Shopping Kyoto

I've mentioned already that there's a lot of shopping to be done in Kyoto for foreigners, and, strictly speaking, it's not limited to deodorant.  Right now I'd like to take you on a little tour of the Nishiki Market. 

You're not as interested in the fascinating history of the market as I am, and please never underestimate my ability and tendency to bore anyone to death on just about any subject as long as they keep anything like a receptive look on their face or are not saying, "pardon me while I go get into my pajamas."  So I'll skip over the fascinating history of the market and get right to the, uh, market.

The first matter of interest concerning the nishiki market is its fascinating history.  It's been going on  in more or less the same place for six or seven hundred years.  It started as a fish market and gradually became a combination fish market and market for all kinds of other things.  It runs parallel to Shijo Dori, the main street that was a click north of where I was staying, so the west end of the market was about two blocks from me. 

Japanese lanterns -- how clever

The market is essentially both sides of the street, except that because the storefronts encroach into what doubtless was once the street, the "street" now is just a space between the storefront, the width of three or four people, maybe.  Or, I guess, nineteen or twenty Japanese people. 

It's roofed, which is useful in the rainy season and probably winter, too, and it's several blocks long, so there's a break at the end of the block for cars to mow you down when you cross the street.  Incidentally, those spots where the streets cross the market are the only places in all of Japan I ever saw where traffic doesn't yield to pedestrians, but rather the other way around.  I think there must some unwritten understanding, or, I guess, maybe it's just written in Japanese.  That would make some sense, I suppose.

Just the thing to quiet that crying child

Probably about half of the stalls are fish stalls.  I use the word "fish" in the Japanese rather than the American sense.  Fish, shellfish, fish heads, salted fish, raw fish, tempura (fried) fish.  I think rather my favorite was what I called the octopop.  I don't know how many words this picture is worth, so instead of doing the math I'll just post the pic. 

It may be hard to tell from the pic, but, yeah, the head is just about the size of a tootsie pop, except that I don't think it has a surprise chocolate filling, though, not having tried it I coudn't say for sure.  I really did try to imagine, though, what is in that squiggly little head.  I admit to being as curious as some and, as concerns Japan at least, perhaps more adventurous than most.  And I do love octopus, it's my favorite sushi.  Still, I walked right on by the octopops.  In answer to the question from the ninth row, yes, people do eat them right on the stick.  Or so I was told.  Maybe someone was pulling my leg.

With or, optional, without brains and eyeballs.

Get it?

For those who like their octopus in a more, I don't know, traditional form, there was just good old octopus tentacle.

In addition to the fish stalls, there were stalls that sold, I think, at least one of everything available anywhere in Kyoto.  Except minutes, I guess, on computers A and B.  There were shoe/sock/slipper stalls, kimono and yukata, stalls that sold fresh eggs and Japanese omelets (with the seaweed cooked in, actually pretty good), fruits, vegetables, green tea ice cream, desserts, porcelain dishes, and one of my favorites, cutlery.

No, not ginzu knives.  This is Japanese knifery in a store started by a bloke who also made swords for samurai warriors, in the 15th century, I think.

My Yanagiba

One of the interesting aspects of Japanese cutlery stores is that all of it is divided into two sides -- one for left handed people and one for everyone else.  In fact, when I expressed an interest in looking at yanagiba  the first thing they wanted to know was whether I was left- or right-handed.

The reason for this is that these knives are sharpened only on one side.  The other side is straight.  What this means is that rather than having two 15-degree edges, for a total of 30 degrees, like a German knife, the Japanese counterpart has one edge, say 12 degrees, for a total of, you know, 12 degrees.  So compared to the Japanese blade the German blade has the slicing power of, say, a ball-peen hammer.

Needless to say that's not for every job, and it requires lots of sharpening (the obliging fellow said sharpening was a snap and then proceeded to give me a rudimentary 45-minute lesson in sharpening the thing which includes such obvious necessities as how to place your feet, what angle to stand at and how far to stand from the counter.  At the end I promised to practice, practice, practice.).  Still, it renders a sharp blade that doesn't have a lot of trouble cutting raw fish.

It's the two symbols at the top, sa & mu (top to bottom)

I'd been looking for a Yanagiba for a while, so I bought this one (the right-handed version of course).  They insisted on putting my name into the blade, so rather than having them deal with my rather difficult last name I just asked them to make it "Samu," close enough.  Which they did.  This is "samu" in katakana, the kana "alphabet" used for difficult German names.

I went to the Nishiki Market almost every day, though I rarely bought anything, just a yukata and the knife (with sharpening stone, which works either left- or right-).  If you ever go to Kyoto, yes, by all means see the pagodas and the temples and the shrines.  See all the sights, but I urge you not to miss the Nishiki Market.  The sights, and the sounds, and the smells, all not to be missed.

More Blogs about Buildings and Food

It could be anything, really.

I spoke recently about pachinko as being a central fact of walking down the street in Japan.  Fortunately, with an apparent total lack of zoning in Japan, every next place on any street can be a surprise.  The next spot on the street might really be anything, even something other than a pachinko parlor. 

I'm going to be talking for a minute about restaurants.  I think I might have mentioned this earlier, but I want to talk about it a bit more, because really Japan means restaurants.  We might like to think of it as Japanese food, but as Chandler would say, of course over there they just call it "food."

The reason there are so many restaurants all over Japan is pretty much the reason there are so many restaurants in big cities everywhere.  Because it's so mountainous 125 million people in Japan are living on about 25% of the land area.  As a result, the average Japanese family home is less than half the size of the American home.

As a result, the Japanese don't do much in-home entertaining.  In the U.S., TV solved that problem for us.  The Japanese, when they're socializing, often do it at restaurants though.


This one includes the dessert menu

 I love the ingenious way they display their wares.  Elsewhere, we put up menus, which rarely have photos.  The Japanese want to get those salivary glands working before you get into the building, so they put up plastic mock-ups of the possibilities.

They're usually pretty good, believe it or not.  I'm not saying you develop a sudden taste for plastic, and you are rarely fooled into thinking you're looking at the real thing because, of course, the plates and bowls are on their sides facing you and they do still have gravity in Japan. 

But they're showing you a lot about what it is, and even if you don't speak Japanese, there's usually a photo menu in the restaurant to match it up with the window display, and with the help of useful hand gestures including pointing, you often don't need Japanese in most of the restaurants most of the time.  And, if you do have a problem, you can always ask, "Nan desu ka" which in most restaurants means "what is that" but in Indian restaurants, of which there seem to be a lot, it might mean "Is that naan?"

Incidentally, the names of the foods are not always only in Japanese; sometimes they have English too, and even when they're in Japanese script, the name might be something that, if they tell you the Japanese name, you might recognize.  I was just looking at that photo above, for example.  The lower left-hand corner of the bottom shelf, the one that's not apparently a cup of tea, is labeled "Moka furoto."  So, that's a mocha float.  So, that sounds good and now I want a moka furoto.

And Look

I might as well go into this now.  Shop names were one of my favorite parts of looking around the Streets of Japan.  The ones in English, anyway, which is lots of them, and at the Kyoto Station, really most or maybe even all of them. 

When was your smallness got to know?

In case  you didn't catch Soup, below, you might want to check that out.  Notice, Soup isn't in the restaurant trade.  It's more your higher-end, what do they call it, "upscale" women's clothing.  No T-Shirts saying "Its smallness was got to know when it was able to go away to people gently," although goodness knows, maybe that's upscale.  I don't have a great sense of these things (I did, however, sincerely appreciate the fact that the designer of the t-shirt was sufficiently familiar with the intricacies of English grammar not to insert the unwanted apostrophe in "Its").  I also love that the motif is the word "Kind," one of my favorite words.

I could have really spent a day taking photos of shop titles of this kind.  One I took, partly for the plastic-food value and partly for lawyers, or for anyone who knows that it's a subject I taught in law school, is "UCC."  I don't know what it stands for, but it doesn't really have sufficiently broad appeal for me to print it here.

My favorite one, though, was a hair salon kind of right around the corner from me.  You've gathered by now that shop names are not picked primarily for marketing purposes, the way they might be in the U.S.  Nothing like UR BEST produce shop or TAS-T-SWEET ice cream.  No, so often in Japan they just pick a word, and whatever it is seems to do the trick.

I just don't know . . .

That said, I'm not sure they always give the kind of thought they should to some of these names.  This shop I mentioned, well, it would have made me think twice about even going in to check things out.



Welcome UK, Belgium and India.

Sumimasen

Pardon me, the time change hit me a lot harder than it has in the past.  On the other hand, it's a bit more of a time change than I'm used to.  I think maybe on the way over there I just went with it, you know, getting up at 4 a.m. and going to bed at 6 p.m.  Here I have this little work thing that's messing with my hours.

Anyway, I promised myself I'd keep writing and now, at 5 a.m., I have a full night's sleep and a chance to write undisturbed, I think.

Does not consider self to be friend of camera.

A friend asked me for proof that I was actually in Japan.  I think her words were a bit less confrontational, like, "do you have any photos of yourself?"  Well, there are a couple.  I do not consider myself a photogenic person in the main, but I will publish this just because I have it, in answer to that question.  It was taken by my friend Ishida san after I took a photo of her my first day at Ippo-do tea house.  I took a lot of photos at Ippo-do, possibly because that's where my camera and I were a lot of the time.

Since it's up there, I will point out that the subject of this photo does probably look as though he's been walking a lot in the Kyoto June heat, though evidence of need of 8x4 Smart Citrus Japanese Deodorant does not yet appear here.  Of course a lot of the evidence is not the kind that shows up in photographs, if you, uh, get my drift.

Scrining

This blog has the unhappy inability to explain Kyoto and the Kansai area in more than one of the five senses (I say "unhappy" despite the suggestion of the previous paragraph), where all five are important to one degree or another, and hearing and smell almost as important as sight.  Nonetheless, we must deal with what we have, and so I'm going to try to explain scrining.  If the word already suggests the sense of hearing to you, you're getting into the swing of things here.

When I was getting ready to go to Japan, as you know, I spent some time studying the language.  I did this in my own special way, which usually included a computer and about 8-9 books in front of me.  Still, there were questions that my books and even Google Almighty didn't help me with, at least for a while.

One of these was the difference between "youkoso" which I understood to mean "welcome," and "irasshaimase," which means, uh, "welcome."  You'd think there would be a lot of discussion somewhere on the difference in meaning between two words with the same denotation.

Let's dispense with "youkoso" (don't pronounce the u, much, so it sounds more like yokoso).  It means welcome, usually to my home.  That's enough of that.

Irasshaimase "ir ra shy mah seh" could as easily be translated "please come in," and it's used almost exclusively in commercial settings. In fact, it is called out from retail establishments of all kinds.  Called out, and called out, and called out.  There's nothing close to the actual experience.

Oh shut up

Imagine yourself taking a lovely walk through a suburban neighborhood early in the morning.  You haven't had your coffee yet, maybe, that's waiting for when you get back.  It's just you and the quiet yards and the trees, ok maybe a bird or two.  Or you even walk by a yard where a dog barks from the back yard.

The dog across the street is now alerted and sets off on its own barking, either because it now sees you, or because it has to keep up with the Joneses' dog, or who knows what makes dogs bark.  My sister had a dog that barked at the bark it just heard, not remembering that that was its own previous bark.  But then, that dog ate pens, so.

But anyway in no time you have a neighborhood of frenzied howling.

Let us return now to the peaceful days of the Japanese market.  What was the bark in your neighborhood is the market call, "irrashaimasehhhhhhh!"  It's not exactly a whine, and not completely a screech.  It's a scrine.  It almost defines the word "shrill."

Taking a scrining timeout to give the photo v.

The cool thing is, there might be shoppers nearby, or there might not be.  Anything can set a scriner off.  Sometimes they won't even have seen you, it will just be the memory of a customer who was in the store or walking by out front earlier, and an employee will call out, spontaneously, "masehhhhhhhh," at which point a chain reaction will sweep the section, the store, the mall (or those parts of it not already undergoing their own outbreak).

Of course, any time you actually walk into a store (and remember territorial waters are included to a distance of about 100 feet from the entrance), you necessarily set off a round of it.  But making a slight movement while in the store will also set it off.  The employees do it by reflex, and may not even be aware they're doing it.

You: (scratch nose)

1st employee (washing window): Shaimasehhhhhh
2nd employee (straightening stock on shelf): Masehhh
Chorus: Irras-massehhh-shaimasehhhhhh-irasshaiiii (like dogs, each employee has his or her own call).

They're not restricted to that word, but it seems to be the fall-back.

After a good bit of searching, I finally found a scrine clip, from some unknown location.  I'll treat you to it here:

That's what scrining sounds like.

Not a lot of scrining at the fancy places like, uh, Soup

Sometimes there would be scrine-offs.  These were clearly intentional, and were competitions between scriners, possibly on their way to the all-Japans. I'm sure the Kyoto station has a number of all-Japan finalists.  I witnessed one poor beginner in a Takatsuki station drug store being absolutely demolished by a nearby scriner in a waffle shop.

The shops themselves really weren't much competing, but the scriners meant every word of it.  I'm sure one day she'll get her voice, but you could hear the waffle guy probably all the way to Osaka.  I'd mention, in his favor, that women tend to have a natural competitive edge because of their vocal range (as an example, listen to the totally out-classed guy at 0:28 on the above YouTube clip). I don't know what Mr. Waffle Man (not his real name) was using but I was surprised on returning a few hours later that she was still challenging him, giving it her best ("ganbatte").  It's that Japanese spirit of keeping up the manager's honor, I imagine.

Scrining.  It isn't for sissies.

P.S.  Oh my!  Philippines!  Youkoso, Philippines!

Main Street Kyoto

Just a little for the moment about one small aspect of my favorite city in Asia (where I've only ever been to one country), Kyoto.

It isn't really main street, of course (no jokes about chow mein street please).  For me, in Kyoto, it was three streets mostly, Shijo Dori ("Fourth Street," close enough) Karasuma Dori, the street I walked down to get to the station, and Kawaramachi Dori.

Day when seven adheres

Despite its largely old-world snooty whatever reputation, doubtless deserved in the main, Kyoto is loaded with pachinko parlors.  On the off-hand chance that you're neither East-Asian nor Jewish, pachinko is the Asian version of slot machines, played with little silver balls, the size of peas, about.  For purposes of this blog, and probably only for those purposes, I really wanted to pop into one of those parlors and take a gander.

The only problem is that, like slots, pachinko machines require the air to contain two parts per two-and-a-half of cigarette smoke in order to function.  One is minding one's own business, Japan's number one pastime, walking down the street, and suddenly the automatic doors of a pachinko room will open in order to allow a person to enter or escape, and passers-by are hit with a huge blast of cigarette-perfumed pachinkorrhea.  One also hears the little bells announcing to the other players and outsiders that yet another lucky player has been rewarded with a payoff.

Your Life Could Be So Cool

You kind of notice a couple of things right off.  The first is that the only way you can think of to make money faster and easier than owning a pachinko parlor would be just to go into a bank and help yourself.  That appears to be against the social norms here, though, so most people don't do it. Other than that, making money this way involves a two step process: (1) set up one of these pachinko parlors and (2) wait.

I know it sounds a lot like Las Vegas and for all I know it is, but in Las Vegas you get a sense of lots of pesky Gaming Regulators and that sort of thing, to kind of put some sort of, I don't know, challenge into the whole thing.  They may have regulators here for all I know but it kind of doesn't feel like it.  I don't know what the Gaming Regulatory Menace feels like, really, though, so maybe I should just Shut Up About It.

Ways you could be if you played Pachinko

The other thing I DID notice was the advertising, which is to say, really, the marketing.  The marketing is not about winning money or thinking you might win money or even having fun.  The marketing is about how cool your life would be if you played pachinko right now.

You're walking down the street, engaging in You Know What, and all of a sudden it comes into your head that your life could be really cool.  Depending who you are and what you'd like to look like and what sort of person you'd like to attract to your completely awesome new presence, there's a poster image for you.  They don't really tell you which image you'd look like or be like or who you'd attract -- they just put the images on the posters and let your imagination do the rest.

The images are mostly of hot chicks and, excuse me, power-rangery type dudes, mostly.  So if you spend your time going to work either on foot or on the subway, with a navy blue suit (men and women both wear navy suits mostly) and white shirt and soon-to-be-unpatriotic (I'll explain that another time) tie, which is to say, half the population of Kyoto, or if you wear any uniform other than the above-described, which is to say, the other half of the population, and you want to become really cool, come on in and play pachinko.  If you're a Japanese guy in particular, other than Ken Watanabe, this has a certain appeal.

The Luck Factor

The other part of this that I find fascinating is the peculiar Japanese fascination with Luck.  Or maybe I should say East Asian.  (BTW if you're over 47, "East Asian" means "oriental."  I have no idea whatever happened to that word, when it became out of fashion to use it or anything, I don't think it's exactly on the list of Words You Should Not Say, but just for purposes of this blog, go with me.)

Spock's Life Could Be So Cool

The thing is, East Asians as a group are often considered very logical and pragmatic.  So, yeah, if the Earth were the USS Enterprise, you know who the Japanese and Chinese would get to play.  Also, they don't normally get hooked into dogmatic religious controls of their behavior.  But the thing is, luck does seem to form part of their culture, and it does kind of, in a strange way, affect their daily behavior.

Where I'm going with this ("Aha!" you say.  "I knew there was going to be a Point!") is that the pachinko parlors also really play on the luck thing.  Again, they don't talk of this really in terms of money won or lost.  And well they might not.  They just seem to suggest that if you play pachinko the force is going to be with you.  Hence the top photo.

Day when seven adheres

The top photo, I don't know how well y'all in the back can see this, some of these if you click on them will open up.  The top photo is of a poster both on and outside a pachinko room that says, among other things, "7 17 27.  Days when seven adheres."

Odd numbers in Japan are lucky.  Which, you know, really ups Your Chances To Win.  In the U.S., as far as I know, it's mostly 7 good, 13 bad, and the rest is just you pick 'em.  But in Japan, pretty much your chances of getting lucky is 50%, while getting unlucky is mostly limited to the number 4, about which later, although it could be said that with odd numbers lucky, you're kind of unlucky just by not ending up with one.

But in any event, this poster is calling on the forces of 7.  I don't think they're telling us all to come back and be big winners on July 17 2027 (although I'm guessing that's going to be a big day for the stockholders in the pachinko-parlor world).  I think that they're suggesting that the forces of, I don't know, good lucky strength powerness, whatever, will be at their top strength powernessness on those three days of the month, 7, 17, 27.  You know, days when 7 adheres.  So that's good because even poor little February has all those days.  Anyway, I took that picture on the 16th I think, so they must have put out their posters just to really get people in the mood for thinking about strength powerness.  Whether they had similar posters for other odd days I don't remember, because I wasn't really looking at their posters earlier, just mostly trying to avoid the nicotene blasts.

お帰りなさい Welcome back

I'm back in the US now.  I miss Kyoto, I told you I would, but I slept in a bed last night and that felt kind of luxurious.

I have a friend who told me this trip would change me, and it has, at least for now.  It has changed me in some ways I know, and in other lifestyle ways I hope stick with me for a while.  And it's changed me I'm sure, for better or worse, in some ways I really have no idea of.

I don't want to harp on this; no, ok, I do for a little while.  I was in the airports, it seemed so long, it felt like a couple dozen of them yesterday (got the bus at 6 a.m. for Itami airport Osaka, to Tokyo, to Chicago, to Dulles DC, to Greenville/Spartanburg).  Almost nobody was taking the stairs at any of those airports outside of Japan.

Stairs are usually quicker.  This photo is in Korea BTW.

It sounds a whole lot, I know, like I'm criticizing these non-stair takers, but I promise I'm not.  I worry about two things in this blog, a lot.  I worry about a lot of stuff a lot of the time, but here, I worry about sounding like I'm down on the US and Americans, and I worry about sounding like I think the Japanese are better than we are.  I don't think any of those things.  But I think there are probably things almost every society could learn to its benefit from others.  There are, IMHO, plenty of things the Japanese society could learn to its benefit from ours.  But the idea that the less I move my body the happier I'll be, even in the short run, is something I hope to have shed myself of for a while.

The Staring Principle

Toward the last couple of days in Japan I started taking photos of things I had meant to take them of before.  I regret that I operated a little on the Staring Principle of candid photography, which is my theory that taking a candid photo of someone I don't know is kind of the electronic equivalent of staring at that person, and I didn't do it more than I had to, or at least I tried not to let them know I was doing it.  And so I don't have a lot of candid photos of Japanese people, or that is to say, not many good ones.

click for a larger version

I did get this photo in the last day or two of one set of stairs up from the subway stop at the intersection of Shijo Dori and Karasuma Dori, the stop closest to my ryokan.  It shows the number of calories per step.  I don't know exactly who this is for, or what it means -- is this the difference between taking that step and standing on an escalator for the same period of time?  Is this the amount for some person of hypothetical Average Japanese Weight?  Heavier people are lifting more weight up a stair than lighter people and presumably have to use more energy to do it.

Anyway, what it did for me was remind me, every time I got to the foot of an escalator/stair alternative, that I had a choice.  That's all.

P.S.  If you're interested, I've started going back to old posts and putting in some photos. Changed the one of Ken Watanabe too.

Update 13 March 2013:

According to one of my gurus, Namiko Abe, the word for nine, which can be pronounced "ku," (although it can alternatively be pronounced "kyu," which sounds like "ku" but I believe is unrelated), is the same pronunciation for the word for "agony" or "torture."  So, you don't want agony or torture to adhere I guess, and that makes that one unlucky, especially, she says, in hospitals, which sometimes eliminate those floors from their numbering system.

Interestingly, in their neo-Japano-western paracultural way they sometimes also eliminate the 13th floor out of a sort of pro-western sensibility.

So, I suppose it's possible to explain to someone that your office is on the 17th floor of a 14-story building.  Another reason to love Japan, not that either of us needs one.

Sayounara さようなら

Sayounara to Japan, that is, not to you. 

I moved to Osaka (accent on the first syllable) last night -- it wasn`t so bad, really considering the slight train problem.  The nice person who sold me the ticket indicated that my train left from track 7, but apparently thought it sufficiently obvious that I would have to change trains in Osaka Station that she need not mention it.  I got suspicious though when we left Osaka station traveling west, so I summoned up the courage to leave my seat and carefully examine the map posted above the door.

I didn`t see my station, and so at the VERY last second I jumped out WITH my luggage at the next station. 

Here`s where my study of Japanese got me into trouble.

I walked up to the nice man and asked him (after taking my common course, which is to rehearse the question in my head, including pronunciation) where I had gone wrong and how to get to Tennoji Station.  What followed was a torrent of syllables that had not the least meaning to me.  He might as well have been speaking Chinese.

get it?

Anyway, it happens sometimes.  I have a pretty limited vocabulary, things-going-unexpectedly-wise, and I probably couldn`t understand my own name when it gets said to me this fast.  So I just stared at him, and had the courtesy, which is as you know pretty big here, to thank him and nod and walk in the direction his eyes were looking.  After only one false start I found the track and confirmed it with another officer.  I think if I were me three years ago listening to myself now do this Japanese thing I would be pretty satisfied but I sure feel helpless sometimes.

Oh, btw, it rained here last night, pretty much all night, I think.  In fact it was raining late yesterday afternoon when I got off the train in Osaka.  Thank you, tsuyu.

A Scrap of Paper.

I'm Home!  Photos!!!

I was at one of the station entrances trying to decide which way to go (another kind of long story that I`m not going to tell at the moment) when out of the corner of my eye I saw a little thing flutter.  I looked -- it was a little scrap of paper, a couple of square inches, fluttering to the ground.  The kind, for example, that could have come off the end of a pack of Men`s Plum Candy, though I don't think it was. 

I looked up to the figure standing over it.  I won`t tell you how I know, but he was definitely western and I really think one of my own countrymen.  And, odds are, yours too.  He looked at the piece of paper.  Then he glanced at me.  Then he looked away.  I know something was going through his mind, and I really think it had something to do with the scrap of paper.  I wanted to pick it up, and in hindsight I should have.  I should have shown the person who I hope was a very new newcomer that there`s no shame in retrieving your own paper over here and perhaps a little in not doing so.  I wanted to show him that team spirit suggests we all do our part here, and that goes so far as to do each others` parts.  But I didn`t.  I can`t tell you why.  For all I know that piece of paper is still there.  If I see it today I`ll pick it up but I`ll have missed my chance with that man.   

The train ride back here this morning

A bunch of kids on an outing.  With their teacher, on my train.  They are not quite as stand-offish as their elders and eventually through the extreme perseverance of Hiro (not his real name) we (meaning just about all 20 or so of them and I) struck up a conversation of sorts.  When the conversation got out of my depth the teacher and I negotiated some translation.  Incidentally the kids knew two English words (one of them twice), or at least were giving up that much: "peace" and "bye-bye." 

They all look like this.  It's not a great photo, but they do.

We asked each other a number of questions, age, name, home, the standard introductory stuff.  They were all 8 and 9 years old, and dressed, as most kids here seem to be, in a school uniform of sorts, which is invariably white shirt or blouse, navy pants or skirt, and white socks.  As the girls get older and go to middle school their skirt uniform sometimes varies to something conservative but not necessarily navy.  It was nice to be talking to 8- and 9-year-olds because at the moment that`s the language level I aspire to, so although we were out of my depth in many senses it was still a lot of fun.

The students were on some sort of field trip, which was a nice thing for me because, as often happens (and occasionally for good reason, as explained earlier), I wasn`t positive I was on the right train.  When you get off the Tokyo-Osaka main line stuff, English tends to fade from the schedules and signs and such.  Anyway, the students` task this morning apparently was to fill in the little chart showing what stations their train had stopped in, and maybe something they saw there.  So All I Had To Do was look at their chart and there, sure enough, was the kanji 大阪, for Osaka, which as it happens I know.  Thank you kids.

And Last (last entry in Japan)

Ishida san, my favorite Ippo-Do helper

Will be Ippo-do, my tea shop.  I will go to tea, which I now am getting reasonably adept at for a foreigner.  I will have a pot of gyokuro and get some sencha and play sidewalk bushido and lose, as I almost always do (won one yesterday, so my record now stands at something like 1-588).  I am loaded up with Smart Citrus and brought some with me.  I have been quasi-communicating with Ann`s cousin, who`s back from the U.S. and it`s possible he and I will have dinner together tonight.

I finished The Teahouse Fire, I know I said that before, and left it in a cafe for someone else to find.  I started the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, I think I might have mentioned that too, though it could have been my Journal.  I have heard a lot about it.  The writing`s not really as great as I`d hoped but he tells a good story, that`s for sure.

Oh, thank you for reminding me I need to buy an alarm clock.  I need to leave not later than 5:30 to be at the airport at 6.  I woke at 4:30 or something today, but I`m not counting on it and I don`t want to be, you know, late.  That wouldn`t be a good thing.

So, goodbye cultural center and computers B and A.  Goodbye Kyoto.  Hello soon my friends at home.

Japanese Diet

A word to myself and anyone else who thinks that the Japanese diet consists of sushi and side dishes:  Sushi`s not exactly hard to find, but it does not constitute the Japanese national dish any more than sake constitutes the Japanese national drink.  That would be beer, incidentally, and by a huge margin.  Second, somewhat distantly, is wine.  Sake is an also-ran.

Sushi is often on the menu but the big dishes are two things I`ve mostly been avoiding -- one in the past decade or two and one pretty much my whole life: tempura and "red" meat.  My stomach is not on especially friendly terms with fried food a lot of the time, Chick-Fil-A notwithstanding, and I haven`t had meat since, by an odd and unaccountable and (of course) then-unknown coincidence, the day the Watergate Hotel was broken into.  17 June 1972.

They serve a lot of pasta too.  The problem with that is, the Japanese, and you know I LOVE them, overcook their OWN noodles a lot of the time.  So, pasta not so much either.  I can find sushi but it`s just not that easy.

So how do these people ALL stay as thin as rails?  I have to guess two reasons:  one, almost certainly, is that good friend, heredity.  And the other is that at 10 a.m. today as I was walking to the station I noticed that the entire walk along one of the main arteries of Kyoto, there were almost no non-taxi cars.  I think that kind of speaks for itself.  Yeah, there`s a lot of public transportation but it seems as though everybody walks and bikes a whole bunch.  It`s hard for me to imagine someone complaining because they had to park two blocks away instead of one.

So, anyway, I get sushi kind of when I look for it.  I`m hoping to get some for lunch today.

Tsuyu

It hadn`t rained for almost a week, I think, so it saved up its seven-drops-a day and really poured -- you know, a total of whatever that is, forty-two drops.  I`m never going to believe the words "rainy season " again.

Yesterday

Poppins before Disney

All day was devoted, other than internet, showering and paying my ryokan bill, to shopping and tea.  So, I`m thinking, shopping and tea -- who does that remind me of?  I`ll tell you, I think it reminds me of the mother who left her kids all day every day in the charge of Mary Poppins.  I`d say Mrs. Darling but that was Peter Pan, I think.  Anyway, didn`t she dump the babies on Mary Poppins so she could go out to tea and shop every day?  Is that what women with nannies did in Mary Poppins`s day -- dump the kids, and go shopping and to tea?  Upper-middle I mean.  I guess which kids were lucky depends on your point of view.  The Mary Poppins in the movie was a sugary treat.  The one in the books was a good bit drier, not at all unlike Nanny McPhee, and definitely cooler.  Then Disney Winnie-the-Poohed her and took away all her charm.

Just back from shopping, on her way to Tea

Anyway, I`m thrilled to say that after all my shopping I can still close the suitcase.  I still have a little bit to do, too.  I packed this morning and hope not to get into my suitcase again. 

Plum Candy

So, the plum candy.  I received some plum candy, Japanese plum hard candy, from a friend a little over a year ago.  I really didn`t like it, but I tried a second piece.  I`m not usually a fan of hard candy and I`ve never had candy before, that I remember, that`s salty, sweet and sour.  It grew on me, and in pretty short order.  By the time I realized how much I liked it I had thrown the wrapper away, and I didn`t know what it was.

It's a great taste, once you've acquired it

Well, I found it again.  It`s called (in Japanese) "Men`s Plum Candy."  Somebody in charge of the Candy Naming department at Nihon Kandi (not the real name) should be informed that Men`s Plum Candy`s internationally biggest fan spends his days shopping and at tea.  And, really, half of the shopping is tea-related.

Anyway, a lot of what I`m bringing back is Men`s Plum Candy.  Yes, you may have a piece.  Even if you`re not, you know, strictly eligible because of the name.  By weight a lot of what I`m bringing back is a stone.  It goes with the yanagi-ba.

Goodbye Kyoto

Last blogging day in Japan is tomorrow.  I have a lot of photos and I have spoken only in half-hour, generally, fits, so I have more to say even after I get back, if anyone`s still interested.

I have now come to the end of my Kyoto stay.  I will be here tomorrow but as a visitor from out-of-town.  I will miss my friend Kyoto, a bit to my surprise considering how homesick I was a week ago and, sometimes, still am.

I will miss her, as I said, a lot.  I have come to feel a real affection for her, and as you may know, since I mentioned it before, I talk to her a lot, every day.  The problem is, of course, that she really doesn`t exactly talk back, we don`t have conversations, and even if we did, they`re not the kind of conversation I think of, not the kind where she listens when I tell her about my panics and embarrassments and worries.  The two reasons for this are that first she`s not a person and second, and more to the point, she`s Japanese, and we really don`t work that way here, I don`t think.

So, thank you dear reader.  I`ll be back, I hope, as a guest of Kyoto tomorrow, traveling on Saturday, and back in the U.S., back in the U.S., Back in the U.S. Sunday.

P.S.  Welcome Australia.  I always get a big kick out of a new country.  I even did when it was me, twice.

Want to hear a good one?

My ryokan, my inn, has a computer that guests can log onto.  It`s funny, see, because tonight`s my last night at the ryokan and I was paying my charges tonight rather than tomorrow in case my new VISA card had a problem so I could have a full 12hours to panic rather than just the two.  Anyway, the nice owner who`s a really neat guy got to talking and I mentioned I was going to go in to the station and get on the computer and he said, oh we have one here.

Ha ha. 

Oh well, if I had known this a week and a half ago Computer A and I and Computer B and I would never have met.  Anyway, being the slightly Japaneezy sort of person I am I would always be assuming I was holding someone else up, sumimasen, on this computer anyway.  I happen to know I`m the only guest in the Ryokan right now and I still feel as though I`m taking too much time.  For what?

I finished my book the Teahouse Fire last night and left my copy at the coffee house/literary thing called Cafe Bibliotheque HELLO or something unimaginably close to that.  I left it so someone would pick it up and start reading it.

Getting Rich Not Quite as Quick as I Thought

Pretty typical I think.

I have to amend my former statement about how many Japanese people wear face masks, at least on the street.  I don`t remember my previous estimate but I think I was guessing about 10-15%.  I took a closer look and I think it`s more like, uh, something substantially less than 1%.  It`s still way more than any place in the US other than, you know, a hospital operating room or something but it`s not going to get me rich quite as quick as I imagined, the idea of selling fashion masks.  Still, rich is rich.  I went into the One-S-One or S-One-S, I can`t remember, the local drug store, to get some plum candy (about which another time) and Deodorant (about which in a sec) and there at the face mask section was a gaggle of young women looking for all the world as if they were in a shoe store or its upper-body near equivalent.  So, fashion`s still a good idea.  Face-mask-wise, I mean.

Well, shoot, somebody already did it.

So, on to the BO thing, you seem curious.  If that`s not curiosity but disgust on your face that I`m mistaking for curiosity, please feel free to skip to the end.

I have been in some sort of angst, possibly a subform of gaijin angst, because every time I read a novel about Japan that has foreigners in it, the foreigners are said to smell bad.  That`s mostly two, I think, Shogun and the Teahouse Fire, and they`re both set before the days of serious indoor plumbing, but still.  It`s enough to make me paranoid.  So instead I`ve been bathing/showering hot and cold a couple of times a day sometimes.  Remember that I`m walking 15-20 miles in the hot June non-rain.  So today at 10:30 a.m. I came back for a second shower and I just thought, I can`t keep doing this although, you know, it`s only three more days.  I had gone into the S-one-S or whatever a couple of times before but I was too embarrassed to ask for deodorant, because partly I didn`t, don`t know the word and partly the impression I get from these books is that the Japanese, after running a 10K in mid-August, have underarms that smell like fresh baked bread or something. 

But my angst got the better of, what, my other angst.  I asked a petite little earnest Japanese store worker who of course didn`t know the word so I had to raise my arm and, uh, demonstrate.  I`d like to say I`m not easily embarrassed but if you know me, and, well, my photo`s in the dictionary next to the word "blush."  Yes, it DOES even come through in black and white.

Anyway, she luckily gets the idea relatively quickly (at least they`ve HEARD of it over here) and says "for men"?  Oh, yeah, some guy will be using this.  Remember, I walked like five blocks just to get to the store.   So, you know.  What kind do you want?  Just whatever you`re holding there in your hand, that will be great.  Because, you know, we have several brands and several kinds of each.  No,no, just that one you have in your hand, thank you.

See, it says "MEN" right there on the label, along with "Smart Citrus"

If it doesn't work, I really hope it's not the best one.

Well, it turns out to be smart citrus flavor.  That`s the name, smart citrus.  So, think of the average grapefruit.  Well, I smell as though I`m smarter than that.

So, here is my one post-6 pm. post from Japan.  unless Osaka has something later, which I don`t think I`m going to try to find out.  Tomorrow I`m writing from the station, and Friday, I already decided to come back and do my last post also from the station.  My Saturday is going to be 13 hours longer than yours, probably.  And feel like it, probably.

But that`s not today.  Tomorrow a word about plum candy maybe.

Clean/Lines

Good morning from Kyoto, my second to last good morning.  Despite how much I miss talking to people I have rather fallen in love with this town.  I know I`m going to miss it when I go home.  Isn`t that weird?  My last full day is today and tomorrow Thursday I`m moving to Osaka, which as I mentioned to someone today is something like the Detroit of Japan.  No offense whatever to either Detroit or Osaka, it`s just much more bustling and a working person`s town.

My only full day in Osaka is Friday because I`m flying back on Saturday.  So, I think I know what I`m doing with my only full day in osaka -- taking the train back to Kyoto and spending the day here.

I wanted to talk briefly about a couple of interesting features about Japan.  One is lines and the other is cleanliness.

I`ve seen clean countries before -- places where the housewives are out every morning sweeping the stoops, that sort of thing.  I remember in England looking at the sides of the train tracks as we went out to Cornwall and thinking how much litter there would have been in the US and how much there wasn`t there in west England.

I`ve never seen anything quite like Japan though.  There is of course no litter anywhere.  It was breezy the other day when I was visiting my friends in Tokyo and we went outside on the sidewalk to have our coffee and a little breeze came up and blew the little receipt off the table onto the sidewalk.  Tim and I immediately got up to pursue that little bugger all the way down the sidewalk (he nailed it with its shoe before it excaped).

There are no garbage cans to speak of.  Almost none anywhere.  That`s of course because nobody does any thing to create litter.  There are narrowly prescribed places where you can eat and drink, socially prescribed I mean, and they all have provisions for disposal.  Next to the ubiquitous drink machines (coke, water, tea, coffee, beer, sake, you name it) there are bottle disposal bins.

The thing that really got me was to see the shop proprietors sweeping what appeared to me to be already imaculate sidewalks.  I remember an older woman squatting on the sidewalk and nabbing, like a pigeon with crumbs at a park bench, little tiny pieces of gravel.  These are smaller than a bb.  Nobody was going to call her the messy shopkeeper on the block.

For those of you who know me well enough to be, well, I leave my room more or less spotless every morning.  Neat and tidy and everything at right angles.  I know THAT`s not going to last but it`s an example of the effect of Japan.

The cult of lines

The other thing is the lines.  They are so orderly.  There were large groups of what I took to be middle-school students waiting sitting on the (clean) sidewalk area in front of the station the other day, headed for some outing or other.  Each group of, what, 50, was not only in orderly rows but evenly spaced lines.  It looked like the Arlington Cemetery of Junior High students.  Group after group, row after row.  They were chatting and having a great time, but sitting on the (clean) ground in very nice neat lines.

A better example really is the 地下鉄 , the subway.   In the US (I am really not putting the US down when I do these things, or not intentionally.  I am just tring to give a frame of reference) when the subway stops the crowd trying to push on is repelled by the crowd trying to get off.  It is a charmingly American and utterly inefficient way to do it.  The Japanese have it figured out.  There are markings on the subway platform where the doors will be when the train stops.  People line up here in double lines.  The rest of the platform is utterly devoid of people, except for the rare foreigner (ahem) who hasn"t figured it out yet. 

Then when the doors open, what?  The right line steps to the right and the left line steps to the left, allowing the car to empty to its hearts content.  Then the lines go, single file, onto the subway. 

I wanted to talk a little about some other things today but time is up.  I will almost certainly be on tomorrow and hope to be on Friday. 

Thank you for reading my little blog.  It means a lot to me.  It gives me a much-needed connection home.

Bag Lady Man

No blog for sure (I know I`ve broken this promise before) on Tuesday -- the cultural center is closed second and  fourth Tuesdays, so no computer.  See you Wednesday.

I should have mentioned this before, because it may color your impression of me and therefore, perhaps, my blog: I`m talking to myself as I walk down the street.  A lot, really. 

I am kind of trying to keep quiet about it, you know, I`m not shuffling along cursing everyone I meet or, you know, nobody.  It`s really nothing like that.  But my lips are definitely moving and if you stood right up to me which, of course, nobody is ever going to do even to a native whose lips are moving, much less a foreigner; if you did though, you could hear that I was saying things.

I have two unrelated but decidedly complementary reasons for doing this.  One is, I don`t know if I`ve mentioned this less than forty times before, I`m pretty lonely here.  I never know what has gone only into my journal and what has gone on here and my time is too limited to reread my own blog so forgive me, but I`m lonely the way I haven`t been for a long time, since college, because I am used to chatting with people and Japanese people aren`t always the chatty type, one, and not with me anyway, two.

So that`s one reason -- I`m not talking with anyone at all and my mouth is trying to chat so that`s part of it.  The other part is that in its drive to deal with its surrounding the part of my brain that is trying to read all the time is trying to read Japanese and being only partly successful.  Because while I know most of the kana I know only a small percentage of the Kanji, so anyway my brain is trying to sound out or figure out what I do know on every sign I see, which, I can tell you, in Kyoto gives me a lot to do.

So, yeah, talking to myself.  Go figure.  Quietly though.

The Japan Diet 

I bought a pair of pants the other day -- it wasn`t a fashion thing; it`s just that even my belt couldn`t keep the old ones up any more.  It`s what I call the Japan diet, which is not so much exactly a diet as a combination of walking, as I may have mentioned before, 15-20 miles a day, with eating, as I may have mentioned before, about one meal plus a couple of little snacks a day.  Three gallons of tea I don`t think figures into this whole equation anywhere.  So I was walking along eventually with one hand in my pants pocket, whose sole function was to hold my pants up.  If you`re walking along talking to yourself it does you no good to also be holding your pants up by grabbing your belt.

Should I take off my . .  . ?

So I bought a pair of pants when I was visiting my friends in Tokyo.  I have to say I didn`t have any trouble remembering the word for pants. 

When I was learning Japanese early on, we had a chapter on family, you know, and colors, and all kinds of things.  And of course we had one on types of clothing.  (As an aside I`ll tell you that the verb for "to wear" differs for what you`re wearing, depending in part on whether it`s above or below the waist.)   But of course, since they all came in the same chapter, I had trouble in a couple cases remember which was which.  This was not uncommon, of course -- the words for yellow, ("kiiro") and black ("kuro") took me a little while to remember.

Anyway, the two I kind of couldn`t remember of kinds of clothing were pants ("zubon") and shoes ("kutsu").  I think it was the zu/su sound, that gave me the problem.  

So the first time I went into a Buddhist temple area I wanted to ask if I should take off my shoes.  No, I didn`t, you know . . .. But at that moment I formed a very clear sense in my mind as to which was pants and which was shoes.

Oh, and by the way, the salesman who sold me the pants bowed to me when he sold them and kept bowing to me when he was following me out of the store, and in fact followed me all the way out onto the sidewalk bowing the whole way.  These were DEEP BOWS.  Oh my.  I can`t imagine what a suit calls for.

Tea

One day real soon I`m going to shut up about tea.  But it`s not going to be today.

This was a lot of it. 

My sensei

I went to Ippo-Do today and had a Tea Class.  This was not the history/tea ceremony thing.  This was just everything you might want to know about making Japanese tea, and a little about other teas.  It was really kind of spectacular.  When I get back to the US I`m going to post the photo I took of the table near the end of my two-hour lesson.   It looked like a post-Thanksgiving-meal photo only tea things instead of empty gravy boats and cranberry sauce bowls.  It was totally cool and whereas before what I knew about making tea was pretty much (1) put tea bag and boiling water into cup and (2) drink, I got a real lesson today.  Totally cool.

So, dewa mata ne, I`ll see you I hope on Wednesday.

A New Form of Incompetence

Well, I took my first real class on tea ceremony today.  There were two students and one teacher.  The other student was a very nice young Indonesian woman who is here in Japan with her husband who is at the University in these parts.  One reason I liked her so much is that she was almost as uncoordinated as I am, as far as the tea ceremony goes, and that`s something I don`t think I`ve ever run into before, really.

Anyway, I was taking this class, one hour, on the making of tea in the tea ceremony.  Check that link out.  The person performing the ceremony is kind of back-lit but especially keep your eye on that little napkin thing she`s working with because every finger has a place it has to be at every moment, not to mention that every little implement and every little tool has a place and a direction it has to be.  I won`t bore you with every bit of it any more than  I already have, but suffice it to say I considered it a masterstroke of Japanese patience that this poor teacher didn`t pull out a gun from somewhere and shoot me.  All the baseball I ever tried and failed to play in my life never prepared me for the uncoordinated feeling I had here.  I ket looking at the way the guy was holding the little napkin and wondering why, you know, my god it`s just holding a napkin, why can he do it and I can`t?

Well, ok, that`s tea ceremony and now I understand a lot of things about it.  If you`ve read or will read the Teahouse Fire, a book I`ve kind of pushed earlier on this show, you know that every little school of tea ceremony is a little different, but I asked this fellow　どれぐらえこちらを弁雇用していますか, how long have you been studying this procedure, and he said 三十年, thirty years, and apologized that he wasn`t very good but he knows some people who are pretty good and can answer any questions I might have. 

Oh well, you know, I didn`t take this class in order to become a master of tea ceremony, just to find out what in the world was going on.  So, I have some kind of idea at an insanely basic level what sorts of things these people are doing when they do tea ceremony. 

Most of their customers are Japanese

I had an iced cafe au lait for brekkie today.  Sometimes I just feel the need to go all western and everything although of course I was the only westerner in the place.  Incidentally, in the Station, where I spend some of my time (this cultural center where I am now is within the station building) there is a Cafe Du Monde Japanese style.  I keep walking by it -- it`s next to a Mr. Donut, which I think they ought to call Donut-san.  I am proud to say I haven`t been to either one.  The Japanese people seem to live on donuts and the like and yet they all have waists about the size of my wrist. 

I think part of the reason is that most of them drive very little.  I walked from my Ryokan to the station today.  I can`t reall tell how far it is but it`s certainly more than a mile and probably not as far as two, although it could be that far.  Anyway, I walked that on the way here this morning and more or less kept up with a young woman in her early 20s walking the whole way.  Incidentally there`s a subway station at each end of that walk (and one in between).  This was relatively early, maybe 8:30, which is early for Japanese people, on a Sunday morning.  So, I guess, people are routinely walking this much they can stand to have a donut from time to time.

But I really wasn`t expecting to see a lot of bakeries and boy was I wrong about that.  They are everywhere here.  They`re all over the place, there are at least a dozen, maybe two dozen, of various kinds, in this train station.  They sell all kinds of things -- one of the most interesting has a sort of hot dog sitting in the middle of it.  OK.  See, that`s not what I think of when I think of bakeries and less what I would expect to see in a Japanese bakery. 

Enough about bread, which I came here vowing to try not to eat much of.  So, yay, it`s  been almost 8 days and I haven`t had a single donut YET and I hope I can wait it out because once I have one I`m going to want about three dozen and then all that beautiful walking will be down the tube.

Himeji Castle

This center will be closed on Tuesday -- closed second and fourth Tuesday of the month, go figure, so I will not be making an entry on that day.  I think I will take that as a sign to go visit Himeiji Castle that day which I almost did earlier in the week but didn`t, I had a tea ceremony, lunch and bath instead.  So this time for sure, assuming it`s open.  I keep hearing that they`re restoring it and some people say that means it`s closed to tourists and some people say it isn`t.

From here, now, I think I`m going up to Ippo Do where I haven`t been since what, Wednesday I think.  I`m having a tea class there tomorrow, the last one here, apparently.

Face Masks

Everyone has a foolproof plan for making 81,000,000 yen, right?  It`s a little kind of joke, that`s about a million dollars as of the day I left for Japan.  Here`s my plan, the longish version:

About one Japanese person on the street out of maybe 15 or 20 wears a face mask.  The surgical kind, like on M*A*S*H.  At first I thought their primary purpose was to keep out the germs but I think I learned that, right along with the Japanese team spirit, the purpose ostensibly is not to pass on one`s own germs to everyone else.  It`s amazing.  Needless to say, deep down in their heart of Japanese hearts these people many of them probably have some additional motives for wearing them.  You might be able to imagine some of your own.

Anyway, I was in the 7-11 the other day and I saw several types of them, sorted by I don`t know what.  Size?  It`s all I can imagine. 

Well, here`s my big-money idea.  Fashion.  Mask fashion.  Japaneeeeeeeeeze mask fashion.  Nobody in the world that I`ve seen is as fashion conscious as Japanese women, particularly young Japanese women, and I`ve been to Paris in the last year.  In fact one year ago at this very instant (not adjusting for time zone differences) I was battling traffic on Paris`s version of the LA Freeway.  Anyway, nobody I`ve seen is as fashion conscious as these people, not in Paris, not in Rome, goodness knows not in London.

So, are you ahead of me here?  Fashion masks?  I think there is a huge amount of money to be made.  Really huge.  That`s just me, but I don`t get these ideas very often.  I think they would sell like Donut-sans.

OK, my time is almost through on this version of Computer B.  I will probably be on some time tomorrow but not on Tuesday (see above) because the Center is closed.

So, dewa mata ne, see you soon.

A day with rain

Finally it rained in the Kyoto rainy season.  All night, just about and into the morning.  You don`t have to like rain as long as you`re happy for me.  I like rain and I like summer rain best and in the summer I like morning rain best of all.  I woke up just before 5, as usual, and the rain that had been in my head all night was real outside.  What a soft sweet sound, and my window is right up against the street. 

Center-top poster on the right.  Part of the "Jaywalking 3"

I came down to the station and spotted her:  the Kyoto serial crosswalk criminal.  I decided to follow her and sure enough, she crossed against the light several times.  She`s I think near the top of the kyotonokeisatsukan (Kyoto Police)`s most wanted and I would have turned her in but I have yet to learn the Japanese for "really don`t want to get involved" so I just let it go for now.

Tomorrow, Sunday for me, more tea learning and another class at Ippo-do, my home away from home. 

I have a second to talk about yesterday.  I was in a little town called Arima which is outside Kobe which is, oh well, Kobe is really its own city, and kind of a cool one.  Arima is sort of resorty; well, let`s just, for a change, be honest.  It`s a resort, and I feel pretty guilty about that because anyone who knows anything about "culture" knows that whatever it is it doesn`t for a second include rich people.  But there were kimono and tea and onsen just all over the place, so as unclutured as it was it felt to me a lot more like culture, pardon me PLEASE pardon me than sitting on the subway watching a bunch of people with earphones jammed in their ears playing some game I don`t understand on little electronic handheld devices. 

Mine was cooler because I bet I didn't look that geeky

Yes of course I love Japan but I love the Japan I want Japan to be and you know, not necessarily the part that wishes it were underground Philadelphia.  Whatever that means

So back to what I was saying yeah there were kimono and obi and onsen and no one admitted to understanding much less speaking English and it seemed to hearken back to a day before what, the Meiji Restoration when eating meat was anathema.  This is the Japan I like to imagine, perhaps the way Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best are the America the Tea Party likes to imagine, though I consider it at least possible that this Japan once, at some place, at some time, existed, whereas Leave it to Beaver never really of course did.

Sounds more soap-boxy than travelogy.  Anyway, all this and rain kind of took away my homesickness for the time being.  In fact, again for the time being, I am kind of doing ok in that regard.  And at some point this morning I passed the half-way point in my trip to Japan.   Ii desu, it`s ok.  Lots of tea in the future and I`m considering going to Nara on Tuesday or Wednesday.  I feel a little pulled apart taking day-long trips because they get in the way of what are, the trip to Arima aside, maybe my two favorite Things to Do here, Ippo-Do and a daily posting on Sumimasen, my blog.

Oh oh oh, and I learned a new apology today.  This is huge, you know, for me.  Because every nuanced level of apology gives life new meaning.

I don`t even know whether, and I don`t have time to look, I don`t know whether I have given you the account of sleeping through my railway stop and the wild situation after that, walking up to my ryokan, my lodging, at 11:45 or something with an 11:00 curfew, but the silver lining was that it was giving me the chance to practice the utterly most profoundly abject apology, moushiwake gozaimasen deshita which if there`s a more abject one I seriously need to find out about it. 

But I don`t think I did tell that story yet and right now with 2:45 left on computer B I don`t have time to do it.  So, my newly-learned apology today: (polite form of course, what else) Machigaemashita -- "my mistake."  I have absolutely no clue where this fits in the pantheon of Japanese apologies right now, but it`s a new one and I sure am going to find out. 

So, sumimasen, I have about half a minute left now and I`m signing off.  My tea class tomorrow is in this very room so I should be here for this too.

Very quickly.

A very quick note because I just got into the station and the internet-available center closes in about five minutes, and I wasn`t expecting to get on today anyway.  

I had unbelievable Japanese day today.  Onsen, the Japanese hot spring; lunch on tatami -- about nineteen different forms of soybean plus other roots and beans and things -- all vegetarian YAY!

But mostly TEA.  This was tea ceremony and not I mean the kind you might find in Gatlinburg Tennessee.  In fact some of it was so cool I promised the nice woman I wouldn`t even tell anybody about it and I mean to keep my promise.  But I was the only one in the place not speaking Japanese and I was doing my best with that and there was all kinds of other Japanese really Japanese Japanese Tea stuff that was so cool that

Better get out a handkerchief here and take a break.  Mop the brow.  Anyway, I`ll go into detail maybe Saturday or Sunday, whatever it is for you, it will be Sunday for me so for you too I guess, to the extent I can.  Because I have more tea things on My Sunday and Monday.

Bing bong -- gotta go.

Sidewalk Bushido and other Japanese Facts of Life

note: I`m away from my computer for the next three days -- probably no post until Sunday 12 June.

First, I mentioned in my last post that I`d give you a second definition of Bad Boys in Japan.  This kind doesn`t have to be boys or even male.  These are your out-and-out Japanese toughs who make your skin crawl just to think about. [Yeah I realize the headline says Chinese but cut me some slack, I`m photo-impaired here]

There was a crime, Japanese style, committed by one of these toughs in my presence just yesterday.  I shall elaborate.

Kyoto, the only Japanese City in which I have spent any time, has two types of streets:  Major thoroughfares, which appear every, what, 6-8 city blocks, and minor streets, which is everything else, and which you and I (in the U.S. I mean) would call an "alley."  This doesn`t stop cars and trucks from using them as true thoroughfares, but most of them strain to allow cars to pass each other in opposite directions.  I checked it out and figured they`re about the width of a single interstate lane which is, I think, something like 20 feet.

The fact that they are only 20 feet wide, and that`s pretty much wall to wall -- it includes pedestrian and bicycle room, does not stop Japanese people from thinking of them as streets, because functionally they are.  The thing is, intersections of Major Throughfares, the big wide ones, with any other street, large or small, calls for a crossing signal and crosswalk area. 

I hope you`re getting the picture, because when you combine the lit wait/walk signal (a red person standing or a green person walking) with the Japanese obsession for obeying the rules, or, really, being part of the group (and I want to be clear that I am in love with this philosophy, at least so far), there are at any given alley crossing, two to ten or more people standing to wait for the alley light to change. 

There may be bicycles approaching down the alley.  There may be taxis or trucks.  Or, as is usually the case, the way may be clear for, well, all day.  There are just no cars on the alley.  And there are 5-8 people on each side of this alley crosswalk waiting patiently for the light to change.  It is SO precious to me I can`t stand it.

Enter the tough.  This is the kind of guy who in the U.S. is cutting throats for cigarette money.  You know who I`m talking about.

The tough will, without a care in the world, cross against the light without even hesitating, after looking carefully left and right to make sure there`s no traffic in sight.  The other pedestrians, in Japanese fashion, give no hint of their thoughts, but it doesn`t take a genius to tell that they are disgusted by this total want of group spirit.

There are the normal scofflaws as in any society, of course.  These are the ones here who, usually at the intersection of two major thoroughfares (an area roughly equivalent to that of the Montana state fairgrounds) venture into the crosswalk lanes a full half-second before the crossing light changes.  As I said, you find these devil-may-care people in every society and there`s nothing you can do about it.

Sidewalk Bushido

No resemblance to John Belushi, who was Albanian

Bushi-do is the way of the warrior.  I have discovered on the streets of Kyoto the existence of a sidewalk bushido, replacing the old Samurai system, I believe.

Like all great discoveries, this one came about entirely by accident.

In Japan traffic direction is according to the British system -- left side of the road.  As a result, the general unwritten rule is that pedestrians and cyclists also use the left side.  Especially on crowded sidewalks this works pretty well  (One day I`ll tell you about getting in line to get on the subway car). 

As a confirmed rule follower, I always stick to the left side on the sidewalk.  It works very well.  Usually.

Here comes the Sidewalk Samurai.  He stakes out the right side of the sidewalk, his right which is my left.  So we're taking the same sidewalk lane, and headed for each other.  Here he comes.  He`s clearly not moving.  We tough it out.  I`m not moving, he`s not moving.  It`s a Japanese game of chicken.  I have the right of way but he`s a Samurai. 

I bow to superior moral strength.  He has defeated me.  It`s almost always a he, usually in middle age.  With the elderly women Sidewalk Samurai I don`t get in a game of chicken, because when I see them coming I swerve immediately.  They win I lose.

I do have one recourse, my own form of bushido if I want to avail myself.

It has to do with the fact that these people are DYING to stare at the tall blond foreigner but in Japan as elsewhere it`s impolite to get caught staring.  My form of sidewalk, or subway, bushido, is to do what everyone here does, which is look elsewhere, anywhere but into the eyes of another person.  I would do that, for example, on the sidewalk, until I they get close and I suddenly look them in the eye and catch them staring at me!!!  Hyyyyyyyah!!!!!!!!!  As it happens, though, I`m wayyyyyyyyyyy too mature to do anything so juvenile.  I`m just saying that I could do it if I wanted to.  I`m also saying that you can take it on faith that these people are staring at me when I`m not looking at them.  I won`t tell you how I know though.

Six minutes left on computer A.

I had a great moment today.  I took some shirts to the cleaners (no, that itself is not a great moment, I know).  I took them in because I walk everywhere, and this beeing a very hot, sunny and humid rainy season, if you know what I mean, after 15-20 foot miles my shirts can get, you know, somewhat laundry worthy. 

Anyway, I found out where the laundry was and took these shirts there this morning.  And what do you think?  The guy spoke no English.  Couldn`t or wouldn`t, I have no idea, but this whole conversation was in Japanese.  How many shirts, how much per, when would they be ready, everything you chit-chat with the laundry person about, you know, that was all in Japanese, no retreat to English.  It really was uplifting to me.  All that study paid off at the laundry man`s place.  Because if I don`t launder those shirts I`m not getting close enough to the Japanese natives even to be tempted to use my gaijin sidewalk bushido.  Now I feel better.

As I said up top, my rail pass kicks in tomorrow and I`m away from my computer until Sunday.

That`s all.  Nine seconds left.  See you Sunday.