Sorry it’s been some time since I’ve posted, my last week in Osaka and first week in Tokyo were busy as hell, although I question how busy hell would be since they’d have pretty much all of eternity to sort their business out. To carry on with Kanazawa, I’ll start by talking about the parks/gardens I visited there: Kenroku-en and Genryu-en. Also updated the last post with new pics btw.

Kenroku-en is the highlight of Kanazawa; it’s the reason the city is famous in Japan and inevitably the first thing anyone  here brings up when I mention I’ve been to the city. Kanazawa has more to offer in terms of sites of course, mostly in the form of museums, ranging the gamut from modern art to old samurai houses-turned-museum (that’ll be the focus of my next post).

Kenroku-en

Kenroku-en

Kenroku-en

Kenroku-en is a stunningly beautiful and quite expansive park. It is like what you’d imagine an ancient wondrous forest to be like, if it were a publicly accessible park hosting hundreds of visitors daily. You can probably see where this is going; its popularity does somewhat mar its atmosphere. It is not the crowds, since going at a proper time reduces those and the place is so massive it’s not a real issue. Rather, it is the additions to the park’s design meant to accommodate the potential hordes; the wide boulevards, gutters, and fencing. It is all very tastefully done, through stone and wood, and its modernness doesn’t detract from the place, but the size, convenience, and order of these measures stands in stark contrast to the park’s native design. I think these next two pics, of a new path and a long unused one, juxtapose the divergent purposes nicely. What Kenroku-en of today is not is it is not a carefully crafted forest of a park that you weave your way through to enjoy its many and varied natural beauties. It is also not a big public park like Kyoto’s imperial palace park (to come in a later post) or Osaka-jo’s park where kids play soccer and baseball, spectacle performers dazzle crowds and sell video tapes, and businessmen ride their bikes through to take the long way home from work. Instead, Kenroku-en is a park with all the care and subtlety of Daitoku-ji’s and Tenryu-ji’s gardens, but focused more on grandeur,  with wide lakes and huge ancient trees. It reminds me a lot of the Boston public garden, but of course on steroids.

A very old path (Kenroku-en)

And a new one (Kenroku-en). I think the images of Genryu-en will make the difference clearer.

A broader boulevard (Kenroku-en), but not nearly the widest.

Kenroku-en

Kenroku-en

Kenroku-en

Kenroku-en

(More pics in the set)

Genryu-en is the polar opposite, entirely equal in beauty and careful, skilled design, but nevertheless everything that Kenroku-en is not. Kenroku-en is a vast, grand park designed to awe many visitors and serve as a main attraction (although not through any lack of subtlety and intricacy). By contrast, Genryu-en, despite being a reasonably-sized garden (about the same as Koto-in’s in Kyoto, but far far smaller than Kenroku-en or Tentryu-ji’s garden), is neither well frequented nor designed to be so. There are no pebbled boulevards or bamboo fences, just the lone weathered stepping stones overgrown with moss. The pictures will hopefully tell the story (although like I’ve said before, the pictures don’t do any of these places much justice, the dynamic range is limited and the colors are muted, with more missing detail than you’d think, for example the tone of lighting is lost almost entirely indoors and out, and the vividness of  lush greens amidst a slight haze is utterly undetectable in the photographs, shooting in RAW and doing my own post-processing would help, but where would that time come from?), but the look and feel of the garden is… indescribable with my limited vocabulary. It’s a similar experience to Koto-in and Tenryu-ji, but different in that there are so few visitors (as in maybe a dozen a day), even compared to the relatively low traffic of Koto-in; this has affected the manner of its growth. I will try to convey the sensation narratively where I’ve failed observationally. (The low visitor volume, by the way, is primarily due to the fact that Kanazawa is usually a day trip or day-and-a-half at most, and people generally don’t include Genryu-en in that itinerary, especially Japanese people, they tend to focus on other, actually famous locations. )

Genryu-en

The size of the garden is difficult to discern, as each time you turn a corner that you thought you had a solid view over, you find yourself in a new, entirely different 15-foot stretch of pathway; a great deal of new scenery is revealed. I think the best word is depth, there is a depth to your surroundings that gets deeper the harder you look. It’s like if you looked at an impressionist or pointist painting, where you are struck by the overall feel and experience it conveys to you despite the seeming lack of relationship between and the details (or lack thereof); only here, when you look much closer, instead of seeing big rough brush strokes that are mundane out of the context of the painting as a whole, you see an entirely new painting with a thousand indiscernible intricacies that somehow contributed to the work at large. Let’s take an example to show this isn’t entirely romanticism. Let’s say you look down at your feet. You see the rock you’re standing on. It’s about 3 feet across each way, it’s flat on first inspection but ruffled with curiously shaped bumps no doubt weathered down from sharp crystalline juts on stone fault lines, and this bumpy surface is on a slightly tilted plane your feet have already adjusted for. And there’s moss, covering the ground around the stone and creeping up on to it, unevenly in the depressed edges; but it’s not just homogenous green moss. It’s several kinds of moss and tiny plants or vines, but not fully intermixed rather in patchy domains wrapped around each other. It reminds me of one of impressionism’s tricks, using 2 colors side by side to give the mind the impression of a third color, which isn’t really a color defined by some specific hue but the sensation of a color invoked by the confluence of the 2 visually presented. It’s a complicated sensory phenomenon that I’ve only had anecdotal experience with, I don’t know if any formal research exists on the matter. Anyway, to continue, while you’re noticing the moss on your rock (which by the way points out to you the small unmossed dirt/mud patches in the moss quilt, whose origins are inexplicable, but add a brown to the palette of greens), you notice the roots. The roots of trees are protruding from the earth, some large some tiny, and breaking into the moss and in between the 6” to 1’ gaps from stepping stone to stone. Then there’s the barked and unbarked portions of the roots, and the mineral deposits on the rocks, and so on and so forth, and not just for what’s right below you but also everything around you. The point of all this is that no matter how deep you look there is just more and more remarkable detail in your surroundings; Like the most impressive masterpiece painting out there, all of the constituent parts combine to give you a whole much greater than the sum, a sense of the natural beauty and the joy and peace associated with that.

In either case, there’s depth. As I mentioned, let me try a couple brief narratives to get that across. Every aspect of these experiences is a consequence of the garden’s design. First, you’re taking a zig zag path that climbs a small cliff in the garden. Steps are formed by the roots of trees, which in preventing runoff have created dry mud plateaus with small boulders set in them to step on. The air is cool but windless and moist. You hear the pitter patter of running water but you can’t identify the source. You’re surrounded, even above and below, by greenery, but there are few tall trees. On your right is the cliff, it is grey and brown and green. Taking a few steps you realize the wider boulder ahead of you is crossing a small creek coming down the cliff. You continue a couple of steps more and discover a stone lantern, before turning to round the corner to find that you’ve reached the top, where you see to your right a bare mossy plateau about 10 feet across with another lantern, bordered by trees, and to your left another stone path leading along a small pond, the source of the creek.

Genryu-en (this isn't actually the place I just talked about, didn't take a pic of it, but it's close enough)

Second, you’re in a teahouse in the garden. Inside is comfy with the bare red paper walls and a soft tatami floor. There’s a scroll in front of you hanging on the wall, to your left is the edge of this porch, an open screen door providing you shade. Beyond this opening is the lush green and grey of the garden; a pond, pathways, and stone lanterns up the cliff are visible. To your right is a screen blocking the view of the host’s entrance to the room, from which she brings a warm, bitter cup of dry tea in a wide stone cup and 3 tiny, delicious candies on a gold-leafed ceramic plate topped with a sheet of watermarked rice paper. The candies are incredibly delicate, formed in curious shapes and speckled colors with a gradient consistency despite their small size.

Genryu-en, pic from inside the tea house. I should probably have left this to imagination, as the pic doesn't capture all that much for various fundamental reasons (see above).

Like I said, each aspect of those sorts of experiences, even the temperature, humidity, and level of wind, is a function of careful design born from a fundamental understanding of how nature behaves, how each of the natural components, the trees, stones, bushes, earth, etc, would behave.

Genryu-en

Genryu-en

Genryu-en, teahouse

Ultimately, to me, the parks and gardens of Japan, which both Kenroku-en and Genryu-en capture, remind me of what I think is the best possible interaction between humanity and nature, which believe it or not is epitomized in the American Lawn. Actual nature, removed from mankind, carries its natural beauty but is also filled with chaos and wildness, from things as simple as a lack of a way to cross a river, or the lack of trail in any untouched wood, to more fundamental  aspects like sickly trees, overgrown areas, and dead animals. Mankind finds nature beautiful, but can refine it with his ability to intentionally manipulate the world around him, which makes nature more pleasurable and accommodating while maintaining the natural beauty that fascinates us (albeit sacrificing the wildness of nature that attracts many). Like I said, let’s take grass. In the wild, grass grows tall and nasty, brown in heat and smelly in damp, stinging you as you work through it and hiding all sorts of insect, animal, and the remnants of both. Man tempers this by choosing his grass and cropping it regularly, the simplest of operations lacking almost entirely in care and skill, but resulting in beautiful green lawns that are great to lie in, indulging in their softness and freshness. Kenroku-en and Genryu-en take this concept almost unimaginably further by the careful selection and control of nature. That is not to say that the nature in these gardens is hampered and confined greatly into neat little sections, that’d be missing the point, like one might imagine Bonsai to be like (the point and joy of Bonsai’s a little different, but not knowing that it might seem like so), just looking at the pictures should make this clear enough. Rather, it is the careful choice and cultivation of natural bodies like trees, moss, and coy, without sacrificing the beauty we love. For example, the design of a pond. It is a dirt pond and whatever lilies or coy or whatever you put in there will live and thrive as they will, but by choosing the design of the pond, its size and depths and shape and relation to surrounding features, like trees and an island or bridges or reeds, and doing so from a knowledge of how the flora and fauna and landmass you’ve introduced will behave, you can heighten the experience in the ways I’ve described. I don’t know where someone would learn such a craft, or if it even still exists (it seems to have been traditionally furthered over time mostly by monks, Buddhist and Shinto of different sects with different approaches, from at least AD1500 on). Anyway, that’s my poorly-conveyed thoughts on the matter, hopefully the pictures will tell you more, although like I mentioned earlier, there’s gross limitations to that.

As a post-script, too many photos in the post? Should I cut back in the future to just a couple representative images, and let you head to flickr to see the whole range?

So of course I’ve fallen behind on posting my doings, but I’ve been writing here and there whenever I get the chance. Of course as I’ve mentioned before I write what comes to mind whenever I get a chance, which does not necessarily form a logical narrative. Thus, I’ve ended up writing a bit on Kanazawa, where I traveled just this long weekend, before getting to the other events that form the time since I last wrote on anything substantial. The order I’ve visited the cities in doesn’t particularly matter  at this point, them all being in hindsight by now, so I’ll go ahead and tell you a little bit about what I’ve done the last few days. Further unfortunately, however, I haven’t had time to write much about what I’ve actually done in Kanazawa; rather I recorded some of my observations on what the city is like first. So I’ll break up the posts, and give you a taste of Kanazawa, with a specific description of its offerings to come. I will probably divide posts up like this more in the future as well, unless I’m magically granted chunks of time.

In either case, Kanazawa is a confused city. I’ll take my hotel room as an example. My hotel room had a double bed, view of the city, and was located in the center of town, next to an Emporio Armani and across the street from Gucci and Tiffany’s, yet it only costed$50/night. It is a city that really doesn’t know what it is or what it will become. It is in an transition state going from being a typical small Japanese city with some unusual famed locales that draw limited domestic visitors to becoming a tourist target and standard stopover for domestic and international peoples alike. The root cause of this I’m unsure of, but even outside, although largely heightened by, this complication, Kanazawa is a curious place.

View Kanazawa City, Ishikawa Prefecture in a larger map

Kanazawa is very much a small city; it is not a town, but it is the size of one. It’s kind of in the same class of cities as Providence, RI; Brighton, UK; and Ottawa, Canada. A good example of this nature is in the nightlife; it has a city nightlife, with around 150-200 bars, clubs, and other, more uniquely Japanese, entertainment venues, but it is small (200 venues is by the way quite few for a Japanese city, even Kyoto has thousands) and when you go out you are greeted by relatively sparse, if raucous, revelers. So Kanazawa is, at its core, a small provincial city. The strangeness comes, however, from the disturbance of this identity. Historically, Kanazawa has been in an isolated, rural environment due to the surrounding alps; via its gold production, however (the city and nearby locales produce 98% of Japan’s gold leaf to this day, although the gold itself can be imported now) as well as fertile land, the city and its retainers, the Maeda clan, became affluent. This resulted in a heavy patronage of arts, culture, and public works. Nevertheless, the remoteness of the city prevented great population growth or political meaningfulness. The end result is the modern Kanazawa, which despite its small size has a lot to see in many many parks, museums, historical districts, and to a far lesser extent temples. This results in a huge influx of tourism which has brought both wealth and affluent shopping venues like the aformentioned, turning the small city center into ten square blocks of Osaka, which only a few steps away transforms into low-density urban/suburban residential neighborhoods, or to the east the large parks. In about an hour you could walk between the two most distant sites in the city, the Teramachi district and the Higashiyama district.

OK, so we’ve got culture, sites, museums, low population, affluence, loads of domestic and foreign tourists (more foreigners even than I’d seen in Kyoto), shopping, and a provincial atmosphere. Putting that all together I think one can see the incongruities.

Still, Kanazawa was a nice little city with plenty to see in a leisurely two days with plenty of variety. Plus there’s shopping for those so inclined, although living in Osaka and eventually Tokyo I felt my time was better spent elsewhere. My experiences at specific sites to come.

(All pics from Kanazawa, not yet updated)

Downtown Kanazawa

downtown Kanazawa

River framing the southern border of the city

Sorry the posts are slow in coming, I’ve been busy lately with work and getting the best out of life in Osaka and Kansai before I move to Tokyo next week.

On another note, here’s a little adage I came up with: someone who burns his tongue on okonomiyaki has no patience.

When you’re hungry, and you’re not at home, then you usually go somewhere to eat. If at that place you order okonomiyaki (see post on Osaka), your patience will be tested. You see, it’s generally described as a pancake-type thing, but its made mostly of vegetables and egg, like an omelet. Unlike an omelet, the surface it’s cooked on isn’t that hot. It’s hot enough to cook it, but its a slow cooking process; they keep the heat up when they first put it on, then reduce is significantly til it’s done. And oh does it take its time to be done, anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes. Furthermore, its generally done right in front of the customer, which means that you are going to sit there and watch it cook for 20 minutes. It doesn’t stop there though, it’s not one of the those stir-fry situations where it doesn’t even look that appetizing til its totally cooked; on the contrary, within a minute it looks ready to go. I assure you that you will, several times, be convinced that the cook is in gross error and that it is in fact done. So you’re sitting there, watching your food cook, but not noticing anything perceptible happening to it and definitely noting how delicious it is right now. Still, you can’t do anything til its done, since they have to dress it when its finished. So you wait. Still, all that is the easy part. Once it’s done and dress and cut up, right there ready for you to dig in, the boys are separated from the men. It’s been sitting on this hot surface for the duration of the process, and it remains on said hot surface. The heat is usually turned down or off, at least at your setting if it’s part of a longer bar serving other customers, but the cooling rate is still reduced significantly, and it is generally quite hot.

So now you are perfectly free to finally indulge in your meal, but it is very hot, and you know that. And therein lies the test of patience.

The adage isn’t accurate of course; you could probably be the most or least patient person in the world and still burn your tongue or not. It’s more in the vein of the countless sayings with no real basis that people here seem to love. Like, if you let someone put their thumb on your chin you must be a masochist, or if you let children pee on worms their members’ll swell up. I get random ‘wise sayings’ like that all the time here, so I figured I might as well add one. That’s the culture lesson for the day.

I’ll get on trying to get some substantive stuff up in the next week or so, probably next weekend.

There’s a few stories that came to mind while I was bored on the train and thought I should recount for you. I think they say a little bit about a part of this city that can easily be forgotten in my commentary.

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Leading east out of Shin-Osaka station towards where I call home there’s a raised pathway leading into a neighboring office building that provides commuters with an escalator down and the businesses on the second floor with a steady income. At the entrance to the building from the walkway there is a big patio and whenever I come home late at night I find five or six breakdancing groups practicing and competing there, boomboxes and all. Every once and a while I’ll see one person there early, around 11 or so, practicing on her own.

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Near my apartment there is a tiny non sequitur of a cafe called La Papillon that serves heinously overpriced coffee and underpriced alcohol. There’s a brass bar and if a beard could be French then the owner’s patch would be. He sits there all day smoking and surfing the internet. His 30-something daughter bustles about keeping the place somewhere between opened and closed. They serve half decent curry and never get any customers. Shin-Osaka is a fairly sleepy place with nothing to note when the sun goes down, but La Papillon carries it’s utter out-of-placedness into the night by transforming into a source of raucous laughter and cheers at the foot of a 4-piece stage. “American Folk” bands bang away all night with their multicolored suits and poorly affected southern drawls that closer resemble the symptoms of down syndrome.

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Outside the busiest and the quietest train stations in Osaka late at night I sometimes find a lone street performer gracing the crowds or the empty buildings. I’ve seen Cellists, acoustic and electric Guitarists, Shamisen, Trumpeters, a Washboard, and a harmonica player, that I recall. It’s rude to give money openly in Japan and although people have come to do it in many stores you don’t really give money to street performers and they don’t really ask.

Himeji-jo is an ancient Japanese castle, built at some point a long time ago and refurbished by various lords up through the Tokugawa area, with each occupant adorning the building with his crest. It is one of 3 major Japanese castles that has survived from antiquity, existing in its original form (most such structures in Japan are concrete reconstructions, like Osaka-jo).

As I mentioned in my previous post, I all-of-a-sudden realized that I was rapidly becoming short on weekends in which to go places other than Osaka, which made me antsy to get out for some day trips to take advantage of my central location; Tokyo is a fun city with a few daytrip possibilities like Nikko and Yokohama (yay, Yokohama), but Kansai, and central Honshu for that matter (3-5 hours north of Osaka), are areas with a wealth of destinations worth visiting. So while I’m here I’d like to take advantage of the opportunity and travel around a bit. After realizing that I miscounted the number of weekends I had left (4 rather than 3, including the 5-day), and remembering that I can’t see every place I want to and would rather enjoy the exciting city I’m living in a bit than travel every weekend, this need to get out of town diminished. Nevertheless, having been foiled in my Kanazawa and Takayama plans, I was resolved to take advantage of the 5-day weekend and get out of town.

So after getting a little taste Kyoto and Nara, to return later, I thought that Himeji would be the best next choice. I considered heading down to Shirahama, a famous beachside resort city in Wakayama, but ultimately decided against it for a slew of reasons unreasonable, or otherwise.

All of the previous serves to explain why I ended up going to Himeji on a brutally hot and sunny summer day in the middle of a national holiday break (one of only 3 for Japanese citizens, you can see where that’s going). This was the day after Kyoto by the way, a Monday, and while later in the break would have been lighter in terms of tourism, the weather reports said thunderstorms and rain. They were of course wrong, but hey, who doesn’t like waiting in lines. And on the crucial point of lines, that is how I would describe my experience in Himeji in one word: Lines. Fortunately, even if it takes the whole day (and it did), Himeji-jo is really the only thing to see in Himeji. There’s a nice enough park next to it (see below), but even arriving at noon and suffering the worst crowds of the year both can be comfortably (time-wise) done. If you have more time i.e. only spend the 45 minutes the castle should take to see, there’s supposed to be a nice fine arts museum and an Indo-Japanese buddhist graveyard as well. All told, the whole experience screamed of exactly what I don’t like to do while traveling; still, it was worth it as an experience suffering through.

Getting to the point, Himeji is only an hour and fifteen bucks from Osaka by train, so it makes a solid day trip. Himeji-jo itself is hailed as one of the great surviving castles of the last two millennia, and it earns that reputation. I only had to suffer 20 minutes of lines to see the beautiful ‘white heron’ from the outside along with the castle grounds (which look like any other castle grounds you’ll see in Europe) which lead up to the main keep. The other two hours was spent laboriously making my way through the Keep’s interior step by step along the queue. Quite literally, there was a line from start to finish, and I moved step by step along that line. Amazingly, I didn’t get sunburned, I saved that particular pleasure for the following two weekends. As I promised though, it is worth it; you get a faint glimpse at life in those times (most of the castle is from the Tokugawa period and just before) through the structure that nobility lived and worked in. It’s a small glimpse, but unlike anything I’ve seen in person before,  and a rare enough opportunity.

To step back, before hitting the castle I was famished so I stopped for lunch, a somen set (ice cold thin noodles) at a small place on the way. The food was fine, but I only mention the place because I was sitting at a table with a couple from Hiroshima visiting Kobe and its environs for the 5-day weekend. They were interesting enough, but kind of green in a cute way. The experience was notable only because I was pleased to find that I could carry on a light conversation through lunch with them. Recently the limitations of my language abilities have been frustrating and tiring as I interact with those coworkers I’ve come to know fairly well. It’s nice to know that at least shallow, simple speech is within my grasp, even if deeper expansion is not.

Anyway, as I said Himeji-jo was one long line that took me through the grounds and up the keep where I got a nice view of, surprise, mountains and more mountains like every other view in Japan, and then came back down. Once I finished up with that unpleasant bit of business though, I had just enough time to take a walk in the park before it closed. Kokoen, as it’s called (koen means park), is a modern garden in that it was built recently as a pleasant additional attraction to Himeji-jo. It provided an interesting contrast to Tenryu-ji’s garden yesterday. It is indeed very beautiful and carefully designed, and it follow the same design features of a traditional Buddhist garden. Nevertheless, it can’t hold a candle to the real deal. There are a thousand little intricacies in the gardens I saw in Kyoto that you don’t even notice but combine to make a world of difference. Ko-koen is like Tenryu-ji’s or Daisin-in’s gardens in form only; despite it’s impressive execution for a modern product, it lacks the subtle depth of the aforementioned, and in this fails to move you in the same way.

As a final little observation, it’s interesting that around the world castles, shipwrecks, and other remnants of war are now tourist destinations. It’s just funny that we fear and condemn war and the experience of it, but we are fascinated by those preserved wartime places where it was once conducted.

Incidentally, the train ride back along the coast and through the hills from Himeji to Kobe is beautiful.