Japan: A 2 part saga in 1

Japan Part I: The Kansai Region
Upon my arrival in Japan, one phrase was going through my head. “Holy **** I’m in Japan!” Granted, this was the same phrase I encountered before, such as “Holy **** I’m in Taiwan,” or the soon-to-be “Holy **** I’m in China.” (As I type this I’m on a flight from Tokyo to Beijing).
As this has been the first real chance I’ve had to really sit down and type out a blog, entry I’m afraid it’s going to be a long one, even for me. If you like, I’ll try to separate with headings. If you don’t like, because its not artistically pleasing or something, too bad, because I’m doing it anyway.
I arrived at the Kansai airport about 2 weeks ago. Kansai, in case you’re wondering is the region of Japan, on the western half of Honshu, which includes Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe, and surrounding environs. It’s also called Kinki, or at least a part of it is called Kinki, and there’s even a J-pop group from the area called the Kinki kids (Kinki is pronounced like Kinky, but it doesn’t have the same sexual connotations in Japanese as it does in English. In English, of course, every word has a sexual connotation. Perhaps they also hear our place names and think of sexual connotations, but I have had hard time imagining a Japanese person getting associated such words with “Western Canada”, though “Westman [Manitoba]” perhaps has some potential.”) Anyway, enough about sexual connotations.
Flying over the Kansai region, you can’t help but be impressed both by the mountain scenery, with forests somewhat reminiscent of Northern Ontario, even though this is the same latitude as California, and the endless expanse of city. Even moreso than Taiwan, the city stretches out like it’s the dominant land formation, dotted with those tall red and white electrical towers that usually would turn into killer robots in imported arcade games from the 1980s. You know the games I’m talking about. For some inexplicable reason, some random enemy force has seen fit to invest in thousands of expendable flying objects, that tend to stay in strict formation even when it is idiotic to do so, and swarm the skies over Tokyo. Often they use other cities in the world too, like New York, London, Paris, but always with the Tokyo. And its up to you, and perhaps a buddy, to fight them using only one 2 dimensional side-scroller jet-like aircraft that you get to fly for only 25 cents. Sometimes you get to destroy landmarks, but chances are you’ll see these red and white electrical towers.
The airport in Kansai, called KIX, is a great introduction to Japan. Never before have I encountered an airport with its own train system to take you to and from your terminal. Of course, I couldn’t access the internet though, which I could at the terminal in Vancouver, and as such, when the entry form asked me to list contact info, I was forced to call Sachi’s family, via an airline representative, over the airport intercom. Sachi, the friend I was visiting in Japan, was at work so I was supposed to meet her mother. I didn’t know her name, only the family name Doi, so I asked for a “Doi-san” (Mrs. Doi) to be called over the intercom, hoping the name wasn’t too common. Luckily, this trick worked and I was able to get through security, after a thorough search of my bag, and meet up with Sachi’s family, which included a very patient Doi-san (who preferred to be called Reiko-san[Lake-O-san], because Doi-san sounded like the name of her late husband [san is used for Mr., Mrs, Miss, and all that jazz]), Sachi’s sister, nephew, and niece. All were very friendly, though the young niece was quite shy of me at first (at only 3 years of age, I doubt she’d encountered many Caucasians before, at least not this close). Later on she would warm up to me, playing peekaboo behind the car seat and insisting, with an unexpected degree of adamancy, I eat shrimp-flavoured potato chips. She would also speak to me feverishly in Japanese, not realizing I had no clue what was she saying (though later on she would try to teach me Japanese using one a Japanese alphabet toy keyboard, not unlike Western models but significantly more complicated). Her brother, Sachi’s nephew was a bit older, say 7, and was quite a soccer player, we had a game at Sachi’s house while we waited for her to get off work, until I realized the ball was coming to close to objects of a fragile nature, ie Reiko-san’s vases and glass figurines. Even at 7, the kid was already developed a conception of “being cool” which of course, I don’t have to this day, but I did manage to impress him by being able to read his English t-shirt (Perhaps the English t-shirt thing is an Asia-wide craze).
We went to a sushi train restaurant (it wasn’t called Sushi Train like they are back home, because that would be a tad silly), where the food came on conveyor belts and specially coloured bowls and you were expected to just grab one, but you had to be fast or it would pass to the next customer. In a sense, it was getting back to human ancestral roots, not only eating raw meat but actually having to catch it in a sense (though in this case, no spears were necessary).
Sachi, by the way is a friend of mine whom I became very good friends with last spring/summer, before she left for Japan. She had come to Canada to go to university in my city, and that’s where I met her. I like to tease her by calling her a Japanese pop star, a volleyball captain (she went to a volleyball game between Japan and Canada last spring, so I naturally assumed she was the team captain for Japan), a samurai and ninja (in a email once, she tried to say she went rollerblading, but it came out as going around town with a blade), and a Japanese pop star. I’m not sure about the pop star aspect, but her mother did confirm for me that she used to play volleyball in high school and that they were in fact descended from samurai (though Sachi sharply denies inheriting anything samurai, ie bushido the feisty samurai spirit, from her mother’s samurai roots). Nevertheless, if the other assumptions were true, at least in part, then perhaps the pop star suggestion is not so far off. She does sing a mean karaoke version of “Private Eyes.”
Her mother definitely, though, has some of that bushido in her. With the exception of my own grandmother, whose English and not Japanese but no less feisty, I have never met such an energetic grandmother. Reiko-san was still up and ready to go, long after Sachi and I were ready to hit the sack. Thus, I called her the Party Girl for the rest of the trip. She’s a very happy woman too, smiling all the time and clapping her hands a lot. On more than on occasion, she burst out laughing, especially after unexpected events. Such as almost running me into a spiked fence with her samurai minivan, accidentally of course (I think). At any rate, both her and I shared an unhealthy, or perhaps overly healthy, obsession with Mandarin Oranges (One of the main reasons I started studying Mandarin, though the name is a misnomer as the blessed things are actually from Japan).
Sachi arrived later that night, exhausted from work and then looking after the kids, so we called it an early night. The next morning Sachi and I headed downtown Osaka to find the Chinese consulate (I needed to get a visa for the flight I’m currently on). After some trouble finding a registration number from City Hall, which actually proved unnecessary, we were able to apply for the visa with relative ease. The Chinese embassy itself was surrounding by Japanese police men, whose uniforms still look kinda wartime era and we had to get to it by going through small alleys, so it was a little strange. As it turns out though, Japan is covered by these policemen and women, and they seem to circle all embassies (Later, while in Tokyo, I accidentally encountered the Russian embassy and it was the same case there).
Our business [or bujiness] done for the day, we high-tailed it to Kyoto to check out the old temples, which looked they were taken right out of the Last Samurai. Some of the oldest wooden structures in the world, they were quite beautiful and even had ancient drawings that looked like the ones I studied in my topics course when I covered the origins of manga (perhaps they were the very same). The landscape was mountainous again (Japan is basically all mountainous) and the trees were very tall evergreen, deciduous with no foliage on their lower branches.
After the temples we walked through the old town, surprisingly preserved and maintained (albeit full of tourists). It was the same feeling of amazement I got from walking the old streets of Quebec City. Here though, there was something else to come across. A sumo wrestler and his girlfriend for one, Sachi said a lot of the Sumo wrestlers were quite wealthy and were popular with women. Not unlike NHL players in Canada, I suppose.
Later on we ran into 2 geisha who kindly agreed to have their photo taken with me. Haven’t never been around geisha before, I was a little nervous and didn’t know what to do, although these geisha could even speak a little English, and seemed, beneath the all-white makeup and the fancy kimonos, to be regular girls. Still, I was scared to touch one, less I mess up the makeup and outfit that must have taken hours to put on.
Further on, we encountered more Geisha, though these seemed to be a group on tour. I’d heard of geisha tours before, but I never expected to see geisha actually going on a tour themselves in Kyoto. Perhaps they were newbies. At any rate, I was quite amused to see a group of geisha just as lost in Kyoto as I would have been without Sachi.
After the geisha, Sachi and I hooked up with one of her friends, Asako (whose name I constantly mixed up with Osaka, as if you just switch the first and last letters…though I suppose they wouldn’t be worrying about the letters too much in Japanese kanji). We walked around Kyoto some more, stopping at a Pachinko parlour after I found a discarded token on the street and wanted to give it a shot. Sachi and Asako didn’t seem overly interested, and were quite surprised at how excited I got about it, but then I’d never seen a pachinko parlour before, and finding a free coin on the street seemed like a good omen. However, after putting the coin in a machine and figuring out the series of the balls, I left emptyhanded.
The next day, the three of us headed to a ryokan [LEO-kan], a traditional Japanese bed and breakfast, which also was an onsen (a hot spring hotel). This was on an island in the Inland Sea, across the longest suspension bridge in the world, near the big island of Shikoku. There were famous whirlpools in the area, called Naruto, that we visited in a boat.You might think that taking a boat around whirlpools is not the greatest idea, but I ddin’t seem to beg sucked in. At any rate, if the boat could handle the surprisingly rough water up to the whirlpool, it could handle the whirlpool which it tended to drive right through. Still I wouldn’t be going swimming their anytime soon. Fascinating though.
As for the ryokan itself, it was nice, had very Japanese décor and food (and they seemed to give us an endless supply of it.) The onsen was a little small, only for one, but that was okay because I kinda prefer to bathe alone anyway. They had very friendly staff, and one of the young girls even asked to have her picture taken with me, which was great for the ego albeit unexpected.
For New Year’s we returned back to Sachi’s house (New Year’s in Japan, is like Christmas in Canada, you spend it with your family). The Japanese also have a rich New Year’s tradition ranging from decorative wreaths, which often look like a snowman with a mandarin orange for a head (Sachi’s house had one, which I accidentally knocked over). They also had 3 decorative bamboo shoots outside the front door, which also appeared around Japan’s stores and temples. On New Year’s Eve, Japanese television is dominated by variety shows, where famous celebrities (famous in Japan at least) compete against each other in talent shows. The shows are usually divided into male and female teams, and I erroneously estimated the women’s team would win, but it turned out the men were voted the winners by the audience. Go figure.
Sachi and her Mom also had me do shots of Sake, another New Year’s Tradition, and on New Year’s Day we visited a Shinto shrine, which was lined up for blocks and had a festival atmosphere of carnival games and goodies all lined up along the surprisingly elongated approach. Sachi, just as she had done at the Buddhist temples in Kyoto, instructed me on the proper methods for entering the temple and etiquette, which I screwed up of course. For one, while you are supposed to rinse your mouth from water from the fountain of purification and not swallow, you are not supposed to spit it out like used toothpaste. Oops.
I should mention that the architecture in Japan is much different than in Taiwan, although the similiarity in Asian styles, especially in regards to temples is obvious. While Taiwan often uses red and yellow in its designs, Japan uses darker tones, often purple and blue.in hue. Also, Japan just looks different, both culturally and environmentally, than Taiwan so telling them apart is not a problem. I was very impressed how preserved traditional Japanese culture was in such an urbanized environment, but even at the household level you see it. Sachi’s neighbours had those distinctive rounded Japanese tiles (dark purplish-blue and somewhat similar to Spanish tiles), and even her own house had paper paneled room with the sliding doors (this is where I slept). It also had a fancy Toto toilet, complete with control panel and buttwarmer, but I count this as more of a new tradition.
After New Year’s we went to Nara [NA-La], Japan’s first permanent capital (though obviously it didn’t stay the capital forever). While we didn’t get to see the famous big Buddha, we did see many old temples including one lined for blocks with those eery but beautiful lanterns that you she around Japan. I have never seen as many gathered in one place. It was obvious the place was very important, and walking around the area made that clear.
I ran into some fellow Canadians for the first time since leaving Canada, though we didn’t stop and chat too long. We also encountered the famed Nara deer, which are fearless of people and apparently can be quite violent at times. We also saw a strange creature, that looked like the cross between a fox and a beaver, and seemed rather skittish. I was able to convince it to approach within a couple metres of me, but no further.
It was Sachi’s first time in Nara too, so we both enjoyed the adventure. The next day, however, Sachi wanted to go shopping (it was now the Japanese equivalent of Boxing Day) and suggested I go check out Himeji Castle on my own, as she’d already seen it. So I navigated my way through Osaka and Kobe to Himeji, a much smaller city these days, but still fair-sized and of course easily accessible by rail. The castle was massive, and no matter what gate I went through, there seemed to be another gate yet to pass through, which was bit unsettling as the loudspeaker told us to rush to the gates as they were about to close.. I was not satisfied that I had reached the top of the castle and realized it was highly unlikely that there would be any more gates, and took a sigh of relief and enjoyed the scenery and the small Shinto shrine. On the way down, I took a much more leisurely pace. Stopping to take many shots of the buildings, the views, samurai armor, the seppuku(ritual suicide) corner, and a shrub which would later mystify, on separate occasions, both Sachi and Asako who couldn’t understand why I would be moved to take a picture of such a non-descript shrub. I answered, because I wanted to show the castle had a shrub.
So yeah the things I choose to mention in my blog.Anyways, staying with Sachi’s family gave me a good idea of what Japanese family life is like, and how the Japanese really think (and I learned how to say “So,so, so” which means “Ah, I see,” among other things. I learned a lot about Japanese culture and etiquette (eg. Don’t use your feet for anything but walking, or perhaps soccer. The use of feet for pointing at objects is apparently highly offensive) and had a deeper understanding of cultural understanding. In the West, we usually say that Japanese people are not direct and honest, that the take the collectivist notion of preserving face and etiquette to such high levels, as one German friend put it “They can’t say NO to you,” which he went to explain meant that if you asked a Japanese person for directions “Is the temple this way?” they would answer that it was even if it wasn’t. In reality, I didn’t find this to be the case, but perhaps Japanese who have a poor command of English (and let’s face it, most Japanese have a poor, at least verbal, command of English, but then how’s your Japanese?) probably didn’t understand the question and just answered “yes” so as not to be embarrassed by their poor language skills (I also do this in Chinese, saying “dui” when I have no idea what the other person said. Granted, it will probably get me into trouble, but it’s a very natural response). As for the Japanese, as well as many other Asians, they tend to have the same stereotypes about English-speakers. Sachi would get furious with me for answering “We can” or “Sure” when she suggested we do something, because although these are both perfectly acceptable affirmations in English, she was expecting something more textbook, and more direct I suppose, like “Yes” or “Fantastic!” I tried to explain that English people, in complete opposite to Asian culture generally, don’t really like exaggerating their emotions thanks to the legacy of Victorian etiquette still lingering around, so answering “We can” or “Sure” was not meant as an insult but actually was the more polite, or at least more conventional, way to respond. Westerners also tend to try and address problems verbally if they come across them, while Sachi said she preferred to just put them behind her, and that talking only made things worse. Needless to say, we both had a lot to learn about each other’s culture.
Thanks goes to Sachi and her Mom for being such great cooks and providing me with such a wide assortment of Japanese cuisine, and maybe a pancake or four, that I know would not have been the same had I tried them alone in a restaurant. Sachi has a really awesome way of saying Nan-dian-ne which I likely spelt wrong but is Kansai dialect for “no way”). If you’re reading this Sachi, I really appreciate the favour you did for me, and I would love the opportunity to return it in the future.
Japan Part II: The Tokyo Region
After a week in Kansai, Sachi had to go back to work so I took the shinkansen bullet train (the fastest train in the world excluding the new Eurostar which stole the record a couple years ago in Europe) to Tokyo and proceeded to hangout there. Tokyo is by far the most famous city in Japan, and also its capital, so Sachi figured I’d have plenty to do and she was right. The first night I basically just roamed around town, walking towards the Imperial Palace, the former site of Edo Castle, the castle of the Shogun during the Tokugawa period (ie the period you’re probably thinking of). The palace was surrounded by a surprisingly large moat (I’ve used “surprisingly” a lot in my description of Japan, not so surprisingly), and I couldn’t get inside, but it was interesting to check out nonetheless. They had nice samurai statue outside one of the walls, neatly framed by skyscrapers in the background. Talk about your metaphors for modern Japan.
Japan’s Infamous War ShrineAfterwards, I made my way to a war shrine called Yasukuni-Jinja, Japan’s most controversial shrine and a bugbear in relations with its Asian neighbours in particular (including China and Korea). The shrine is dedicated to all Japanese lost in war since 1853, which also includes the period where Japan was sending its armies across Asia and the Pacific up until their defeat in WW2. Because I’d heard of the controversy, I wanted to check it out for myself, though it more or less resembled other shrines I’d seen (and was far less spectacular than the shrine I went to with Sachi). Still, it is probably the most prominent shrine to the Axis still in existence (I doubt the post-war Germans and Italians felt any desire to build a similar one, but I could be wrong) gives you a better idea of what Japan’s dark side was like (though the shrine, for the most part seems like a regular shrine). As it stands now, most Japanese don’t like talking about the war, at the Edo-Tokyo museum they called it “a sad part of our history,” and Sachi mentioned that if she mentioned it with her Korean and Chinese friends, she could lose friends. The Europeans I knew in Taiwan, were more willing to talk about the war. The Czechs, who surrendered to Hitler early on, when Britain and the U.S. failed to make good on their promise of military aid (at least right away), said that Czechs generally didn’t like Germans to this day (also because some Germans tend to come to Czechland as tourists and make asses of themselves apparently, not unlike some Americans going to Mexico), but also distrust Russians (who invaded them during the cold war), Americans (who failed to back them up with both the German and the Russian invasion), and, as Jan put it, “anyone non-Czech.” Taiwan apparently was very interested in Czech history, as it wondered its government would do the same if America failed to back them up in the case of a Chinese invasion.The Germans, for their part, had an interesting view as you might imagine. Rebecca lamented that Germany was the only country in the world where patriotism was considered evil and wanted Germans to take more pride in the progress they’d made since the war. Jacob, whose family is actually Polish and suffered terribly under Nazi rule, said that the war was talked about so much in history classes that he worried people were growing numb to the idea and starting not to care. Charlotte asked me, “When a Canadian meets a German, what’s the first thing they think of” and I admitted it was likely the war, but she accepted it as good in the sense that it is something that should not be forgotten.As for Japan, it does have its right-wing elements that seem to have descended from fascist days, but the people I talked to were generally friendly, not anti-foreigner, and generally preferred peace. Sachi herself was especially adamant that the Japanese Self-Defense Force not be referred to as a military. While I cannot speak for the government or all Japanese, I do believe for the most part, like most people in the world, they just want to live their lives in peace.So when I was surfing the Internet one night, and some MSN contact I hadn’t spoken to in years (in fact, I don’t actually remember who he is, but I think he was somehow connected with CreaComm, a program I was in many years ago) messaged me out of the blue with hatred towards the Japanese (He noticed my MSN moniker I guess, which read “Gone Japaning”). He basically said that they were hiding in the trees waiting to attack the “gaijing” as he called them [I’m presuming this was an attempt of his to spell “gai-jin,” the Japanese word for foreigner], and that all Japanese were evil, and that my being in Japan was an endorsement of the Massacre of Nanking. He also went to accuse me of being uneducated (apparently he never heard I graduated university with a degree in English and oh I don’t know… History!), racist, and a spew of would-be metaphors that didn’t make any sense, but suggested he may have had a more than healthy dose of narcotics. I agreed that Nanking was a horrible tragedy, but pointed out to him that A) I and the vast majority of the people of today’s Japan had not a damn thing to do with Nanking, especially since most Japanese were born after the war, B) assuming _______ people were evil was exactly the same kind of fascist attitude that lead to the Nanking massacre and he was therefore no better than the very people he hated. He told me to expand my argument, I told him I didn’t need to, and then he called me a racist again, said I had hate in my heart, hated freedom (apparently he’d been watching Bush too), should be punished and a bunch of other nothing-statements that any idiot could use in an argument he knew he was losing. He said a lot of this kinda crap, but frankly I stopped paying attention, and ultimately he just signed off, probably [hopefully] blocking me from his MSN contacts. The dumb thing was, his own MSN moniker indicated that he was London, England. Did he think building the largest empire the world had ever seen was all rosy? The English invented the concentration camp afterall. Does this mean I hate the English? Of course not! My family IS English (at least before moving to Canada), but I do believe that there is no such thing as an innocent society, and while we should always acknowledge in full honesty the darkest parts of our histories (such as the Canadian subjugation of our Aboriginals or the Nanking Massacre and the rape of thousands of Chinese women), at the same time we have to judge a person by his or her own actions and not solely on the actions of his or her grandparents. Spreading hatred helps no one, only leads to more massacres on one side or the other.
Neon Tokyo: Manga Cafes and Shopping Districts.
That said, I didn’t spend my whole time in Tokyo talking about the war. No, I was there to have fun, and fun I had. I visited an assortment of shopping districts, Tokyo is full of them, such as Ginza, Shinjuku, Shibuya and others, mostly while looking for other things, but still they were interesting neighbourhoods to see, lots of flashy neon lights and scrolling advertisements. A lot like Ximen in Taipei, but spread out all over the city. I didn’t buy much, because well Tokyo ain’t cheap and there was not much room for souvenirs but I enjoyed hanging out in Manga cafes. Manga cafes are like Internet cafes except with free drinks, full meals available (including some really good chicken fingers) and loads of Manga books of which none were in English. Instead though, I surfed the Internet and tried the loneliness I felt being in a big foreign city on my own after spending a week with Sachi and her family. I talked to MSN contacts, most of which weren’t as loopy as that one bigot-hater turned bigot, and one who even offered to sell me a cellphone when I returned to Taiwan.
Edo-Tokyo Museum
On my second day in Tokyo I headed to the Edo-Tokyo museum, which is housed in one of the strangest buildings ever constructed during the futuristic obsession of Japan during the bubble economy. Lonely Planet described it as “spirited off the set of Star Wars,” and it was an accurate description. The building’s 3 or 4 floors, were suspended high of the ground, for some inexplicable reason by 4 massive pillars, making the whole thing resemble at AT-AT walker ready to transform into a cyber-robot at any moment to do battle with Godzilla, anime-style. In the empty concrete courtyard beneath the museum, I happened upon a group of recreationist gun samurai, in full battle garb, who made formations and fired fake guns to the delight of the crowd and to me. I watched with great interest, always surprised when I stumble upon interesting goodies such as these. Afterwards, I checked out the neighbouring Sumo Museum, which carried little but pictures of yokozunas I’d never heard of and nothing in the way of English description. Thus, I began my ascent up a long and tube like escalator that gave me a case of vertigo, until I reached the entrance to the museum on steel stilts.The museum inside was not unlike Canadian equivalents, such as Manitoba Museum of Man and Nature in Winnipeg and the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Gatineau/Hull near Ottawa. It traced the history of Tokyo, formerly known as Edo, from it’s early origins in the Shogun Tokugawa’s desire to move the base of power away from the Emperor’s influence in Kyoto (I believe the conversation between the Shogun and the Emperor, when translated comes out something like “Oh no you didn’t!” “Oh, yes I did!”)I was quite surprised, once again, to find out that for free I could have my very own kimono clad guide, who spoke English. I said why not, and away we went.The highlights of the museum, for me anyway, included the old books of manga (which are the exact same size as their modern descendents), the explanation of how ukiyo-e (wood block print artwork) was done (very labour intensive, I recommend sticking to pencil and paper, but beautiful nevertheless), the old town models and daily life sections. Apparently, by the mid 1700s, Japan already had an 80% literacy, a remarkable feat especially when one considers how hard it is to read Japanese. These days, it’s around 99% like most western countries.
Kabuki Theatre
Friday night, there was a kabuki play on at the National Kabuki Theatre. Sachi had told me that Kabuki was very expensive, and as such she had never gone, but I read that cheap seats (ie nosebleeds) could purchased for around 10 dollars Canadian provided you didn’t stay for the whole program. I thought why not. They gave me a headset that translated what was being said on stage a bit, with the narrator often meandering away from the play to talk more about kabuki itself, the famous actors on stage (all apparently living national treasures), the differences between kabuki and western theatre, and how different things worked and what they meant. Kabuki, in case you were wondering, is a stylized, emotion-centred, traditional Japanese dramatic artform where only men are allowed on stage. The play itself seemed to open like any other play, i.e. it didn’t have the exotic opening flair of the Beijing opera, though all the characters were clearly dressed in period Japanese clothing and the set was immaculately built (the Beijing opera barely had a set, but it performed well with what it had). The set of kabuki was perhaps one of the most memorable aspects of the show, as not only did it seem to be a fully reconstructed to the last detail of a typical 17th Japanese building, but the whole thing was built so that it could rotate. Instead of dropping the curtain to change a set, the stage literally turned. So in one scene where a character leaves a party, you see the partiers still dancing away, but gradually being rotated off stage, while the main character (in this scene seeking to be alone) walks in real time towards the next scene. In reality though, while he is walking, he never really moves from the center of the stage, the scene just changes around him. It really was an amazing thing to see on stage. I think Western theatre should give it a shot sometime.The play itself, written in the same period as the costumes, was about a theater company putting on a kabuki play (a play within a play, so the Japanese not only had an early start on literacy but also post-modernism. Though of course, Shakespeare also pulled the same tricks, and I’m sure the Greeks tried it more than once.) The basic premise is the head actor, himself played by a famous actor I had never heard of, has to play the role of a man who has an affair with another man’s wife, but does not know how to get into character, so to get information he ends up seducing another man’s wife. When the wife feels tricked by him, though I kinda got the impression his character was speaking honestly about his secret love for her, she commits seppuku backstage (apparently women committing suicide over rejection and love in order to teach a lesson to the men they leave behind is a popular plot in traditional Asian drama). This causes the company to be alarmed, as the bad press could hurt attendance, and they attempt to hush up the event, but the main actor refuses. Arguing his popularity is strong enough to overcome this incident, and dismisses her as just some woman in true chauvinistic style, though only to save face. Ultimately, though after all but one of the actors leaves, it becomes apparent he’s in trouble, but doesn’t really give you any ideas of what is going to happen.
And so the play ends, rather abruptly. At this point there was an intermission, and I thought the story would continue when we returned, but it didn’t. Instead all the kabuki actors knealt in line and performed something akin to a knighting ceremony, whereby one of the actors given a new name and higher status as a reward for performance, while all the actors, including many who seemed to be family members (kabuki actors are descended from the same groups of families, which suggests to me that the sons of these families must get a lot of pressure to become kabuki actors themselves), gave heartwarming praise for the man of the hour. For me, while I found this interesting, I kept waiting to find out what happened to the actor in the story. Apparently though, even if I had a chose to stay for the whole program, and paid the higher price, I would have still have learned nothing, because they started a completely different story. Go figure.Roppongi: The Tokyo Wilds + The Not-so-quiet American
If Tokyo had a biological sex drive, or at least a party drive, it would probably be Roppongi. Or at least that’s what the Lonely Planet implied. The neighbourhood is crowded with nightclubs, not unlike Montreal’s St.Laurent, but considerably more spread out. In a city famed for its nightlife, I figured I had to check it out at least once, and besides I had just had a hassle of an afternoon trying to arrange my trip to Nagano, so I was looking to unwind. So off I went to Roppongi. On the train, I ended up sitting beside a fellow gai-jin, about my age, but with darkened sunken eyes and a grunge-fashion camouflage jacket. His expression and body language suggested he was the type of guy who could kill someone, and as such he kinda creeped me out and I didn’t pay him much attention and instead focused on finding my way using my handy Tokyo Metro maps (Tokyo’s train system, by the way, is the most messed up thing I’ve ever seen. Like a bowl of ramen [Japanese noodles that you buy at street vendor and are oh so delicious] was dropped over the central metropolitan area. They go everywhere, so they’re handy that way, but you have basically at least 3 major different private companies running them, with varying degrees of intergration, so it can get a tad confusing.) Anyway, I guess he realized I was confused and asked where I was headed. Taken aback by his friendliness, I mumbled something about Roppongi. “Ah. Went there last night. It’s only a couple stops down from here.” He explained that he spent about a month in Tokyo this time last year, and knew the subway quite well. His accent sounded American. He gave me a lot of valuable advice, and we went to Roppongi, he said he had nothing better to do and would I mind if I joined him, because “Tokyo is great, but being in Tokyo on your own, sucks!” as he put it. I said I wouldn’t mind, assuming my first impression was perhaps an unfair conclusion. The first place we went was a place called the Roppongi Hills, which I had hoped to check out before the nightlife. Perhaps you’ve heard of a building in Japan, once again from the Bubble Economy era, that was supposed to house everything, work, food, entertainment, that a person could need and thus mean they would never have to leave. It would be the ultimate forward-thinking solution to the problem of an overly dense population. The place you may have heard of, is Roppongi Hills. To me though, Roppongi Hills seemed more like a massive mall in a skyscraper rather than the future of urban living (though it was very new, very rich, and very well-lit). The hotel at the top, called the Park Hyatt Tokyo, was one of the top hotels in town, and the place they shot Lost In Translation, with an excellent view of the city. In case you’re wondering, I didn’t stay there. I stayed in a small back alley youth hostel called the Sakura Hotel, which was a little dingy, but it was cheap, centrally located, and had a 24 hour café. Just to give you an idea of how overly ritzy this place is, my friend tried to go to the restaurant with his girlfriend (which had at the time he was there last year), but they rejected him because his blue tie didn’t match his grey pants. Ouch. We went to a couple of pubs on Roppongi proper after, including a British style one and one called Propaganda which had old war-time memorabilia (mainly American). As it turns out my newfound friend, was indeed an American, though he had also been raised in Canada, and seemed to hold some form of dual citizenship. Though in traveling back forth between the two, ended up being socially rejected as an outsider, a foreigner, by both groups. As such, he didn’t have such warm impressions of home. After dropping out of junior high only to realize he hated farming, he joined the military (choosing the American military over the Canadian, because as he put it, “the Canadian army don’t go nowhere.” He then explained his disinterest in being based in Halifax.) He told me he didn’t want people to know he was in the military (he said he wore the fake camouflage jacket because they were fashionable), and apparently only told me because I serendipitously said I was “based” in Taiwan, and thus gave him the false impression I was a fellow member of the armed forces. So what was he doing in Japan? Well it turns out the American army does send its soldiers places, like the DMZ (De-Militarized Zone) between North and South Korea, which was were he was on a short leave from. He said his job was hard to explain, but basically he dealt in information retrieval (which I assume means some sort of spying or scouting activity). He said he found his work incredibly boring, though, and wished something would happen, though the line would probably still be there when his grandkids became old enough to serve.As it turns out, his previous station was in the Gulf, in a little old city called Baghdad. Not really knowing what else to say to such a bombshell, I simply uttered “So uh, how was Baghdad?” As if it’d been a family vacation or something.“Well this is going to sound morbid and wrong,” he said, “But I actually preferred it to Korea.” He went to explain that in Iraq, his line of work was in great demand and had activity everyday. He worked with a bunch of high-ranking officers and developed a ton of skills “only useful there.” While in Korea, he sat day after day with his hands tied, waiting for action that wasn’t coming, unable to do his job (whatever his job exactly was), and had to deal with security clearances that were ignored haphazardly and officers with no experience on the ground. He lamented university grads in particular, saying they were no smarter than him, and that he could read and write too. While he wanted to gain a degree, he was trapped in the military for another 6 years and wouldn’t reasonably be able to earn a degree until his mid-life crisis. I figured that mentioning my plans for pursuing a master’s next year was probably not a good idea.He also lamented the fact that he had been surrounded by only men for the past 4 years, making my week on my own in Tokyo seem measly.“I don’t even know how to approach a woman in a bar, like those two over there. I don’t know what to say to them.”I suggested that was probably because they were Japanese.“That’s not the point. The point is, even if the could speak English, I’d still not know what to say.”I told him I had the same problem. I never know what to say to women in bars. What do you say to a woman in a bar? Hello? Can I buy you a drink? Would you like to dance? Does this stuff really work? Well for me, I have trouble getting interested in a woman on looks alone, and in most bars the music’s too loud for talking anyway.At any rate, things weren’t as bad as they were for him. It turns out the girlfriend he had in Tokyo, was actually a girl he hired as a “shopping guide.” I didn’t know what the hell a shopping guide was. Tokyo has a ton of things which I had no idea what they were. Among these include manga cafes, already explained, capsule hotels, small cheap hotels where you effectively are given a coffin-like box in a wall to sleep in, sort of like a space capsule I guess, rather than a room. Shopping guides, he told me, while intended to help you find whatever it is you want to buy in Tokyo, are also listed under escort services. It seems he had been on the DMZ too long.At about 10 pm we parted ways. He said he had an early check-out the next morning, and didn’t want to stay up late. He gave me some pointers on where to find good clubs, and how to avoid the aggressive South African street recruiters who’d try to pester you into coming into their strip clubs (why they seemed to employ South Africans, I don’t know).I ended up walking the streets another hour or so, trying to find a place that looked interesting. I ended up at a place called Vanilla that the Lonely Planet had recommended, which had 3 floors of different types of dance music. The place had an interesting décor, very urban, very chic, and the Japanese clientele, especially the women, were impeccably dressed (Japanese women have a sense of fashion the envy of all of Asia, and apparently some parts of the rest of the world too), but really it was not all that different from what you could find in Montreal, or even nightclubs in Brandon for that matter (all 3 of them, or is it just one now?).As for me, I felt just as much a fish out of water as I did back home in these types of places. Granted you could have fun, if you were with the right group of people but on my own, it was just wasn’t working. After people-watching more or less for an hour or two, I swigged back my complimentary Singapore slings, included in the over-priced cover, and took an equally expensive cab ride home to the Sakura Hotel (the subway had stopped at midnight).
Sunday Afternoon with the Goth Girls of the Cos-Play-Zoku,
Talk to any Western twenty-something whose been to Japan recently, and chances are he (especially if its he) is likely to mention an encounter with the Cos-Play-Zoku, a group of disillusioned rebellious Japanese teenage girls who congregate ever Sunday afternoon in gothic, vampy, or just flamboyant garb at one station in Tokyo. Of course, being a twenty-something guy in Tokyo, my curiousity got the better of me, and I headed on down. The place was right beside a busy station, and full of people, but the goth girls were there, and so were the tourists taking photos. Literally, right beside them stood a traditional monk, trying to collect donations for a nearby shrine. Once again, old and new side-by-side. The monk refused to have his picture taken, but the goth girls were more than happy to oblige. There’s probably a metaphor there, read it as you may. As for me, while I appreciated the girl’s desire to express their individuality in a collectivist culture (many apparently come from the uniforms only dorm schools in the suburbs) and the role of Cos-Play-Zoku as a sub-cultural phenomenon, I did feel a little creepy taking pictures of dressed up teenage girls (not that they were scantily dressed, it was January after all). So after I got my quota of souvenir shots, I bid them a fond farewell and headed back into the mobs getting on the train.
Sony Building – Because who needs a real dog? Does your AIBO bite?
From watching a teenage girl phenomenon, I went to somewhere associated teenage males (if not all males). The home of the playstation, that is to say the Sony building. Basically, it was just an over-sized Sony shop, but it did have a lot of strange gadgets great for gawking if somewhat lacking in their practical uses. The quintessential keystone to this is of course, the AIBO: Sony’s robotic dog toy thing. Assuming that the number of people wanting dogs must surely outnumber the number of dogs available, Sony set about constructing a robot that could perform all the functions of a canine, without leaving little presents to stain your carpet. Naturally, like all things in Tokyo, it would also be many times more expensive. The AIBO does look like a dog, at least in shape, but the flashing lights, and the lack of those puppy eyes, make it seem more like a robotic novelty than man’s best friend. (I’m sorry, I’m a bit of a dog person, I had one as a child, and also bit of a romantic, so while I find the AIBO very interesting as a novelty, it could never replace the real thing). Still the AIBO could do more tricks than my dog could, including dancing on command, picking up an object on command, and not peeing on the carpet on command. I soon found that if you put your hand over the AIBO’s head sensors it would nuzzle up to your hand, like a dog might. But then I got the nasty suspicion the AIBO was going to bite me (or at least clamp my fingers with its movable plastic jaw), so I jerked away. The AIBO seemed insulted by my distrust and promptly trotted to play with a 4 year old, ignoring me completely. I tried to get its attention again later, but no avail. Fine, I said, I don’t need you anyway. Stupid Aibo.
Did someone say SUMO!!!
Well I did. Because what’s a trip to Japan, without a little Sumo wrestling. Granted I’d already gone to the museum, but the museum wasn’t all that much (I’d really only gone there for the Edo-Tokyo museum), and it just so happened the New Year’s tournament, the most important Sumo tournament in Japan (and therefore the world, because its not really huge outside of Japan, eh?) was beginning in Tokyo while I was there. So I said, well why not? And away I went. No I didn’t enter the tournament as a competitor. A) You have to train for years and go through special ranking systems, kinda like with kabuki B) I’m not THAT fat. Actually though foreigners can and do enter these tournaments (a Mongolian recently won, and a Turkish guy was big enough a star that the front desk handed me a file folder covered with this large Mediterranean guy in sumo clothes all over it). Also, they even had some really scrawny guys wrestling. I’m not sure why they even bothered (there’s no weight division in Sumo so you can end up wrestling someone twice your weight) with sumo instead of basketball or equestrianism (small light people are good for equestrianism, no seriously they are. The horse, y’know). I had to get up pretty early, and wait in line for a while, but the tickets weren’t really that expensive (about $20 Canadian for one full day of Sumo, compare that with an NHL game), and I got to see the action up close, because I could only go to the early, lower-ranked matches, while most people only bothered with the yokozunas themselves. Still though, they had all the pomp and ceremony, even with 15 people in the audience, and I do enjoy watching amateurs in other sports (amateurs have one major greater capacity than professionals that makes them interesting to watch. The greater capacity to screw up). Each match lasted about 20 seconds on average, so the ceremony was more of the show. Before each bout, a guy in a purple kimono with a fan would stand in the center of the arena (which had the smallest playing field I’ve ever seen for a major sports arena, well under 20 feet squared. The arena itself was square and had two levels, the 2nd level with seats and lower level only with traditional Japanese pillows, and was comparable in size to the Keystone Centre). In his best soprano voice, which was actually pretty good, I mean he could have been a professional opera singer or something, he would, I think, announce each new competitor’s name as if a god was calling to battle… sumo style. Then came a young referee in a green kimono and traditional black hat, the shape of which was later popularized, turned white, and used on short order cooks in the United States. He, and the two summoned fighters would make announcements, clap hands, stomp feet, and strike a variety of dramatic poses according to Shinto traditions (Sumo originally was a religious ceremony). On the referee’s signal the wrestlers would clash, the bout would begin, and the referee would repeat the same words over and over, which I will translate as “Huzza, Huzza” because that’s what they kinda sounded like, until one wrestler fell or got outside the ring. Thus the match was over. Repeat as necessary. The wrestlers themselves were dressed exactly as you imagined them, wearing nothing but that quintessential protective loincloth, but they weren’t all overly huge. Indeed some were only moderately flabby. While occasionally you could see massive slams and people getting tossed (remember the aforementioned scrawny guy), it was mainly just two rather rotund naked men, girly-slapping each other until one was able to get a grip, and then pushing or heaving their way to victory. Fun stuff really, once you get into it. The last characters in the stadium were the judges, dressed in somber black kimonos with equally somber expressions. The 5 of them sat equally place, almost like points on a pentagram to reference an earlier blog, around the “playing field” converging on the center in cases of dispute. Though in actually they were only deciding who won the match, they looked somber and serious enough to be deciding if the wrestler should be admitted to heaven or confined to an eternity in hell. Luckily, thanks to Buddhism, Japanese people tend to believe in reincarnation, Sachi included, so if you screw up in front of the judges, at least you get a second chance.
NaganoI’m beginning to realize this blog entry is going on too long, so I’m going to end it with a brief description of my last days in Japan, namely my trip to Nagano. Unfortunately, this was also the most frustrating experience of my trip, though Nagano-ken [the Nagano area] is very beautiful and the people are very friendly. The problem is, despite having once hosted the Olympics, they don’t seem that used to foreign visitors, and thus I spent most of my time in Nagano commuting by hours to ski hills, ninja museums, or snow monkeys, only to be disappointed. The snow monkeys, which my book said were always around, had gone by the time I reached Yadanaka the small town where they lived (though I must say, it was an interesting change of pace from city life, traveling through the small rural mountain areas on the way, by the train line that emerged from the Nagano subway—yes a town smaller than Winnipeg has a subway). I hoped to get there sooner, but I had trouble getting directions. The next day, I tried to go skiing, the reason for my coming to Nagano in the first place, but after commuting an hour to the hill, after losing my morning to trying to get money and an inconvenient bus schedule, they didn’t have my shoe size. Desperate to make something out of my outing, I opted to try and teach myself snowboarding (instruction was only in Japanese). After face-planting, back-planting numerous times, nearly twisting my ankle, getting run over by a chair lift, and feeling dizzy in the head, I decided to give up and head back down the mountain. The town where the sky resort was in (not in Nagano itself, nothing seemed to be in Nagano itself) was also the historic training ground of ninja, so I thought if I can’t ski, why not check out the ninja museum. It took the bus driver numerous tries to convince me it was closed for the season, but I did learn the international Japanese sign for “No.” Just cross your fingers like an X. Go on, it’s fun. Truth be told, I did actually like Nagano though its trains and surrounding attractions proved frustrating. The area is undeniably beautiful and much more rural, and snowy, than Tokyo. The night I spent in Nagano, I stayed at a nice ryokan with some kindhearted hosts eager to please (the ryokan was quite big and I was their only customer that night I’m sure). It also had neat Japanese architecture. I like neat architecture. The night before I went skiing, on an illfated attempt to withdraw money (Japanese ATMs never work for international cards), I ended up crawling through a random curtain into a hidden family-run noodle house where I used my last bits of yen on some soba, cold buckwheat noodles Nagano-ken is famous for (every region is famous for something). The cook was friendly enough, and so was the waitress, who I assume was his daughter, but the real character of the place was the old man in the swing era hat, quite possibly drunk, who constantly asked me questions in Japanese, like Sachi’s niece, not understanding that I had no clue what he was saying. When the food came, he delighted in using his new digital camcorder to take pictures of me eating it, something about a foreigner trying to eat soba with chopsticks I guess. He then had me and the waitress pose for pictures (he took a lot of pictures) and vowed that he’d cover the ceiling with them. Perhaps next time I’m in Japan, I’ll return to the little noodle shop and just see if the ceiling is covered with pictures of me trying to eat soba.