Hello everyone 皆さんこんにちは



Oh look!

It"s been really nice so far, and I feel like I"ve been here a week.  I apologize for this computer"s punctuation anomalies, sumimasen.  Today they gave me computer B.  Yesterday I had computer A, which had its own problems.  I don"t  think I"m going to be able to post photos on this one either, even though I brought my camera and its little cable. 

Well, that"s a certain bit of good news.  It"s not my huddled knot of flight attendants but, you know.  It promises at least the possibility of posting photos.

Sweet Cutie Blue-Eyes

I went up this morning for a long hike into the mountains, at a site called Fushima Inari Taisha -- it`s a shrine complex, meaning shinto, as opposed to a temple, which is Buddhist.  The way to the top of the shrine complex, which is at the top of a mountain (the shrine complex eseentially winds almost from the Kamo River to the mountain top,) I was reminded of a movie.  In fact, I"m pretty certain the movie scene I"m reminded of was filmed there.  The movie is after all set in Kyoto.

That was a bit frustrating.  I ran out of time suddenly and they couldn:t change the bill I had so I`m back after three or four hours.  Back on Computer A.  I don`t know who in Japan decides these things, but I feel certain it`s not random.



Sayuri ran on ahead

As I was saying, the movie I was reminded of was set in Kyoto.  After a time I was able to stop thinking about the movie and start noticing the amazing beauty around me.  I kind of got the impression from watching the movie (Memoirs of a Geisha) that these torii were set in downtown Kyoto.  In fact they climb a mountainside, some steep, some shallower, some stepped, some smooth, but lots and lots of them, thousands, and most have writing on them.  I could read enough to know that they contained reference to time (`13 years, 4 months`) but I couldn`t read most of the rest of it. 

The mountainside is really beautiful, too, with forests, streams, small lakes, a couple of long views down to, uh, urban Kyoto (which would look more romantic if the view were of 1926 Kyoto, I have to believe, but even the Shinto priests couldn't arrange that).  Anyway, I got some photos, many of which look pretty much like the one at right, but they`re mine, so, you know.  Also they have hundreds of kitsune, fox statues, all guarding the grounds.  They:re really cool too, they all seem to be different from each other. 

Hundreds and hundreds of them, all different.

There`s a myth among some Japanophiles, if that`s the word, that Kitsune necessarily refers to kami, a divine or in this case semi-divine being, perhaps like a fairy or leprechaun.  But not really, kitsune is just the Japanese word for fox.  Although I get the impression that these particular kitsune are kami. 

As I told an acquaintance before I left, this trip is not all about tea, but it`s as much about tea as any other single thing.  She recommended that I go by a place called Ippo Do, which I did this afternoon, after part I of this blog entry. 

[NOTE: This maddening Japanese adherence, apparently, to the rule of international law is preventing me from posting the photos I want to post.  As careful as China is, for example, about what it allows on the internet there, I imagine they`re not anywhere near as scrupulous about intellectual property such as internet photos.  Anyway, for the illustration for this paragraph, please refer to this page.]

A sweet, left.  Moist towel, oshibori, for wiping hands before tea.

Reference above is to a photo of part of the interior of Ippo Do, whose translation is NOT "Tea Dream" but might as well be.  There`s a little side area, dripping with serenity, where you can order tea at a very reasonable price.  The person who brought me my tea explained to me, in excellent English, exactly how to prepare it.  This was gyokuro, a tea that is a grade above the sencha that I usually drink.  It requires even cooler water than sencha to brew, probably because it is considered to be more delicate.  Sencha brews at a cooler  temperature than English tea.  So anyway there`s a little ceremony that involves four little cups and a timer that I could swear might also be used for chess, and by timing and pouring you get your water to the proper temperature.



High-grade sencha.  It`s anybody`s guess which costs more, the tea or the bowl.

Oh pardon me, you are the party who requested instruction on the preparation of the various kinds of Japanese tea, am I right?  Or am I confusing you with someone else?  Anyway, if you`re reading my little blog on travel Japan, and there`s no accounting, they say, for taste, you`re going to get some talk about tea.  That`s just the deal.

In the 9:42 I have left I want to mention a concept that a friend of mine (my wife`s cousin who I met yesterday -- he and his wife live in Osaka, the next big city over) and I kind of developed together over a sushi dinner -- the concept of GaiJin angst.  Or at least we gave it that name and never heard it before.

Gaijin angst, which I think I have and the cousin doesn't, is the constant knowledge that you`re almost certainly doing something wrong, and you care.  It has those two parts.  The second requirement is why the cousin, who has lived in Japan for 16 years, doesn`t have it. 

Gaijin is Japanese for "foreign person" and is my guess for the word James Clavell had in mind in Shogun when his characters constantly say "barbarian."  Anyway, there are so many little tiny rules here, I've made that point over and over in this blog.  Somehow I think I was trying to fool myself into the belief that I could avoid the idea that I was behaving like a bull in a teashop, but I can`t, because I see little corner-of-the-eye looks all the time and I just know that I`ve screwed something else up.  And if you know me at all well you know that that`s kind of killing me.

Oh well, more next time.

I love this place.