Sayonara, Japan!

Another 28 hours of traveling, and I'm back in my Crawfordsville apartment with two cats on my lap.  

Harusa and Anthony went to the Narita airport with me and shared my last meal of udon noodles and tempura (my favorite Japanese foods!).  It was a seamless travel day, and I couldn't be more glad about it.  During my layover in Chicago, I even had enough time to grab a bite to eat.  I was so excited to see a fork and knife at my table that I used them to eat my panini and fries!  Next on the list is a spinach salad and some fresh fruits - maybe tomorrow.  My stomach is definitely happy to be back in the States!

I'll have to re-train myself to say "yes" and "no" instead of "hai" and "iie", but I think I'll manage. :)  

Thanks to everyone who's been following along with my adventures!  I'll be posting some more photos, videos, and stories this week, so be sure to check back again. 

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A note to anyone who might try to call me:  I think my cell phone is still plugged into a wall in Harusa's apartment, so I may not be getting back to you for awhile!  You should probably email me for now... just to be safe.

Miyajima Island, Hiroshima, and Himeji Castle

You can check a few more World Heritage sights off my list today!

From a cable car over Mt Koya to a ferryboat across Hiroshima Bay, I’m finally starting to feel a little crazy for saying “it’s all in a day’s fun”! I’ve been called “hardcore” more times than I can count for traveling to Japan by myself, navigating the public transportation system without knowing the city, and oh yeah, being in a country where I don’t speak the language! All I can do is laugh and be appreciative. I think it’s one of the best compliments that a backpacker can receive. ☺

I arrived at Miyajima Island around 5 o’clock, which gave me time to check out the Itsuku shrine (the island’s real namesake). The Itsukushima-jinja is listed as a World Heritage sight for its “floating” torii. The gate entrance to the shrine is accessible by land during the low tide, but the both the torii and the jinja appear to be floating on water once the tide rolls in! Since I was staying on the island, I was lucky enough to get to see it during the day and the night. It’s beautiful when it’s floodlit at night!

A little mishap with the hotel dinner cost me a nighttime trip to the Peace Park in Hiroshima. Apparently, if you tell them your order isn’t right, it will take about 2 hours to cook you a new one! The good news is that it was fresh as can be – and I got a high-class meal for free for my troubles. Well, “free”. I would have loved to see the Peace Park monuments lit up at night! Instead, I settled for a walk around the island to cool off and ended the night in the 100% natural onsen (spring bath of mineral water that is heated naturally) in the basement of the hotel to warm back up. It was exquisite, and quite relaxing. In order for the minerals to take full effect, you’re not supposed to rinse off after you get out of the water. I came out looking like a lobster (from the heat!) and I was hoping I wouldn’t wake up with some strange skin condition. Lucky for me, everything turned out okay!

The next day, I got up early for breakfast and some souvenir shopping. I rounded out the morning with a visit to the Peace Park in Hiroshima. There were all kinds of things to see there. There was the A-Bomb Dome that was almost directly under where the bomb detonated, the Cenotaph that contains names of all the known victims of the bombing, the Flame of Peace, the Children’s Peace Memorial with thousands of paper cranes, and a mound memorial that houses the ashes of those who died. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to go into the Memorial Museum, but I was glad I got to see what I did!

My last detour for today was the Himeji Castle, also sometimes known as “white heron” to the people. It was a magnificent white plastered castle overlooking the city of Himeji. It was surrounded by hundreds of sakuras (cherry blossoms) and a park. I was there at the end of the day on a beautiful Saturday afternoon, and I guess a lot of people had the same good idea. For the first 20 minutes of my tour, it was smooth sailing. <> Then, I was herded for over an hour just to get to the top of the main tower. I have never seen any tourist site so crowded in my life! A few seconds after I (finally!) got to glance out the highest room of the highest tower, the guards made everyone scurry back down the stairs. I feel really bad for the people who stood in line that long behind me and didn’t get to see the top! The view from the castle was gorgeous, and some places looked like a sea of sakuras… or a snowstorm when the wind was blowing!


Getting back to the train on time from Himeji Castle involved a 1+ km run. Words cannot describe how glad I was to sit down for my four-hour ride back to Tokyo!

Culture Shock and Awe

This morning I woke up with a little black cloud of culture shock hanging over my head. If you’ve never experienced culture shock, it’s like culturally-induced claustrophobia, and involves a general disdain for whatever it is about the culture that you find different, uncomfortable, or shocking. Once you get it in your head, it’s really hard to get it out. The resolution to culture shock is acceptance and assimilation (finding ways to exist within the confines of the culture).

As I was headed downstairs for breakfast, I was just hoping I wouldn’t have fish on my breakfast plate. I also thought, “If I see any more seaweed, pickled plums, or ramen noodles on my table, I’m going to scream!” Guess which of them were on my plate? Yep. All three. Hahaha… but don’t worry; I didn’t scream!

For my processing purposes, and probably for your entertainment value, I offer the following mind-boggling components of my culture shock (not all of them are bad things):

• Why, in a place so obsessed with hygiene, is there rarely toilet paper in public bathrooms?
• Why, in a place so obsessed with hygiene, is it so difficult to find warm water, soap, and any form of hand-drying in public bathrooms?
• (side note: I have to point out that Japan is much cleaner than, say, Paris or Barcelona, whose lack of public restrooms leaves the bladder-full to their own devices.)
• Why pickle fruits? Why can’t I just eat them fresh? Really.
• I am SO sick of ramen. Udon noodles are still good.
• Why are “fashionable” women the same ones who can barely walk in their pointy-toed stilettos and boots by 10am? Is it really fashionable to hobble? (Honestly, I think this is more than just Japanese culture, but it's very noticeable here!)
  
• I am amazed that no one here owns a Bluetooth headset or walks around talking to themselves. I’m really impressed with the commitment to not talking on the phone in crammed, public places (such as the subway or train). I have yet to hear a Japanese person’s annoying ringtone (at all, much less at an inopportune time/place). I also have not heard someone screaming/talking loudly into their phone in public. I can vaguely remember a time in my life when people didn’t do this in the States.
• No matter how crowded it has been in a public space, I have not been pushed or shoved like I was in Europe.

Here are some things I’ve had to deal with to stay sane:

• Trying to get around without knowing all the Kanji on signs can be exceptionally frustrating, and often makes me spend more time than I want to just trying to get around.
• It’s emotionally trying to lose time because I can’t figure out which train/bus/stop to take. So far, I’ve dealt with this with some “self-soothing”. I just have to remind myself that I’ll get there when I get there. This is supposed to enjoyable, even if I don’t consider it a vacation. I’m not going to enjoy it if I’m all stressed out over the clock. (There have only been a few exceptions to this rule, such as the last ferry of the night to Hiroshima and back to Miyajima Island, and a few incidents that involved me running to a train station.)
  
• Yep. The schedule. “The schedule”, I have to remind myself. It’s better to enjoy what I am seeing than to be stressed out or hurried through everything. Oddly enough, the only things I’ve really had to hurry through were the World Heritage sites. (Hmm… what a strange coincidence!) I didn’t really have time to appreciate them when I was standing right there. Like the pyramids in Mexico, I have a feeling it will take me awhile to fully absorb the whole experience.

Sound repetitive? It’s even more challenging because it is a recurring problem!

Overnight at Muryoko-in (Buddhist Temple): The Full Experience

Three trains, a subway, a cable car, a bus, and two and a half hours away from Kyoto sits Koyasan. The site was founded by Kobo Daishi, who was an important scholar, historical and religious figure famous for developing the Japanese alphabet, calligraphy, and the monasterial beginnings of Koyasan. His religious stature is similar to that of a Saint in Catholicism. The area is considered quite sacred. Just as the Great Buddha sits in the center of a lotus flower with a guard on each of the eight petals surrounding him, Koya-san is a high-elevation plateau surrounded by eight mountains. The whole town is a World Heritage Site.

The temple where I stayed was called Muryoko-in. It housed about a dozen Buddhist monks.

There were maybe fifteen guest rooms, each 11 tatami mats big. (Tatami mats are about 6’ x 3’, and tile the floor.) Each room had a kotatsu, which is kind of like a cocktail table with a heater underneath. The heat is kept in by placing heavy blankets under the tabletop. There was also a small shrine area in every room, as well as a mirror and small set of drawers, a rack for hanging clothes, and pillows for sitting. All the “walls” were literally paper-thin. They were visually private, but let’s just say that I wouldn’t have been able to fall asleep without my earplugs!

When I first arrived, the monks showed me the toilets, washrooms, and my room. If you ever have to walk through a Japanese guesthouse, there are some very important shoe rules you must master. (Imagine trying to learn these with backpacks strapped to your back and chest.) At the entryway to the building, you must take off your street shoes and step up to the wooden platform. Street shoes are kept in a bookshelf-like rack outside the building. You are given slippers to wear through the hallways of the building. Once you get to your room, you must remove your slippers and then step onto the tatami mats inside, but please keep your socks on. And don’t forget: The shoes must be facing away from the door – i.e., you can slip into them coming out. I’m not really sure why it is this way, but so it goes. If you have to go to the toilet, you must step backwards out of your hallway shoes and slip into a separate pair of bathroom slippers. At Muryoko-in, the hallway slippers were red and the toilet slippers were green to avoid any confusion. Once you get to the washroom, you must remove shoes and socks.

After a few minutes of getting settled, the monks brought me some hot tea and cookies – which were delicious! I took a stroll through the building and the garden afterward. Gardens can be considered as important as the building itself for some temples. Dinner was served in my room at 6 o’clock. It took me over an hour to eat it, and – honestly – I was eating as fast as I could!

After dinner was bath time. As you enter the washroom (same gender only!), there is a changing area where you take off your slippers, socks, and everything else. The washroom was through another set of sliding doors. On one side were stools, buckets, faucets and showerheads, where you actually “washed”. On the other side was a steamy hot bath. It’s really important to wash – and rinse – really well before getting into the bath. The water is shared by everyone and is only changed once a day.


After the bath, you can slip into the robe and “housecoat” provided and get ready for bed. While I was washing up, the monks removed all of my dinner dishes and laid out a futon mattress for bedding. It wasn’t more than 3” thick, but it had some nice, warm blankets and a dense pillow that felt like a beanbag. Noisy neighbors aside, I slept like a baby!


The morning service was from 6 am to 7:30 am. I didn’t feel comfortable taking pictures during the service, but you can listen to a chant from the day before by watching the video of the guestbook. The service area was three chambers lit by only a few candles. The monks sat up near the shrine area, and the rest of us sat back. The shrine area was a wooden platform that was as big as the three chambers. There were altars, red tapestries with gold embroidery, statues with bronze and gold, a fire pit for burning incense, and many other things. Overall, the room was dark, so the candles and the reflections off the gold and bronze were the only light sources. Even though I knew where the back of the chambers were, they looked like they went on forever, like looking into a cave.


The chanting was amazing , and reminded me of an orchestra of stringed instruments. They weren’t talking or singing – it wasn’t necessarily harmonious – but it was more moving than the prayers spoken aloud at many Christian services. The chants went on throughout the service, led by one or two monks who were joined by the other monks and some bowls or cymbals for a ringing or clanging tone. The temperature of the room rose as the service progressed and the incense-burning firepit took effect. The air became smoky and fragrant. Needless to say, it was a whole-body experience. We were able to participate in the ritual offering of tea. To do so, we walked up the left chamber by the incense, offered the tea, walked through the back of the second chamber where all the monks were chanting, offered tea leaves (I think) in the right chamber, and returned to our seats. I don’t feel any more Buddhist than I did yesterday, but it was a very moving experience in any case.

Breakfast was served in my room at 8 am, and by 9 am, I was out on the town. I saw a few of the important sights in Koyasan and then geared back up to begin my five-hour trek to Hiroshima. One of the monks was even kind enough to drive me to the cable car station in his car!

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I'm sorry to everyone who's been checking every day for updates!  I've just been having too much fun to blog every day! :)

Since I don't have time to make individual posts for the past four days, here's a quick run-down.  I'll post full details (and more pictures) later.

On Sunday Mar 30, Harusa took me on a whirlwind tour of Tokyo.  I can't believe how much we were able to see in one day!  We started up north in Ueno park, and took a stroll through the cherry blossoms and museums scattered throughout.   We spent a couple of hours in the Tokyo National Museum, which houses information about Japanese history and culture.  There

 weren't many explanations in English, but Harusa gave me some really great "insider"

 information about a  lot of the exhibits.  It's one thing to have an English-speaking guide, but it's totally different to hear the details from someone who has lived it!  Next, we conquered central Tokyo by a trip up the World Trade Center.  We got a panoramic view of the whole central downtown area, and we could even see out into the bay despite the cloudy day.  We finished up the day with a trip to the International Anime Festival and some quality time in a 100-yen store (like the US $1 store).  Falling asleep was easy that night!

On Monday Mar 31, I walked with Anthony and his friend through an area of Tokyo known as "Electric Town".  We went into all kinds of arcades, some vintage video game and electronics stores, and we spent way too much time in an eight-level store called "Don Quijote".  This store has everything.  Except for the eight- or ten-storied electronics shop that takes up its own block.  We didn't get inside that one.  We might have never gotten out!  That afternoon, I took a train to Kyoto.  There, I met up with Harusa's friend Ray and he took me out with some of his friends.  He lives in a small town in Japan, so it definitely wasn't a "big-city" experien

ce.

The next day (Tuesday Apr 1), Ray went with me to Nara, an old town full of parks, shrines, temples, and deer.  Seriously, the deer were everywhere!  We saw a ton of temples and shrines, and we even got a quick tour of the Seismic Isolation System - designed to help buildings

 withstand earthquakes.  A quick trip through the Nara 

National Treasures Museum revealed dozens of statues that were almost a thousand years old.  We also saw the second-largest Buddha statue in Japan.  For a size reference, my guidebook says:  "On days when the Buddha is receiving a dusting, visitors may be shocked to find four or five monks standing in the Buddha's upturned palm."  Yeah.  It was huge.  There's also a wooden column behind the statue with a hole carved in it (supposedly the same size as the Buddha's nostril).  According to legend, if you climb through it, you will attain nirvana.  About one hundred small children, Ray, and I are well on our way!

Wednesday Apr 2, was my first day in Kyoto.  Ray was kind enough to spend another day walking around with me and showing me the sights.  We didn't go into as many temples and shrines (I was a little templed-out from Nara).  We did visit a shrine that has over one thousand orange gates.  You'll have to see pictures to believe this one!  We took advantage of the first warm, sunny day I've had in Japan by walking the Philosopher's Path through Kyoto.  It's a little over a mile long, and follows a canal lined by cherry blossoms and small shops and restaurants.   In the evening, I walked around the Gion district and found all kinds of treasures:   Some sort of Geisha parade, a shrine full of lanterns, and a park lighted for nighttime cherry blossom viewing.

Today (Thursday Apr 3), I'm on my way to experience a tea ceremony in Japan's Geisha headquarters, and do some shopping and sightseeing this morning.  This afternoon, I'm headed to the monasteries of Mt Koya, where I'll be staying in a Buddhist temple overnight.

Tomorrow (Friday Apr 4), I'll stop by the Peace Park in Hiroshima and spend the night on Miyajima Island. 

After that, it's back to Tokyo for the home stretch!

The Quest for Studio Ghibli

This morning got off to a slow start, and Harusa took me to a cute Japanese cafe down the street for lunch. I'm not feeling too jetlagged, seeing as I was out of bed by 9 or 10 and was hungry for lunch at noon. I think I'm doing a-ok!

After lunch, I set off on my quest for the Ghibli Museum. Between trains, subways, buses, and transfers, it's only 45 minutes away. It took me an hour and a half to get there. The public transportation system here is difficult for many reasons. There are multiple companies running all the train lines; this means that none of them produce a map of all the train/subway stations. Doing so would be advertising for the competitor. Then, it's really difficult to tell which stations are subway and which are train. The really big stations aren't labeled well enough to even find the platforms most of the time. This results in a lot of trial-and-error searching and is ultimately the most frustrating part. Oh yeah, and everything's in Japanese! I finally wised up and got an English and Japanese map of Tokyo and Shinjuku stations (the biggest ones). Now I walk around like Tom Hanks in Terminal, sounding out the station on the English map and then playing a weird matching game with the Japanese map!

Eventually, I made it to the Ghibli Museum. The museum is for the work of animation artist Miyazaki (Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Castle in the Sky, etc.) It's a really amazing museum, designed mostly for kids. Its theme is "let's lose our way together."

Not just the exhibits, but even the building itself is a work of art. If you've ever seen the Dali museum in Spain, it's like that but with cute cartoons instead of Dali's distorted images. I also got to see a 10-minute short film by Miyazaki. It was my favorite part! It was a cartoon about an underwater spider who falls in love with a water skier on the surface. The best part was that there was no speaking, so I had no trouble following the plot! The museum only had a few things in English - signs for the toilet, the exit, and a paragraph in the information book. A few of the workers said some things in English to me, but I usually couldn't understand them. I'm amazed at how well I've gotten along so far with the language barrier. It's been challenging, but I'm still at it!

My ride back to Harusa's proved my learning curve: I made it in an hour! We took it easy all evening and wrapped up the day with a trip to an Internet cafe and the best meal I've had so far. It was Udon soup (thick noodles) and tempura (fried things to dunk in the soup - I chose veggies and sweet potato). Yum!

First night out

Surprisingly, I wasn’t feeling too tired after unpacking, so Harusa took me out to a birthday party with a lot of her friends. We had dinner at a restaurant, which was more like an all-you-can-eat selection of appetizers. We had pizza, sticky rice with meat, snow peas, and some puffed rice candy. I got to meet Harusa’s boyfriend, Yu, (pronounced “You”) whose name is kind of confusing in English conversation. Her friends were really nice and a lot of fun, and all of them spoke English well enough to talk with me.

After dinner, we went out to a karaoke bar. You may have heard me say that I will never do karaoke. I think four years of working at Caleco’s (a restaurant/bar in St. Louis) scarred me for life. Still, a karaoke bar in Japan is much different from ones in the U.S. In the States, the whole restaurant is at the mercy of the drunk(s) with the microphone. Here, you rent a room with all of your friends… which means you’re only the mercy of a few people that you already know. It’s also a lot less intimidating to sing in a small group. I started off pretty timid, but by the end of the night, I was belting out songs with the rest of them! The only catch is that English songs are limited to the American pop that has made it over to Tokyo. My best performances included “Barbie Girl” (sung as a duet with a guy who was actually named Ken), “Crazy” by Britney Spears, “All that Jazz” (from the movie Chicago – Harusa and I rocked this one!), and Hotel California (thankfully, a group effort). I’m surprised to write it, but I can’t wait to go back and do it again! Karaoke bars are really popular in Japan, so I’m sure I’ll have plenty more opportunities!

Here's a shot of Me and Yu, singing Wonderwall:

Konnichiwa!

First impression:

It's hard not to think of words like "SARS" and "Asian Bird Flu" when the first ten people you see in Japan are wearing hygenicmasks over their noses and mouths. Apparently, this fashion (sported by 5-10% of the people here) is an extension of a cultural obsession with hygiene. These people aren't necessarily sick, but they're wearing the masks as prevention a lot of times. On the metro, in the airport, walking down the street, in the museum, and even during conversation, people are wearing these things. Weird. Other strange hygiene habits include carrying around your own washcloth to dry your hands in public bathrooms, and public toilets with a full set of "cleaning" tools (See above for full instructions).

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Now the rest:
The flight was pleasantly uneventful and oh-so-comfortable! The food was delicious, I got to try sake (Japanese rice wine), and I successfully ate the Soba noodle dish with chopsticks! My Japanese seat buddy was quite impressed. I was able to sleep on a pretty good schedule, so my meals and naps were in-line with Tokyo by the time we landed.

The flight path didn’t take us directly across the Pacific as I had expected. Instead, we arced up, towards Anchorage, Alaska, and stayed along coastline for most of the flight. When we were over the Bering Sea, thick sheets of ice were covering the water as far as I could see in every direction. If you’ve ever seen it on the Discovery Channel, that’s exactly what it looked like… minus the polar bears and other wildlife. There were several rifts where the ice had begun to pull apart

. It made me think of Pangaea and how all the continents must’ve drifted apart all those years ago. I didn’t get much other sightseeing done on the flight. The cabin was dark the whole time, and the sky was very bright outside. The shades were down for almost the whole trip.

At the airport, I was able to get my train ticket and SUICA card.  The  SUICA is basically a rechargeable debit card that you can use in train and metro stations. You just hold it up to the sensor at the turnstyle and it automatically charges the correct fare as you walk through. I’ll even be able to use it in many stores that don’t accept foreign credit cards. I think it’s a brilliant piece of plastic!

After the airport and my (eventually) successful battle with the train and metro systems, I arrived at Takadanobaba station, where I met Harusa and headed to her apartment. Thankfully, everything I had to do this afternoon had an English version alongside the Japanese!

All told, it ended up taking me about 28 hours to get from my apartment to Harusa’s “matchbox” apartment. She has a beautiful view of Shinjuku (an area of Tokyo), but her whole apartment is probably the size of the kitchen in my apartment. I was glad I didn't bring the BIG suitcase!

Layover in Dallas

I never understood the real benefit of taking a first class flight within the States. I figured, “Just suck it up” for a couple of hours, and it’ll be over in no time. This morning, I realized my appreciation for the first class fare!

Breakfast was an omelet with velveeta filling and hash browns, fresh fruit, biscuit, butter, jelly, tomato juice, and orange juice. I was a happy camper. The sun was shining into my window seat over my shoulder. I felt like a cat:  fed, lazy, and stretched out in the sun. Now that I think about it, what’s not to love about reclining chairs that actually recline?

With a cat nap under my belt, I think I’ll be ready to conquer the hard part of jet lag. I’m going to try to sleep through the Tokyo nighttime while I’m on this next flight. By the time I board, it will be 2:30 am Tokyo time…. Which means I’d better get to snoozing right away! Wish me luck!

Ready for liftoff?

There are many debates about the best way to battle the 13-hour + 1 day jet lag I'm about to face.  I'm going with the stay-up-the-night-before-and-sleep-on-the-plane approach.  Of course, I added it all up.  Knowing my advanced and highly reliable math skills, you should have no fear that everything is under control!  

Ah, who am I kidding? I'm just too excited to sleep!!! (I'll call it "strategy" though, just to sound like I planned it.)

If all else fails, I can always take a nap.

I've looked at the menus for the 14-hour flight overseas.  There's a Western menu and a Japanese menu.  

Western breakfast:  chicken eggs

Japanese breakfast:  fish eggs

Western lunch:  grilled beef   

Japanese lunch:  grilled eel

Yeah, the Japanese meals sound kind of gross, but when you stop and think about it, the Western ones aren't any "less gross" just because they use chicken or cow instead of fish!  Hmm... the first of many examples of the culture shock I will encounter in the next 12 days.  

I'm really looking forward to my business-class window seat on the plane, too.  (Thanks again, Dad!)  If all goes well, my travel time (from my apartment to Harusa's) will be about 21 hours.  

Check back for updates from the other side of the world, starting at 3:00 am EST!   

Did I mention how excited I am!?!  This is going to be an amazing journey!!  I can't wait!!!