’t find the station you need on there, only to realize that company doesn’t serve that station.  I’d say there are three major companies—Tokyo Metro, JR, and Toei—that own most of the subway lines, but the monorail line is owned by another company entirely, and its signage isn’t the greatest (hence our confused walk for nearly a kilometer underground).

The view from the monorail car is spectacular, though, taking you past the skyline of the mainland and over the water to the interesting, off-kilter architecture of Tokyo Bayside, providing fleeting glimpses of Mt. Fuji in the background along the way.  On arriving at our destination, we decided to check out Tokyo Big Sight, which looks like four upside-down pyramids holding up a square glass building between them.  For some reason, there’s a giant plastic sculpture of a saw outside it.  Naturally, it was closed, but we tested the door and found it open, so we went in.  We stood looking up at the high skylighted ceiling and closed futuristic stores, taking a few pictures and soaking in the eerie atmosphere of post-apocalyptic abandonment until some janitors came in and told us to scram.  We obliged and went out looking for another ideal place to take pictures of Mt. Fuji from, eventually settling for a little picnic area down below.  The escalators there had built-in sensors, so they conserve power by only running when people are near them; seeing that we were the only people around and I wouldn’t be holding anyone up, I insisted on taking the up escalator down, and made it to the bottom just as what we thought were Japanese police officers came in sight.  I thought they were going to hassle us like the guy in Kyoto for screwing around, but they turned out to just be monorail workers who passed by without a word.

Although Big Sight was closed, nearby Venus Fort was open and had some New Year’s sales underway.  Unfortunately, as we found out after a fair amount of wandering around inside the giant mall, the stores inside sell nothing but clothes.  Three floors, and nothing but clothes (well, and a food court and arcade).  We bought a couple cheap shirts made to fit tiny Japanese people but were unable to find souvenirs of any sort.  Walking around the mall is an experience in itself, though; it feels like a sprawling museum that contains clothing stores instead of exhibits.  The ceiling is an artificial sky that changes throughout the day, and the European pillars and arches made for the most beautiful mall I’ve ever seen; there’s even one room that’s a sort of rotunda with a huge blue-lit chandelier above a Roman fountain containing statues of buxom ladies whose togas seem to be slipping off in all the right places.  (There was also a rest area further on where families were sitting with little kids beneath giant reproductions of old nude paintings; methinks the mall curator’s a bit too into naughty Renaissance bits).

Architecture aside, our favorite part of the mall was probably the arcade, which we stopped at on a whim as we were on our way out.  We ended up staying for probably an our, playing some Mario crane game, taking the mandatory Japanese photo booth pictures you get to decorate afterwards (we had to do it twice because Christine somehow deleted two of our pictures from the first time, but it was just as fun getting to do it again), and finally playing a game of Music Gun Gun.  I’m not sure if this game exists in the States, but it’s a lot of fun.  It’s similar to Guitar Hero and Taiko Drum Master, in that you have to match the rhythm of the song, but in this game you get to shoot cute flying things in time to the music.  We did rather well, actually, probably due in part to all the our hours we’ve logged together at Guitar Hero.

After that we took an elevator to the top to take some pictures of Mt. Fuji as the sun was setting; as we stood there taking shot after shot, shoulder to shoulder, trying to capture that iconic Japanese scene perfectly, this song by The Cranberries, whom we used to listen to together all the time back in the day, started playing over the mall loudspeakers.  It was pretty perfect.  Straight out of a movie.

We left Venus Fort after the song ended and, spotting a high observation tower in the distance, decided to try to make it there before the sun set to see if we could get an even better picture of the mountain.  As we neared it, we saw that it was part of a maritime museum, which was closed that day; we were already close to the water, though, so we decided to keep going to see what we could see.  We passed an old clipper ship strung with Christmas lights and sat down on a bench facing the Tokyo skyline across the bay, silhouetted by the setting sun, with Mt. Fuji behind it all.  Even though I’m not a city person (as anyone who knows me could tell you), it was a beautiful view, better even than the New York skyline, for me.  We sat there until dusk, watching the sky slowly grow dark behind the city lights.  All the big buildings in Tokyo, even the ones that aren’t that tall, have red lights on the roof to alert planes to their presence (this being overcautious Japan, after all).  They blink slowly on and off, and the combined effect of all of them fading in and out, each at its own pace, is utterly hypnotic.

Though we were reluctant to go, eventually we took the monorail back to the mainland to go find dinner; on the way, I finally figured out which was the Rainbow Bridge, which looks like a normal suspension bridge during the day time, but is lit with a beautiful array of colors at night.  We arrived back in Shimbashi, where most of the restaurants were closed, so we went over to Shinjuku, which I had read was a younger, hipper place where things were more likely to be open during the holiday.  To our delight, this turned out to be true.  This being our last night, we decided to go all-out on dinner, and ate at an Indian restaurant (our third of the trip—we ended up eating at one per city) before going to a Turkish restaurant for appetizers.  I realize that’s a little backwards, but it worked for us.  I also got to try raki there, which is a Turkish liquor that tastes like really strong licorice; I was convinced you could sell it in America under the name “Liquorice” and it would go over well, until wrote it out just now and realized people would probably pronounce it “Liquor-rice” or “Liquor-ice” and not like “licorice,” which I’m now realizing is a really weird-looking word.  I guess that’s an even worse pun-based product than my old roommate Evan’s idea for “Jewce,” a beverage he planned to market to his Hebrew brethren.  Ah well.  The hummus, bread, and eggplant dish at the Turkish restaurant were unbelievably good, and we realized afterwards that it was actually our favorite meal of the whole trip, even though it was just appetizers.

As we got up to pay the bill for dinner #2 we realized that we weren’t tired, for once, and decided to stroll around Shinjuku for a bit.  After walking through a depressing number of seedy sex-trade-affiliated streets, we went into an enormous arcade to lift our spirits.  On the bottom floor were a number of crane games where you could win awesome prizes, such as: Ritz Crackers, Oreos, and Kit Kats.  It’s like going grocery shopping, but harder!  I’m convinced it’s how all the die-hard gamers in Japan bring up their children to be ultimate samurai videogame warriors just like them: “You want to eat, Takeshi?  Then you’d better win yourself your food!  I’m only giving you 100 yen.  You either get that box of cookies with that robot claw, or you go hungry tonight.”

We went up through a couple floors of crazy new videogames that were packed with people who seemed intent on spending all night in those seats, no matter how much yen they had to pay to stay there.  There’s even one game called Lord of Vermillion where you have to buy these cards to play, and you place them on this screen and move them around to fight stuff.  On one of the upper floors we found a corner full of 90’s games where we could kick it old school on the cheap, so we played Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, placing 3^rd and 5^th.  We rule.  (Greg, I don’t know if you remember, but we played that game once, long long ago, and I had never forgotten it.  It was as good as I remembered.)

Now we were tired—saving all those dinosaurs had taken a lot out of us—so we bid farewell to Shinjuku and went back to the hotel for the night.

1/2/10

Our last day in Japan together.  (I’d put a sad face here but I’ve made it a rule not to use emoticons in this blog.  Just use the combined power of your imagination and my helpful context clues to imagine how sad I was, like we had to do before these internets came along.)  I had called all the vegetarian restaurants listed in my guidebook the day before, and only one of them had a recorded message for callers (the rest either rang endlessly or were numbers that were no longer in service); this message said they’d reopen on the 2^nd, so that’s where we headed, all our heavy luggage in hand, after checking out of the hotel.  The place was called Crayon House, and was located in the basement of a children’s bookstore.  It was cute, but a bit disappointing, food-wise.  It was “organic” but not entirely vegetarian, and although it was a lunch buffet, there weren’t a whole lot of dishes to choose from.  It was one of those health food places that’s never going to convert the unconverted.  There’s a vegan place in New Jersey that makes my Dad swear he could be a vegan, if only he could eat there everyday.  This was not one of those places.  Our vegetarian options were: brown rice, radish soup, what we thought were noodles but turned out to be pickled vegetables, and sweet potatoes.  Only the potatoes were what I’d call “enjoyable.”

From there, since we had time to kill before Christine’s 7:30 flight, we went looking for a park to sit in; the first one we managed to find was a squalid little square consisting of dirt, dirty benches, and garbage cans overflowing with garbage.  Thinking this an unpleasant spot to spend our last few hours together, we went instead to find the famed Hachiko statue of Shibuya station, which was erected in honor of the beloved Hachiko, a dog who met his master at the train station every day after work, and continued to wait for him at the train station every day for ten years even after he had died.  It took us a long time to find the statue (located at one of the exits of the station) and I think it was partly because there were several different train lines and companies there with their own exits, in addition to a department store on the ground floor, which threw us for a loop.  Eventually we found it (and none too soon!) and got our picture taken by a friendly gaijin.

As the day was growing late, we resigned ourselves to the sad trip out to the airport via the Narita Express.  We checked in Christine’s baggage, managed to find a few souvenirs, and then had to say our goodbyes before the departure gate, which was open to ticket-holders only.  It was hard, but I didn’t cry as we hugged for the last time, knowing it would be another four and a half months before we’d be together again.  We finally let go and she walked towards the gate, and I walked a couple lonely steps back towards the down escalator, then turned around to watch her go; I watched as she moved all too quickly through the line and then disappeared around the corner, through the gate, out of sight, and that’s when it really hit me and I got all choked up.  It was going to be another long four and a half months without her.  As I got to the top of the escalators there was an Asian couple standing to the side doing the same thing; they were holding each other in what was clearly a goodbye hug, and they were still holding on by the time I was halfway down the escalator, and then could see them no longer.

Thanks for my best week here.

The ride to Kyoto was the easiest, quickest, and cheapest of our travels, due to its close proximity to Nara; it only took 45 minutes and only cost about 7 bucks (in contrast to the 2-hour, $70 trip to Nara and the 2+ hour $100+ trip to Tokyo).  When we got to the behemoth Kyoto station, for some reason the machine gave me an error when I put my ticket through it and it told me to go see an attendant, but being a busy man with important things to do (and always having the option of playing the gaijin card and pretending I didn’t know any better), I plowed through the closed flaps (the Japanese equivalent of a turnstile that doesn’t actually stop anyone from going anywhere) and never looked back.  We do what we want.

Again we managed to find our lodging—a ryokan, a Japanese-style inn—with no trouble at all.  The people inside spoke English, albeit in a weird, polite but stilted and sometimes unknowingly imperative way.  We left our bags with them, as our room wasn’t ready yet, and went off on our first and only successful adventure of the day: Kinkakuji, the Golden Pavilion.

We took a bus to the far northwest corner of town (our ryokan was in the southeast), and stopped at a bathroom just outside the entrance to the site, where Christine (to her dismay) got to see Japanese outside urinals for the first time, where Japanese men pee in full view of the public without a care in the world.  This is one of the bizarre things about Japanese society I’ve noticed: in many ways it’s considered a conservative country, and in its ancient history you weren’t even allowed to glimpse the face of the noblewomen, who were kept behind curtains, but it’s perfectly acceptable for men to pee wherever they want.  In addition to outdoor, unscreened urinals, I’ve unfortunately witnessed people peeing:

1)      on the side of the road

2)      in their front yard

3)      in some reeds by the river

4)      on the side of a building.

There was also a municipal sign in Osaka once posted on a fence on the side of the road, which said (in Japanese) “DON’T STAND AND PISS HERE,” which publicly acknowledged the Japanese male’s tendency to do so.  The statue of the “Manikin Piss Boy” (mentioned a few entries back, under Tokushima) now begins to make sense: apparently peeing on things outside is a cherished national pastime, so much so that they erected a monument to honor it.  In some ways it’s symbolic: there you have a tiny little boy, standing alone on the top of the mountain, fearlessly peeing on the great world below him, just as tiny imperialist Japan with an ego as big as the sun once tried to do, beginning with Manchuria, in the Great War.

Anyway, Kinkakuji: a splendid three-story pavilion, its upper two stories gilded with gold, overlooking a beautiful pond encircled by carefully manicured pines.  It was originally built in 1397 as the estate of a shogun, whose son converted it into a Zen Buddhist temple.  $5 bucks if you can guess what happened to it.  Email me now with your answer and don’t look ahead.  When I get back to America I’ll pay up, if you’ve gotten it right.

Okay, I’m going to write it backwards so you can’t spot it accidentally if you’re trying not to cheat but happen to glance down the page.  Erif a ni nwod denrub tI.    This one was different than other erifs, though, which had ordinarily been caused by war or lightning.  Kinkakuji was destroyed in an act of deliberate arson by a crazy bastard in 1950, who had become a monk in order to get close to Kinkakuji, which he thought to be the most beautiful thing in the world.  Then he went and ruined it.  Fortunately he died only a few years later.

The pavilion we saw was a reconstruction (just like Todaiji, Matsuyama Castle, Osaka Castle, and countless other places I’ve seen), completed in 1955, but it’s still beautiful (and is a full-scale reconstruction, unlike many others, as the building wasn’t actually that big in the first place).  The outside is covered in pure gold leaf, and it’s reflected in the pond below (called “the mirror pond” for this reason), which is a rather nice effect.  Unfortunately, you can’t go inside, but apparently it contains precious Buddhist statues, and each floor is designed in a different style.

We then took a bus to the Imperial Palace, which is in the very center of the city.  The palace grounds are rectangular, and contained within a huge rectangular park, which is itself walled off from the rest of the city.  We found the north gate to the park open, but when we walked through it to the Palace gate, we found it closed.  I had heard that you might have to make special reservations with the Imperial Household Agency early in the morning, so we went to the Agency office on the grounds and found that they had closed for the New Year holiday.  The New Year holiday is officially Jan. 1^st-Jan.3^rd, and we had heard that many things in Tokyo would be closed during that time, but we had never expected anything to be closed in Kyoto, three days before New Year’s.  Dejected but still determined to see something, I went up to the gates to the Palace enclosure and put my eye to the crack between the doors, triggering a small siren and a recorded message that said something in Japanese, probably to the effect of “STEP AWAY FROM THE PALACE DOORS, PEASANT.  CAN’T YOU READ?  WE’RE CLOSED AND WE DON’T WANT YOU SEEING THE IMPERIAL FAMILY CAVORTING NAKED ON THE FRONT LAWN AS PART OF THE ANCIENT NEW YEAR’S RITES,” but I wasn’t listening, as I was laughing too hard.

From there we walked all the way to Nijo-jo (Nijo Castle), which we were excited to see.  Christine really wanted to see a castle, and I really wanted to see this one, which had all sorts of ancient anti-ninja devices that I wanted to see after reading about them in several books about the samurai.  This too was closed!  And for some reason it was closed Dec. 26^th-Jan. 1^st, meaning it would actually be open during two of the days of the official holiday (but we wouldn’t be in Kyoto then).  AND it wasn’t as if they were closed to give all their employees a nice break, because one guy was still “working.”  Apparently it was his job to sit in a booth outside the closed castle and read newspapers.  I declared that I was going on a hunger strike until they reopened.  No one cared.  Stupid, frustrating Kyoto.

Having abandoned all hope, we went to the neighborhood of Ponto-cho, whose buildings are still traditional ones, holding out against the modern, generic, charmless blight that has engulfed the other areas of Kyoto (temples and palaces excepted).  I had read that there is no (automobile) traffic on its main street, which turned out to be true, as it’s a rather cramped alley lined with restaurants on both sides, thronged with pedestrians, leaving no room for cars, which enables it to preserve its “traditional” atmosphere.  We were starving and hoping we’d find more vegetarian options than we had in Nara.  One man trying to draw customers into a restaurant pointed out to us that they offered an English menu; we took a look at it and to our delight, they offered grilled vegetable skewers and even wheat gluten!  We decided to try it out, and the man showed us in to an empty bar, where he seated us at the counter and hung our coats up for us.  Christine and I have a habit of being the only customers at a restaurant, usually by chance, though sometimes it’s because we feel bad for the owners, so we laughed and said, “It figures.”  After we placed our order (a bunch of vegetable skewers, tofu skin [yum!], and wheat gluten [or seitan], the man said something (in Japanese) about cooking being done on the second floor, and I think something about it maybe taking awhile.  We said that was fine and he went away, only to come back a couple minutes later talking about the second floor again.  I don’t think he ever said it directly (being Japanese) but I finally got the hint that he wanted us to move to the second floor.  I have no idea why, nor do I have any idea why he sat us on the first floor when he knew from the start that we were going to order food and weren’t just there for drinks, if that is indeed what the first floor is for.  We went upstairs and discovered that it was full of people, and we were not the only customers in the restaurant, for once.  We were shown to another counter that looked like a bar, except that it just looked into the kitchen where they were preparing stuff.  We started to get bad vibes about the place, looking at the dishes that were coming out for other people, and we feared we may have been suckered into someplace trendy and overpriced.  Sure enough, when our food came out, the portions were just right for a supermodel, or perhaps a family of mice, but not for two people who’d been walking around all day.  Not even for one person who hadn’t gotten off the couch all day.  Not even for anyone over the age of two.

Our eggplant skewer consisted of one slice of eggplant; the pepper skewer—one slice of pepper; mushroom—three button-sized ones; yam—a generous two pieces.  Our order of tofu skin (which cost over $9.00) was made up of three 9-volt-battery-sized pieces of tofu.  Our order of wheat gluten (which actually tasted good) was just slightly bigger.  We cursed our stupid little meal and laughed our heads off as we made fun of it and took pictures; Asian people take pictures of meals at restaurants all the time, so we didn’t look strange, and since we were speaking English no one knew we were relentlessly grumbling and mocking the place, and our laughter made it seem like we were having the best time there.  We actually did have a lot of fun, making fun of a so-terrible-it’s-funny experience.  They garnished a few of the dishes with what looked like salad greens, and another dish with little flowers, and I ate them all out of spite, and because I was starving.  I declared that my hunger strike was still in effect, because I was still hungry.  DON’T GO TO MIDORI RESTAURANT IN KYOTO, EVER unless you’re on an extreme diet or you don’t have a lighter to simply burn your money with.

Afterwards we walked through Gion, reputedly a geisha district, though we didn’t see any.  We did get to see the outside of a Kabuki theater (which was closed for the new year), and we chanced upon Yasaka-Jinja, a shrine that was still open.  It wasn’t very shriney (or was, depending on your take on Japan), as it was filled with carnival-looking tents and stands, which were abandoned for the night but which had signs hawking various sweets from Winnie the Pooh crepes to the ubiquitous Japanese staple, fried octopus balls.  From there we decided to try our luck (silly us) at Heian Jingu, a shrine mentioned in the guidebook as containing a garden modeled after the original Imperial Palace’s (which I can only assume was consumed by fire).  Heian Jingu was closed for the night when we got there, but we did get to see its massive torii gate which spans an entire road.  That was better luck than we had had almost all day, so we were satisfied on our long walk back to a bus stop, talking about history along the way and stopping for some udon, since we were still hungry even after our dinner of galactic proportions at MIDORI RESTAURANT, where you should never go knowingly if you expect to still be my friend.

Finally we arrived back at the inn and went upstairs to our room, which was absolutely wonderful!  The wood floor was covered in tatami mats, there was a rice-paper door, a golden tokonoma (an ornamental alcove decorated in the traditional fashion with a hanging scroll and a vase of flowers), and a small round table with thin wooden, cushioned chairs.  We changed into the yukatas they provided (kind of like a kimono but much lighter and simpler), made some tea, and ate mochi we had bought on the way home.  There was something about sitting in that old-fashioned, quiet, pleasantly dim little room that made us completely content.  It more than made up for the rest of the day, which had been a bit disappointing at times.  We just stayed up for a couple of hours at that little table drinking green tea and eating more mochi than we needed to, with the biggest smiles on our faces.

12/30/09

We woke up more rested than we had expected to be; the futons we had to lay out ourselves—as is traditionally done in Japan—were surprisingly comfortable to sleep on, just as the yukatas were warmer than they appeared.  After a quick breakfast downstairs (toast for me, eggs for Christine) and a glance at The Japan Times in English (which was when we first became aware of that Nigerian’s attempted plane bombing) we struck out for a series of temples on rented bikes.  Higashi Honganji, down the street from our hotel, was large and impressive, full of goldwork, though it had a strange section that looked like an office building under construction.  Next was Toji, at the far southern end of the city, behind the train station.  Here we toured another treasure house, where we saw statues of the Twelve Guardian Kings and an assortment of Buddhas.  On our way out, we saw that the temple apparently had a pet parakeet, which sat on a perch outside when it wasn’t perched on visitors’ fingers and shoulders.  Some ladies were hogging it so we didn’t get a chance to hold it, but pressed on to the tallest pagoda in Japan, located on the temple grounds.  This one was five stories high, just like the one in Nara, but once we got close to it we realized it was indeed a lot taller.  There was also a small pool of water in a garden nearby, where I fussed for five minutes trying to get a picture of the entire pagoda reflected in the water, with the whole building still in the background; I got most of it eventually (the “lightning rod” at the top was cut off a little) and called it a day.

Wild Goose Chase #2 (or 3, if you count the second tomb search in Nara separately from the day before it): The Ruins of Rajomon.  This was marked on the map in the guidebook, so I thought we could find it easily, but wasn’t mentioned in the text anywhere.  It was spelled slightly differently than Rashomon, the gate of the Kurosawa film and the Akutagawa Ryunosuke story the movie was based on, but I figured it had to be the same thing, since the ruined gate of the story was at the entrance to ancient Kyoto (or Heiankyo, as it was then known).  On the map, it looked like it was very close to Toji, but after cycling down the street for more than a while, without seeing anything I was sure we must have passed it, or it didn’t exist.  We turned around and kept an eye out on the way back, but again saw nothing.  I think it’s possible that the city built over the area where the gate once stood (I think I remember reading something that vaguely alluded to that), in which case the map was only showing where it used to be, though it gave no indication that was the case.  A waste of time, but not as bad as the search for the Emperors’ Tombs in Nara.  Sorry, Christine.

[Note: I just took a break to do a Yahoo search to see if it was indeed the gate in the story, and found an essay by Kurosawa talking about the movie; the gate was called Rajomon from the start, but for some reason in a Noh play it was changed to Rashomon, which stuck.  Kurosawa said nothing remained of the gate except some tiles, though, which are probably in a museum, so it’s not surprising we found nothing.]

We then rode our bikes north and all the way to the east to reach Kiyomizudera, which I could tell Christine had been looking forward to.  It’s a temple set up high on the eastern hills which provides a spectacular view looking back on the rest of Kyoto (similar to the shrine we found in Nara, actually, now that I think about it—it too was on a hill located in the far eastern part of the city); in addition, there is a shrine behind it which is the home of the pair of “Love Stones” or “Blind Stones,” which are said to grant good luck in love and marriage to a person who can navigate from the first stone to the other one sixty feet away with their eyes closed, while silently repeating their lover’s name.  We had to walk our bikes up a long, crowded street to reach the foot of the temple, at which point we took a rest and ate some snacks before venturing up the stairs to the temple itself.  Kiyomizudera is brightly colored—an orange base with green and blue ornamentation—which I think gives it an Indian feel.  After taking some pictures of the temple and the city below, we headed for the shrine behind it.

There we found the Love Stones, but no one appeared to be doing the blindfolded walk, and we were hesitant to be the only ones doing it, looking like idiots.  Fortunately another white couple showed up and they got right to it, so we closed our eyes and followed behind.  We had walked for what turned out to be about eighty feet before we realized something was wrong.  “Are we there yet?”  I asked.  “I feel like we’ve gone a long way.”  We opened our eyes to find ourselves groping towards a fence, our goal already twenty feet behind us, and off to the right.  If it weren’t for that fence, we’d probably have tumbled off a cliff, muttering, “This doesn’t feel right…I wonder if we passed it?”  We tried to pretend that we weren’t superstitious, and that missing the Love Stone by a long way didn’t bother us.  “Just because we walked past a rock with our eyes closed doesn’t mean we’re going to break up,” we told ourselves.  “That’s just more poppycock invented by the Japanese, an inherently superstitious people.”  We threw some coins into various boxes in front of little altars to gods of love, “just to cover our bases.”  By this time several other people had attempted the walk (not just honkies like us) and usually one person would go with their eyes closed while someone else guided them.  Was it cheating?  It didn’t say in the guidebook you couldn’t do it.

We finally cracked and did it that way.  First I closed my eyes and Christine guided me verbally to the other stone, then we turned around and I guided her from that one back to the original.  We breathed a sigh of relief when it was over and admitted we both felt a lot better now that we’d made it.  We’re a superstitious lot, in spite of ourselves.

We walked on to what I thought was another temple, but turned out to be an ordinary building under construction with a huge drape thrown over it, on which was painted the temple we had just come from.  Bizarre.  From there, we headed back to our bikes and coasted down the steep street we had struggled up, finding it now wonderfully free of people.  We rode further north and east towards our last stop of the day: Ginkakuji, the Silver Pavilion.  All seemed right with the world, until The Man decided to give us a hard time.  Some flatfoot stopped us as we were riding down the sidewalk on our bikes, telling us that riding bikes on the sidewalk there was illegal and pointing to a sign in Japanese that said so, which I was seeing for the first time; as he was saying this we witnessed several Japanese people riding their bikes down the sidewalk on the other side of the street.  “You can walk them along,” the cop said, “but don’t ride them.”

“Where can we ride them?” I asked.

“In the street.”

“The street?  Like this?”  I pointed to the street along the curb.

“Yeah, you have to ride there with the cars.”

This seemed insanely unsafe, but I yessed him and made as if to go, but he held us up.  Apparently he was going to issue us a ticket.  He asked me my name and address and I practically spat it at him.  He stopped before I had told him the second line of my address, so I thought we were in the clear.  Then he asked Christine for hers.  “She doesn’t speak Japanese,” I told him.  “She’s Chinese.”  He then looked at me for her information.

I gave him her name.

“EH?” he said, not comprehending anything that sounds unlike Japanese.

“KU-RI-SU-CHEEN-IN-GU.”

“Aha,” he said, jotting that one down with rapidity (I had already Japanized my own name earlier).  “Address?”

“NYUU-JA-JEE-SHU” (New Jersey State).

“Aha.  Okay.”  He didn’t ask for anything more than that, and he didn’t give us anything.  I think this was the equivalent of “letting us off with a warning,” taking the information down in the event we were caught again as repeat offenders.

We rode off in the street, as close to the curb as was possible, though it was made difficult by the cars frequently parked on the side of the road.  We actually made much faster progress in the street than we had been doing on the sidewalks.  As we rode, we didn’t see any more of those signs that he had pointed out, and people were biking freely on the sidewalks everywhere.  We stayed in the road just to be safe, but I think biking on the sidewalk was only prohibited in one short stretch, where I suspect they posted the cop just to nab foreigners unfamiliar with the nonsensical rules of the city.

Fortunately, we made it to Ginkakuji just in time (4:23), barely seven minutes before they close the gates to new visitors.  It had started to rain but it was hardly even a light mist.  The Silver Pavilion is a bit smaller than its Golden counterpart, and is in fact not silver at all.  At first, we were a bit underwhelmed—in comparison to the other sights we had seen, it was a little small and drab, and its roof was undergoing repairs at the time, too, so there was a white tarp draped over a small part of it.  I told this to a gaijin friend I happened to run into there, and she was shocked, saying Ginkakuji is one of her favorite places; she blamed it partly on the cloudy weather, saying it all looks nicer when the sun’s out, especially at sunset.  She also said it looks best viewed from the hill behind it, and she was right—once we had gone through the little zen garden with its interesting sand sculptures, through the little wooded path and up the hill, we had a view of the pavilion that was really nice.  There’s something tranquil and quietly beautiful about it from up there, and it makes you glad it’s not more gaudily colored. 

It was starting to get dark, and nearing closing time so we headed back down the hill, making a pit stop at the bathrooms.  There was a helpful employee there who kindly pointed out the bathrooms to everyone coming near, in spite of the fact that we had already passed several signs pointing us that way to the bathrooms, and there was a big sign over the bathrooms saying “TOILET” with the traditional man and woman figures.  I’m beginning to suspect the reason unemployment is so low in Japan is because the powers that be have created millions of unnecessary jobs to be filled by its citizens.  [In addition to him and the guy who may as well have been sleeping in front of closed Nijo castle, every day in Kanonji I pass some sort of construction crew or another, and there are always two or more people on the crew whose job it is to keep waving pedestrians along past the construction.  Today’s example: there was one guy digging up the sidewalk with a small steamshovel, and two people with flags, one in front and one behind the spot being dug out, waving me along outside the border of the cones set up.  That’s three people on the job, and only one of them doing any necessary work.]

 It was raining a bit harder when we left, and our bike seats were wet, so we wanted to quickly find a place to eat.  Several restaurants were closed or had no vegetarian options, but as we rode we glanced in one window and spotted something that looked like a dream catcher and beads.  “Hmm…hippies…” we thought.  “There’s got to be something we can eat there.”  Our only option turned out to be a salad, but we took it.  The place was warm and cozy and had a friendly atmosphere; the menus were hand-drawn, awesome Japanese indie music was playing, and one of the busboys stopped by the table to chat for a bit and ask us to explain the English on his shirt to him.  The salad was good but not entirely filling, so we stopped at an Indian place on the way back, marking our second Indian restaurant on the trip and our second night of two dinners in Kyoto.  We are such gluttons.  We brought our bikes back to the old lady who had rented them to us, and returned to our inn for our last night of tatami mats, rice paper screens, and traditional Japanese futons.  I miss that room.

12/25/09
FINALLY!  After a lonely four months, Christine came to visit, and all was right with my world.  I met her at Okayama station on Christmas—technically, though only 23 minutes of Christmas remained by that time—and we took a train back to Sakaide, which was as far as we could get before the trains stopped running for the night.  My friend Mai was nice enough to come pick us up there at that late hour, even though she had work the next day.  When we got back to the apartment, we talked to my parents on Skype and opened some Christmas presents, and for that brief hour it actually felt like Christmas, though it was now the 26th in Japan; the earlier part of my day had been spent cleaning, practicing Japanese, and playing videogames, with nary a relative or friend in sight, so it didn’t seem much like Christmas at all.

12/26/09
The next day Christine and I went bike riding around Kanonji, where she got to see our famous sand coin.  Unfortunately, it was weirdly hazy all day, and she couldn’t see the mountains I wake up to every morning, which bring joy to my heart on my daily bike commute to work.  We went to bed early, because the next day our vacation began in earnest.

12/27/09

I think we got up at 7:00, because we had to catch a train at 8:59.  We dilly-dallied a bit and had to rush to the train station, which wasn’t easy with all the luggage we were hauling.  I took Christine’s luggage (it wasn’t too bad) and we made it there in time, to our great relief.  This was the biggest pain of all our train rides: first, the half-hour walk to the station, then three transfers before reaching Nara.  Fortunately, my IC Kaori and her brother- and mother-in-law were already waiting for us at the hotel when we arrived (with a New Year’s gift of food for us), and after we threw our stuff down in the hotel, she whisked us off to the Tenrikyo Headquarters.

There, we were given a tour by an official tour guide who spoke perfect English, having lived in America for 15 years.  I had thought it would be just a tour of the building and grounds, but it seemed he was trying to convert us along the way.  We did learn a fair amount about the tenets of Tenrikyo (and why the church was constructed the way it was) but there was definitely some proselytizing packaged into the “tour,” which I guess is natural.  Neither of us are converting, but I do like their take on reincarnation: unlike Buddhism, which sees the cycle of reincarnation as infinite suffering, Tenrikyo followers see reincarnation as a gift from the Creator, a chance to live again and again and celebrate the joy of life.

Once we left the church headquarters, Kaori took us down a shotengai (a covered shopping area lined with stores, common in all cities in Japan), where we saw a lot of shops selling religious items in addition to the usual groceries and touristy fare.  It seems there are a lot of Tenrikyo followers living in Tenri, the area of Nara that houses the church, and the neighborhood has also preserved many Japanese buildings, so it looks like it’s from the 19^th century or earlier, Kaori says.

Kaori’s brother-in-law had picked up his father and his friend by this time, and we had a conversation about the Zodiac; Kaori and I are ushi (“cows” or “oxen”), while Christine (and someone else in the car—I forget who) are tigers; 2009 was the Year of the Cow, but we were giving way to the tigers in 2010.  One of the old men in the back (I think it was her father-in-law) said he was a Snake—“Scary,” he added.  They dropped us off at Kasuga Taisha, but having already passed tame deer in the car, we couldn’t muster much interest for the shrine, and wanted to feed and pet furry woodland creatures instead.  We spotted two deer hanging out by some trees, fed them some cheerios from our trail mix, gave the shrine a quick run-through and then hurried over to the park where we had seen the huge groups of deer roaming freely.  Christine’s face was aglow the whole walk there.

We bought some shika senbei (deer crackers) and offered them to the deer, who immediately began to swarm us, some of them head-butting us and others biting at our jackets.  It was still fun feeding them, but they were rather insistent, and a little off-putting.  We got to videotape one girl running away from them, her terrified giggles echoing through the park.  I found out the stories were true: the deer do bow to you (believing you’ll feed them if they do so), which is pretty amazing.  Some of their bows look more like seizures or motor system disorders, but they do bow, especially if you hold a cracker up without giving it to them right away.  It’s really cute.

After we went through about three bundles of crackers, we walked along a street bordering the park, lined with shops on the other side, towards Todaiji.  Deer dotted this street, generally standing alone in the middle of the street, not moving.  You could reach out and pet them or take a picture with them, and they won’t care.  We thought they were more relaxed than the other deer, but if you do offer them food, they’ll start to swarm you.  If you have nothing to offer them, though, you can interact with them quite peacefully and pet them or take pictures without scaring them off, and without them expecting food in return.  It was more of an ideal experience with the deer than we had had in the park, where we spent half the time holding the biscuits overhead, out of reach, fleeing their attempts to bite at our clothing or ram their heads in our sensitive regions.

We admired the massive gate at Todaiji and the Nio inside, but seeing that it was getting dark, and knowing that Todaiji is the thing to see in Nara, we decided to put it off until the next day.  Onto our first of many miserable attempts to find vegetarian food.  Our guidebook had indicated that vegetarian food wouldn’t be hard to find in Nara, on account of the numerous temples and Buddhist fare popularized by the monks, but we failed to find any vegetarian restaurants.  There was one listed in the guidebook, but it was rather expensive, and Japanese addresses being what they are (completely unhelpful, as streets rarely have names and, if they do, these are not listed in the address), we never found it.  Instead we wandered up and down the street our hotel was on, passing from one place serving almost exclusively fish to another.  Finally we gave up and settled for the “Vegetable oil fry” we had seen offered at one restaurant we passed.

We sat at a weird hibachi table where the manager barked at me to take off my shoes, because you had to climb across Japanese cushions before you could sit down.  The food wasn’t bad: a selection of vegetables—mostly cabbage—which we ate with a separate order of rice.  Christine was also eager to try sake, which, much like the rabid deer in the park, crushed her expectations a little.  It was served warm in two little sake pitchers, and we poured for each other, Japanese-style, though she wanted to quit after the first cup.  Mustering a gambare effort, we managed to down it all, and were a little silly afterwards.  No trouble sleeping that night, especially since the hotel had exceptionally cushy beds.

12/28/09

We got up early again—I’m still proud of us for our job well done each and every morning, when we got out of bed and out the door, into the cold to see the sights that awaited us, in spite of the temptation to stay in a comfortable, warm bed and sleep for a few more hours.  This morning we headed first for nearby Kofukuji, where we brought our bikes with us up a set of stairs to the three-story pagoda (our first of many pagodas in Japan).  There were a few deer milling about, looking as if they weren’t expecting anyone to be visiting yet, as there were only one or two people walking around besides us; it felt as if the city were still asleep, and we had beaten everyone to the punch.  After admiring the pagoda, we saw an octagonal building with a matching stone lamp in front, lined up perfectly.  From there it was over to the five-story pagoda (still on the Kofukuji temple grounds), which, as we read on the sign, is the second-tallest pagoda in Japan; there used to be seven-story pagodas around, but, like everything else in Japan built before the 17^th century, they all burned down.  There was a deer who had somehow gotten himself stuck in the fenced-off area surrounding the pagoda, and he looked like he wanted out, so in spite of my fear of police castigation or divine punishment, I opened the gate (which looked like it should have been locked) and set him free.  I hope it wasn’t a sacred deer who was supposed to be kept in there, but either way, I figure Buddha would understand a kind deed done for a hapless-looking animal.

The precious artifacts of Kofukuji were stored in a treasure house, where we saw numerous statues carved by the famous Unkei and other sculptors; the most striking was a Thousand-Handed Kannon (she doesn’t really have a thousand hands, but she does have quite a few), which, though carved entirely of wood, is covered in gilded lacquer which truly makes it seem made of gold, or some other precious metal.  I wish a picture of this awe-inspiring work could accompany this description, but alas, photography was prohibited inside the treasure house.  Each of the goddess’s hands held a different object except the two top hands on each side, which were symmetrical: the uppermost hands on the right and left both held a Buddha, and the hands below them held a round object that may have been a mirror.  The other hands held numerous weapons and tools, all of which probably have some significance that escaped us, being entirely ignorant of symbolism in Buddhist art (something I must rectify with the aid of a book before I go on my pilgrimage).  It was huge, intricate, beautiful, and masterfully carved, evoking an amazed reverence (whether for the goddess, the artist, or both).

We then headed to Todaiji, the largest building in the world, and house of the Daibutsu, the world’s largest bronze Buddha.  After feeding some deer, we passed through the immense gate, which was today decorated with poop by a rather irreverent deer who stood straddling the threshold looking for a hand-out as he calmly dropped his turds all over the floor.  Beyond the gate was a long walk to another, smaller gate, set in the wall that enclosed the temple courtyard.  At the entrance to this courtyard, lined up with the doors to the temple, there was a large cauldron, where we burned incense for her Aunt Kerry and my Uncle John.  We then entered Todaiji, whose wooden roof towered high above our heads, and whose pillars dwarf the people passing through them.  Inside, we saw the Great Buddha, some 55 feet tall, sitting on his throne of lotus petals.  Flanking him were two gilded Buddhas, smaller, but still huge, and brighter than the central one, whose bronze is a bit more dull, though it has a golden back to its ornately carved throne.  These images have names I don’t remember and are probably not all called “Buddha” but, being as ignorant of Buddhist art and philosophy as I have previously mentioned, I’ll call them Buddha for the time being.  The sheer size of these statues, and the temple that housed them, was incredible, in spite of the fact that the extant Todaiji is but a 2/3rds reconstruction of the original version, which (you’ll never guess!) was destroyed in a fire.

After soaking it all in, we went out for lunch, deciding to put off the rest of the temple grounds until after we had eaten, as we were pretty hungry.  This being vegan-hating Japan, finding lunch was far more complicated than we thought it would be.  We went into a shopping center full of restaurants and decided to try to get some vegan-friendly okonomiyaki (commonly, but misleadingly, called “Japanese pizza”), since one restaurant advertised a vegetable version and said “you can make your own!”  We were welcomed in and taken to a hibachi booth (again), where we explained to the waitress what we could and could not eat.  No fish, including dashi (fish stock that they use in almost everything here), and while Christine could eat eggs, I couldn’t.  The waitress wrote it all down and seemed confident it could be done…but returned ten minutes later saying it was impossible, the chef couldn’t make it that way.  I had thought it would be the lack of egg that would be the problem, as it might affect the consistency and not make it hold together like the pancake it’s supposed to be, but no, apparently it was impossible to make the thing and not put fish broth in it.  If you can figure out why, please let me know.

So we left, dejected and still starving, and decided to try our luck at another place which offered Neapolitan spaghetti and the chance to WATCH A MODEL TRAIN while we ate our lunch!  Of course, this sounded too good to pass up, though we’d have to tell them to hold the hot dog they plopped on top of the spaghetti in the menu picture.  We stuck our head in one door to find the room devoid of people, and after a moment’s bewilderment, we decided we must be in the wrong place.  We headed out and went in a door facing that one, where we found some customers eating around the model train running through its mountainous course, as advertised.  The waitress sat us down and took our order, but after we said we didn’t want the all-you-can-drink soda buffet, we were told we’d have to go to the restaurant next door to eat.  Again, IF YOU CAN FIGURE OUT WHY, PLEASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME, because this country is seeming more arbitrary and insane by the day. 

We went back into the empty room we had walked into by mistake the first time, and sat down, waiting in puzzlement for five minutes before some lady showed up to take our order.  At this point we changed our mind and ordered the “mountain vegetable” spaghetti instead of the hot-dog-topped Neapolitan, in large part because our waitress did such a fabulous job of explaining it (this is all in Japanese, by the way, so it’s not like there was a language barrier for her): “What’s in the ‘mountain vegetable’ spaghetti?”  “Mountain vegetables.”  “Yeah, but what vegetables, exactly?”  “Mountain vegetables.”  “What kinds of vegetables?  Which vegetables?  What is a ‘mountain vegetable?’ ”  “Um… ‘MOUNTAIN VEGETABLES’… mushroom… ‘MOUNTAIN VEGETABLES…’ ”  “Okay, okay, two mountain vegetable spaghettis, please.”  When our food finally arrived, I thought maybe I could understand why she had explained it so poorly—because I couldn’t tell what the hell these things were, either.  Some of it was mushrooms; the rest was stringy green stuff I couldn’t identify, but which tasted okay.  We ate, watched the train, decided we didn’t want to pay eight dollars for the once-in-a-lifetime chance of driving the train ourselves in this bizarre, dimly-lit, customer-alienating Kafkaesque restaurant, paid our bill, and left, shaking our heads in frustrated perplexity and cursing the awfulness of the majority of Japanese eateries.

We returned to Todaiji, found we had pretty much seen everything that was open, and trekked along to a shrine that was reached via the temple courtyard.  Behind this, we climbed a hill, where we had a spectacular view of the city, with the top of Todaiji looming large in the foreground and hills in the distance, on the other side of the city, as far as the eye could see.  After taking some pictures and admiring the landscape, we followed a trail of small Buddhist statues into the woods, where we spotted some deer who had returned to their roots and were foraging for themselves, too proud to beg for handouts in the park.  We stood amongst the trees and realized it didn’t feel like we were in a city at all, which is the beauty of Old Nara; the area around the train station isn’t great-looking, but once you get out to Todaiji, the rest of Nara stretching east is all park, leading up to a forest still in its natural state.  In Kyoto, you’ll find surprisingly big temple complexes, pockets of green scenery and old traditional buildings, but outside their gates it’s all city, whereas Nara is almost divided in half, with modern on one side and traditional on the other.

On our walk back down the hill, we passed a famous Buddhist school with centuries of historical importance (closed to the public), and then circled a quiet pond on our way back towards the hotel.  Here we made the terrible decision to go off on one of my doomed quests to find something vaguely noted on a map but without a clear description in any guidebook; I thought we could find the old Emperors’ Tombs, which I had read were shaped like keyholes, and which looked like catacombs on the map drawing.  They were all the way on the other side of town, but Christine said she was up for it, so off we went on what turned out to be at least an hour of cycling across highways and then down dead-end residential streets, asking puzzled locals for directions until we finally ended up at a military complex where there was a sign pointing left for one tomb, and right for another.  We went right, and cycled around a pond with a thickly-forested island in the middle, seeing nothing that looked like a tomb anywhere.  We noticed that there was a sign on this island, but it was way too far away for human eyes to read.  There was nothing on our side of the water indicating anything.  Finally, after looking at the map over and over again, and circling the pond to no avail, we realized the tomb was the island itself.  Supposedly one of the first Emperors was buried there, though modern scholars believe he is a completely fictional character.  We then decided to try our luck going left at the fork of the military base, only to discover the same thing on the other side.  Another “tomb” island with a moat surrounding it, and it didn’t look like a keyhole at all (or a tomb, for that matter).  Tired, hungry, and a little frustrated (but still in good spirits, even laughing at our wild goose chase), we headed back towards the center of town for dinner.  In a shopping area we found a group of restaurants, one of which claimed to be an organic place with lots of vegetable dishes.  Elated, thinking we’d finally found the vegetarian food we’d been awaiting, we headed for it, only to find nothing but pictures of fish on the outside menu.  “Screw it,” we said.  “There’s an Indian place right over there.”  Little did we know that this would be the first of many times we would utter these words.  We ate some fine Indian food, vegetarian-friendly, as all Indian places are, then grabbed some snacks for the hotel room at a grocery store on the way home.  It was either this night or the night before that Christine fell asleep early (surprise!) and I stayed up watching some movie about a kid’s turtle from outer space that turned into a giant Godzilla-sized turtle to fight off the Godzilla-sized evil monster and save the city.  I cried at the end.

12/29/09

We got up early, knowing we had to get on a train for Kyoto, but seeing as we still had a few hours free, we decided to go out and see one last thing in Nara.  If you can believe it, it was another Emperor’s Tomb.  This one was right next to the hotel (according to the map), and this one definitely looked like a keyhole (on the map).  After asking the hotel clerk for directions, which I completely didn’t understand (they were in Japanese, a language I find I still have difficulty with), we ventured boldly forth to find the tomb, with only our map, our wits, and the one thing I gleaned from his Japanese directions, that at some point we would have to “turn right and go straight.”  We headed right after exiting the hotel, then made another right, after I tried to read a Japanese sign and gathered that it said something about an emperor and a tomb.  This was indeed right next to our hotel, but we had to walk through what looked like a construction zone to arrive at a locked fence surrounding…something—we couldn’t say what, exactly.  There was a shrine next to it, but we couldn’t reach it from where we stood, on account of several fences.  We circled the block, stumbling eventually upon a different shrine which contained a regular cemetery but certainly no tomb that belonged to an emperor, nor anything that looked like a keyhole.  We went down various tiny streets and eventually asked someone for directions, but as usual, I didn’t totally understand them.  There were a couple of other temples and shrines we somehow bumbled into, but none of them were the right place.  Finally we found ourselves next to the hotel again, where I took another look at that sign and determined that yes, it was definitely saying something about Emperor Kaika’s Tomb.  It must be beyond that locked fence, we thought.  We approached it again and though we couldn’t see much of anything inside, it finally dawned on us that the trees growing up within it were suspiciously isolated, just like the forested “tombs” surrounded by moats that we had seen the day before.  This was apparently Emperor Kaika’s tomb, which was again inaccessible, looked nothing like a keyhole from where we stood, and nothing like a tomb, either.  Stupid fake emperors and their stupid fake tombs.  Since we still had time to kill, and we had wasted this much time already on our wild tomb chases, we took an elevator up to the seventh floor of our hotel, hoping a view from above would show that it did indeed look like a keyhole from up there.  The seventh floor was a restaurant—locked, naturally, so we couldn’t get to a window to test our hypothesis.  And so it was down a floor to the sixth, where we finally got to a window and found that maybe it would look like a keyhole, if you could see the whole thing, but we couldn’t—we could see only the vague beginnings of the lower left corner, if anything.  And a whole bunch of trees.

Laughing at ourselves once again, we left for Kyoto.  If I appear to have complained a lot about Nara, know that afterwards we laughed about everything that went wrong, and Nara was actually our favorite city of the three.  Aside from the tombs debacle, I had done a fairly good job of navigating and we got to see all the things we wanted to see.  We also got to play with deer that were coexisting peacefully with humans, something you can’t really see anywhere else (except the island of Miyajima, and the deer there don’t bow), and which made Old Nara feel like some idyllic paradise, a small slice of Japanese Eden.

I’ve just finished posting on Facebook pictures that had been languishing on my computer for a while, as well as more recent pictures from my vacation with Christine over winter break.

You can view the albums here without being a member of Facebook.

In chronological order, they are:

Long Overdue Photos of Japan - http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2123370&id=24800641&l=653bdb65da

More Overdue Photos of Japan - http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2126538&id=24800641&l=1adca9642d

Osaka - http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2126542&id=24800641&l=be294ee25a

Engrish - http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2126543&id=24800641&l=1d94d315a3

Overdue part 3 - http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2126545&id=24800641&l=23bbef2a7d

Last Batch of Overdue Photos - http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2126667&id=24800641&l=f12a745b90

Christmas Cards for Nathan Elfrink, and My First Snowfall in Japan - http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2126668&id=24800641&l=2ab1b7e300

Christmas Break: Kanonji - http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2126671&id=24800641&l=5b1770c047

Christmas Break: Nara - http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2126673&id=24800641&l=85e062502a

Christmas Break: Kyoto - http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2126750&id=24800641&l=8eb93b540b

Christmas Break: Tokyo - http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2126754&id=24800641&l=3ed1283489

A summary of our travels will be up soon.

Tokushima Part 4 (Final)

Tokushima Valley Part 3 (The amazing stop on the side of the road)

Tokushima Part 2 (Iya Valley Vine Bridge)

Tokushima Part 1 (I had the picture quality set high on my camera so I can only upload a few pictures at a time due to size restrictions)