Kyoto Part One

(Sorry I haven't been writing ....!)

PART ONE

When most people think about traditional Japan, they think about the pagodas, the gardens, the famous temples and shrines: they think Kyoto. I’d never been before, just read about it on WikiTravel and in a couple of Lonely Planet books, and it turned out to be much like they said. Kyoto is still a normal Japanese city; it’s just pocketed with super famous, ancient historical sites. It would have been nice to have been instantly transported back a few centuries ago, but I didn’t see one geisha or maiko (geisha-in-training) while I was there. No samurais or ninjas, either.

I did see a lot of tourists from all over the world, though—Korea, China, Vietnam, Germany, Russia, France, Australia, England, the U.S., and even Spain! It was wonderful to hear so many dialects and languages in one place, and I was thrilled to speak a little Spanish. I was disappointed though because I kept messing up! A) I said “Amerika” instead of “los Estados Unidos” as the response to the “¿De dónde eres?” question, which you never do in Spanish but always do in Japanese; B) I said “hai” instead of “sí”; C) I said “Puedes usar nuestra mesa” instead of “Pueden”; and D) I bowed and said “arigatou” instead of “muchas gracias” when I left. I get stuck in Japanese mood and can’t switch to Spanish as easily as I would like. (Like this morning I had to Google “cute” in Spanish because all I could think was “kawaii”. Good grief!)

But I digress.

On Tuesday night, I stayed with my friend Anna in Maebashi. We woke up at 5:00 a.m. on Wednesday morning and were on the train to Tokyo by 6:29. We took the JR (Japan Rail) from Takasaki to Tokyo, and then the Shinkansen from Tokyo to Kyoto. Due to circumstances beyond our control (i.e. I don’t speak Japanese) we ended up in a smoking car in a kind of uncomfortable seat, but it was a quick ride to Kyoto, just a little over two hours.

Once there, we shoved our luggage in the Kyoto Station lockers, met my friend Wayne, and had lunch at a tonkatsu place (deep-fried breaded pork cutlet served beside a mountain of shredded cabbage). Then we bought a 500 yen bus pass and went to Ryoanji to meet our friends L & M (who prefer for their names to remain anonymous even though their pictures are all over Facebook). We saw the temple there and stared at the famous rock garden, searching for a deep meaning between the stones. (L said the garden meant islands in the middle of a sea; another friend of mine said it means that since the rock formations aren’t perfect, humans aren’t perfect either. I haven’t decided what I think it means.)

That evening, we had green tea parfaits for dinner, and then went back to the hotel.

On Thursday, Anna and I woke up at 8:00, had a traditional Japanese breakfast of coffee and pastries at Starbucks, and visited four temples/shrines in a row:

Daikakuji Temple (which was closed but we got in anyhow)

Tenryuji Temple

Iwatayama Park

Matsunoo Grand Shrine

It was freezing all day long, the sky threatening rain for hours until finally it started coming down. Looking at the unheated temples with their wooden floors and tatatmi mats made me feel sorry for the monks who lived there in the days of old: surely they were cold all winter long! But maybe that's how it's supposed to be . . .

I won’t give you a detailed description of every temple and shrine, but I will say that they were beautiful and historic. They also tend to look fairly similar after a while. (And this isn’t just my American-ness coming out; one of my Japanese friends said that even he thinks it’s all kind of the same old hat after you’ve seen a few.) I had thought that shrines were Shinto and temples were Buddhist, but then I saw a statue of Buddha in what I had thought was a Shinto shrine . . . so I’m confused again. Can anyone enlighten me?

The way it works is this: You enter through a large red gate (torii) [鳥居] whose kanji for reasons I don’t understand is made up of “bird” and “live”—avian sanctuary?) You walk down a path a couple hundred meters to the actual buildings that are usually in a group of a lot or a little, depending on how big it is. The architecture is fairly plain compared with the ornate temples I saw in photos of Taiwan, which seems to fit with the Japanese spirit.

After our temple tour, we met Wayne, Amy, and Andrea at a delicious ramen place, which came with a huge steaming bowl of ramen and four pieces of karaage (fried chicken), plus a bowl of rice for less than 1000 yen. Delicious!

Friday, New Year’s Eve, Anna and I repeated our breakfast adventure at Starbucks, this time admiring the new snow falling quickly down. But we didn't stay in Kyoto to see the snow; we took the train to Osaka to meet L for his last day in Kansai. We spent the entire day shopping at Amerimura (American Village!) which is a super hip, super cool section of town where I couldn't quit buying clothes. We ate famous Osaka okonomiyaki for lunch (I'll try to upload a picture soon).

My highlight was finding a Krispy Kreme with a brilliantly lit up red sign, that immediately devastated me because only the name of the store was lit up: not the HOT part. However, it was a little piece of heavenly home to stand on the corner of a busy intersection in Osaka, Japan, eating a chocolate glazed doughnut and sipping coffee.

At said intersection, waiting to cross the street, some Japanese boy (maybe 23 or 24) stood in front of the growing crowd of people and started singing in a loud voice, “I want you! I need you! I want you! I need you!” doing a little dance and pointing at Anna. After he finished, we clapped, ignoring the other people who were obviously horrified, and he came up to us. “Nihongo jouzu?” he asked, wanting to know if we spoke enough Japanese to talk with him. “Um,” we replied. Slowly, enunciating every syllable, he pointed at his face (not chest, like we do in the U.S.) and said, “Wa-ta-shi-wa- (pause) Hi-ro-shi-ma-ni (pause) sun-de-i-masu” (I live in Hiroshima). He said something else I didn’t catch, but it might have been asking about us, so I said in Japanese, “We live in Gunma.” “Eee? Gunma?!” was his shocked reply, and then the light turned green and we never saw him again.

That evening, Anna and I celebrated December 31 by going to the Osaka Sky Building to stare at the Osaka skyline. On the way there we kept hearing what sounded like an old man coughing up his lungs, but ended up being the sound caused by clogged pipes running overheard. Regardless, it still sent us into fits of giggles every time we coughed. . . .

On top of the building, 160 meters tall, there is an open-air viewing of the city. Anna felt a little vertigo, so she made her tour quickly, but I stayed out for a bit and tried to take pictures of the night skyline. None of them came out the wanted them to, but it still felt nice to be on top of the world on the last day of the year.

(Next Post: New Year's Eve and the days following)