Japan 2006 - Kyoto and Nara

Second and final entry in my trip report from Japan (at least, I haven't been able to find any later emails in my archives).

Well, I've been staying with Lisa in Osaka for five days now and have had an action-packed time. Turns out Kyoto has enough fascinating stuff to fill a six-week visit, let alone a one-week one. Anyway, I may have been raving enthusiastically about Tokyo in my last email but that was nothing compared to how much I'm loving Kyoto. Seriously, after coming home on the first day I went there I was so excited I couldn't nap properly.

Kyoto is a gorgeous city. At least, the shrines and temples, and there are a lot of them, are gorgeous... the modern part of the city is pretty much like the modern part of Tokyo or Osaka but on a smaller scale. Also beautiful is the historic part of town, where the streets are lined with tea-houses and inns, these two-storey wooden buildings that have little red paper lanterns outside to indicate their presence. Everything in that neighbourhood is very discreet... you can't see into the places at all,you're stuck admiring their quiet, elegant facades. Also there are a few streets with canals running along them, and now that the cherry blossoms are exploding everywhere it's an absolutely magical kind of place, especially at night. I've spent one full day in Kyoto, doing some intensive temple-hopping, and two evenings, eating and walking around.

Yesterday I went to Nara, the first capital of Japan, which has a multitude of shrines and temples as well, all set in an expansive park overrun with deer. The deer are cute but they harass people for food, and they eat all the greenery, and they're national treasures so they won't be leaving anytime soon. I think I read that there are about twelve hundred of them. Nara was nice, too, but not as nicely landscaped as the shrines in Kyoto. Although there is one shrine there with the largest indoor statue of a buddha. That building is enormous, and the buddha, equally so. Really impressive. Although the grounds of that temple (for your reference, temples are Buddhist, shrines are Shinto) are a little overrun with tourists. Kyoto's sights are equally touristy, but for some reason the gaijin seemed more prevalent in Nara than in Kyoto, and they make it seem more annoying. Possibly because the Japanese tourists tend to actually be visiting the shrine, with at least an inking of religious motivation, while the white tourists are just slightly bewildered or else loud and obnoxious.

On Sunday Lisa and I went to a town west of Kyoto called Arashiyama, a quaint little tourist town on a river, in the mountains, that is big stuff on the Cherry Blossom circuit. This country is obsessed with cherry blossom season, it turns out -- there is seasonally inspired everything. The kimono fabric on display features cherry blossoms, there are cherry-blossom-flavoured limited edition beverages for sale, cherry-blossom-flavoured chips, cherry-blossom-flavoured street food... it's bizarre. People go so far as to put up posters in the Kyoto subway every day, rating the dozen or so most popular spots for Hanami (cherry-blossom viewing) on a scale from zero to five blossoms. Anyway, luckily for us, Arashiyama was not on the list of must-see sites for Sunday, although unluckily for us this is because the blossoms there were mostly not out yet. But because it wasn't busy we were able to get on a river cruise that would have otherwise been sold out for days. A nice, scenic jaunt through the mountains... of course, with the thousands of trees planted along the route I could see how it might have been more spectacular in a week or two. At the end of Sunday, we met up with a couple that is friends with Lisa, and went for a nice dinner in Kyoto, and then to an onsen (naturally-heated hot spring, although in this case it was naturally heated hot tubs on the sixteenth floor of a hotel near Lisa's house). Today I'm going to attempt to get to a more rustic onsen, in the mountains north of Kyoto, where you sit ouside and look down a mountain valley. We shall see. For those of you who have seen Memoirs of a Geisha, I'm also headed to the shrine that has the path lined with the hundreds and hundreds of bright red gates (torii) that the girl runs along to pray with the coin the Chairman gives her.

Anyway, I'd better get a move on.

Take care, all, I'll see you in a week (sigh).

Japan 2006 - Tokyo

I'm feeling nostalgic today, and so have decided to reach all the way back to 2006 to pull in my notes from my trip to Japan. Here's the first of two entries, originally sent as emails to friends and family.

Hey everyone... I made it to Osaka, and am now staying at Lisa's place. She and her roommate have a huge, nice apartment almost right next to the park in which Osaka's castle is situated. After a few very busy days in Tokyo (my hostel was not in a location that was convenient for mid-day rest stops, so I pretty much went from dawn til dusk on my feet -- the absence of any public seating of any kind anywhere in the city didn't help, either) I'm taking a day off today. Slept in til 1*30, actually, so evidently I needed the break. Apologies for any bizarre punctuation, by the way... things aren't always where you expect them to be on a Japanese keyboard.

Anyway Tokyo was pretty fantastic, if totally overwhelming. The subway system there is ridiculous. It's very convenient once you figure out where you're going, but with a dozen or so different lines, the stations are enormous and finding your way to the right platform can involve a five-minute walk. That's not to mention the fact that there are also rail lines run by different companies. In Shinjuku, for instance, there are actually five stations named "Shinjuku station", each on a different line, and all connected by a maze of underground walkways. And then, of course, there are the people; the biggest station in Shinjuku handles two million riders a day, apparently. Luckily I was never squished into a rush-hour train myself, but navigating the flow of pedestrian traffic is still pretty much a nightmare. I haven't even mentioned the pedestrian overpasses, above-ground walkways, or the fact that many of the downtown train stations are several stories above ground level. It really is insane.

So, a bit about the city itself: it is incredibly enormous. It's twice as big, three times as bright, four times as confusing, and six times as incessant as I thought. The crowds were about the only thing i adequately envisioned. New York may be the city that never sleeps, but Tokyo is the city that never even sits down. Seriously, the park benches aren't the only symptom; many of the eateries are standing-room only, and stands selling bento boxes for commuters seem to be the preferred lunch option. The shopping districts incorporate dozens of different monolithic department stores, each eight storeys tall and a full city block big... sandwiched in between these are these thin, tall buildings, with a different store on each floor, each with a sign down the side of the building advertising its existence. How anyone ever discovers (or chooses between) anything above the ground floor is a mystery to me. There's a Fifth-avenue style shopping district called Ginza next to what seems to be the modern financial area; there's a beyond-trendy area called Harajuku where all the high-fashion designers (Prada, Louis Vuitton, etc) have their flagship stores, each more architecturally adventurous than the last; there's Shibuya, with insane neon and video screens and all the stores you'd find in a high-end mall aimed at teenagers; and then Shinjuku, with a bizarre mix of department stores, discount clothing stores, and a red light district. I spent some time wandering around all of these areas, and also managed to get to the giant wholesale fish market bright and early on Monday morning. That place is just as enormous as you might expect (given that it's billed as the largest of its kind in the world), and not entirely pleasant all the time, what with the aisles and aisles of dead, dying, frozen or soon-to-be-eaten fish, shellfish, eels, and other critters. Also spent some time in a more "traditional" part of Tokyo called Asakusa, which is more like a normal, livable North American urban neighbourhood, with a nice shrine in it.

All in all, an utterly exhausting city, but one I'd love to go back to.

Dad, by the way, Chicago may be high on your list of Architectural Cities to Visit from a historical point of view, but I'd add Tokyo from a contemporary point of view. Some of the things being built here are awesome (particularly the fashion buildings in Harajuku... if you look through your Architectural Records at home you might find one with the Prada building on the front of it).

Anyway, I'm off for a bit of a stroll (can't spent the WHOLE day doing nothing, although it's already 4:30). Tomorrow I make my first of hopefully three or four visits to Kyoto (Lisa has to work, after all), and on the weekend there's talk of heading to Hiroshima for a night.