Not Just Ninjas

About a week ago, Chris and I returned from a 9-day visit to Okinawa. Instead of outright telling you about the complex awesomeness of the place, let’s see if our new vocabulary gleaned from the trip paints a vivid enough picture.

Of course, there’s all the uniquely Okinawan things you’ll find there: umibudou, awamori, chanpuru, gusuku, ryukyu, utaki, tebichi, habu, togyu, sanshin, bashofu, bingata, mozuku, rafute, beniimo, eisa and shisa.

But several other general-use words adhered themselves to my long-term memory as a consequence of the trip, including: hade (gaudy), kaesu (to return, as in a car), yakeshimashita (sunburned), kokusai (international), suizokukan (aquarium), yatai (a food stall without walls), yakimono (pottery), ei (ray), haka (grave) and jietai (soldier in Japan’s self-defense force).

Create a mosaic in your mind’s eye with that vocabulary (and these pictures), and we’ll return soon to provide the narrative.

Tomorrow we leave on our big three-week trip to America. In between seeing all the lovely people we’ve been missing for a year and a half, this trip is going to consist largely of stuffing ourselves with all the lovely food that we’ve been missing for a year and a half.

For fun I am establishing this graph to track my weight throughout the trip. If I am lucky, it will be a very boring flat line. As I blogged shortly after arriving in Japan, I lost 15 pounds pretty much immediately on moving here; I’m fully expecting to gain it back, with gluttonous interest, during this trip.

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We’ve been madly planning our whirlwind three-week America visit this holiday season, and the chips are settling out thus:

• Dec 22-25: Los Angeles
• Dec 26-29: Davis/Bay Area
• Dec 30-Jan 2: Seattle
• Jan 3-7: LA/Thousand Oaks
• Jan 8-10: San Diego

If you live in one of those places, we are very excited to see you. If you don’t, but can somehow manage to appear in one of them during those dates, we would be ecstatic! This is about the most complicated trip we’ve ever planned, and it’s been hard to resist the temptation to squeeze in more and more little side-trips.

Score! A second travelogue has been accepted for publication at bootsnall.  Check out our more of our adventures in Central Java here:

http://www.bootsnall.com/articles/07-07/the-charm-of-solo-travel-indonesia-asia.html

Just a quick note to say that a travel story I wrote has been published at the Bootsnall travel site.  Check it out if you’ve got a moment to hear about our hijinks in Indonesia last winter:

http://www.bootsnall.com/articles/07-07/my-inner-indonesian-asia.html

We met this absolutely priceless lady on the train in Sendai. She spoke a bit of English and likes rap.

Sendai Rapper

It’s been three weeks. But that’s because I was at the wedding. A Japanese wedding for one of my co-workers, where the bride wore white and red and pink and white. Where the guests laughed but didn’t smile. Where there was karaoke, but a suspicious lack of dancing. Where the guests get presents instead of the couple of honor. Oh yeah, and the cake was steaming, billowing clouds of vapor.

And then I was sick, for like 5 days of mind-altering I can’t even remember my name but somehow I have no visible symptoms sick. That was the week of sleeping and more sleeping.

And then I was in Kyoto, hunting monkeys, jumping from train to train, climbing castle keeps, hoping for cherry blossoms, getting a suntan, a suntan on the beach, sucking every possible drop of goodness out of the kansai region before heading back to Noshiro. A trip I won’t write more about here because, hey, a) and then b) there’s this podcast I’m supposedly contributing to now, where I’m telling everyone, anyone who will listen about the best and strangest parts of Japan that I can find. So I’ve got to keep something up my sleeve for you there.

And now I’m here. Watching spring wrestle with winter for dominance in Noshiro. This means that I wake up to gloriously sunny (if slightly cold) weather, which is followed by snow at some point during the day, and then, inexplicably, more sun. The school year starts fresh on Monday; I’m in a suit for the first time since I began teaching in Japan, required costuming to welcome the new students to school. I just watched my first opening ceremony, which was an odd combination of the sober and the comical. The kids are all outside with their sports clubs in the sun, running through drills with a steady stream of “Gambare!” (“do your best!)”

And tomorrow I’ll still be here. Waiting for my first chance in weeks just to stop and do nothing and breathe, hoping for a weekend where I can lie in peace and revel in boredom.

Japan’s school year ends in March, and that means it’s spring break for Steph! No classes for three weeks means vacation possibilities, so Steph’s mother and step-father Peggy and Michael chose this time to stage their inaugural visit. Their time was limited, and since it’s easy to lose a day getting to and from Noshiro, we all decided to meet in Kyoto, by all accounts one of Japan’s oldest and most profound cities.

We were not disappointed. Steph and I took the sleeper train on a Friday night and arrived bright-eyed in Kyoto on Saturday morning. After hitting the tourist office to load up on maps, we found our lodging, the Chita Guest Inn, a Japanese style hostel/guest-house run by a delightful motherly woman with whom we enjoyed conversing in our broken Japanese. It’s amazing what a 1st-grade vocabulary will get you here. She let us check in at 10am even though the official time wasn’t until 4pm. Within two days she had given us not only apples from her family that was coincidentally visiting from Aomori at the same time as us, but four free train tickets to Nara that they had been unable to use. Saved us $40!

(Aside: from the very beginning I have called Akita the Oregon of Japan – it’s full mostly of lumber and hicks. Ha ha! No offense, Oregon; my grandma lived in Medford for years. The funny thing is that Aomori is the Washington of Japan: known for apples and directly north of Akita. Amazing.)

Steph spent weeks researching all the things to do in and around Kyoto, and the results were marvelous. Each day basically focused on a geographic area. We’d arise in the morning, go to the designated place, and start walking. Most days we walked for a few hours, had lunch, returned to the hotel (or perhaps just a local restaurant) for a rest, then hit another spot in the afternoon/evening and walked some more. I think we walked about five miles each day. Every day was capped by a delectable meal of vittles unavailable in Noshiro.

Saturday

Steph has a nose for culturally enlightening events, and she dug up the fact that a bunch of girls would be doing a flower dance at a random Buddhist temple south of the city. We hopped on the subway and found ourselves sitting on tatami watching drizzling rain, chanting monks, and very sedately dancing girls.

But bigger is better, and there was a temple down the road that had “big” right there in its name. Here we found our first of many pagodas on this trip, as well as the quintessential Japanese koi-pond-temple-bridge scene.

And, of course, one of the big attractions of any real city for us is the eating opportunities. This first day featured Thai food for lunch, British pub (with GOOD fish and chips!) for dinner, and a late-nite Mexican snack, complete with really bad (“Ra Bamba”) live music. It was a great night.

Sunday

Today we slept in to recover from the not-so-great sleep we got on the train the previous night. We were woken at about 9:45 by a jolt from the big earthquake that hit to the north that morning.

First we hit Fushimi Inari, a Shinto shrine famous for its thousands of orange Torii gates arranged into winding corridors. It was cool beyond description, and ultimately I think our favorite shrine of this trip. It’s a fantastic place because it’s free, it’s amazing, and you can easily spend all day there hiking through the mountains amidst the wonderful calming atmosphere of a Shinto shrine.

That afternoon we visited a few temples in the northwest corner of Kyoto, including the famous Kinkakuji, the Golden Pavilion. Kinkakuji was lovely but not moving; though I must say the admission price was surprisingly low, the lowest of any of the (charged) temples we visited.

Sunday’s food included mountainside udon and bad Indian food.

Monday

This was our first day trip. Kyoto (unlike Noshiro) is in a region just full of larger-than-life tourist attractions. Armed with a discount train ticket that allowed us to go anywhere on slow trains all day for about $15 each, we made the three-hour trek to Amanohashidate (天橋立 literally heaven-bridge-stand), one of the official three most beautiful scenic views in Japan. (We visited one of the others last year.) This is a natural land bridge that cuts across a bay on the northern side of the island.

Any good tourist attraction needs a gimmick (especially in Japan), and the one here is that you are supposed to bend over and look at the land bridge between your legs. This way it becomes a brige across the sky, see? (Hence the name of the place.) It was actually pretty fun, and there weren’t a whole lot of people out so we got a nice and rare feeling of seclusion.

The highlight of the day had to be throwing Thai coconut cookies (from lunch Saturday!) to a group of seagulls and hawks and photographing the results.

The second highlight of the day was discovering a Buddhist temple high in the hills over Amanohashidate. We eschewed the vastly overpriced bus and walked 20 minutes up a steep switchbacky road and were rewarded with a wonderfuly peaceful and mostly-deserted scene of a mountain temple.

On the way home, we experienced that rare treat, a late train. It screwed up the whole train schedule on the way back because we had to pull over and let all the on-time trains pass. We ended up stumbling home after 11pm, which ended up being past curfew (surprise! there was a curfew), but Sakai-san didn’t mind and that was when she rewarded us with the train tickets and apples!
Tuesday

Day trip number two was to Himeji castle, a place that is actually not particularly close to Kyoto (it’s an hour on the opposite side of Osaka, in fact). We have seen a few castles in northern Japan, and none of them are what you would call impressive, interesting, or even particularly beautiful. The main remnant of many Japanese castles is the huge park grounds surrounding them, and these often are worth a visit.

But Himeji is different. Apparently the best-preserved castle in Japan, it has been around since the 1300s and stands very impressively on a hill over the otherwise modern city of Himeji. The hype is true: this is a great place to visit and the experience of exploring the various buildings and the six floors of the castle itself are well worth the price of admission.

In addition, the cherry blossoms really started coming out in full today, which despite the rainy day added an extra quality to the castle grounds.

And of course, the day wouldn’t be complete without exotic food. Just a block from the castle we found a wonderful Persian restaurant. The sight of the Persian owner conversing with a Japanese guy in fluent Japanese was a treat.
Wednesday

Today marked the auspicious arrival day of Peggy and Michael in Kyoto. We started with a wonderful walking tour conducted by the cutest-ever old Japanese man who has been doing this for 12 years. We had to rush from there to Steph and Peggy’s 3pm appointment to be made into geisha, after which we stumbled upon the greatest hole-in-the-wall okonomiyaki establishment ever.

I believe this was the only day on which we ate entirely Japanese food.
Thursday

Nara. We finally got to use our free train tickets from the Chita proprietress. Nara is a temple town south of Kyoto, known for being full of free-roaming deer. I don’t know where the deer came from and why no other place in Japan seems to have them, but the hype was true.

This lovely day only got better upon the discovery of an Indonesian restaurant called Hati Hati. The food was superb and Steph even got to trade business cards (and a bit of Indonesian banter) with the owner.

Friday

Friday was exotic-trip day. Arashiyama is a suburb to the west of Kyoto. A river, as they say, runs through it, and it’s also on the edge of a range of hills through which the train passes on your way out of Kyoto. We had heard about this boat cruise down the river, starting upstream and ending in Arashiyama where we wanted to end up. We were skeptical at the $35/person price, but decided to do it anyway. Imagine our surprise when we discovered it wasn’t so much a cruise as a (tame, but still) whitewater rapid trip down the river in a large boat rowed, poled, and ruddered by four entertaining guys. Considering that Steph and Peggy have been longtime river-rafting nuts, this was a treat.

At the bottom, it was time for lunch, monkeys, and zen. Arashiyama is home to a random monkey sanctuary (which of course doubles as a Shinto shrine, this being Japan). These monkeys live high on a hill overlooking all of Kyoto. It was a cloudy day but the air was sparkling clear and the panorama was brilliant.

This was also Michael’s birthday, which we celebrated at a great Indian restaurant. After that we walked to a nearby park where hundreds of people were out celebrating the advent of the cherry blossoms.

Saturday

Our last gasp in Kyoto before Peggy and Michael had to get back to Osaka for their flight. More walking and more temples and shrines marked this unremarkable but still fun day. In the afternoon we packed up and headed for Osaka for a single night of food and rest.

Sunday

April Fool’s Day meant it was time to send Peggy and Michael home and get on back to Noshiro ourselves. We had the morning to kill in Osaka, and it turned out our hotel was just around the corner from Osaka Castle. It looked impressive from the outside, but we had heard that it was disappointing after Himeji so we didnt try going in. Great looking building though!

After packing the folks onto the airport train, Steph and I headed back to Kyoto for one last hurrah. After getting on the right bus in the wrong direction, we eventually reached one last temple (which we’ll have to properly visit next time), and then got the overnight train once more to Noshiro. The train arrived at 6:17am, just in time for Steph to have a shower at home before heading to work.

It was a wonderful trip. Kyoto lived up to all expectations, and even after nine days of exploring various parts of this city, Steph still has a list of stuff that could fill another week.

Tune in a month from now when we return to Kansai with our friend Claire for the four days of Golden Week!

Kites. I was promised kites. And, in turn, I promised others kites. So it happened that four of us made the long 3 hour trek up to Aomori City, on the north tip of Honshu last Saturday with a song in our hearts and a gleam in our eyes. So what if the weather was grey and unambiguously wintery? Surely this would highlight spectacular dragons and whatnot flying through the sky. However, when we arrived in Aomori, we all noticed right away that the city, while windy, was spectacularly lacking in wind powered aircraft. Crap.

Kite festivities would not begin, we were informed at the information desk, until tomorrow. Stupid internet and its empty promises. We then sat down to regroup and figure out how to salvage a day in (let’s be generous) a mildly interesting city in the dead of winter. Step 1? Drown your sorrows by taking refuge in the closest Thai/Vietnamese/New York themed restaurant you can find.

When we heard of a little lunch spot called Saigon that purported to have Thai food, we knew something had to be up. Not picky about the geographic consistency of their menu, Saigon offers samosas, bagels, Greek salads, and Hawaiian beer with aplomb. This met my basic criteria for excitement in Tohoku: just feed me food I can’t get in Noshiro.

After lunch, we went in search of a big Buddha at the nearby Blue-Green Dragon Temple. I have to say, he bested the kites in that he a) existed and b) lived up to the hype. The temple complex had quite a bit to see. Shrines for the old and forgetful, shines for children. Even lots of bells to ring to alert the almighty to your prayers, which Frank will now graciously demonstrate below:

[youtube KL3LwAbCzKQ]

After we’d photographed every subject in the shrine from every possible angle, we went to check out Aomori’s archaeological claim to fame, the Sannai-maruyama site, where you can view artifacts from the Jomon period. I have to say, as the afternoon went from gray to grayer, I wasn’t very excited about going to see a muddy field with a few thatched huts and a huge glorified ladder. But my mind was set, I had to see it. It was one of those “if I see it now I don’t have to come back to see it later” kind of deals. But, the huts turned out to be surprisingly photogenic and even kind of interesting.

Still. I wouldn’t drive 3 hours just for the pleasure.

We concluded our trip to Aomori with a quick onsen visit. For those of you who are still a little fuzzy on onsen etiquette, here’s a charming graphic for you which illustrates the big no-nos. Please provide your own captions:

There is, however, a rule which isn’t shown above which was enforced by this particular onsen: bring your own soap. Little did we know. I mean, it’s not like this was the first onsen trip for any of us. We thought we knew we knew how to play by the rules, honest.

On the women’s side, the showers were packed to capacity, and I only hesitated for a moment when I sat down to wash up at a seemingly empty spot and noticed that the shampoo bottles at each shower were different. Not what you would expect for onsen-provided items. But never-mind! I ignore lots of stuff that seems strange to me here and chalk it up to the Japanese way. While everyone took my lack of manners in using their belongings gracefully (thanks for the shampoo, whoever you are!), the boys weren’t so lucky. When they sat down to wash up (so I’m told), they elicited a vicious growl from whomever’s territory they’d intruded upon. One of those “maybe-I-look-demure-but-never-forget-this-is-the-land-of-samurai-
and-ass-kicking-ninjas-so-back-the-hell-off” kind of interactions.

Yikes. So much for internationalization.

I had elementary school visits for the last two weeks, which means the inevitable… I’m sick again. Although it’s doing wonders for my conversational Japanese. Here is what I’m getting really good at saying:

• I became sick.
• Yes, I have a cough. I’m sorry that I’m loud!
• No, I don’t have a fever.
• Yes, I’m taking medicine.
• Slowly, slowly I am getting better.

Being sick for like the 4th time this winter, I have been disinclined to blog lately. But this didn’t stop me from going to the mother of all Japanese festivals… The Sapporo Snow Festival. Dun-dun!!!!!

Vivien the unflappable joined us in Noshiro for the few days preceding the festival. This must have been tiresome for her, but we tried to spice it up a little by dragging her to a few tasty restaurants and an elementary school, as well as introducing her to the boredom banishing joys of purikura and karaoke.

As for the festival… this year was kind of a great and kind of a terrible year to go. Great because the timing was such that the festival culminated on a 3 day weekend. This is essential for anyone traveling from Akita who wants to spend more than a day in Sapporo. The logistics of the trip are a little insane… 7-9 hours by train, and around $150 each way, but hey, this is a once-in-a-lifetimer, right? On the other hand, it’s a not such a good year to go because, well, it’s the warmest winter in Japan in like 100 years, which has turned visions of grand icy vistas to slush.

Viv and Chris took off early on Friday, since they’re not chained to the Japanese school system as I am. I left later with a flock of JETs… we drove an hour to Akita City, then took a 9 hour red-eye ferry, followed by a bus to the train to the subway, finally arriving in Sapporo at 8am on Saturday with 3 solid hours of sleep. I have to say, if you’re thinking about taking the ferry in Japan, go for it, cause it’s super cheap (comparatively… unless you have one of those super amazing gaijin train passes, in which case, never-mind) and SWANKY! This boat was totally decked out with an outdoor hot tub (sadly, not in service in the winter), a pub, cafe, restaurant, video-game room, and movie theatre. Also included were some of the most awesome food vending machines I have ever seen. One spit out ice cream, for those in need of immediate gratification. Another would produce your choice of karaage or onigiri, providing you had a few minutes to wait for the manufacture of hot food. Also awesomely present was a “sports” room, which consisted of two ping pong tables, only one of which had a net. Let me repeat that so it can sink in: a boat with ping pong. Seriously, how great is that?

We made up an elaborate set of rules that allowed all 4 of us to play at once with only 2 paddles. I believe the other two people made do with a cell phone and a hair brush. Rules included spontaneous verbal commands, including “llama” (switch tables), “eagle” (aim for the ceiling), and “tiger” (aim for your friend). It all smacked a little of Calvinball, and produced not a few sidelong glances from our fellow passengers.

So! Sapporo! Full of great restaurants, parks, and temples, all on an orderly and not-so-Japanese grid system, along with extensive underground tunnels, shops, and stores to duck the harsh winter. Fabulous city, just fabulous. Except, this year, for the lack of snow. Kind of a disappointment when you go to a snow festival, eh? I’m not a very hearty winter soul, so I was happy enough with the weather, which hovered around freezing, and got to -5 Celsius at its coldest. It snowed just enough to be atmospheric. Apparently, earlier in the week when folks were making the snow sculptures, it was too warm, and snowy appendages were falling off left and right (the horror!), but the cold returned just in time to rejuvenate the sculptures for the hoards of incoming tourists.

Pretty much what you do for a snow festival is walk around and look at stuff between snacks. We sampled the gamut of Sapporo’s festival food: corn, potatoes (these mysteriously were covered in powdered sugar), amazingly delicious frankfurters, condensed milk crepes, pork buns, and chocolate covered bananas. The snow sculptures were of course the main attraction. The sizes ranged from person-sized to larger-than-your-house. All sorts of snowy gimmicks were employed, including a sculpture with fish frozen in it, and all manner of blinking and colored lights. Performers took to the snow stage at night, ranging from hard core heavy metal to cuter than cute J-pop.

Though we were severely sleep deprived, we took a whirlwind tour of everything the wintery city had to offer. In rapid succession, we ate the famed Genghis Kahn at the Sapporo Brewery, followed by a tour of their museum. How fun is it to see old pics of Japanese brewing masters with vests and handlebar mustaches? We also liked the wall of advertising, showing geisha after geisha from multiple eras with a nice tall frosty pitcher of beer.

Then it was off to the Ishiya chocolate factory, which produces Sapporo’s famous white chocolate delights. We made it there just in time to see the slightly sinister and overly happy on the hour clock display, which lasted for a good 10 minutes, and involved singing dogs, gophers, pigs, and chocolate chefs. After a quick cake and coffee and sled down the kiddie snow hill, we hit the third museum of the day, tried to learn about sake. Really we just ended up taste-testing, as it was more of a one room store with pictures than a museum.

Phew. Exhausting. With that we had to go and eat a very speedy (but utterly delectable) ramen meal before sending Vivien on her way home by train. If you go to Sapporo, it is mandated that you try their ramen. I don’t care how hot the weather is. I don’t care if you think all ramen tastes the same. You’d be wrong, and you shall kick yourself a thousand times over if you don’t sample the liquidy noodle-tastic delight that is butter-corn ramen. If you can find it, patronize MOGURA (ã‚‚ã��ら). It’s on the southeast corner of the big central intersection of the Susukino nightlife district, just a few doors down from the subway station entrance. It’s the ramen shop with filled to the gills with equal parts steam and local character, with the lady at the door telling anyone who will listen, “Doozo. Oishii, yo!!!”

Of course, with evening came the illumination of all the snow sculptures, so we had to go see them again, taking goofy thematic pictures with as many as possible. At night, the ice bars also open for business, which are pretty fun to try… bartenders pouring whatever you just ordered down an ice slide to chill your beverage of choice. Or there was the “carve your own shot glass out of ice” booth. Or you could be boring but happy like me and get some hot Bailey’s to warm you to the tips of your toes.