Thoughts Near the End of Our Stay

As our departure date approaches, I reflect often on what I will miss about Japan and Kyoto. The first thing that comes to mind is one of the first things I noticed when we arrived: the way that people have of moving around each other, of intuitively knowing what’s going on all around them and gracefully moving to approach, but almost never collide, with others. One sees this in subway stations and stores, but mostly on the street. Sidewalks may be narrow or non-existent. Bicycles move back and forth between street and sidewalk. Motor scooters, cars, trucks, buses, bicycles and pedestrians all share the same thoroughfare. And it’s almost silent. Honking is so rare as to astonish on each occasion.

Speaking of silence, cell phone use is prohibited on subways and buses.

Schools (at least in our neighborhood) don’t have bells. They have chimes. There are several tunes, ranging from four notes to a full eight bars. Presumably each has its own meaning.

Every neighborhood has its koban, or police box, staffed with friendly, helpful officers who can help you find an address or retrieve something you’ve left somewhere or just get information about the area. They probably get bored. They seem to love visitors.

There are clean public restrooms everywhere. They don’t provide warm water for washing—only cold and sometimes no soap; sometimes you have to bring your own tissue; almost always you need your own towel—everyone carries a small towel or large handkerchief with them for the purpose. But they are clean, and they are ubiquitous.

You can get anywhere by train—by trains that run on time. Really, I think that all right-thinking Americans need to get on our Congress people to fund Amtrak better and to give it priority on track use so trains can run on time. You arrive at the station minutes before “take-off”. The station is close by and easy to get to. Seats are comfortable, with plenty of legroom. You can bring food from home without worry that it will confiscated at security. For much of the travel that we all do, total travel time is shorter, or at least no longer, than flying, and it’s certainly much more pleasant. Let’s import the no cell phone use rule, too.

On the subject of transportation, the fare boxes in buses and trolleys have change machines attached. This doesn’t hold up boarding because you board at the back and pay your fare when you get off at the front. You’re supposed to get your change sometime in between.

You notice I haven’t mentioned the food. But I have become quite fond of some of the local pickles that Kyoto and other places are famous for. My favorite is a Takayama specialty: pre-tofu albumin boiled in soy sauce with some other stuff—not technically a pickle I guess and sounds awful, but tastes delicious. I also love (from Kyoto) pickled baby ginger—not at all like the slices that we get with sushi at home.

Photos in order: 1. A School Zone sign; 2. An umbrella stand; 3. Toilet with sink built into the back; 4. Fare box with change machine attached. The lighted board tells you what your fare is based on where you boarded.

Final Field Trip

Last weekend, on our final trip away from Kyoto to another part of the country, we visited two museum villages—one Meiji era, one rural Japanese life from 16th-19th centuries. In each case, actual buildings from different parts of the country have been disassembled, moved and reassembled in the museum village setting. What a contrast!

The Meiji period buildings are massive and vary enormously in their design and construction—though all influenced by Western style. It’s hard to speak generally about them since they do vary so much. The simplest is a high school, a simple wood structure that could claim to come from 19th century U.S.; the most elaborate is the entrance and lobby of the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Tokyo Imperial Hotel. Great bridges and the huge Kitasato Institute for medical research reflect the reference for engineering and science held by Meiji leaders.

A foreigner's western style house with Japanese style servants' quarters behind.

Hida-no-Sato, the rural life village is so different from anything else we’ve seen that it qualifies as unique. No tiled roofs with fancy ridge trim. No gracious verandas or soft tatami floors. Steep and thick thatched roofs tied down to prevent cold winter winds from tearing the house open. Gigantic, closely spaced rafters tied together with cord support meters of accumulated snow. Wood plank floors with large square fire pits in the middle of the room. Trees felled and planked by hand, then pulled on sledges, for building and firewood. It was a hard, hard life!

Roof construction shown from outside (above) and inside (below)

Both places are well conceived and produced. At Meiji-Mura, one can participate in historical leisure pursuits by riding an old tricycle with enormous front wheel or walking on stilts. At Hida-no-Sato, wood carvers and straw sandal makers work under the fascinated gaze of tourists. Both are laid out on hillsides, arranged as real villages. And of course…each has a saké brewery.

Cherry Blossoms - The Less Learned View

Cherry blossom season is in full swing and it’s all the poets claim for it and more. For one thing, cherry trees require warm weather to bloom, and after two months of wishful spring festivals, this celebration marks the real thing.

For another, the sheer profusion of tiny paper-thin petals with sunlight upon them or shining through them expresses more exuberance than all the Christmas lights in the world. They line rivers and streets as far as you can see. Up close, each tree has its own dramatic shape and sports its own subtle shades of pink and white making you gasp at its beauty.

The drama is enhanced by the contrasting colors of other things blooming nearby—maples in earthy yellow and orange, nejiki (I don’t know the translation) in electric purples from pale lavender to deep violet—and the sweet potent fragrance of spiraea.

And when, far too soon, the blooms pass maturity, each gentle breeze generates a small snowfall, slow, soft, silent and startling.

No wonder everyone takes off from work to sing and get tiddly under the trees. We’ve done it several times ourselves.

Sakura

An awful lot has been written and said about cherry blossoms in Japan. They have been made into Buddhist images of the evanescence of life, patriotic images of Japan’s national self, tragic images of young pilots on suicide missions and young lovers in difficult relationships. Gallons of ink and acres of paper—from botanical taxonomy (with Latin names) to classical poetry—have created a kind of sakura subculture, putatively unique to these islands, in which everyone is supposed to know what they mean and how important they are. The media begin discussing the sakura season weeks before it starts, analyzing temperature trends and centimeters of rainfall—Will they be early? Will they be late? Will this year’s blossoms be as profuse as last year’s? And the progression of budding and flowering from Okinawa northward appears on the nightly news as a pink cloud, spreading up the islands in slow, stately rhythm, bringing the blessings of national identity to the whole country. As the pink cloud approaches their part of Japan, folks plan their hanami (flower-viewing) outings—Which grove shall we visit this year? What shall we put in the picnic basket? How much sake is Grandpa likely to drink under the trees? For that’s the classic cherry-blossom outing: The whole family goes, spreads out a blanket under the cloud-like flowers, and eats and drinks until everyone’s happily tipsy, simultaneously wallowing in the transient beauty of the cherries and bemoaning their impending demise with the next strong wind or rain.

There’s nothing wrong with this, of course, except the notion that no one who isn’t Japanese can understand it. Sakura are stunningly beautiful flowers, dozens of varieties, in colors ranging from almost-pure-white via every-possible-pink to dark-almost-plum, planted in rows along rivers and streams, singly in tiny front yards or in huge groves around major temples and shrines. They would be hard to miss and harder still not to appreciate. Kyoto has become a particular mecca for hanami because so many types of cherries grow here in so many settings, from the most delicate and wispy weeping types to huge, dark-trunked, ancient, senior-citizen sakura that have enriched a hundred springs. There’s even a variety that sports both pink and white blossoms on the same branches (we saw one this afternoon). The city government estimates that 10,000,000 tourists will visit the Kyoto valley this spring to look at the flowers. That’s ten million people in about three weeks, 97% of them Japanese, and they will flood the grounds of Nijo Castle, the Imperial Palace, the Kiyomizu temple, the Daigo temple, and dozens of other spots famous for their cherries. In these places, the architecture, the garden design, the placement of the trees all contribute to the enjoyment (though the huge numbers of fellow viewers might not). Today we walked along the Path of Philosophy, a famous canal in eastern Kyoto planted with hundreds of cherry trees—the crowds were thick (but not unbearable), the foreigners plentiful (but reasonably well behaved), and the flowers just gorgeous.

Things only begin to get precarious when the viewing of beautiful flowers, possible (indeed likely) in many places and cultures, becomes conflated with nationalism, with how special we are because we love and appreciate sakura. Come on, people. They’re flowers, and we all love them, and many of us find part of their beauty in the fact that they stay with us for so short a time. Foreigners walk along the Kamo and Takano rivers (as they do the Tidal Basin in Washington) to enjoy the clouds of bloom. Some foreigners even squeeze their way into the famous viewing spots, sit on the ground, get tiddly, and enjoy a classic hanami. We, however, will not do that, though we did attempt the Philosopher’s Walk for an hour or two. For ourselves, we have found a much quieter and less traveled set of trees, spread out over half a mile or so of riverbank in the steep, narrow Kibune valley north of the city. There we will walk with friends in the rustic atmosphere, as gently as possible, from one tree to the next, breathing in the calming fragrance and greeting the season of growth and flowering. We might drink some sake; we might even eat a skewer of “flower-viewing glutinous rice dumplings,” colored green, white, and pink for the occasion. Rituals do matter, after all. Happy spring everyone, happy Passover and Easter, and happy hanami to us all!

Robatayaki

We had a new food experience last night. A friend took us to a “robata-yaki” restaurant. We began this experience by walking downstairs directly from the street into a low-ceilinged basement room so dark and smoky it was hard to see exactly how big it was. As the proprietor pointed us to seats at a low counter, he informed us that we were allowed to stay for two hours, no longer.

We stashed our coats and bags inside the stools we sat on and looked around. The room was packed with people. In front of us a large grill was surrounded on three sides by baskets of raw food—meat, fish and vegetables, some skewered, some in chunks—arrayed like giant flower petals. Behind the grill stood a young man dressed in knee-high rubber boots, light weight black pants and shirt and a sweatband. Near his right hand, half a dozen crocks held various sauces for brushing onto the grilling food. When a customer ordered a dish, he cooked and plated it (from a stack behind him), then placed it on a large paddle at the end of a long pole, which he used to pass the plate over the grill, the baskets of food and the width of the counter to the customer. The paddle, when he wasn’t using it, rested across the front of the grill, preventing him from leaning on it and burning himself. He never seemed hurried and he barely sweated. On the contrary, his movements were graceful and practiced. He seemed to love what he was doing.

We ordered beers while we studied the menu. The beer arrived in mugs so large I could barely lift mine. Our friend started ordering dishes, each one a tapa sized serving. As we finished the first ones, he ordered more. It was the cook’s responsibility to take the orders, keep track of what we’d eaten and prepare our bill at the end. He was doing this simultaneously for maybe two dozen people encircling him. The only assistance he had in this was that every dish was priced the same, ¥300.

Adding to the ambience was the exhaust fan in the ceiling over the grill, a box the size of a ping-pong table that sucked noisily, pulling the sounds of conversation and the smoke from cigarettes into it. Cooking smoke thinned, but did not entirely vanish into it.

The food was good—standard fare, fresh, unimaginatively but nicely presented. It was good accompaniment to beer, which J points out was probably the point. And the cooking of it was certainly a good show. I’d do it again anytime.