Final thoughts on Japan

As I write this I’m comfortably ensconced in the living room of friends in San Jose, California, jetlagged but conscious. This is after a Day 346 in which I packed up in Tokyo and then visited a museum and an electronics megastore, had more conveyor belt sushi, took the train to the airport, flew overnight from Tokyo to Vancouver, crossed the International Date Line, had coffee with Rob H and Steven G in the Vancouver airport, flew from Vancouver to San Francisco, got picked up and driven to San Jose, napped, and went out for dinner before collapsing into bed at 10:00pm after the longest Wednesday of my life. I’ve got a few days here in the San Francisco area, then it’s home to Winnipeg on Day 351. So the Fat Lady is certainly warming up in the wings, but it ain’t over yet.

There’s still a lot to say about Japan. For instance, I haven’t really talked about the language at all. I found it a much easier to pick up than any of the other Asian languages, mostly because it doesn’t have those maddening tones that make proper pronunciation so difficult. The script, on the other hand, actually employs three different systems all mushed together. Kanji are the borrowed Chinese ideographs that represent whole words or concepts; it’s generally agreed you need to know about 2,000 of these to be considered literate. Hirigana are symbols that are building blocks to forming larger words; they’re complete syllables like ka, sha, ti, tsu, cha, and so on. There are 46 of those. And then there’s katakana, which represent the same syllables as hirigana, but are used for words borrowed from other languages, mostly English. If my name were to be rendered in Japanese it would be done using katakana and would come out something like Pa-me-ra: パ メ ラ. I think this is why the Japanese have such trouble with R and L. There is no L sound in Japanese so R is used as a substitute when they adopt words from other languages that use the L sound. So naturally they have trouble pronouncing L sounds to begin with, and they have trouble remembering when to use R and when to use L when speaking in English). Some excellent Japanified words that would use katakana are things like: “wa-ru-do kap-pu” and “to-ra-be-raz chek-ku”. See if you can figure out what those are.*

And did I mention that there is always a free, clean public toilet around when you need one? Like the vending machines, just when the urge swims into your consciousness, you look up and there they are. And you know how I’ve complained a few times about countries where no one can ever give you change for a large bill? In Japan, vending machines will all take ¥100 notes (that’s a $10 bill) and the local 7-11 won’t bat an eye if you give them a ¥1,000 note for a bottle of water.

Speaking of vending machines, how about some fun vending machine food? I never found any really weird stuff in vending machines, though you can get hot cans in coffee and tea in many. And I did run into these things in a machine in Kyoto, and subsequently saw them in convenience stores too. I couldn’t help but think of soylent green when I saw the package, but it turned out just to be dull and dry chocolately flavoured cookie sticks.

Soylent Yellow

How about a weird drink to wash down your “balanced food block”? Believe me, you’ll need it. Well you could do worse than a refreshing bottle of squid juice! Actually it’s hard to imagine a worse concoction than squid juice, but luckily this turned out to be surprisingly tame.

Nicely chilled and ready to drink!

The most interesting thing turned out to be the bottle. It was sealed with a glass ball stuck in the top of the neck. To open the bottle you pull off the plastic cap and peel it apart to turn it into a sort of plunger. Then you put the plunger on top of the ball and smack it with your hand. This forces the glass ball down into the wide part of the neck of the bottle and lets the beverage flow around it. Apparently it’s very retro. And what does carbonated squid juice taste like? Cream soda. No, really. I think the squid ink was only used for colouring because it really just tasted like cream soda. Phew. Talk about dodging a bullet.

And I have to show you this short video I took on my first night in Tokyo, as I was wandering through the Akihabara area. It's... well, it's kind of a car vending machine:

Now, back to some sightseeing. I mentioned in the last post that I’d hoped to get out to the Hakone area, and I actually managed to do that on my last day in Japan when it finally stopped raining. Hakone turned out to be a bit of a bust, but that wasn’t due to the scenery, it was simply because I was trying to fit two days worth of sightseeing into about six hours. First I made my way by bullet train to the city of Odawara. There’s a castle there, and since I hadn’t seen any Japanese castles yet I figured it was worth a stop. It was, but only barely. The original castle dates back to the 15th century, but was demolished in 1872 by order of the Meiji government. The current castle was rebuilt in 1960 and though it’s pretty on the outside the inside is fairly modern looking and filled with case after case of only mildly diverting artifacts. At least they had the decency to build it a short walk from the train station.

The donjon (keep) of Odawara Castle

After hopping onto a slow local train in Odawara, I made it to Hakone-Yumoto, where the wacky transport starts. First is the switchback train, an antique two carriage affair that chugs up the side of a mountain using three switchbacks with a maximum grade of about 8%. They're a bit startling at first, those switchbacks, because the train pulls into a station and then pulls right out again back in the direction it just arrived from. Of course it switches to another track as it’s leaving, but it’s still disconcerting the first few times it happens.

Insufferably arty shot taken on the switchback train

After 45 minutes the train drops you off at the base of the funicular line, which climbs up Mount Soun-zan and deposits you at the cable car station. The cable car then travels over a remarkably blighted valley that looks like a strip-mining operation but is actually a sort of geologically unstable area over a volcanic rift.

A look at the rift, including the operations that are attempting to stop the mountain from continuing to slide away

The volcano is called Owakudani, and at the top there’s a short but smelly walk to view the sulfurous steam bubbling out of milky white pools of water. After Owakaduni it’s possible to take another cable car to the top of Togendai and then visit Ashino-ko Lake where they have tourist boats that are purported to look like something out of “Pirates of the Caribbean”. Unfortunately my schedule meant that I only had time for a quick hike around the windy, stinky slopes of Owakaduni before I had to start retracing my steps back all the way back to Tokyo. I did, however, find the time to indulge in the volcano’s famous weird food: black eggs! These are plain eggs that are boiled in the sulphurous water of the volcano, which causes a checmical reaction that turns the egg’s shell totally black. The legend is that consuming one will add seven years to your life. They’re sold in packs of five (35 years) for ¥500, and EVERYONE tries them while they’re at the top. So many hard boiled eggs have been consumed in the area that in places it looked like the ground was paved in tiny shards of broken eggshell.

Black on the outside, but plain old white on the inside. They tasted like… boiled eggs. The taste could not hold a candle to the eggs-on-a-stick.

I had to rush back to Tokyo because that evening I was having dinner with Paul and Takako, the dynamic duo who smoothed the way for me the whole time I was in Japan. For their grand finale they invited me over for supper and whipped up a Japanese feast of roll-your-own sushi cones and takoyaki. Takoyaki (literally meaning fried or baked octopus) is a party food that I first saw at the food fair on the temple grounds during Aoi Matsuri in Kyoto, though I didn’t know what it was at the time. And what is/are takoykai? They’re bite-sized fried dumpling sort of things with a chunk of octopus in them, and with tempura bits, pickled ginger, and green onion. At fairs the vendors make them in huge cast-iron grills, but at home people have special little electric tabletop versions. They’re yummy, and get topped with mayonnaise, okonomiyaki sauce, flakes of nori (seaweed) and katsuobushi, which are micro-thin shavings of dried fish that wave like a living thing when the heat from the takoyaki rises past them. It’s fun and tasty.

Paul and Takako, tending to the tokoyaki, with partially devoured plate of assorted raw fish in the bottom right. (My new favourite is hotate – raw scallops. They are soooo yummy.)

And after dinner Paul gave me a ride back to my hotel on the back of his motorcycle. He’d picked me up by the same mode, and I loved having a chance to see Tokyo that way. You get a much better view from a bike than you do from a car. After dinner we took the scenic route through Shibuya crossing, which is lit up like Christmas at night.

More video! This is us pulling up to Shibuya crossing just before the pedestrians start their massed scramble through the intersection.

We also went through a few back streets in Shibuya, and I got to see some of the famous “love hotels”. The entrances are shielded from view so you can’t be seen entering or leaving, and they all had signs outside advertising the “rest” rate (just a few hours) and the “stay” rate (overnight). Paul told me he’d read a statistic that said the average stay in one of these places was 45 minutes. That’s the average, which means half of the people who come must stay for less than that... We also drove past the Tokyo tower, and over into Odaiba for a look at the bizarre Fuji TV headquarters “Death Star” building. It was a great ride, and a perfect way to end my last night in Tokyo.

Tokyo Tower. Nine metres taller than the one in Paris on which it was based.

On my last morning in town I finally made it to the tiny Shitimatchi Museum, which was conveniently located next to the train station I needed for the trip to the airport. I stuffed my big bag in a locker at the station (there are always lockers at stations) and went to check it out. It was great – charming and compact, and offering a free English guide service that I took advantage of. The museum is dedicated to showcasing a tiny bit of the Edo period Shitimatchi area, a work-a-day neighbourhood of shops and tenements. The whole main floor was not much bigger than an average Starbucks, and had a recreated tenement house on one side and a recreated shop on the other. The second floor had some fun games and toys you could try and a few interesting displays. My guide was a friendly woman who showed me around for 30 or 40 minutes and when I turned to leave the woman at the front desk stopped me and pulled something out from behind the counter. As she offered it to me she said, “Present”. It turned out to be an amazing bit of origami – an octagonal box with a perfectly-fitting lid that appears to use no fewer than sixteen separate pieces of paper. I have no idea why she gave it to me, but I was blown away. What a great way to end my time in Japan.

My good bye gift from Japan

Yep, Japan was charming right to the end. For instance, on the train I took out to the airport they switch the orientation of the seats at each end station so that they’re always facing in the direction of travel. That’s nothing special; the shinkansen clean-up crews that descend on the train at terminal stations go through each car and spin the seats by unlocking them with a foot pedal and swinging them around. However the Keisei Skyliner to Narita Airport did this all automatically. I looked over as I was waiting for the train doors to open and saw all the seats in the car spontaneously spin themselves around. I love Japan.

And now I’m in America for continent number 4, country number 33, and bed number 158. In a few days my long journey will be over, but don’t despair. I’ve still got a few things on my mind so you’ll have to endure some more of my long-winded ramblings before we can finally put this thing to bed.

* “Wa-ru-do kap-pu” is World Cup. “To-ra-be-raz chek-ku” are traveler’s cheques. I love that.

Two Rainy Days in Tokyo

I had a spell of wet weather while in Tokyo, but I tried not to let it get in the way of things. On Sunday I met up with ever-helpful Paul and Takako and they gave me a quick tour of the area around Shibuya. Shibuya Crossing is, as Paul describes it, the picture postcard shot of Tokyo: tall buildings covered in video screens, traffic, the world’s busiest Starbucks, and a timed surge of humanity every few minutes when the whole intersection is given over to pedestrians as a giant scramble corner. (People in Saskatoon: remember those?)

Shibuya Crossing, through dirty window, in the rain

I also got a picture of me at the statue of Hachiko, the little dog whose story is essentially that of Greyfriars Bobby from way back in Edinburgh: faithful hound who came to Shibuya station every day to await the arrival of his master and continued to do so after his master’s death, until his own death 11 years later. The statue is famous, and I hear the dog himself is preserved through the miracle of taxidermy at the National Museum.

Me and Hachiko, in the rain

Paul and Takako and I wandered around the area a bit, and they gave me the Coles Notes version on lots of different odd Japan things that we happened on, like game parlours (as distinct from pachinko parlours). The game parlours seem to be filled almost entirely with variations on the old “claw” machines where you try to pluck, nudge or otherwise persuade some article inside the case to drop into the chute below where you then claim it. There were the mandatory stuffed animals of all descriptions, but there were also silvery sort of briefcase things with skull-and-crossbones motifs, and in Kyoto I even stuff like boxes of Ritz crackers and bags of cookies in these machine, which seems like a really cumbersome way of doing your grocery shopping.

And there was the Taiko Hero game! Actually, I don’t know what it was really called. I call it Taiko Hero because it was just like Guitar Hero, but with Taiko drums. There were two drums in front of the machine and you had to bang away at them in sequence with the dots that scrolled past on the screen. Red dot meant bang the drum. Blue dot meant whack the edge. BIG red dot meant whack the drum really hard. And yellow seemed to mean go nuts on the drum for the duration of the dots.

Me and Takako (hidden behind me), in a head to head Taiko Hero duel, seeking refuge from the rain.

I’m proud to report that even though Takako is Japanese and hence must have an inborn cultural advantage, and despite the fact that for half the game I thought that blue dot meant whack the SIDE of the drum, not the edge, it still ended up being Canada 55,570 - Japan 43,370. The Maple Leaf forever!

After that vigorous session of taiko drumming we visited a store called Tokyu Hands, which was one of a chain of enormous crafty-ish stores that carried a little bit of everything. There were seven floors and they stocked pet and garden supplies, knitting stuff, sewing notions, fancy stationery, ordinary stationery, games, puzzles, cell phone accessories and ornaments, kitchen, bath and linen supplies, luggage, rubber stamps, stickers, foot care products, tools, building materials, Father’s Day gifts, travel gadgets, and on and on and on. It was a bit overwhelming, but at least it was out of the rain, and I was able to pick up a gift and some origami paper.

Eventually we made our way up to Harajuku, an area that’s normally famous for the cos-play people that come out on the weekends to strut their stuff in weird and wonderful costumes. However, did I mention it was raining? Well the cos-play gangs don’t tend to come out when it’s wet, for fear of matting their fun-fur or streaking their hair dye or something, so there wasn’t much living scenery that day. We did have fun poking around a ¥100 Shop (Japanese dollar store) and then Paul and Takako delivered me, on time, to my next appointment of the day. I tell you, I’m a freakin’ social butterfly in Tokyo.

This appointment was a GSRED first. For the first time I was to meet someone who knew me only through the blog. Charles found GSRED through a link at the Tom Bihn site (the company that makes the Aeronaut, the bag I’ve carried around the world, and to which I have referred many times). He wasn’t related to me, or a friend, or someone who’d been referred to the blog by one of those two classes of people, and those are the only three kinds of readers that I’ve really considered might exist. So when Charles sent me an email saying that he’d been reading the blog and lived in Japan and would be happy to help me out with Japan stuff if I needed it, or even just go for a coffee or beer, I figured I should take him up on that.

I’ll admit I was a bit nervous because you really never know when someone is going to turn out to be a mouth-breathing, cyber-stalking freak. But then I realized that I’d just spent the better part of a year meeting and drinking beer with total strangers, so there was no reason I should exclude this guy just because he’d been taken the trouble to read my blog, and apparently liked it. Actually, the fact that he likes the blog is a sign of great intelligence and discernment. You should all give yourselves a pat on the back for being such a high-brow crowd.

And of course it all turned out fine. Great, in fact. We got along right away and spent most of the afternoon hanging around chatting. Charles is a teacher from the States who’s lived in Japan long enough to be fluent in the language and, I think, to call it home. He had a lot of interesting stuff to relate about life in Japan, and about his travels (the Galapagos Islands! Cool!). We talked about my travels too, and what it feels like now that they’re almost over. (Unreal. Sad. A relief.) Most people who hear about my trip ask me what my favourite place was, but Charles asked me something no one else has asked yet: “If you could go back to one place before your trip was over, just for a short while, where would you go?” (Ireland. I missed too much there. Like pretty much the whole country). And I told him something weird that I realized recently: I can’t remember what my socks look like. Not the ones I’m wearing, obviously. I mean the dozen or so pairs of non-traveling, non-quick-dry, normal, everyday socks that are waiting for me in a suitcase in Winnipeg. This was an oddly disorienting realization.

We talked over coffee and then over lunch, and Charles took me to a big bookstore with a large selection of English books. This was lucky because my latest disposable paperback was almost finished and I needed something to tide me over until I got back to English-land. It all ended up being a great afternoon, and I feel like I met a good friend. Thanks for not turning out to be an axe murderer, Charles!

Me and Charles, in front of Shinjuku Station, the busiest train station in the world, in the rain.

On Monday I’d hoped to spend the day outside Tokyo in the Hakone region, which is full of nice scenery and wacky forms of transport like switchback railways, funiculars, cable cars and cruise boats that look like Disney pirate ships. But that kind of thing is no fun in the rain so instead I decided to stick around Tokyo. My first stop was to be the famous tuna auction at the Tsujiki fish market, where ten thousand dollar fish are auctioned off at an ungodly hour every morning. It’s supposed to be fascinating, and the sashimi is as fresh as it comes. But if you’re plugged in to the Tokyo tourist scene at all you know that the tuna auction has been closed to tourists, off and on, for months. Apparently the crowds got a bit out of control and some particularly gormless and half-witted tourists actually got in the way of the buyers while trying to pose for photos, and some even touched the fish, so you really can’t blame the Tsujiki people for being touchy about things.

They’ve now decided to limit the number of people allowed to view the auction every day and restrict them to a particular viewing area, so you have to get in early to get a spot. Very, very, very, very early. The auction starts at 5:00 am, so I got up at 4:00 and got a cab (because of course the subway does not run at that hour). When I got there it was immediately obvious that what the LP said was true. This is not a place for tourists. This was an enormous, working fish market with big trucks everywhere and zillions of foam coolers full of every imaginable species of fish and little motorized carts zooming all over. I was trying very hard to stay out of the way of those little carts, but then one of them pulled right up to me and the driver turned around and told me to hop on! The guy was incredibly friendly and zipped me right through the whole warehouse kind of place to where the tuna auction is held, at the back. It was really really cool.

In fact, it was by far the coolest part of the morning, because I quickly found out that the spaces to see the tuna auction were all full. And then there was a Japanese security guard type guy with a hat and a walkie-talkie who seemed to be telling everyone that the whole area was closed and could we all please bugger off. And then there was a huge lineup of people at the place I assumed to be the sushi shop. It was at this point that I decided to give up and start my day over. So I legged it to the nearest metro station (which was running by this time), went back to my hotel, and went back to bed. I didn’t even get any photos. It was a total bust.

When my day started for the second time it was still raining, but I was much happier. I spent a pleasant, slow afternoon doing a bit of souvenir shopping in the Asakusa area, near the famous Asahi Brewery. I say it’s famous, but really I think it’s only notable for the gigantic golden statue of a sperm on the top of the building.

Well what do YOU think it looks like? (… in the rain)

That night I had weird food, and then suddenly it was my last full day overseas. More on that in another post, along with as many random observations about Japan as I can remember and make worth reading about. For now let’s leave me content but damp after two days of rain.

Steve’s Weird Food for Japan: the trifecta

There has been a lot of weird food in Japan. In particular, I’ve been a bit obsessed with the amount of matcha-flavoured stuff I’ve encountered. Astute GSRED readers will remember that matcha is the particular type of powdered green tea used in the tea ceremony, and for some reason it’s a popular flavour that gets added to, well, just about anything. Pretty much any food you encounter has a matcha variety, identified by a particular shade of green packaging, and a particular shade of green food. Let’s have a look:

Matcha-flavoured cheesecake. This was the only “matcha” food I had that actually had any matcha flavour at all, due to the fact that I think it was sprinkled with real powdered matcha. This gives a decidedly bitter topnote to an otherwise pleasant cheesecake.

Matcha Kit Kat. I love this. It’s a Kit Kat, but it’s GREEN. Tasted just like it was covered in white chocolate - no matcha flavour, just generalized creamy sweetness. (I also saw banana flavoured Kit Kats, and heard they have strawberry as well.)

Matcha Oreo Cookie Candy Bar. Green crunchy oreo stuff.

Matcha Balls. Little crispy sweet balls covered in the ubiquitous green creamy coating.

Matcha and black bean donut. Again, no matcha flavour, just a cake donut that happened to be green, and studded with things that look like chocolate chips, but are actually beans. The fact that Asian cultures persist in the belief that beans are a dessert food is weird.

Matcha chocolate chip cookies. Again, chocolate chip cookies… but they’re GREEN.

Matcha mousse. Lovely, creamy, and with the faintest hint of matcha.

Matcha caramels. The weirdest of the lot. They are presented in tiny flat cellophane wrappers that you peel open like those Listerine breath-freshener sheets you stick on the back of your tongue. This reveals a square of very squishy goo that you pop into your mouth. It’s definitely caramel, but there may have been a vague note of matcha too. But really, shapeless green goo? That has to qualify as weird food.

But that’s not the weirdest food I had; that honour goes to a meal I ate in Tokyo on my second-last night there. I got some advice from the very friendly guy at the hotel desk and headed out to a local place that turned out to be quite fancy, though surprisingly reasonably priced. (This was mostly in comparison with the tempura meal I had the night before which, while pleasant and tasty, clocked in at a budget-busting ¥8778. More than $90. Ouch!). And when I opened the menu I saw right away that I was going to be able to make this a Weird Food trifecta – starter, main course and dessert. How could I not?

My started was based on an ingredient called yuba, which is soy milk skin. The LP says, “Its creation is a labour-intensive process in which soy milk is allowed to curdle over a low heat and then the skin is plucked from the surface.” Yes, first they curdle the milk, and then the nasty skin that forms on the surface? The bit you’d normally skim off the top and throw out? That’s the bit they keep. However, the way I had it prepared it was really nice. The menu described it as “baked fresh yuba and cheese”. It came in a very hot little dish, bubbling away, with small pieces of toasted baguette on which to spread it, and it was really nice. Creamy, a bit cheesy, and with no trace of skin-ish-ness.

Baked yuba and cheese

The main course was the real centerpiece – that which I’d specifically sought out as the Weird Food of the night. The Japanese call it basashi, but the English speaking world would describe it as raw horse meat. It’s a real delicacy, served sashimi-style with slabs of fat and a light dipping sauce.

It’s a delicacy, I’m telling you

The basashi was, well, sort of like you’d expect any raw red meat to be. It was chewy and a bit stringy, and the bits of fat between were tough (not like a melting lardy kind of thing). There wasn’t any strong flavour at all. I tried a few of the pieces of fat along with the meat, but decided it was better on its own. Better being a very very relative term here, sort of like you might describe the third season of “Heroes” as better than a boot to the head. Truthfully, it wasn’t bad. It wasn’t really… anything, which makes me think I’ve been doing this for too long.

On to dessert, and we’re back to that bean thing again. My choice was “yam pancake with sweet bean jam and ice cream”. Among the other choices was black bean ice cream. I’m telling you, this place was a Weird Food gimme.

Dessert

It was very nice, though I still can’t get over the sweet bean thing. The flavour is sweet, but the texture is… bean. I suppose it’s not miles from carrot cake, or candied yams. Entirely cultural, I’m sure.

And to top it all off I had to try a glass of sake, which turned out to be much much bigger than I expected. The “small” glass I had was 180 somethings, mililitres, I guess. It seemed like a lot, and it was poured right at the table. The glass was set and then carefully centred in a large wooden coaster with a high lip. Then the glass was filled. And I mean filled, until the sake reached the rim. I was impossible to lift it without spilling, hence the heavy-duty coaster. It was nice enough, but by the time I got through the whole glass I was ready for bed. After all, I’d had soy milk skin, raw horse, and bean jam. What else could I do that day to top that?

Bed time

The Big Mikan

I’m told that’s the nickname English speakers use for Tokyo - The Big Mikan. (Mikan means mandarin orange). So I’m here in the big city, the last overseas stop in a string of stops so long that people’s eyes glaze over when I’m asked to list them. And I’ve checked in to my last hotel room. The hotel room I’m in now, however, was not the first place I stayed in Tokyo. I decided that one of the things I needed to do in Japan was to stay in a capsule hotel, so I booked into a place at Asakusa (not to be confused with Akasaka…) and checked in when I got off the train from Takayama.

I’ll admit I had some preconceived notions about what the capsule hotel would be like. I imagined floor after floor of spotless, space-age capsules arranged with same-floor access to pleasant common areas and with communal toilets, showers and a bath close by. The capsules would be small but cozy, with tv, alarm clock, power outlets and maybe even internet. Spacious lockers would secure my belongings right next to my capsule. It would all be clean, efficient, aesthetically pleasing, and display one or two unforeseen but brilliant little bits of hospitality or technology, like sliding doors that would automatically open and close to seal off the capsule, making a whooshing Star Trek noise when they did. This is Japan, after all, I’ve come to expect nothing less.

Not surprisingly, I was mostly wrong. The capsule hotel I stayed in did have rooms spread over many floors, but it shared those floors with a bunch of other things. The place was generally run down, and the services were scattered all over. My capsule, #8021, was on the 8th floor, and shared the room with 23 others. There were toilets and sinks in the next room. Lockers were there too, but were awkwardly shaped, like interlocking Ls, I suppose to allow you to hang up clothing in the tall part. Large bags had to be left unsecured, or put in pay-as-you-go lockers on the 2nd floor. Luckily I was able to rearrange things to be able to fit everything important into my locker, but it was a bit of a pain.

The weird-shaped lockers

There was a communal bath on the 9th floor, divided between men and women. The only showers were the ones next to the bath. They’re a particular sit-down type that you find at onsen all over Japan. And because I happened to have my camera with me when I was investigating, and there was no one using the place at the time, you get to have a look. You’d normally use these shower stations to wash yourself thoroughly before getting in the bath. I I’m used to having a shower in my room at other times, so maybe this is what communal showers are always like in Japan.

The sit-down showers

And just because I can, here’s a look at the bath. It’s much more utilitarian than the ones I’ve had in nicer hotels.

There was wifi internet, but it was on the 2nd floor, along with a tv and a bit of a lounge area. The 9th floor had laundry machines, the baths, and a reasonable view over the river. And once I got over my initial disappointment at the decidedly non-Flash Gordon-like atmosphere, I realized that it did indeed have everything I needed. If I thought about it as a hostel with slightly more private bunks, then it all seemed pretty reasonable. And for ¥3,240 per night in Tokyo, you can’t really argue.

And the capsule itself? It was about 1 metre x 1 metre x 2 metres (one tatami mat), and had a very 1960s moulded plastic kind of flair. It did have a tv, though I didn’t bother with that because, like lots of TVs in hotel rooms in Japan, it had an impenetrable vending machine pay card system for viewing any channels other than those showing Japanese game shows. It also had a digital clock and a small shelf and a light with a dimmer switch. The opening could be covered with a rolling blind, and once I was ensconced for the night, it was pretty comfortable and cozy.

The capsules

All in all, the capsule hotel wasn’t bad, but I was very happy to move to my “real” hotel the next day. It has a full-sized bed, desk, internet, balcony and a very very small kitchenette. It’s my last hotel room of the trip, and it is certainly worthy of that honour.

Once I’d safely moved hotels, it was time to actually see something of Tokyo. My first stop was the Edo museum, which was really excellent, giving a great overview of the history of Tokyo (which used to be called Edo) during some of the most interesting periods. Better still was the guide service that was offered. The LP indicated that English guides were available, and signage at the museum seemed to confirm this, so I presented myself at the guide desk and expected to be given a pamphlet, or, at best, an audio player. Instead, I was presented with a perky Japanese woman who was my personal guide for the next hour and a half. It was an outstanding service – all volunteer, and totally free. She took me through most of the displays, explaining things I wouldn’t have understood on my own, and even took a photo.

Me in a traveling palanquin sort of thing

I spent a very happy morning at the museum, had lunch, and then went back for a bit to see some of the exhibits I didn’t have time for with my guide. Then it was time for the other big event of the day, and when I say big, I mean BIG:

SUMO!

I was lucky enough to be in Tokyo during one the three grand sumo tournaments held each year, and when I realized this, and found out that I could get a walk-up ticket on Friday morning, I was there in a flash. (Well, actually I was there after a frustrating ride on the Tokyo subway, more on that later). The ticket was ¥2,100 for an all-day seat anywhere in the very last row of the very top balcony. The nice thing is that most of the people who attend these tournaments only come for the later matches of the day when the highest-ranked wrestlers are competing. This means that lots of good seats stay empty during the afternoon so it’s quite normal to camp out in a better seat than you’ve bought until someone with a real claim to it comes along. And that’s just what I did.

Sumo is fascinating, partly because it’s full of tradition. The matches take place in a ring called the dohyo, which is made out of straw rice bags arranged in a circle and then mostly covered with clay and dirt so that only a slight ridge is exposed. A new dohyo is constructed for each tournament. The one at the national sumo stadium also has a large roof structure suspended over the dohyo, meant to resemble a Shinto shrine. The rules of sumo are simple enough, the bout is one by the first rikishi (wrestler) who either forces his opponent to step out of the ring, or to touch any part of the dohyo with any part of his body other than the soles of his feet. Sometimes matches are over in seconds, sometimes they last a minute or two. Interestingly, there are no weight classes in sumo, so a small guy can be put up against a monstrous mountain of flesh, and that’s just his tough luck. These are the kind of matches the crowd really gets behind, but they usually end up the way you’d expect, with the little guy tossed out in short order.

What takes the most time is all the ceremony and posturing that goes on before the bout starts. There’s a lot of pomp involved, including the ceremonial arrival of the fighters in each division at the beginning of their day’s session. They parade in wearing nothing but their mawashi (the loin cloth/waist band thingy you’ve all seen) and an elaborate and colourful silk apron with rich embroidery and fringe (costing up to ¥500,000). And each bout is preceded by the sing-song announcement of each fighter’s name, performed by a specific person. There’s also lot of symbolic and aggressive posturing by the rikishi who, at the highest levels, are allowed to spend up to four minutes preparing for the match by getting set into the crouch position, glaring at each other, and then walking back to their corners for more ritual cleansing, scattering of salt in the ring, and general gamesmanship. This just gets everyone – the fighters and the crowd – more and more worked up before the initial clash.

And lucky you, you get to see some video of one of the sumo matches I saw. This is two of the higher ranked fighters, who came along later in the afternoon. They’ve just finished about four rounds of posturing, crouching, getting ready, walking away, slapping themselves, cleansing themselves, throwing salt, and generally trying to intimidate the other guy. (And look at that guy on the right, sitting down. He’s huge! I think they just classed him as a new planet…)

I really enjoying watching the sumo, partly because they had an excellent and informative English pamphlet available, which helped immensely. I spent a couple of hours there, wandering around the stadium, watching matches, reading my pamphlet, and just enjoying myself. It was a great afternoon.

I mentioned that I’ve had some trouble with the Tokyo metro system. It turns out that the Tokyo metro/subway/trains are a bit too Kuala Lumpur for my tastes. There are several different companies running trains around the city, and they don’t always play nicely together. For instance on the morning of sumo, I strode out confidently and bought a ticket from Asakusa station, planning to head to Ryogoko, just one change and two stops down the line. It turned out though, to be a case of you-can’t-get-there-from-here. I needed to be at a different Asakusa station, on a different line (Asakusa on the Asakusa line, not Asakusa on the Ginza line. Silly me). That station was a few blocks from where I started, and necessitated me buying another ticket. Then I got to the interchange station and discovered that Tokyo defines interchange in much the same way that Kuala Lumpur does meaning, it seems, that any station within a 1.5km radius of can be considered “connected” to the station you’re changing from. Considering that Japan is so very good at so very many things it’s odd to me that the transit system in the country’s largest city should be so… meh. People who live here tell me that once you get used to it it’s very efficient and you can get anywhere and blah blah blah… to which I say: Tell me that the next time you have to walk three blocks between the Asakusa line and the Odeo line in the pouring rain. And if it’s so easy, then why does everyone have some kind of application on their phone to help them navigate the system? I rest my case.

And how about a few more thoughts on vending machines? Remember how I mentioned that the TVs in hotel rooms require cards you get from a vending machine? The same thing was true when I went to buy laundry soap so I could do some washing at the capsule hotel. I managed to convey the idea of “laundry soap” to the mostly uni-lingual desk clerk (though of course he was a lot more bilingual than I was) and he kept pointing behind me and saying “30 yen”. I turned to where he was pointing and faced some kind of vending machine. It was covered in buttons labeled with Japanese characters, so I punched the one that said ¥30, shoveled in some money, and was rewarded with… no, not a packet of soap. I was rewarded with a tiny ticket. I turned 180 degrees, advanced one step and presented the ticket to the desk guy, and he presented me with a packet of soap. This seemed an oddly complicated system. Surely it would be simpler if I could have given the guy ¥30 and he could have given me the soap, and we could have eliminated the machine entirely. However, in retrospect I realized that by using a ticket machine like this for all kinds of odds and ends, the hotel managed to avoid having their staff handle any money. It’s actually kind of smart. (Hey wait a minute! They took my money when I paid for the capsule… so much for that argument.)

Ticket vending machine outside the ramen restaurant where I had supper one night.

So that was my first few days in Tokyo: capsules, vending machines, subway frustrations and sumo! And now I’ve had two solid days of rain, and am getting a bit frayed. It’s a cool city, but it’s less cool in the rain. Perhaps this is good though, because I’ve only got two days left and the rain is making me feel like that will be just fine. Two days. Too weird.

Tatami mats in Takayama

I know I have been unreservedly lavish with my praise for Japan so far, so I feel like I need to admit the few things that I find annoying about being here. So here you go, the things I don’t like about Japan:

1. Hotels have slightly less-than-generous check in and check out times. Check out is usually 10:00 am, which is a bit early for comfort. Check in is rarely before 3:00pm, which can also be annoying. And there’s really no room to move on those times. 3:00 is 3:00, do not ask about getting in earlier. I arrived in Granada, Spain after an overnight train ride at about 7:30 am and was genially shown to my room at 7:31; I can’t imagine the apoplexy that would cause here.


2. A couple of times now I’ve come up against maps that are oriented with some direction other than north at the top. This is maddening, especially when you’re confronted with two different maps of the same place, one with north pointing to the right, and one with it pointing to the left.


3. Despite the fact that the country is spotlessly clean it’s often ridiculously hard to find a garbage can. I have no idea what Japanese people do with their garbage, though if there’s like me they end up carrying it around for hours as if it’s some kind of precious keepsake.


4. Toilets are bizarrely and unnecessarily complicated. They usually have long instruction stickers posted nearby telling you how to operate the various automatically telescoping nozzles that spray parts of your anatomy which, if you are from North America, are probably not accustomed to being sprayed at all regardless of the many combinations of water temperature, angle and pressure you might be presented with. And sometimes toilets do things all by themselves. I first ran into this in a hotel in Kyoto when I sat down and the water started running immediately. I swear my first thought was, “Has my ass become so wide that I’m sitting on one of the little buttons on the side control panel?” Then I realized that there was a pressure-sensitive switch. I have no idea what this was for. My best guess is it’s just there to make noise to mask the sound of whatever you’re doing, which seems incredibly wasteful. In Turkey I was asked not to wash out my laundry in the sink because it used too much water, but in Japan they’re literally flushing it down the toilet. (Then again they also have clever all-in-one toilet/sinks where the toilet tank cover is a shallow basin and the water that fills the tank when you flush first comes out of a faucet above the basin so you can wash your hands with it before it flows into the tank. Clever.)

The instructions for my first Japanese toilet, at Narita Airport. I rest my case. (Also: “Equipment to cleansing the buttocks” Hee hee!)

But on to Takayama, which I liked very much, partly because it had almost no temples and the ones it did have were easily avoided. It’s a small city (population about 95,000) and most of the interesting bits are easily reached on foot. It’s got an excellently preserved section of Edo Period homes (1600-1868), a few of which you can tour through, but most of which have been turned into restaurants and shops selling tourist tat, sakē, ice cream, glutinous rice balls (err… yum) and zillions of these creepy faceless dolls called saru-bobo (monkey babies) in sizes ranging from key-chain to impossible-to-pack.

I think it’s a town bylaw that every shop in the city sell some form of saru-bobo. I’m surprised they let me leave without one. (I did buy a souvenir though, a lovely wooden lacquered tray that’s very plain, very Japanese and not creepy at all.)

The big sight to see just outside of Takayama is the Hida-no-Sato village. It’s a collection of dozens of traditional homes that were dismantled at their original sites around the area and rebuilt in an open air museum. I arrived early enough one morning to avoid most of the crowds and had a very nice, quiet time wandering in and out of the buildings . I also borrowed the free English audioguide (On cassette! Remember those?); it talked about the styles of architecture, the various industries villagers would have engaged in (like silk production), and the lifestyle of the people who lived in the houses.

One of the steeply pitched, thatched roof houses of Hida-no-Sato. They’re steeply pitched to shed the snow, which falls up to 8 feet deep in this mountainous region. It’s nice to be back in a part of the world where people have snow scoops leaning next to the back door.

One section of Hida-no-Sato contains the homes and workshops of artisans who live and work at the park, demonstrating their craft and selling their artwork to tourists. There were supposedly workshops for pottery, weaving, lacquerware and carving, but they were almost all closed the day I was there. There was one old gentleman in one of the historical houses demonstrating how to make straw sandals. Like everyone in Japan (except tour guides) he wasn’t exactly gregarious, but he let me take some pictures after I asked (in Japanese, even!). The sandals themselves look remarkably uncomfortable, but it was interesting watching the man work.

Straw sandals, under construction

And just because I’ve got bandwidth up the wazoo here in Japan (which can be uncomfortable, but the toilets have a setting for it), here’s a video I took of a clever bit of water-powered machinery at Hido-na-Sato.

The automatic banging device

I did enjoy some local cuisine in Takayama, which is most famous, culinarily speaking, for two things: hoba-miso, a particular type of local miso served on a mulberry leaf over a ceramic burner (miso is the ubiquitous soybean-derived salty paste that’s used to make miso soup), and Hida beef, cousin to the renowned Kobē beef, and famous for its quality and marbling. Of course I tried both. I went to a very local place recommended by my hotel and had the miso (described by a friend’s traveling companion as “cat barf on a leaf”) which turned out to be really tasty in a salty, savoury, umami kind of way. It was also quite nice when spread onto thin slices of Hida beef grilled on the same ceramic burner. And it all goes down a treat with a glass of cold beer to put out the fire that’s lighted when you apply a slice of molten-miso-covered beef directly to your tongue.

Hida beef. Marble-licious.

Because Takayama is so compact I ended up being able to delve into a few more corners than I expected, which is how I found myself rushing to take a seat at a Karakuri puppet show. Karakuri dolls are clockwork-driven creations originally from the Edo period; their most famous incarnation in Takayama is on elaborate parade floats that are brought out every year for the local festival. The floats are oddly tall and skinny, and I walked past a couple of three-storey garages in town with very tall doors where parade floats are stored. The karakuri I saw were smaller than parade float ones, ranging in size from about 18” to 36” high. They were quite impressive, too. Controlled by a series of rods and mechanisms, there was a karakuri that could climb steps with nothing connected to the bottom of his feet, one that swung through a series of trapezes, and even one that could write calligraphy on a piece of paper. I managed to get a video of part of the show, which was completely fascinating and charming:

Karakuri in action

I mentioned that Takayama has an excellent stock of historical homes, and I toured through two of them that have been preserved in the northern end of the city. Both had been home to merchant families and were collections of tatami mat rooms, large and small, that could be reconfigured with sliding screens. The screens might be opened to allow a view of the garden, or closed for privacy, or removed completely to join several small spaces into one for a large celebration. It’s a very different style of design than we’re used to in the west. Here’s an excellent introduction from a pamphlet I picked up at Yoshijima House in Takayama:

“The rooms with tatami, or straw mats, not only in Yoshijima house but in most traditional Japanese houses, possess no fixed function. The function of the room is determined by the objects which are placed in them. For example, by placing a portable dining table in a room, that room becomes a dining room. If fine zabuton, or floor cushions, are placed in the room, it is now a guest room; when bedding is placed in the room, the same room is transformed into a bedroom. Furthermore, the furnishings, hanging scrolls, etc., would be changed to fit the seasons or the ceremonies to be undertaken in a particular room.”

A typical 8-tatami mat room

Again and again in Japan I’ve run into the “tatami mat” method of measuring floor space. The size of a single tatami mat differs slightly in different areas of Japan but is always around 3' x 6' and always a perfect 2:1 ratio. All of the indoor living space in the historical homes I’ve seen have floors covered with tatami mats, as have several hotel rooms I’ve stayed in. And whenever they describe a room in one of these historical structures they almost always start by telling you the number of tatami mats covering it. (“This 8-tatami mat room was used as a resting place for guests before blah blah blah…” or “This large 49-tatami mat room can be divided into three different spaces with the use of sliding screens.”). One of the most famous rooms at Ginkakuji is called the Four-and-a-Half Tatami Mat Room, capitalized here because that particular room came to be a model for similar rooms all over Japan. And I think this method of measuring space is still used today. When he saw the picture of my ryokan on Miyajima Paul was quick to point out that it was a 12 mat room, generous indeed since many modern apartments are only 8, or sometimes just 6 mats.

I also noticed that the importance of the room can sometimes be divined by the elaborateness of the binding along the sides of the tatami mats. The mats in servants’ quarters might have no binding at all, whereas everyday rooms could be bound in plain black or blue. And I saw rooms for important guests or for the master or mistress of the house where the tatami mats had been bound in patterned fabric.

A stack of tatami mats in a shop in Takayama

And it’s not just the historical homes that display particularly Japanese characteristics. The modern places occupied by the normal people of Takayama were wonderful too, in a very Japanese way. For instance, windows facing onto the street are almost always frosted or covered in rice paper. In addition there’s usually a slatted wooden screen of some kind in front of that and sometimes a bamboo blind hanging in front of that. Very private, and so very Japanese. And the gardens in front of the houses are fabulous too – compact, spare and thoughtful.

A normal house in Takayama

I loved wandering through those traditional Japanese homes with the tatami mats, the sliding rice paper screens and the woodwork burnished to a smooth, deep brown colour. Again and again I’d turn a corner and be faced with some perfectly designed space with a single scroll of calligraphy hanging in an alcove and a view over a fantastic garden; it was all really peaceful and calming, and I liked it very much. As I get closer to having my own space again I wonder how much my experience in Japan will affect how I chose to design where I end up living. I don’t think I could manage the completely empty look – I like a good couch and a proper bed too much for that. But Paul’s words echoed in my head as I stood in those rooms and my mind whirred thinking about how I might fit my own life onto 8 tatami mats. I’m definitely going to miss life on the road, but at the same time I can’t wait to get back and see how it all unfolds.

Pick of Pics: Kyoto

These are "tourist geisha", visitors to Japan who pay to be made up as maiko and wander around the streets for a few hours. They're much more amenable to photography than the real thing.

Japan’s greatest hits: tea, origami, geisha and sushi

Kyoto is one of Japan’s former capitals and is often regarded as the home of the country’s traditional culture – those Higashiyama things we talked about already. I figured this made it the perfect place to experience that culture first hand, albeit in a touristy kind of way. My first stop was a place called Wak Japan, whose brochure I picked up in my hotel in Kyoto. Geared to foreign tourists, I figured it might not be super authentic, but would give a reasonable glimpse at some of the more refined Japanese arts. I chose to do two programs in one afternoon: tea ceremony and origami.

The tea ceremony was held in a lovely tatami room that looked onto a tiny, perfect garden. I was expecting to share the experience with a bunch of other Western tourists but it turned out that everyone else in the group was Japanese – six women from other parts of the country who were in Kyoto as tourists themselves. It seems the Japanese are great fans of traveling within their own country, which I think is great and perfectly understandable. Apparently this was an unprecedented occurrence, such a pronounced Western/Japanese imbalance, and the woman running the program was worried about me. Ha! Little did she know that she was dealing with an experienced world traveler who would no more be thrown off by a room full of Japanese tourists than she would by a delayed flight, a lost wallet or plate of worms.

The tiny perfect garden

It turned out to be very nice being with all those Japanese women. They were super polite and friendly and very concerned about making sure I understood everything and had a good time. The only difficult part was spending so much time sitting on the floor. This is something I’ve found to be common to most Asian cultures, this ground-level existence, and even though Japan gussies things up with tatami mats, it’s still damned uncomfortable spending that much time kneeling. I was largely crippled when the hour was finally over.

Luckily most of the commentary was conducted in English, since it’s normally done for foreigners. I learned about how the green tea is grown, picked, dried, and ground into matcha, the special powdered tea used in the tea ceremony. And then we got to watch one of the women at Wak perform the tea ceremony.

She entered in a beautiful kimono, knelt down in front of the water boiler and began. All of the movements in the tea ceremony are prescribed – how the cloth is held and folded while wiping the tea scoop, how the tea bowl is washed and dried, how the water scoop is grasped and released. It was in some ways rigid and yet also very graceful. And once the water was poured over the powdered tea and whisked into a green froth, it was presented. Presented to me of course, because all the other women insisted that I should have the first cup. I was instructed in the proper way to receive the cup, bowing with hands flat on the floor. Then I placed the bowl between me and the person next to me and said in very coached Japanese, “Excuse me for going before you.” And to the woman who made the tea, “Thank you for making this tea for me.” There was a specific way to hold the bowl and a specific way to drink it, in three or four gulps, one right after another. And there was a specific sort of inhaling slurp noise to be made at the end to indicate that the tea was so excellent you just had to suck back every drop. Then the bowl was to be placed back on the floor in front of you. After that, it’s customary to pick up the bowl again and inspect the decorations more carefully, handing it around so others can see it too. Appreciating the artistry of the bowls and other utensils is all part of the experience.

Each woman in the group was served a cup of tea made by our hostess, then it was our turn to try making tea ourselves, and who was first up to bat? You guessed it! I acquitted myself pretty well, though I had to start over once because I added too much water to the tea the first time. (I plead inadequate instruction.) Despite that initial misstep everyone was very impressed with my whisking. Apparently foreigners almost never get the tea whisked into a proper froth, so there were many murmurs of appreciation at my savant-like whisking skills.

Me getting ready to make tea

I was very pleased to have the chance to experience a tea ceremony from both sides, and it was nice to do it with real Japanese people instead of a load of whisk-challenged foreigners. The two women conducting the experience were lovely and friendly. One of them, Asa, was also the one who sat with me for another hour (on stools, thank God) teaching me some origami. I was the only one who’d signed up for origami that day so it was just the two of us, which made for a very genial time. I took the opportunity to quiz her on how to say a few Japanese phrases, and we folded and chatted and had a great time. And apparently it’s not just my whisking skills that are above average because Asa was very impressed with my origami too, and with my grasp of the concept of wabi, as evidenced by my wallet. (See, I told you people comment on it!)

A few of our origami projects – flower petal boxes and spinning tops

On my last evening in Kyoto I joined a walking tour of Gion, the most famous geisha district in Japan, and the setting for much of the popular novel “Memoirs of a Geisha”. The tour was called “Night-time Exploration in Gion” and promised to explain the history and life of the traditional geisha in Kyoto, while walking the backstreets of Gion. It was only ¥1,000 ($10.00 - what a brilliantly easy exchange rate! Just one more thing to love about Japan.) and turned out to be worth much much more than that. Emi, our guide, was fantastic and gave us exactly what the tour promised, so I can tell you some really interesting facts about geisha.

Emi, standing beside Gion’s Shirakawa River, reciting the poem inscribed on the rock behind her. It’s by Isamu Yoshii (1886-1960), and translates something like: “No matter what they say, I love Gion. Even in my sleep, the sound of water flows beneath my pillow.”

First of all, they are not called geisha in Kyoto. It’s apparently quite insulting to call the Kyoto variety geisha. The term used in Kyoto is geiko (“GAY-ko”), which differentiates between the Kyoto variety and the much less traditional Tokyo type. And it’s important to understand that geiko are NOT prostitutes. They’re entertainers highly trained in traditional Japanese arts like music and dance. A qualified geiko makes her own money by attending parties held a tea houses and entertaining the guests there with performances, games and sparkling conversation. They’re expensive, sought-after and somewhat mysterious. The cost to the patron for a 90 minute party with one geiko and one apprentice (not including food) is about $1,000.

The other world we learned was Maiko (“MY-ko”), which is the term for an apprentice geiko. Emi talked a lot about the maiko, and it was fascinating. They usually start their apprenticeships around age 15, and serve a probationary year as a sort of house-girl/maid in the boarding house they move into. Every maiko is sponsored by a boarding house mother who pays for the girl’s board, training and clothing for her entire apprenticeship, which is usually about five years long. After the girl’s probation period is over and her boarding house mother determines she’s fit to become a maiko, the real work starts. She must learn traditional arts, keep her hair up in an intricate style all the time, attend parties along with a qualified geiko, and earn enough money to eventually pay back her boarding house mother. It’s a weirdly archaic lifestyle, and fewer than 40 maiko are now known to be living in Gion. The total number of maiko and geiko combined in Kyoto is around 300, whereas at the height of their popularity several hundred years ago, there were as many as 3,000.

Maiko are not allowed to go out except in traditional dress, and that dress is elaborate. They’re not allowed to have cell phones, they’re not allowed visits from their family and they only get to go home very rarely, maybe once a year during a big festival. It’s a very restrictive, difficult lifestyle. But if a girl survives and flourishes, she can become a geiko, earn her own money, go out on the street in normal clothes and live in her own house. And popular geiko can earn a lot of money. It’s estimated that the number one geiko in Kyoto earns as much as the CEO of Toyota.

We were lucky enough to see a maiko as she was leaving her boarding house to go to a party. Naturally, they are kind of tired of tourists trying to get photographs of them, and they move quickly to get where they’re going, so let's just call this an action shot and leave it at that.

She was moving fast, despite wearing those crazy shoes!

Emi told us a lot more about Gion, and geiko and maiko, and about the tea houses and the tea house parties within. There’s just too much rolling around in my head to tell it all here, but it was fascinating. (This Wikipedia article is really good and tells a lot of what there's no room for here.) I finished that tour happy with life and ready for supper, which means it’s time to talk about food again.

Specifically, let’s talk conveyor belt sushi! I found a place in the LP that was so great I went two nights in a row and stuffed myself. It was a long counter with seats all around and a couple of sushi chefs in the middle. And there was the conveyor belt, like a miniature version of the things they use as luggage carousels in airports. You sat down at a stool, filled up on green tea (or ordered a beer… guess what I did…), poured a bit of soy sauce into a small dish and grabbed the first tasty looking plate that went by. Every once in a while the chefs would stick another few plates into the mix and cause the whole business to back up alarmingly, but they never let it go long enough that there was a total derailment. These guys were pros.

The view from behind the belt

It was great. Every plate was the same price - ¥137 – so it was cheap enough that you could be adventurous and try a few weird things. I had one with raw quail egg, and I had uni, and something pink and stringy and… well, I had a lot. You could even request something special from the chefs and they’d make if up for you on the spot for the same price. On my second visit I got up the gumption to ask for another round of shrimp with avocado, mayo and sliced raw onion and it was YUM. And even though I stuffed myself and had two beers the bill was only about $20, and the fun factor was through the roof. On my first visit I was seated next to a friendly Australian guy who I chatted with the whole evening. We ended up walking around the area for a while after we finished gorging on sushi, and had a great conversation. (Nice to meet you Adam!). That conveyor belt joint really had it all – cheap sushi, a great gimmick, beer, and engaging dinnertime conversation, all in one easy to navigate package just a few blocks from my hotel.

And that was Kyoto. It’s a city you could easily spend weeks in, especially if you’re a fan of Buddhist temples. Even I, templed-out as I was, felt sad to leave it. But time is ticking away on my big year-long adventure, and I have more of Japan to see. I can’t believe that, as I write this, I’ve only got a week left before I fly back to North America. I think I’m in for a big big shock.

Random Japan fact: Those half-curtains that hang in doorways of shops and restaurants? They mean the place is open for business! No curtain means the shop is closed.

All templed out in Kyoto

It’s broken record time: Japan is GREAT! I love it here! It’s easy and safe and beautiful. And I feel like it’s really starting to get under my skin. For instance when I give money to a cashier I now do so holding it in both hands and with a slight nod/bow. It is received with two hands, and my change is offered in a similar way. I’ve also tried to stop eating and drinking on the street – it’s kind of not done in Japan. Yesterday when I went to a vending machine to get a drink I stood in front of the machine and consumed the whole thing before I moved on. Admittedly this was partly because the contents of the bottle were quite surprising so I was sort of frozen to the spot in contemplation. I thought I was going to get a nice cold orange drink, but it turned out to be a bottle of watery, lumpy orange jello. If McDonald’s orange drink could curdle, that's the texture it would have. Like a lot of things in Japan it was not unpleasant, just unexpected.

A row of vending machines. They are, I swear, EVERYWHERE. You can be walking down the quietest back street and think to yourself, “Hmmmm, I could really go for a bottle of curdled McDonald’s orange right now.” and as if by magic a vending machine will appear around the next corner. And yes, there is a drink called “Pocari Sweat” – apparently it’s a Gatorade-like sports drink. I haven’t tried it yet, but I’m told it’s nice. And I’ve really only seen machines for drinks and cigarettes so far, nothing really weird like bicycles or live goldfish. I’m told the real vending machine paradise is Tokyo.

I saw a lot of temples in Kyoto, though it was only the tiniest fraction of the 1600 Buddhist temples and 400 Shinto Shrines in the city. It didn’t take me long at all before I was completely “templed out”. Actually, it took half a day – the length of the Lonely Planet walking tour of the southern Higashiyama district, though in fairness my tolerance for religious structures of any faith has been extremely low for a long long time now. I quickly instituted a One Temple Per Day policy in Kyoto, and this made things much better. Therefore, I’m only going to tell you about the real highlights as I saw them. First was a small temple called Yasaka-jinji, located in a park that was the halfway point of my walking tour. The temple itself was nothing special, but I happened to arrive right at the start of a wedding ceremony, and I got to see the bride and groom and all the wedding guests arrive and seat themselves. I love it when you happen upon some unexpected real life event like this.

The bride and groom, with an attendant carrying a red umbrella to shade them

By far my favourite temple was Ginkakuji, literally the “Silver Pavillion”. It was originally part of a genteel retreat built in 1482 by the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa. It’s a small and exquisitely designed site – a few buildings, a beautiful pond and garden, and the two-level pavillion. It’s compact enough that the whole area can be viewed in detail without too much trekking, and I rented the audioguide, which was excellent. It gave a lot of information about Yoshimasa, who was instrumental in forming what’s known as Higashiyama culture, widely credited with being Japan’s first nationally-shared artistic aesthetic. Higashiyama culture includes things like sado – the tea ceremony, ikebana – flower arranging, Noh theatre, and sumi-e ink painting – many of those things that we tend to think of as typically Japanese.

Come on, how fantastic is this?

Ginkakuji is also an example of the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, which I really like, if I understand it at all, which I probably don’t. It’s a slippery idea for non-Japanese. I think Wikipedia has made a good stab at a definition:

Wabi … connotes rustic simplicity, freshness or quietness, and can be applied to both natural and human-made objects, or understated elegance. It can also refer to quirks and anomalies arising from the process of construction, which add uniqueness and elegance to the object. Sabi is beauty or serenity that comes with age, when the life of the object and its impermanence are evidenced in its patina and wear, or in any visible repairs.

Remember my paper wallet from way back in Barcelona? Well it’s still going, having been taped back together countless times. I think in its current state it’s a decent example of wabi sabi. People comment on it all the time. I don’t mean people say, “Wow, is that wallet ever totally wabi sabi!”, I just mean that when I pull it out people often notice and say it’s interesting, and the Japanese people who’ve commented have agreed that it’s pretty wabi sabi.

I found the whole vibe at Ginkakuji just excellent, and really wished I could banish the zillion other tourists at the sight, hop over the barriers, and wander along the garden paths and across the stone bridges. Instead I tried to tune out the crowds and enjoy the scenery. And of course I stopped to answer the questions of a junior high school boy who waylaid me on the path to the exit. He was on a weekend field trip from a town outside Tokyo, and had the now-familiar questionnaire, which I filled out happily. He even gave me a 5 yen coin in an envelope as a thank you, and we both got photos of us together.

That thing with the fingers… that’s soooooo Japanese. I see people posing with one hand up like that all the time. Sometimes palm out, sometimes the other way, and often with different combinations of fingers held up. I have no idea what it’s about.

Other than viewing some of the compulsory temple and historical sights, I also took some time in Kyoto to explore a part of modern Japanese culture: manga. Manga is the Japanese word for comics or graphic novels, but you really can’t compare the stature and popularity of Japanese manga with their poor Western cousins. Manga is HUGE in Japan – as the LP puts it: “manga stand shoulder to shoulder with traditional text-based books.” On my first night in Kyoto I found a bookstore that had a small section of manga that had been translated into English, so I bought one and dived in.

Part of the shelf of translated manga

The first weird thing is that they read back-to-front, because Japanese is written and read from right to left. (They also drive on the left here, but frankly I’ve switched back and forth so many times in the last month and a half that I hardly notice anymore.) This means that the pages are read, in a Western sense, starting with the last page and moving towards the front of the book. It also means that each panel of the comic is read in a different order on the page: top right, top left, middle right, middle left, bottom right, bottom left. Because the artwork and dialogue balloons were originally created in Japanese, it would be impossible to switch it all around, so you read the individual English words in each text bubble from left to right, but the panels are ordered right to left and you turn the pages from back to front. It’s odd, but you get used to it pretty quickly.

The manga I bought was “Hellsing: Vol. 1”, and it was fun – lots of vampires and blood and gore. Most manga are serialized stories, often appearing in short chunks in periodicals and then being bound together into volumes for later sale. And the sheer amount of manga produced, covering every possible subject, is staggering. I learned this when I visited the Kyoto International Manga Museum! This was a four-storey temple of manga. (Note: this site was exempted from the One Temple Per Day Rule). I went on a Sunday afternoon, when the place was full of people sitting inside and out, taking advantage of the enormous manga library. There was a short but informative display on the history of manga (with English translation! Yay!), and a gallery of manga artwork, but mostly it was just shelf after shelf of manga. Oh, and lots of people dressed up like their favourite manga characters. Called cosplay-zoku (costume play gangs), this is a popular activity for some Japanese youth, and because it was Sunday afternoon they were out in force.

I have no idea who these girls were supposed to be, but they took it pretty seriously. When I asked to take their picture the one in the middle wouldn’t let me do it until she’d put her glasses on.

As has become my habit, I inadvertently arrived in Kyoto on the eve of a big festival. Aioi Matsuri (the Hollyhock Festival) “dates back to the 6th century and commemorates the successful prayers of the people for the gods to stop calamitous weather. Today the procession involves imperial messengers in ox carts and a retinue of 600 people dressed in traditional costume.” (LP) I planned to take in the procession after my morning walking tour and set out from my hotel in what I thought would be plenty of time to catch the parade at one of its more northerly points. I was going to take the metro and then walk to the parade route, but the hotel desk clerk said I didn’t have enough time for that and I should head straight to the Kami-gamo Jinja, the end point of the procession. I was dubious but went ahead and caught the bus he suggested, which turned out to be a bit of a nightmare. It was packed full of people going to the temple, and was very slow and a bit warm and standing room only. As we crawled through the streets I could just tell that there was no way we were going to get where we were going in time to see the procession pass.

And I was right. Just as we crossed the bridge near the temple, we could see the tail end of the procession disappearing ahead of us. I was pretty annoyed and all for packing it in and staying on the bus for the return journey downtown. Instead, I got off and followed the huge crowd to the temple grounds. There I discovered a sort of fair ground atmosphere with lots of people hanging around and vendors set up selling all manner of weird Japanese fair food. I decided to stick around and see what was going to happen. And of course I had to try some of the food. Most of it was unrecognizable, though I did identify an okonomiyaki stand, and there were people selling shaved ice with flavouring (no way of identifying what flavours, mind you…). The first thing I tried was a perennial favourite – stuff on a stick!

Squid-on-a-stick! I think it’s a sign of how far I’ve come that I didn’t really consider this as a possible Weird Food.

I sampled few other less-weird things and struck up a conversation with a French woman who was also hanging around. There really weren’t a lot of Westerners there, so it was nice to have someone to talk to even if it was in a combination of my vocabulary-challenged French and her much better English. We chatted together and waited some more – she had it on good authority that there would be some horses going past a some point, so it seemed worth waiting for. I’ve found a lot of travel is like that. The strictly rational, 9-5, work-a-day part of my brain thinks, “You have no idea what’s going on here. There might be some horses going by at some indeterminate point this evening. Big deal. It might not even happen. And if you hang around too long there will just be another crowded, exhausting bus ride back. Bail out now!” Then then casual, long-term traveler part of my brain kicks in and says, “Relax! What else have you got to do anyways? Stick around, and maybe something cool will happen.”

So I stuck, and there were indeed horses. First they were led out of the temple along a wide approach that was lined with reserved seating. Then, one by one, they were raced back towards the temple at a full gallop only to veer off left just in front of the temple gate and right past where I was standing. Ok, it wasn’t high altitude fireworks and aerial ballet or anything, but it was still cool.

And then to avoid the crush on the bus I took a pleasant stroll along the Kamo river. Kyoto’s riverbanks have beautiful, wide walking paths on both banks, and they were full of people out enjoying the warm evening, walking dogs, practicing different sports, and playing musical instruments, it was lovely. There were even spots along the way where large steeping stones allowed pedestrians to cross the river without bothering with bridges. I walked for about half an hour until I reached a convenient subway stop, and then got a quick train back to the hotel.

What a great system. Mind you, the water was very tame and only about eight inches deep, but still.

It turned out to be a nice evening after all, and that was just one of three I had in Kyoto. There’s still lots more to tell – I participated in a tea ceremony, did origami, learned all about Kyoto’s geisha culture, saw half a show, and ate sushi off a conveyor belt (twice)! But my train has almost arrived in Takayama so that’s enough for this installment. All I can say, once again, is stay tuned.

Small, interesting Japan observation that doesn’t really fit anywhere but bears telling: The buses in Kyoto turned off their engines at red lights, rather than idling.