Everything's Bigger in Nara

I was a little worried about my friend after dinner on Wednesday night. Pretty soon after we got home it was obvious that she was ill, and she didn’t look any better on Thursday morning, and we were both fairly certain that she had gotten food poisoning at the Italian restaurant where we had dinner. It would have been better, I think, not to continue on to Nara that day, but for some reason my friend’s host mother disagreed. I don’t know if she thought that my friend was faking it, or overreacting or something, or if she was just embarrassed to have asked me all the way to her house just to send me home early, but we wound up getting in the car and driving to Nara, about an hour and a half away. Nara itself was beautiful as Ise with regards to fall colour, and if we had been disappointed with the scale of things on the previous day, we were more than impressed with our findings on the following one. The main two features of Nara that people will bring up are 1) deer and 2) Todaiji Buddhist temple. As for point 1, there are, in fact, a lot of deer, but they were not as aggressive as the deer at Miyajima, mainly (I believe) owing to the fact that tourists are allowed to feed the deer in Nara, and there are many stands that sell sembei (rice crackers) for that purpose. Basically, if the deer see that you don’t have any sembei, then they won’t bother you because they know that you have no food for them. Now on to the more interesting point 2. Todaiji temple has been in Nara for a very long time, though it has been destroyed by fire on more than one occasion. The current structure is actually about 33% smaller than its predecessor, but still manages to rank as the largest wooden structure in the world, and houses a massive statue of the Buddha (14.98 meters) seated on a lotus flower and flanked by two gold-plated Boddhisattvas. It is hard to give justice to just how awesome this place is, and pictures simply don’t do it justice, though I did my best. The temple also ranks as a UNESCO world heritage site (I wonder how many of these there are in Japan? Because I feel like I’ve been to quite a few). At the end of the day my friend looked a little better, though could still only bring herself to eat rice. They dropped me off at home with a massive box of persimmons and my own Omiyage of cakes shaped like camellia blossoms.
-I really love persimmons and persimmon trees, though I can’t remember having ever seen either before coming here. My favourite thing about the trees themselves is that long after the leaves have fallen off the fruit remains, which is really a lovely effect.
-Everything’s bigger in Nara.
-I’m really glad that I have the host family that I do, even if they don’t have central heating.
-Almost everything in Japan, it seems, has a history that goes something like ‘they built an incredible structure here a really long time ago, but then it burned down. They built another pretty darned cool one after that, but it burned down too, so this one’s not so nearly as old as it could be if we they’d had a sprinkler system installed.’

Holy Lands

After dance class on Tuesday I went home with one of my friends, since she and her host mother had invited me to come with them to Nara and Ise. Many of the other AKP people had taken advantage of the break to go out of town to Tokyo and the like, but as I had made no such plans it was nice to be able to get out of Kyoto, if only for a few days. Starting early (for me) Wednesday morning my friend, her host mother, and myself boarded the express train for Ise, which took about 2 and a half hours with only one change of trains. Ise is the site of the most important shrine in the Shinto religion, a religion indigenous to Japan and so highly tied into its culture that even people who profess to different faiths often observe Shinto holidays and the like. The reason that the shrines at Ise are so important is that they are the earthly homes of the highest Goddess, Amaterasu-Okami, and one of her main vassal-Gods, Toyouke-Okami. Amaterasu is the sun goddess of the shinto religion, and the mythological progenitor of the Imperial line, which means that besides having a massive temple complex dedicated to her, she also receives gifts from the Imperial household, as well as daily meals, and a new house every 20years. The first place that we went, though, was not the main shrine but the outer one dedicated to Toyouke, the god of food and clothing, responsible for feeding the Goddess, which is much smaller but similar in architecture. From there we went to the ‘Inner Shrine’ to Amaterasu, which was much larger and more crowded. The most striking thing, for me, about both of these temple sites is how little there was in the way of ornamentation. In most every other shrine that I have visited, the buildings have been covered in decorations, surrounded by statues and closed in by brilliant red torii arches, but here there was not only a dearth of carving and statuary, but also no paint: every building and arch was the natural colour of the wood that formed it. According to my brochure, this style of building is believed to be the oldest and purest form of Shinto architecture. The houses of the gods themselves were also very different from what I was used to, in that they were square-ish thatched cottage-looking things, with crossbeams from the ceiling protruding from the roof on both sides to form wide ‘V’s that were then capped in gold. All around the houses themselves were black river stones, with a wide, carefully delineated path of bright-white ones leading up to the ‘front door’. No pictures are allowed to be taken of these buildings, a rule that I have encountered at no other shrine, and only the Emperor is allowed to enter the gates of the main sanctuary. Though the buildings were few and simple, the area surrounding both Toyouke-Okami and Amaterasu-Okami’s shrine were extremely serene and beautiful, simply by virtue of the fact that they were left as natural forests bordered by extremely clear rivers. Besides these two shrines, we also went to another, smaller, one at Iseshima, where there are two rocks in the ocean itself tied together with rope. Both my friend and I had seen pictures of this before, and really wanted to see it as the scale of it all seemed massive. When we got there, however, it appeared that photographs of the location skew the proportions a bit, as it was not nearly so big, and, because of our expectations, a little ridiculously small. In actuality the rope is no bigger than any other rope and the rocks are only a stone’s throw offshore. It was, however, rather amusing that the shrine’s onshore site’s main ornamentation was given over to statues of frogs, which is a play on words, as the word for frog (kaeru) is the same as ‘to come’, suggesting money, good luck, or whatever one wants coming in. After all of this it was time for the all-important Omiyage shopping trip. For a very long time, the most popular gift from Ise was a dessert made by a company called ‘Akafuku’. Unfortunately, there was a scandal involving Akafuku shortly after I arrived in Kyoto, which meant that every single stand, store, or outlet of the Akafuku company was closed, doubtless causing massive losses in revenue. Surely when you hear this you are thinking that they must have inadvertently killed someone, but that’s actually not the case. What they did was freeze some unsold merchandise, thaw it out, and sell it as a fresh product. No one died. No one even got sick, and the dessert wasn’t the sort of thing that could be dangerous if not fresh (such as meat or dairy), but because they lied about the freshness of their product they are in serious trouble. They take freshness here very seriously, apparently. In the end I decided on some lovely pickled radishes (we eat pickles with just about every meal at my host family’s house) and some candy that apparently has nostalgic value and is also only available in Ise. After a very successful trip we headed back to my friend’s house.
-The word for shrine in Japanese is ‘Jinja’, often used as a suffix to the name of the god that lives there (seimei-jinja, for example, enshrines someone named Abe no Seimei). Very big shrines are called Jingu, also used as a suffix to the name (Heian-Jingu, for instance, enshrines a Heian emperor). Amaterasu-Okami’s shrine is so important that it is just called ‘Jingu’. It doesn’t need any other name, it is THE Jingu.
-Ise is also famous for being the site of the Mikimoto, the famous Japanese pearl company.
-If you go to Jingu, there are very detailed English-language brochures available for free from the large stands where they sell the shrine’s charms, you just need to ask or look really foreign.

Clear waters and the 30-ken-long gallery

Because my host mother had a day off, she offered to take me to see two of the most famous temples in Kyoto, Kiyomizudera and Sanjusangendo. We got up early (for me) and headed out by bus to Gion, got off in front of the Yasaka shrine, and took a long-ish but beautiful walk through the grounds and out the back, stopping at a Victorian-style ladies’ hotel for lunch. It was a bit expensive, but it was quite nice and the interior of the place was positively beautiful. After that we walked through some very nice streets lined with vendors of every sort of traditional Kyoto Omiyage to Kiyomizudera. Kiyomizudera is a Buddhist temple built up into the mountains around Kyoto, and has been declared a UNESCO world heritage site. It’s most famous for the way that large portions of it are built on tall platforms out from the side of the mountain, which are supported on series of wooden beams fitted together without any nails. It has remained this way for well over 100 years, though I can’t remember exactly how long. Even though it was no longer a holiday the place was mobbed with tourists and school groups, who were often recognizable by their brightly-coloured hats before their uniforms could be spotted. Below the main buildings there is a smaller shrine where a spring from the mountain is channeled into three streams of water, which people drink from by way of long-handled dippers, that are supposed to grant (from right to left as you face them) success in ones studies, health, and love. I drank from the studies one, since there wasn’t one for ‘ridiculous amounts of money.’ After this we hopped on another bus to Sanjusangendo, which might also be a world heritage site. This was another very old Buddhist temple, though of a completely different feel from Kiyomizudera. The main focus of this temple is the 1,000 carved wooden statues of the Buddhist deity Kannon, all incredibly detailed and plated in gold, carved by master carvers over a period of 100 years. They are joined by a complete collection of statues of 28 guardians of Buddhism, which are also incredibly lifelike, aided in that illusion somewhat by the fact that, although the statues themselves are made of wood, their eyes are made of crystal. The overall effect of all the statues flanking one massive statue of Kannon, all in wood and all in a single long room is very impressive and definitely worth seeing. After such a long day, we only made one more stop: the Minamiza Kabuki theatre in Gion, where the names of the actors and plays that were going to be shown at the biggest Kabuki event of the year had just been put up on the façade. Every actors name was written in calligraphy on a large plank of fresh wood, and every play was displayed with a full-colour painting to represent it along the top of the entrance. The tickets for this event are apparently all but impossible to get.
-Maiko experience shops, where any tourist can be dressed up like a Kyoto maiko and allowed to walk around the area for awhile, are myriad in the neighbourhood around Kiyomizudera. This means that if you see a ‘maiko’ walking around that area, they are almost certainly not the real thing. According to my host mother, maiko are almost never seen in such touristy areas unless they are there for a festival of some sort.
-Most places temples that I have gone to allow pictures, but not Sanjusangendo, so be aware.
-The temple building at Sanjusangendo was built on layers of clay and sand in order to protect it from earthquakes.
-Fall and Spring are the two most touristy seasons in Kyoto and it shows.
-I also bought Takarazuka tickets today by reserving them over the phone in advance and then buying them from a machine at the Lawson’s convenience store. I only ordered just over a month in advance, so it’s not impossible, and the woman on the phone was very nice and understanding of my language limitations. I was, however, extremely happy that my host mother was there to help me with the machine, since the entire thing was in complicated (for me) Japanese, though probably I could have gotten help from the girl behind the counter at Lawson’s.

Market

On Sunday a couple of friends and I decided to go to the Kitano Tenmangu market, held every month on the 25th, weather permitting. Unfortunately, because it was still a 3-day weekend for all of Japan in a place famous for beautiful leaves and an unseasonably warm day, the place was absolutely mobbed. There was no where in the entire flea market (which raps around the entirety of the Kitano Tenmangu shrine, which is pretty big) where you could turn around without bumping into at least 4 people, but it was still fun to be out in such nice weather with my friends. For some reason, I’ve made it out to the Toji market twice, but never before to the much closer one at Tenmangu. Anyway, no one really bought a whole lot, which is fine, though we saw a lot of entertaining things and tasty-looking foods, and we did eventually choose lunch out of things of the second category (I had takoyaki, which is octopus heavily battered and baked). After that, I went with one of my friends to see the student festival at my college. Student festivals here are amazing to me, especially because they really are entirely put together by the students themselves. We were actually too early for this one, but we did get to see people setting up their stands, practicing the acts that would be on the two large stages that had been set up, and painting signs, testing equipment and all matter of other industrious things. Essentially, school clubs decide on their fund-raising method of choice and fully plan and execute it themselves, which is interesting enough when college students manage it, but extraordinary when you realize that most every school of Japan from elementary-on has one of these every year. Doubtless the first-graders have a certain amount of help, but it’s still pretty cool, in my opinion, that they are given responsibility for something like this from such a young age. Anyway, that was pretty much what I did on Sunday.
-I heard once from someone that Japanese people will not wear clothes that have been used by someone else, but this is clearly a fallacy, as there are massive numbers of used kimono booths at these flea markets, at which the vast majority of shoppers are Japanese.
-I had here my first bad experience with someone, though I could be over-reacting. I was perusing a box of hair ornaments in someone’s booth, and went to pick up one from the tangle when the shop woman jumped up and forcefully yelled “No! Only look!” which surprised me and annoyed me enough that I just left. I don’t know that it was just because I was a foreigner, but it really felt that way. Too bad for her though, because I had money in my pocket that could have been hers.
-Japanese college students (not all of them, but far more than in America) do not do much work or go to many classes. Basically, the goal is, through years of stressful testing, to get into a good college whose name alone is proof of your intelligence and will help you get a job in the future. Once you’ve actually entered college you essentially devote all of your time to your club of choice, which accounts in part for the students’ zeal in fundraising at the festival.

Fall leaves and Murasaki

This week was my fall break, which ends up being actually a full 10days, because Friday was a national holiday (Labour Thanksgiving, actually). Luckily, a friend from my Joint Seminar class (one of the Doshisha students) invited me to tag along with her ‘Genji’ class to Ishiyamadera, which is the Buddhist temple where it is believed that Murasaki Shikibu began writing the Tale of Genji, generally considered to be the world’s first novel. My friend had told her professor before that there was an American girl who was interested in classical Japanese literature, which he found amusing, and so I found myself headed out to the farther reaches of Kyoto Friday morning. Because the elevation at Ishiyama (literally ‘stone mountain’) is higher, the maple leaves were out in force, making for some of the best foliage I’d seen thus far, a fact that seemed to have gotten around, because the temple was mobbed with people enjoying their 3-day weekend. The temple complex itself is huge, with several buildings, outbuildings, winding paths up and around the rocks and many rooms for small exhibitions. We started up, after washing our hands at the fountain to purify ourselves, towards a beautiful area of tall grey rocks that were surrounded with beautifully contrasting red leaves, which I was told the poet Bassho had once compared to white autumn wind, which people think means that the rocks themselves actually used to be bright white instead of grey. Beyond that there was a replica of a screen which showed a series of small pictures that each represented a chapter of Genji, and then the main temple building. After that we saw a small exhibit of old scrolls, paintings, and more folding screens having to do with Murasaki and Genji, as well as an ink-grinding stone that is said to have belonged to Murasaki herself, though my friend said that this would be hard to verify, since almost exactly 1000years have passed since Genji was written. The amusing thing, for me, about the stone was that it had two circles for mixing ink in, the left-hand one decorated with a carp, and the right-hand one with an ox. These are puns: the word in Japanese for dark (koi) has the same sound as the one for carp, while the word for thin (usui) sounds a lot like the word for ox (ushi), so one would mix darker ink in the left one and lighter ink in the right one. After we’d had our fill of Genji for one day we headed to a café, where we stayed for awhile talking over our cake and café au laits. I returned home a little later than expected, but luckily just in time for a wine party that my host family had put together. They had bought a bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau and prepared several delicious ‘tapas’ to complement it, including octopus and potatoes (much better than it sounds), scallops and sweet pickled onions, and crab salad with cucumber. This wine was the first that I’d had since coming to Japan, but actually fits in with the regular schedule of Japanese customs: every year on the same date Beaujolais Nouveau comes to Japan first (since it’s probably the first country to get to any particular calendar day) and since it’s the sort of wine that should be consumed immediately, every year it’s a big sell. A very satisfying day, in my opinion.
-It’s not a good idea, when you don’t understand what someone has said, to repeat part of their sentence, as that can sometimes be seen as an actually answer to their question, and sometimes a very odd one. I don’t know what I said, but I could tell it was weird from the laughter that followed.
-There is a boat on the river near Ishiyama called the ‘Michigan’. Imagine my surprise as, in my search for a regional ‘Hello Kitty,’ I found a charm of Kitty riding a steamboat labelled prominently with the name of a state from my own country!
-It is very easy to find yourself both ordered for and paid for in a big group here. It happened with the temple entrance fee, the café, and a significant portion of my return fare. Now I really need to buy a gift for my friend’s professor.
-When it comes to small talk, lamenting the weather works equally well in Japanese as it does in English.
-My friend had actually lived in California for a while when she was younger, and is thus fluent in English. She related to me an essay that she had read about a Japanese literature professor teaching in America, which talked about the differences between teaching on America’s East coast as compared to the West. One major feature of Japanese literature and arts in general is the extreme attention paid to making sure that the season is accurately referenced, with images carefully grouped by seasonal appropriateness. Because of this, the professor had no trouble teaching Japanese literature on the East coast, where seasons are similarly distinct, but ran into a problem teaching near LA: he felt as though he was teaching fiction.

Today was amazing. That is to say, today was the day when we went to see the Takarazuka Revue in the city of Takarzuka itself. I should explain. Takarazuka was an all-female revue begun in 1913 to bring tourists to the resort town of Takarazuka, and was based on the Paris reviews of that time period. Because it is an all-female performing style, women play the men’s parts as well as the women’s parts, with actresses specializing in one or the other. The style is opulent, somewhat Vegas-like in its love of sequins and feathers, and the actresses are all extremely talented in singing and dancing as well as acting. The show that I went to see with my class was called ‘El Halcon,’ staged by the Star troupe, which was about a ruthless British naval officer who was secretly a Spanish spy, and a French noblewoman-pirate, but really the plot was not very important. What were important were the amazing costume and set changes, the intensely synchronized dance sequences and the many raising and lowering platforms, not to mention the extremely convincing acting. After the show itself and the entirely plot-less (but amazing) musical review that followed, we made a couple tries at the gift shop, where the DVD’s were well out of our price ranges, then walked around the city a bit and visited a small museum of costumes from previous shows, including a set from the most popular Takarazuka show ever staged: ‘Rose of Versailles.’ I really hope that I can go to another show before I leave Japan, but the tickets are very hard to get, as the fan following is intense. I have to say though, that the tickets we had were probably the worst in the house, but even so I had no trouble seeing what was going on, probably because though the auditorium is tall, it isn’t very deep and the levels are steep. Plus, everything is amazingly over-the-top and everyone is mic-ed.
-The Takarazuka actresses who specialize in male roles (‘Otokoyaku’) are immensely more popular than those who play female roles (‘Musumeyaku’), and generally have more starring roles (and more merchandise).
-Takarazuka has done everything from ‘The Importance of Being Ernest’ (which they called ‘Ernest in Love’) to a ‘biographical’ show about Hemingway to ‘Carmen’ to period Japanese dramas.
-Almost the entire audience was made up of middle-aged women, with practically no men in sight.
-The Takarazuka Hello Kitty was twice as expensive as any of the other special Kitty’s, so I didn’t end up buying one.

Dolls

Rather than hang out in the AKP lounge after my Japanese class on Friday, a couple of friends and I decided to check out the Kyoto Costume Museum, which is near to Nishi Hongan-ji Temple and in the area of the Gojo subway stop. It was a little hard to find, mainly because we were expecting some sort of building devoted to costumes, but we eventually realized that it was on the 5th floor of a building that, on the main level, sold supplies for Buddhist temples, including ceremonial robes and large altar implements. When I realized how small it had to be, I was a little disappointed, but I quickly recovered. The first thing in the place is a scale model of the Rokujo Mansion from The Tale of Genji, which was in incredible detail and gave a very good idea of what life was actually like for nobility at the time. Because the conventions of architecture were incredibly different way back in 11th century Japan, it was a little hard for me to envision most of the rooms when I was actually reading the novel, which made this model especially interesting to me. The first half was devoted to various scenes of the normal activities of Heian noble women, represented by perfectly dressed dolls in 12-layered silk gowns with tiny books, go-boards and mirrors. The second half of the mansion was devoted to portraying two major scenes from Genji itself, the first being ‘Marriage vows of the third night’, where Genji makes the lady Murasaki his official wife. The second scene, however, is from the ‘Aoi’ chapter, where Genji’s first wife is giving birth. They show all of the ladies in waiting getting everything ready for when the baby comes, dressed in white to drive away evil spirits, with priests reciting prayers for health, and mediums being possessed with any malignant spirits in the area. The centre of the scene, of course, is the Lady Aoi herself, laying on her sickbed with Genji attending her, but over her prostrate form, carefully positioned is a doll of the Lady Rokujo, Genji’s spurned mistress whose living spirit is attacking Aoi and making her ill. It was very effective. The other half of the exhibit was devoted to a life-sized mock-up of a Heian room, with two fully dressed figures. In this room, however, they also had an assortment of robes that could be donned by any visitor for free. They weren’t complete 12-robe sets or anything, but they were enough to give a good idea about what it was supposed to look like, and only took a second to put on instead of over an hour. Thoroughly thrilled with our find, we returned to the lounge to head out with everyone for a dinner arranged by one of the other students to thank the women who work at the office keeping everything running smoothly. We ended up at an Italian restaurant near sanjo, easy walking distance from the Karasumaoike subway stop. Our reservations had been made beforehand, and the dishes going to be served were also decided in advance. We got a LOT of food for not a whole lot of money, and it was really tasty too. I wouldn’t recommend going there with only a few people though, because the portions are famously large. As it was, no table finished everything given to them. Several people went out for drinks afterward, but since I was going to have to wake up early the next morning I declined.
-It seems that ‘pumpkin pie’ is a bit hit-or-miss here. The slice on the dessert tray at the restaurant seemed to be literally pureed pumpkin on a crust topped with whipped cream.
-A story told by a friend of mine bears repeating: She was going to stay the night at one of the other students’ host family’s house, and thus needed to buy a gift for them as a ‘thank you.’ She decided on flowers, and was looking at all of the expensive single stems of chrysanthemums and the like, when she saw a group of little bouquets to the side. She picked one of them up and asked the store owner to wrap it up nicely, which he did after giving her a strange look. When she arrived at the house, the host mother thankfully accepted the flowers, but a couple days afterward, her friend (whose house she had stayed at) pulled her aside and said ‘my host mother just wanted me to tell you that the flowers that you bought, while nice, are actually only meant for offering to graves and the like, so..’. So, the small pre-prepared bouquets should not be used as gifts to living people.

7-5-3 Day

Sunday I hadn’t really intended to do anything, since I had so much homework for Monday, but my host sister pointed out that it was probably the last weekend to see kids going for shichi-go-san, or ‘7-5-3 day.’ This is a holiday of sorts in Japan where three- and seven-year-old girls and 5-year-old boys get dressed up in (usually) traditional clothing and go to a Shinto shrine to be blessed by the god there for long life and the like. I have read that it has roots in old samurai class coming of age days, but I’m not entirely certain about that. What I do know is that I went around noon to Heian Jingu in Higashiyama and saw a number of very adorable children, whose parents were only too happy to let me take their pictures. The seven-year-old girls tended to look very excited and proud of their pretty clothes, though I saw a couple minor tantrums in the making, while the 3-year-olds seemed kind of confused and dazed by the number of people, and I saw more than a couple just sit down in the dirt and start playing with the white gravel in the shrine courtyard. The boys seemed to be either very proud of themselves or a little wary of other people, in which case they tended to stay close to their mothers. To the side of the main area of the shrine I saw what appeared to be several different brides having their photos taken, and though I tried to get a good shot they were a bit too far away. On my way back to the bus stop, I got my first sense of fall since being here. The leaves would normally have changed already in the rest of Kyoto, but this year they are a little late, so only the areas at a higher altitude, such as Higashiyama, are sporting much in the way of colour. The smell of warm, dry leaves and the sound of them being blown across the sidewalk behind me made me miss home, and I’m glad that I made it outside on what is probably one of the last of such days left in the year.
-Traditional shoes will not stay on kids’ feet any better than normal shoes. The mother of one boy I saw had clearly realized the futility of putting them on her son at all, who sported brand new sneakers under his traditional-style clothing instead.
-While I made sure to ask parents before I took pictures of their children, large tours were making their way through the shrine that day, and tons of them were snapping away without so much as a ‘Thank You.’
-I say that ‘usually’ they wear traditional clothes, because there were some notable exceptions, among them a pair of sisters dressed in an inspired modification on traditional dress. Both girls had kimono-style dresses on, with the swinging sleeves and robe-like collar, but they were short, with a ruffled crinoline underneath, and decorated with lace at the collar and sleeve-openings. Instead of a stiff obi sash, they had large sashes that tied in large bows covering most of their back, and then, the absolute perfect decision in footwear: cowboy boots. I wish that I had managed to get their picture.
-In truth, not only did the parents grant me permission to photograph their kids, they were very flattered and made sure that their kids looked their best for my pictures.
-Because the sum of 7+5+3=15, families tend to go to the shrine on the weekend closest to the 15th that is convenient. Since all holidays in Japan were dated by the Lunar calender until the early 20th century, many dates remain unfixed.

Osaka and Puppets

Saturday was a great deal of fun, but also incredibly long. For my performance class we had tickets to go see The National Bunraku Theatre in Osaka, about an hour and a half by train from Kyoto. Bunraku is traditional Japanese puppetry, where each puppet is about ¾ life size and operated by three men: one on the feet, one on the left hand and one on the head and right hand. These men operate in full view of the audience, but one hardly notices them. The puppets themselves are capable (because of their complex design and three-man system of operation) of extreme levels of subtle movement, including moving eyebrows (on some puppets) and heavy breathing of someone scared or exhausted. Because the puppets are so dynamic and evocative, the impassive faces of the men behind them are easily ignored. Well, a friend and I got to Osaka pretty early so that we could have a look around, since neither of us had ever been in the city before. The section that we were in seemed rather like any other big city in America, except for the extreme proliferation of themed specialty hotels, including a Christmas-themed one that was pink and decorated in giant Santa Claus figures. We also found ourselves at one point in a massive shopping arcade, that was made up of a number of covered streets and cross-streets full of all sorts of stores. Before the performance itself we were able to meet with one of the puppeteers who showed us how the puppets worked and moved up-close, and then led us around backstage of the theatre itself. We even got to stand on the stage with the curtain closed, which was very exciting for me, at least. The shows were both very well done, though I preferred the second piece, ‘Love Suicides at Sonezaki’ to the first one, which was a story from the ‘Tale of the Heike’. All told, each play was two hours long with a 30-minute break in between, which made for a very long day. If anyone has a chance to go, however, I would recommend it, especially because they provide very good earphone guides for non-Japanese speakers if you reserve them. Unfortunately, as has happened to me a couple times since being here, I expected to eat with people after the show, but everyone else had had their fill with the snacks that they ate at intermission, and as it had gotten so late most of them opted to just head home, so I was left eating dinner at Mos burger by myself, which was still very tasty.
-A full program of Bunraku is four hours in the morning and then another four in the afternoon. I don’t think that I could sit for that long, even though it is amazing.
-You can eat meals in the Theatre itself, though you need to make sure that you don’t have any crinkling paper or anything.
-A popular actress here admitted on TV that she was afraid of the ceramic badger figures that you often find in front of shops or in gardens here, and after seeing the one above I don’t think I blame her.
-The Japanese term for a comb-over translates to ‘barcode,’ which is pretty funny, in my opinion.
-Maybe I should check with people about dinner plans before I make assumptions about them.

More Karaoke

Friday evening I went out with a couple of my friends for dinner and karaoke. We were just walking around, looking at shops and vaguely searching for food when, while loitering in a kimono shop, we ran into another of our friends! So, the four of us found a neat little café above street level called the ‘Shinsetsu Café’ which roughly translates to ‘Kindness Café’. It was actually very reasonable and cute, though the menu was rather limited to skillets with various arrangements of noodles, meat and okonomiyaki, always served still sizzling with two eggs on top. The inside was covered in vintage Japanese comics, old signs in English and soccer paraphernalia, and really felt like the kind of place that people just hung out in during the day. After that, we wandered over to a karaoke place that we had heard of, stopping at a comic and comic-related stuff store that was fairly amusingly, and sadly containing a special, limited edition of an anime that I’ve wanted to see for awhile, that was not only really expensive but also the wrong region coding for any machine in the US. But, the karaoke place was fun and reasonable, and we got through quite a few songs before we had to head home, including ‘Nights in White Satin’, ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, ‘The Phantom of the Opera’, and miscellaneous Japanese songs, with one attempt by me to sing ‘Vanilla’ by Gackt. A good end to a Friday, if I do say so myself.
-These karaoke bars are set up for the die-hard fan, with all three meals available at decent prices, showers and enough different activities to satisfy pretty much anyone, I should think.
-It seems that things get less expensive the farther from the open ends of the shopping arcades or the higher above street level that you go.
-I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but prices here almost always include tax, and there is no tipping, which makes splitting a check immensely easier.
-There are post boxes everywhere, both for domestic and international letters.
-They have enormous chrysanthemums here. They're beautiful, in many colours, but the biggest I've ever seen.

Thanksgiving

Because they couldn’t book a room on the actual day of Thanksgiving, AKP threw a Thanksgiving party this Thursday instead. It was a potluck, but AKP provided the turkey and drinks, and a group of students organized the decorating and entertainment. For the occasion, Mom sent me the recipe for one of my favourite Thanksgiving dishes: roasted chestnut dressing. I managed to pull it off fairly well using fresh rosemary from my host mother’s garden, but I accidentally didn’t add chicken broth, which made the texture a little dry. I think that the most amusing thing about the party itself was the wide variety of dishes that people brought. There was, of course, a great deal of Japanese food, such as sushi and croquettes, but also some other western stuff, like mashed potatoes and rice crispies treats. One of my favourite additions was the batch of spam musubi that some of the students from Hawaii made. I was able, in addition to stuffing myself, to meet some of my friends’ host families, including my friend’s host father, who frequents a teahouse in Gion, and gave me several name cards of Gion maiko-san, which are incredibly beautiful and amusingly uninformative. They only actually include the maiko’s first name (which is a sort of ‘stage name’ that they come up with when they become maiko) and the district that she is from, but are printed with beautiful patterns, which change depending on the season. These ones were also stickers, though I can’t say I know why.

More Dancing

Sunday was when the Gosechi dances were going to be held, so I decided to go and see them, since it was only a 10-minute walk and it was the last day that they were going to be held. I got there a little late, and the crowd was huge, but I was still able to see the dancing itself. The dancing and music more closely resembled the dancing in Noh or other traditional Japanese styles, and the kimono were beautiful, all in a Heian-era court style (I believe). Instead of the main melodic line being carried by reed instruments, today it was given by a group of male singers in something resembling Gregorian chants. After the dance was over, I stopped at one of the little areas set up within the palace grounds where they were serving tea, and got a very tasty red-bean ‘cake’ and a cup of matcha for only 500yen, which is a steal. After that I perused the various souvenir stands and headed home. While on my way there, however, I got a message from a friend of mine saying that she had tickets to go to the ballet with two other girls, but was feeling too ill to go. After some deliberation I decided to go, and had a very good time. It turned out that it was a sort of exhibition of the best dancers from various ballet schools in Kyoto, and even if they were not professionals, they certainly seemed to be of high caliber. The final two groups were, I thought, the best, with beautifully choreographed groups of nearly synchronized dancers weaving in and out of gorgeous symmetrical tableaus. Not a bad day, considering I’d had no plans going into it.
-No matter where you go in Japan, there will be somewhere to buy Omiyage. At the Imperial Palace there were massive varieties of traditional snacks, pickles and tea, as well as photos of the Royal family and fine stationary.
-I actually really like ballet, maybe I’ll go see it again sometime.
-On Hina Matsuri or the dolls’ festival, the traditional drink is some heated mixture of soft rice, milk and ginger that is very tasty and apparently rather good for your health.
-This is my 40th entry, scary huh?

A sampling of the traditional

Because the Palace is open, they are holding dances every morning this weekend inside the grounds (where they have been traditionally performed) at 10 and 11am. My host mother and I went to see the 10am one, thinking that the performance today was of the Gosechi dances, which were dances held yearly (I believe) at least since the Heian period to commemorate a legend that says that one night the emperor was playing music by himself when a group of heavenly maidens came down to dance for him. Actually, today’s performance was of something called Gagaku, a court dancing style I believe performed only by men that came over from China a very long time ago. That was also very interesting, because everything about it seems very foreign to the traditional arts that I’m used to, though it greatly predates them. After that, my host mother had gotten us tickets to see a house called Reze-ke, which was I believe the home of an imperial princess that has been passed down through many generations from before the Edo period. The house is only open to the public very rarely, and also contains priceless artwork and is a designated cultural property. The current ‘owner’ of the house (because she cannot live there, and the house itself is, I believe, maintained by the government) is actually my host mother’s waka teacher. Much of the house is actually made to facilitate singing and writing poetry, including an unusual interior. To make room for large gatherings, large sections can be opened up so that there is no separation at all between rooms, and because they usually sit in a row to do this, some extremely traditional architectural conventions have been warped. The storehouse of the estate was actually one of the only things to survive the great Edo fire that destroyed the imperial palace and Reze-ke itself, making it one of the oldest buildings in the area. Inside are (apparently) priceless collections of poetry and art that can only be accessed by the house’s owner. After this, my host mother, host sister and I went almost to Gion to a temple that was having a sort of event. Basically, the finest traditional stores in Kyoto were exhibiting their products, with each store having a sort of diorama to decorate. They had everything from traditional candies (Toraya was there, which is only a block from my house) to sushi (real sushi, I don’t know how they did it) to kimono and ceramics, and every booth seemed to be attended by a very elegant-looking person in traditional attire. I couldn’t get over how cultured some of the older women looked in their kimono. At the end we were served tea and a snack Omotesenke school style, and I was able to take a picture with the current head of the Omotesenke school of tea ceremony. When we left we were served soba noodles in broth topped in grated radish by women dressed in a style traditionally worn by country women selling their produce in the city. After that we visited the main temple building and paged through the used book fair going on outside of it, then walked around the corner to a café for lunch. The inside of it really reminded me of the inside of an Irish pub in the daytime, with long wooden tables and benches where several parties were seated, and a relaxed atmosphere.
-While ‘waka’ to most people implies poetry, the words for ‘poem’ and ‘song’ are the same in Japanese (uta), which makes it possible to sing a poem.
-Rezeke’s tatami mats have a pattern on their silk borders that cannot be used in any other place in Japan.
-Rezeke also is one of the only houses that may receive one of the special straw tassels from the main float at the Gion matsuri, which is a good-luck talisman.
-Toraya is coming out with a special collection of Tale of Genji sweets for the novel’s 1000th year anniversary, which depict the different flowers that are used as names for characters and chapters in Genji.
-To show off its prowess, one of the kimono shops had in their display a type of kimono not worn by pretty much anyone today. It was a kosode, which was common dress only until the middle-beginning of the Edo period, and afterward was only used in the Imperial court.
-There are two major schools of Tea Ceremony in Kyoto (maybe Japan as a whole, I’m not certain): the Urasenke and the Omotesenke schools, both of which descend from the founder of tea ceremony as it is known today, Sen no Rikyu.
-Omotesenke tea is less foamy then Urasenke tea.

The Imperial Palace

Fridays I have, as I’ve doubtless noted before, only one class, which allows for a large amount of time-wasting, but today I actually did something educational. Usually the park-like area within the walls of the Imperial Palace complex is open to the public, but the inner gardens and buildings are surrounded by separate, alarmed walls that are too tall to see over. This weekend, however, people were allowed for free to walk through a designated path and see where the Emperor used to live. Unfortunately, there have been so many fires at various times that have destroyed different sections of the palace, and at times the whole thing, I believe, there are actually few buildings that date from before the 19th century. Even so, the buildings have, I believe, been rebuilt in the same styles that have been in use since the Heian period. It really was beautiful. The gardens alone were gorgeous, with carefully pruned pines and large ponds, and the various rooms had paintings that were from the great masters of various periods of history. I particularly like the Emperor’s Study room, where they used to hold big waka poetry contests with the large blinds open to the garden. After our tour through the Imperial Palace, we returned to the common room at school and loafed around for awhile before someone mentioned going out to an Indonesian restaurant that they’d heard of. It took us a little while to find it, but when we did it was both beautiful and delicious. It was called ‘Hati Hati’, and had many dishes with complex flavours, the best of which were the beef rendeng and the beef satay. One of my friends had, I learned, lived in Jakarta for seven years before returning to the US, and so was able to speak a little bit of one of the Indonesian dialects to the owner of the restaurant, who was very nice. It was a little more expensive than our usual fare, but not bad for the quality of food we got. After that, one of the other students was being thrown a surprise birthday party at a bowling alley close by, so I stuck around long enough to scare him along with the others as he came out of the elevator. As I’m not much of a bowler I headed out after that. When I got to my street, however, I noticed that it was cordoned off by policemen and trucks with red lights. I told the police officer that I lived just a bit down the road and he let me through, but on my way I saw what the problem had been: one of the houses in my neighbourhood had had a fire. I don’t know how or when it started, but once I drew close I could smell the unmistakable odour of charred, wet wood. When I reached the house itself my host mother was a bit worked up, and understandably so: fires have been extremely dangerous in Kyoto as long as there has been a Kyoto to catch fire. All of the buildings are made of wood and paper, and they are packed closely together with only narrow streets separating them except in modern areas where there are firebreak roads. This fire was far enough away from the fire to not even acquire much of the smell, but it was still rather startling.
-The Imperial Palace grounds have been in their present location since 1331. The palace described in The Tale of Genji and other contemporary literature was located 2km west of the current one and was built in 794.
-After a large fire in 1854 most all of the Palace had to be reconstructed.
-As you face the ‘throne room’-like building, there is a tachibana mandarin tree on the left and a cherry tree on the right, something that is often mimicked in different locations and gardens in Japan.
-The owner of the Indonesian restaurant seemed to speak fluent Japanese, English, and at least one dialect of Indonesian, maybe more.

Outcastes and Innards

For my joint seminar class we went to a community centre and museum for the Burakumin in Kyoto. For those who don’t know, the Burakumin were a class of people rather like the untouchables in India. They dealt with things such as slaughtering cows and pigs and handling corpses, which were considered extremely unclean. Because of this, they were segregated from the rest of society until the Meiji restoration, where the caste was abolished. Unfortunately, writing down on paper that Burakumin were just like any other citizen did not destroy the belief that they the lowest class available, and so up until the post-war period Burakumin neighbourhoods remained the most impoverished and poorly-funded areas in cities all over Japan. Also, the Burakumin had, while they were a separate class, monopolies on certain trades including shoe-making, which disappeared when the class was abolished and the market flooded with foreign imports. To aid the local population in Kyoto, a member of the class who had become rich set about improving schools, building modernized shoe-factories, and even starting a bank for his fellow Burakumin. The bank is now the site of the community centre and museum that we visited. I wish that I could recommend something with such history to American visitors, but there isn’t a single word of English in the entire place, which makes it virtually incomprehensible to the non-Japanese visitor. After that, we went out with the professors for Korean barbeque, which was tasty, though only because I didn’t ask what I was eating. The specialty of the place was pork, so we had that instead of the more traditional beef. We were given the pork raw along with a gas burner to cook it on, and served kimchee (spicy pickled cabbage, daikon radish, and something resembling zucchini), salad to wrap the meat in, a rice porridge of some sort, and a soup with thin slices of mochi (pounded glutinous rice). All the way back to campus I talked with one of the Doshisha students from the class about The Tale of Genji and The Pillow Book, which was very entertaining. On the train, another American said ‘hello’ and introduced herself as an exchange student studying near Tokyo who was from Washington State. I always want to introduce myself to other foreigners, but I’m always too shy to actually do so.
-When you have Korean barbeque and you don’t think that you have been given actual meat, it’s better not to ask what exactly it is that you are eating.
-Just like in Chinatowns in various large cities, Korean restaurants also seem to like to place things like pigs’ heads in their front windows to advertise the appetizing nature of their foods.
-Be five minutes late to a meeting place for a class field trip and you could wind up going the whole way by yourself.
-The ATMs here accept Bank of America debit cards.