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

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.

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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.

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.

At least in America, Kyoto is perceived as the cultural heart of Japan, and the inevitable goal of any trip to the country; it’s the nation’s Rome or Paris, with a long and illustrious history that gives its citizens and nation pride and provides an incredible abundance of things for domestic and international visitors to see. Someone once told me that the least site in Rome would be the main attraction anywhere else; that observation would apply to Kyoto nicely.

Osaka is conveniently only a few dollars and half an hour away from Kyoto by that pervasive transportation means the train, so I planned from the start to make frequent hops over to the city for some quality time before visiting on more dedicated stints. My first such day trip took place during the 5-day weekend you’re already familiar with if you’re up to date, the day after my trip to Nara with coworkers.

To fill in newcomers, a 5-day weekend is ironically a terrible time to travel because of the hordes of others who do the same. Japanese businesspeople don’t get much time off, just two weeks of the year and everyone at the same time, and Japanese people by and large seem to love to travel within the country and without, so an unusual confluence of 3 holidays to form a 5-day weekend is a call for mass exodus to the cultural centers of the country.

With this in mind I decided that I would try to visit those sites in the city, of which there are countless, that are not the central draws. The main attraction to foreign and domestic visitors is the forests of Higashiyama, which are filled with priceless temples built or further developed during Kyoto’s heyday as the capitol of Tokugawa Japan. In that time temples were generally segregated into discrete regions outside the city due to Tokugawa Ieyasu’s and many of his descendant’s fears of the power of various Buddhist sects. As a result, the forests of the mountains immediately east of Kyoto are rife with cultural treasures and irreplaceable experiences (and UNESCO agrees, making the whole lot a world heritage site). So I avoided the region for this particular visit; I certainly intended to return and felt that there was more to the experience that might be marred by the throng of visitors than just seeing the temples. Reading my post on Himeji (following this one) I think you’ll understand the distinction I’m getting at.

I also sought to avoid the major sites frequented by mostly domestic travelers (to be honest, having taken a few trips around the country now I can say that there are far, far more domestic tourists than foreigners. In fact, for the most part there are not that many white tourists, although it is probably worse in the spring and summer, and those that there are are mostly Australians…), like Kinkaku-ji and Tenryu-ji (although having a bit extra time I did end up going to Tenryu-ji late in the afternoon, just before closing).

So I saw three sites in Kyoto on this little trip and was handsomely rewarded for my choices, but before I get to that a couple observations on the city itself. First, Kyoto is blessed in its surroundings. The city is bordered (and its growth constrained) by gorgeous, forested mountains. The city of course is not right out of a Kurosawa film, it has modernized and the bulk of the city is urban Japan like anywhere else. Nevertheless, the roots of the city are still apparent in the countless little locations that have maintained the feel of a long and enduring history, and the undeveloped mountains are stunning, like nearly every nameless range you roll through on the train in this country, with all the businessmen paying no nevermind to the awe inspiring vistas of rain clouds lifting up like a fog over mountains carpeted with dewy pines (I’m on the train to Tokyo right now, and that’s exactly what’s going down). Japan amazes me in its ability to maintain majestic natural beauty and relentlessly modern urbanism in close proximity. I should say that such temples and shrines and gardens are not merely holdovers from a bygone era, to be wondered at with a degree of romanticism (Himeji-jo is closer to that), these are locations that embody what life in Japan was like for millennia and what forms the core of Japanese life today. Shrines and temples are used and prayed at, and the interior of many modern homes look not unlike their ancient ancestors. A family trip to Koto-in is to relax under the bamboo shoots, not to revel at an ancient and lost way of life. Japan like every nation of the world has gone through considerable change over its history, especially in the modern era, but it is important to remember that this country was largely isolated for an extremely long period of time, and totally isolated for 250 years from 1600 on; I suspect that the close ties of even today’s everyday-Japan with the cultures, traditions, and lifestyle of the previous millenium is a consequence of this domestic-centric evolution of the nation. For example, temples built in the last millennium have been renovated every hundred years or so since, but every new construction has been an exact replica of the previous structure, just replacing old wood, paint, ornamentation, etc.. In fact to the untrained eye (or the average Japanese person) the changes in architectural style over the last millennium are unnoticeable, especially when compared to other variations (religious sect, regional culture, etc.).

Anyway, getting to the point, here’s how the day went. Everything said and done I didn’t roll into Kyoto station until around 11. At that point I’d read up on all the sites in Kyoto but had still made no decisions on what I was going to see, so I stopped by a café and got a cup of coffee to mull over my options. I already had an idea of what would be too busy on that day, and I had already figured what sites I wanted to see, so it was only a  few minutes before I picked a circuit that looked promising.

On transportation, while many large Japanese cities thrive on an extensive and efficient subway system, Kyoto’s native underground is insufficient to handle the mass of visitors, and as a consequence an effective bus system has been developed. I highly recommend that any visitors to Kyoto get a bus day pass, it’s only 5 bucks, you take the bus everywhere, and if you don’t buy it (like me) then you pay 2 bucks every ride, which adds up fast when you have to change here or there. In either case, my first stop was way up in the northern portion of Kyoto, 30m by bus, Shimogamo Jinja. Jinja denotes shrine, not –ji which indicates a temple (Otera). I planned to make a walking circuit from there a bit north to Kyoto’s botanical gardens, then west to the Daitoku-ji temple complex. Didn’t go exactly according to plan but what does.

In either case I arrived at Shimagamo Jinja to find an interesting crowd. Mostly it was locals coming to enjoy the public park and make a quick ring of the bell and double clap at the shrine for good luck. As I said, the shrines and temples of this nation are very much ‘lived in’ in the sense that you get businessmen stopping by after work, families swinging in while out for a walk, etc. In this case there was also a wedding going on, or at least a crowd of people from a wedding and a wedding photographer.

(A note on the vids, you may notice that the height is strange and the balance terrible, it’s because I hold the cam at chest height so as to attempt to attract the least amount of attention, that being relative of course)

On that note Christian weddings are very big here. It’s not like anyone’s Christian, it’s just that Christian weddings with the white dress in a church are very popular right now. That ties into the Japanese perception of religion in general, which I don’t have time to get into now but I find very appealing. I’ll probably comment on it further at some later point.

Anyway, Shimogamo Jinja was nice, the buildings are modern-ish, rebuilt every couple hundred years as exact reproductions of the original design in the 10^th century or somewhere abouts, so the compound has an interesting feel to it being well-kept and ancient at the same time. There’s not much to say on it, take a look at the pics (as a reminder, clicking on any photos in the blog will bring you to relevant flickr sets or collections).

I walked about the grounds’ several shrines, picked a big one, tossed my coin in, rang the bell, took my bow and made my claps (I’ve been surprised, by the way, at how hard it is to control the sound of a symmetrical clap). The grounds were pleasant enough with many well-kept shrines, including a river one set in a little creek, and all told the place was a nice experience. The park outside the shrine gates is also good for a stroll, but on the whole I’d say Shimogamo Jinja, Sumiyoshi Taisha, and most shrines in common use I’ve seen are pretty much the same deal. Nice to visit if you’re in the city, stop by from time to time if you live there, but never worth a trip in itself.

Daitoku-ji, by contrast, is unquestionably worth putting forth time and effort to visit. Before getting there however, I had some ideas and a plan. As I mentioned, I was going to head up northwest by foot to the botanical gardens and then cut west to Daitoku-ji, about 20 minutes each leg (heh, pun). If you’ve read my comments in an early post on getting around Japanese cities, however, you can guess where this is going. My map had only nominal coverage of the area I was in, with no street names and only a few major roads and the river indicated. Still, the botanical gardens were along the river to the north, so how hard could it be to find? Well when I stopped by a real estate agency to ask directions and they had no idea, I knew there might be a problem. I worked my way west until I hit the river, but much to my chagrin found that there were in fact 2 rivers that forked, and which of them was the one on my map was impossible  to discern. Using the general orientations of the roads on the map would have worked nicely in any other country, but that’s not how the Japanese roll. You see, maps in Japan like to have straight lines, but roads in Japan like to curve and wander. As you might imagine, this poses some very pragmatic issues. Angles and distances on maps are more of a rough approximation than actually useful representations. Additionally, ‘major roads’ are a loose definition, and without proper name indications on maps, roads, or both the roads that are on the map are indistinguishable from those not shown. This all really frustrates me because I love maps, I love the sense of a place they give me, with the ability to organize disparate locations into a cohesive picture and infer the spatial relations between things. So after asking a jogger where the place was and having them point me west which I knew was wrong, I said fuck it and made my way west to Daitoku-ji with a few more requests for directions and a street vendor’s okonomiyaki.

So, Daitoku-ji. Again, pictures speak a thousand words and I’ve got movies up as well, so to get an idea of what the place is (but not really what it’s like) those’ll do a better job than I can. Still, I’m not using a nice Nikon DSLR or my old OM-2 film SLR, so despite my best efforts the P&S images, with their low dynamic range,  can’t do much to capture a sense of these places. I really don’t think they can take you there. Even so, they should provide some context for what I present.

Anyway, Daitoku-ji is a temple complex consisting of hundreds of small temple grounds, the vast majority of which are not open to the public. The main arteries feature some nice wide pebble roads with slab stone footpaths that take you around the grounds. You can pop into temples that are open to visitors and appreciate the gardens or temple proper, often with calligraphic works, stone sculptures, bonsai, flowers, or other effects that are appropriate for the scene. That is the central concept in each of these temples, a cohesive atmosphere generated by the convergence of a thousand unnoticed subtleties. Experiencing those gardens and temples is just like looking at a powerful masterpiece painting that transports you to an experience or emotion. The contrast between the carefully but naturally crafted environments and mere copies on their theme is stark and obvious, as I’ll describe in my next post on Himeji’s Kokoen gardens. All of this sensation culminated at the last temple I visited, Koto-in, set in a small bamboo forest.

It's a trap (look closer at the bonsai)

It was here I found myself enjoying the soft rustle of bamboo shoots in the wind on the porch of a quiet temple room opened up to the gardens, sitting alongside others who had come to while away some time in the shade. Again it was families, businessmen, teenage couples. People looking for neither a spiritual venture or a tourist spectacle, just a quiet afternoon in a place where they feel perfectly natural and at home.

Needless to say, I had found something at Daitoku-ji that I would compare many past and coming experiences to. The bottom line is that while some temples, like Daibutsu-den in Nara, are sites to be seen, many are experiences to be indulged in and should be ventured on, if possible, at times when things are quiet and you can take them in at your leisure. I’ll be happy to return to Kyoto and other locales in the winter when I finish at DA.

Once I had finished at Koto-in it was about 4PM so catching any more temples before the usual 4:30 closing was seeming unlikely. Still, the big and famous Tenryu-ji in Arashiyama (the mountain-temple region of northwestern Kyoto) was open til 6:30 so I thought I’d give that a go. 30 minutes and two buses later I was among the throng of visitors at the thick tourist shopping area by the bus stop at Tenryu-ji. Fortunately, as I made my way up the path to the temple grounds I found I was moving against the grain, with most people working their way back to wherever is home.

There were a variety of walled Buddhist compounds, silent and nameless, along the way with a few doors slightly ajar. When I arrived at the at the renowned temple I found two entrances, one to the interior and one to the garden. I had about an hour before closing so I figured I’d hit both, starting with the garden because that’s always what you’re there to see.

If it isn’t clear by now, a Japanese garden is more of a small dense park than what we usually describe as gardens in the western world. These ‘gardens’ as I call them from an ignorance of the English language are much more arboreal and generally on a more human scale. They’re crafted of stone and wood and water. Their density, even though they never feel too busy or chaotic,  is such that you can become entirely removed just feet away from a busy street. This is of course the ideal situation, and while it isn’t always met Koto-in and Tenryu-ji certainly deliver.

Tenryu-ji’s grounds are fairly large with everything from small ponds and waterfalls to muse over to grand mountain vistas to be awed by. So I took an intensely pleasant stroll through the grounds in the fading light and then moved on to the temple proper, which is really just a series of porches and pathways from which to enjoy the grounds, but must be separate as that area, however exposed, is ‘indoors,’ as opposed to ‘outdoors.’ In most situations and certainly in structural ones that distinction is definitively made in Japanese culture.

As the compound is on the eastern slope of the mountain the setting sun was masked which gave the last half hour a real dusky grey light which, coupled with a cool breeze lifting the heat, gave me my second utterly relaxing and contemplative experience that day.

It’s hard to know what confluence of forces put me in that precise mindset at those precise moments, but if it is purely the temples doing it, I can see why people become monks. It is a static joy you feel, a place where you’re certainly not bored and certainly not anxious. You’re happy and you really don’t mind staying even if you’re just sitting there. All told though, the most I’ve been like that is an hour before having to pack up and go, so how long the sensation lasts I don’t know.

So there you have my first venture to Kyoto, I think you’ll find the following trip to Himeji provides some interesting contrasts.

As a post-script, sorry for popping in and out of past tense, it’s what happens when you write posts weeks after the fact, adding retrospective commentary to a present-tense commentary. Plus I’ve got no time to properly edit so you’ll have to deal with it. Really I should just write all the posts from a future perspective, but hey, I write them at a lot of different times in a lot of different places so consistency hasn’t been big. Most of the posts so far haven’t been written as a single whole, I just write things from time to time in different places, not even about consecutive events, and then try and fit them all together into something mildly cohesive.

Experiencing the Japanese monetary system, where 10USD equivalent is the smallest bill denomination, I can tell you it is far more convenient to have high value coinage.

Here’s how it goes. Even in the smallest of my jean pockets I can surprisingly easily throw in and pull out change, including 100 and 500 yen coins (100 yen is roughly 1USD). Then I just fold a few tens, maybe a fifty if I’m leaving town, and put those in a second pocket, not even in my wallet or money clip if I had one. Most small things (coffee, snacks, incidentals, etc.) I just pull out a handful of change. Since different coins are different sizes, colors, etc. mustering exact change from whatever I pull out of the pocket is easy and takes half a moment. If I get a meal or something, I just pull out a ten or two, whatever’s appropriate. Since there’s only really one bill denomination, I don’t have to fiddle with or separate bills (I don’t fold the bills together, just keep them separate so I can take out howevermany I want).

I’m finding that 20 dollars is a useless denomination, tens are far more convenient since most things I buy are somewhere between five and ten bucks, and anything over that I just pull out two tens, its really not that hard. For big purchases I just use 50s. This seems like a pretty elaborate description I know, but I’m trying (and probably failing) to convey that the monetary system here is much more convenient in the day-to-day than it is in the states. Dollar bills are unnecessary, nothing costs a dollar any more you just have to pull out a bunch of bills, and five dollar bills are even more worthless, it’s just a bill that gets you somewhere short of ten and therefore requires some ones.

That may sound like gibberish, but here’s the bottom line: pulling out and combining a bunch of bills is a lot harder than pulling out and combining a bunch of coins, trust me it just is. Bills are great if you only need to use one, or several of the same denomination. Having more than 2 common bill denominations is a pain, and I’m realizing that only after having given that up for this system.

Coins are much easier to handle. I know they’re heavier and all that nonsense, but it really doesn’t matter because you move your change rapidly. My first week I was just pulling out tens and accumulating change; I thought it’d take a month to get rid of it so I only took a few chunks of it here and there, often ending up not having the change I needed on me. Even so, I used up every dime in a few days. It’s just so easy to use change when there’s 1’s and 5’s in there because that’s all you need to access, you never have to combine change and bills. So, you really don’t accumulate much change. In fact, you accumulate far less than when all the change you have is a matter of cents that aren’t really worth pulling out, like we have in the states.

Anyway, this seems like a small and crazy point I’m sure, but when you get used to the convenience of this system, it sticks out.  I warn that the experience might be different for womenfolk, with the purses and wallets and all that. The whole change experience is predicated on being able to quickly and easily pull out change and bills from separate pockets.

It’s a similar system in Europe, but it’s not nearly as convenient because of all the damn bills, the 5 euro and 10 euro and 20 euro bills and all that. Lacking a 20USD equivalent and having the 5USD equivalent in coin form means that the purchases you use bills for and the purchases you use coins for are nicely separated, and you don’t need to worry about anything more than one and occasionally two denominations of bills. Japan’s is by far the best exchange system I’ve ever encountered. Except for drachmas, what a hilarious currency. ” That’ll be 10 drachmas please.” Hilarious, I don’t know how they do business with a straight face. “sales this year broke one million drachma’s“

If you can’t tell, things are still in a bit of a transitory phase, so please pardon our appearance while I get all the kinks worked out and morph this guy into his final conformation.

If you have any complaints or suggestions about the site as it evolves, please feel free to post that here in the comments for this post (not more recent but unrelated ones) or shoot me an email, any input is appreciated.

Also you’ll notice I added a twitter stream for the site. Do not be fooled, it is not a real twitter stream, it is an rss feed masquerading as one. Basically whenever I post something it’ll throw a notice up on twitter, it’s just for those of you that do use twitter to get your updates but don’t use rss readers. Personally, I don’t like twitter; I hate stopping what I’m doing just to take photographs let alone stopping to holler at the world. I see the point and I see it’s appeal, it’s just not my thing right now.

Anyway, here’s to new hosting, a new domain, and my continued travelling. Thanks for reading so far.

So two weeks into Japan and I hadn’t really gone anywhere, and I was in a bit of a panic when I realized that, after the coming 5-day weekend, I had only 2 more left in Osaka, after which Kansai would be expensively out of reach from Tokyo. So I was resolved to go somewhere (although I realized a couple days later that I was in error, and I had an extra weekend in there heh). Unfortunately, I was not the only one with this plan; there are normally only 2 weeks of holiday a year for the Japanese businessman, once in June and once after the first of the year, so this anomoly where three national holidays fall on a Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of the same week generates serious domestic tourism. I wanted to visit the seaside town of Kanazawa, but found that there wasn’t a manger to sleep in; I called 24 hotels, and every single one was booked full. It was a similar story at Koya-san, a mountain retreat where over 50 Shingo Buddhist temples host travelers overnight including breakfast, dinner, and prayer (for a hefty fee), and Takayama, a mountain town that supposedly has a wealth of sights and peaceful locales to see and enjoy. I was able to book a place in Shirahama though, a beach and onsen resort town in Wakayama. I thought to go there for a bit of a change; nice beaches and onsen, a relaxing place. Ultimately though, I decided I’d rather do day trips in the Kansai area, of which there are many, than go hang out at the beach alone. The guy operating the ryokan even told me on the phone they were full until he found out I was going along, they had plenty of singles left.

The first of these trips was to Nara. My coworkers, in an effort to be almost unbearably gracious, constantly offer to take me places. I appreciate it deeply, but it’s a bit much, and I still haven’t gotten the hang of how to turn people down for stuff. I can’t just say no I’d rather travel alone, I gotta make up excuses and such; the problem is I don’t have excuses prepared beforehand, and the way the conversation works, or least how it works when talking to a foreigner with broken Japanese, is that if my immediate response is not some reason I can’t do it, then I indeed plan on doing it. So far things have worked out ish with me managing to turn down many very kind and considerate offers for entertainment without, hopefully, hurting too many feelings. Nevertheless I looked forward to making a little trip to Nara with coworkers, feel the place out a little and get a sense for it before I return after my duties at DA are done.

So on another hot Kansai morning I took the subway down to Nanba station where the Nara line reaches Osaka and met up with three of my coworkers, including my buddy T***-san and his child, Yuuki. The day that followed I’d describe as pretty *blank*. It was pretty fun, pretty hot, and overall pretty mild in terms of event, excitement, or adventure.

The express train to Nara’s only a few bucks and takes about half an hour from Nanba Osaka. You arrive in the midst of Naramachi (Nara being Nara and machi meaning town), which is essentially just the shopping focal point of the city, beefed up beyond the usual for a town that size by the tremendous influx of visitors. Indeed there was no shortage of tourists, especially Japanese, likely given the fame of the location, proximity to Osaka, Kyoto, and Nagoya, and the long weekend. Nara koen (park), where the hundreds of temples are located, is quite vaste though and there are ample tea houses and restaurants skirting it so despite the crush of visitors that you pass by, it doesn’t really effect the experience of visiting the big, popular temples like Todai-ji or getting a bit to eat. Getting out from the station we walked up uphill along the park, past the various Nara museums, I imagine containing mostly artifacts drawn from the temples and exhibits explaining the history of Japan’s (first?) capitol. We picked up some Bento boxes for lunch on the way that one of my companions had called ahead and had prepared. The day was hot, something you think I’d get used to or least pay attention enough to that I would, two weeks later, have gotten every inch of exposed skin burned to high heaven. I joke that I”m a New England lobster. But in either case it was hot, and of course the Japanese don’t wear (and therefore don’t frequently sell) sunglasses, so my retina’s remain thoroughly bleached. So we worked our way up in the shade by the park, walking past the other visitors (which were numerous, but as I mentioned nicely dispersed) and the Shika, or deer in Japanese, or Shkashkashkashka as Yuuki-chan loves repeating ad nauseum in his excitement after, full of trepidation, “sneaking” up to the lazy, braindead beasts and poking them in the butt to make them jump up and whirl about. There were tons of deer, all over the place. They’re not quite the deer I’ve seen in various parts of the states, quite different actually, but they’re no less stupid and do little more than walk around chasing tourists that hold out food for them (which is quite fun actually) and then processing said food all day. If you can’t tell I don’t have much love for deer, they just eat constantly and proliferate, it’s like the lowest common denominator of the mammal kingdom.

T***-san coming back with some drinks from across the way

Yuuki playing with Shika

Anyway, we worked our way up by the park towards Todai-ji, our primary site for the day, and probably the most famous of Nara’s landmarks. It contains a famed massive Buddha with two Bodhisattva’s flanking it. Before then we stopped in the park to eat lunch, which was made more exciting by a couple deer making their way over and accosting us. I found the best trick is to just back into the deer to push them away, allowing you to easily protect whatever you’re eating in your hands, and to continue the process. It was quite pleasant though, despite all the people. Again the place is massive. Himeji (a post to come), with but one real attraction is quite a different experience on touristy days.

A note on Yuuki-chan, the kid is very bold and excited, and fairly clever. I’ve interacted with him a couple times since, and he’s really endeared himself to me. He’s five, and in meeting people is generally quite shy at first, but opens up fully very quickly. He also cries about random things, which his father makes fun of him for endlessly. Still, he’s a pretty fun kid, with a tremendous amount of energy.

A gate to Todai-ji

So we completed our walk over to Todai-ji and took in the main site for the day, Daibutsu-den. It is a massive, gorgeous, entirely wooden structure (the largest wooden structure in the world actually). I don’t really have much to say about it other than what you’d read in a travel guide. It’s impressive in its scale (which is apparently only 2/3 of the original, rebuilt after, surprise, burning down in the 1700s, although I believe the buddha is original from the 8th century), but as a major attraction doesn’t really inspire anything than some awe on the concept of this massive structure and grounds set against the beautiful mountain backdrop (and in Japan, there is always a mountain backdrop, I can’t get away from it). To make the visit appropriately complete I had to of course indulge in some good old Japanese superstition. There’s a hole in the base of one of the pilons that is supposedly the same size as the Daibutsu’s nostril, so everyone tries to climb through the thing for good luck. It’s a fun little trick, and when adults do it, with great difficult, it solicits clapping and cheers (although short, T***-san is pretty buff and therefore wide, an unusual thing in Japan, so a real round of applause followed his unbelievable journey through the nostril).

Just like lighting candles in churches

Well, buddha

The hole

A final note on Daibutsu-den, the Japanese government has done an extremely simple and clever thing I’d love to see reproduced in the states and other countries. At major attractions around the country, including Daibutsu-den, they have big metal stamps with a well-designed mold that depicts some representative image of the site. This is coupled with an ad campaign to get kids around the country to put these site stamps (not like postal stamps, the kind you pound into ink and then mark paper with) in books and collect them. The effort, I imagine, is to get kids to take an interest in exploring the nation and its cultural heritage. They spin it in the advertisements like a mystery adventure to discover the sites and collect the stamps, quite clever as I remember how big sticker collecting was as a kid, despite how stupid that is. Kids like to collect things, especially things that fall neatly into a given medium, like stickers, and they can feel are personal treasures. The stamps colorfully and dramatically reflect being to these sites, which are famous, ancient, and awe-inspiring, so I think it does a good job of getting kids excited about trips to see things. Even if the kids don’t learn much traditional history at the sites, I think experiencing the holdovers from historical times at a young age will give children a sense of the past, of previous existences, and hopefully an interest in what the past has produced.

After that visit, we worked our way back to naramachi to promenade a little through both the quiet and busy streets, taking in the little niceties the city of nara has constructed and the bustling retail industry before heading home. It was a fine day, and taught me something important about Nara: it’s massive. Seeing a significant chunk of Nara’s sites is nothing to scoff at, and one should go there with the right mentality and reasonable expectation in order to best enjoy their experience.

Naramachi

In the following days I took a couple more day trips, first to Kyoto and then Himeji. Associated posts will follow.

As a rule of thumb, I always suggest purchasing two travel guides to get two perspectives, it’s not as hard as you might think to cross-reference them. Basically you pick one for whatever purpose (that’ll make sense shortly) and then double check with the other one in tough decision making circumstances.

First of all, it depends on who you are and why you’re going when determining what travel guide to purchase. If you are looking to travel in luxury and comfort, with the associated price tag, I suggest you purchase one of the travel guides I won’t discuss here, such as Fodor’s or Frommer’s, that is well established in evaluating luxurious accommodations with fairly little thought given to price. I would also purchase Lonely Planet to get a more accurate opinion of sites and locations than Fodor’s or Frommer’s is likely to give you.

For everyone else, Fodor’s and Frommer’s and, frankly, every other guide that I’ve seen out there except for Let’s Go, Lonely Planet, and Time Out, are worthlessly biased, poorly researched, and largely irrelevant to an enjoyable experience.

If you are traveling with a family of four for a couple weeks, get Lonely Planet, that’s all you need. Lonely planet by the way is not the best guide out there, personally I think Let’s Go and the Time Out City guides by far eclipse it, but if you are traveling with a family you are probably mostly interested in hitting the major sites and getting the most out of them, I think Lonely Planet is good for that, and will give you the most solid and affordable experience.

If you are traveling for most other reasons, whether it is alone for short or extended times, with friends, or any other reason I can think of (even business), get Let’s Go (LG) Japan and Lonely Planet Japan (LP). here is what you do with them:

Let’s go is by far superior for all practicalities: accommodations, transportation, shopping, entertainment, dining, long-term accommodations, jobs, and all other practical information. It’s opinions are honest and realistic, largely unidealized (you’ll find that misrepresentation can be a slight problem with Lonely Planet). Furthermore, it is excellent for an actual budget-conscious traveler, focusing on actually cheap locations and good deals at higher price ranges. All that said, its descriptions of sites can be randomly lacking, especially in major tourist cities like Tokyo and Kyoto, so it should be accompanied by another book. Furthermore, if budget is not an issue at all, LP provides more useful accommodation and nourishment information for those wishing for some style or expense, it’s a better middle ground.

Lonely Planet, as I mentioned, offsets LG nicely in that it provides much better maps and site descriptions, along with better orienting information in the maps (as useless as that is, see earlier post), although LG often provides crucial written landmarks that prove exceedingly useful (such as the KFC that led me like a savior to Kimi Ryokan upon my arrival).

LG and LP provide a great combination, and both will see fair use.

If you have any more questions about the guides or disagreements (or agreements) with what I’ve said, hit me up in the comments and I’ll try to respond.