One Week To Go

After six months of travel, I am still smiling and happy.

Here I am at Horyuchi Temple, which is in the outskirts of Nara. This temple has the oldest wooden building in the world. It is 1300 years old. Most of the other wooden temples have been destroyed by fire, earthquake, or neglect, so it is rare to find one still standing after so long.

The temples (and traditional wooden houses) are made from Japanese Cedar, which is an insect-proof hardwood. It is also affected very little by changes in humidity and heat. Otherwise, weather cycles would cause expansion and contraction of the wooden joints (no nails are used in these structures) and eventually the joints would become loose and the structure would weaken.

Shortly after entering the temple, I was approached by a woman who is training to become a guide for English-speaking tourists. She was looking for a solo traveler to practice on, so I had another free guide for the morning. It was good, because I learned a lot more about the temple and the Japanese form of Buddhism than I could from the temple’s brochure.

Retro Daihatsu

I mentioned a very retro 60’s style Daihatsu car a few posts earlier. I managed to snap a photo of one today, as it was pulling out of a parking lot.

I think it looks a lot like some small British cars from the 60’s. The Japanese automakers were probably copying the style of these cars, at the time. Now, they are looking back to their early designs for styling inspiration for current cars.

(Note also the female passenger wearing a mask over her mouth and nose. This is a common sight in Japanese cities.)

Kyoto and Nara

I’ve spent two days exploring Kyoto, and today I had a free tour of some sights in Nara with a student guide.

The cherry blossoms seem to be peaking now, in both cities. I can’t imagine they will get any more profuse! I’ve taken many photos of cherry blossoms, temples, and cherry blossoms with temples. I’ve also seen a number of Japanese gardens, and they are always great.

Bamboo, in a Kyoto garden.

Gion

The Gion district in Kyoto is where the Geisha live and work. I have seen three Geisha touring the cherry blossoms, two on foot, and one riding in a rickshaw. I have also seen some Maiko, who are the apprentice Geisha. They spend a number of years training in the skills of dance, song, and playing music under experienced Geisha before they can become independent Geisha.

There are also a lot of young Japanese women wearing kimono strolling the cherry blossoms. The Geisha and Maiko are easily distinguished by their white faces, elaborate kimono, and tall sandals. They also tend to walk and move more gracefully while wearing a kimono.

The kimono-clad (non-geisha) women seem most interested in having their photos taken with the cherry blossoms, and amidst some traditional architecture.

Not geisha. Just tourists.

The Geisha have an aura of dignity which makes them seem unapproachable, and you even feel a little bad about staring at them (which is hard to avoid doing). Most of the Maiko are very quick about getting to where they are headed. However, I ran across one Maiko who was graciously posing with tourists, in front of a shrine and cherry trees:

But, it didn’t take too long before she managed to excuse herself and head away. Considering the small steps they must take in the kimono, and the dangerous-looking sandals, they can walk quite quickly!

The canalway in Gion is also where I’ve seen one of the densest arrays of cherry blossoms:

Many Types of Cherry Trees

I am learning that there are many types of cherry trees. The vary in color of flowers, from mostly white to a very deep pink. The sizes of the flowers vary, as does the direction, angle and density of branches. One of the most interesting types is the weeping cherry:

The Golden Pavilion

The Golden Pavilion is one of the most famous temples in Japan. The top two floors are covering in gold flake, and it is also considered one of the best examples of temple architecture. It is also located in a fine Japanese garden, which adds to the beauty. In 1950, a monk obsessed with the temple burnt it to the ground. It was subsequently rebuilt.

Zen Garden

Another temple in Kyoto hosts the most famous “Zen Garden”:

Crazy Restaurant

I had dinner in this crazy restaurant. They only have one item on the menu: it is a sort of crepe filled with various vegetables and a fried egg.

Note the anatomically complete boy, in the restaurant’s logo statue.

Commute to Kyoto

The commute from Nara to Kyoto is tiresome. It takes about one hour to get to the train station and then ride the train to Kyoto. Also most of the sights are quite far from Kyoto Station, so there is another hour or so waiting for and then riding a bus. The busses between Kyoto Station and the sights are very crowded right now – everyone is going to see the cherry blossoms.

I would prefer to have stayed in Kyoto. It would have eliminated a lot of extra travel time (and expense – it is about $20 to make the round-trip).

Nara

Nara is much smaller than Kyoto, and a good portion of its sights can be seen in one day. My ryokan is well-situated for walking to most sites (as well as shopping and the rail stations).

One of the prime sights in Nara is Todaiji Temple. It is the world’s largest wooden building. Ironically, the current structure, built in 1692, is only a 2/3 scale replica of the original temple, which burnt down (twice!). It houses a giant Buddha.

Today is very cold, with some heavy rain. Japan has some blustery spring weather, too.

When it started raining heavily, my student guide took me to a sake brewery where, for Y400, you can sample six different types of sake that they make. Each one was very good, and very different in flavour. The last one, which was unfiltered, tasted almost like lemonade, and had a fizzy quality! My favourite was a very complex, appley-tasting sake.

Plans

I have a ticket to see “Miyako Odori (Cherry Blossom Dance)” on Saturday. This is the only time that Geisha and Maiko perform publicly, so it is a rare opporunity (although there are four shows daily for all of April). The tickets sell out quite quickly. Luckily, since I am travelling alone, there was one front row (!) ticket available for the last show on Saturday.

Also, on Saturday, a Noh play will be performed at another theatre nearby. I should be able to fit both performances into my day.

Otherwise, I will continue to tour the temples, gardens and parks in Kyoto and Nara.

Sugoku Kawai!

This is the car I rented for four days, to visit Kirishima National Park. It is a Nissan March. It is sugoku kawai! (extremely/exceptionally/unbelievably cute.) Kawai rhymes with Hawai’i.

I think I ended up with this car because, at the rental company, the girl at the counter could point outside at the only blue car on the lot and ask, “Blue car is okay?” The rest of the cars were white or silver.

Cute car and cherry blossoms.

I drove from Kagoshima to Ebino-Kogen. The car has a “navi” (GPS navigation), but it is in Japanese only. However, I got the rental people to enter Ebino-Kogen as the destination, and I was on my way. The navigation system is very nice to have! It talks to you in a cute Japanese woman’s voice. It also shows the lane arrangement at upcoming intersections. On the highway, it draws a picture of upcoming interchanges. It will also suggest alternate routes, as they come up.

The navi picks the fastest route, but, in my case, it chose the toll expressway, and it cost over $20 to drive 80km! I actually did want to get to Ebino-Kogen quickly, so it was okay. On the way back, I took a slower route on free roads.

You may notice that the car has slightly ’60’s retro style to it. This is a trend in Japan, probably spurred by the success of the New Mini. One manufacturer especially, Daihatsu, is making cars that on first glance look like they are from the ’60’s, and only closer inspection reveals that they are modern. They have big grills and chrome rings around the lights.

Anyway, the car was great, and driving in the Japanese countryside and small cities is not a problem.

Hot Coffee in a Can

This is hot coffee in a can, from a vending machine. Coffee is usually a pick-me-up, but “Deepresso” sounds like it will knock you down!

Life is Not All Cherry Blossoms

There are some plum blossoms, too!

Kirishima National Park

Crazy statue, crater lake (Mi-ike) and volcano (Takachiko-no-mine).

I had three days to explore the park. It is not really big, so I saw most of it.

This park has the equivalent of New Zealand’s Tongariro Crossing. You can hike about 15km, across a number of volcano peaks. I didn’t do the entire hike, partly because of weather, and partly because I did not know how to arrange transportation back to the starting point. It was very overcast for two days, and the middle day was clear, but extremely windy and hazy (so the views would not be great). I did hike to one of the lower crater lakes, and partway on another part of the trail.

Tatami room

I stayed at a nice ryokan. It is definitely “low season”, because most of the lodging was very empty. I stayed in the annex building of the ryokan, and I had it to myself for three nights! It had a number of tatami rooms, a kitchen, and a Japanese bath. I bought some soba noodles to cook for dinner.

Japanese bath.

Delinquent deer, hanging around in parking lots, smoking cigarettes and bumming change.

Shinkansen

The Shinkansen (bullet train) is a nice, fast way to travel. It is very comfortable and quiet.

The trip from Tokyo to Kagoshima involved four trains. On the first leg, which lasted four hours, I was in the smoking car, because no reserved seats were left in the non-smoking car. I have to say that I felt pretty ill at the end of it, and my respiratory system felt dirty for a day!

For the trip from Kagoshima to Nara, there was another 2:45 leg that had only smoking car reserved seats. This time, I chose to risk using the non-reserved car to avoid the smoking. This was a good choice, because I boarded the train at the origination point, and there were plenty of seats. Later on, the car became full and many people had to stand for 1:30!

The connections are timed very tightly. You may only have two or three minutes to change trains. On the first trip, the close connections just involved walking across the platform to a waiting train. On the return trip, however, I missed a connection because my train was late, and a six minute change became one minute, with a long walk. Fortunately, there was another train in one hour.

Nara

I am in Nara now. I will stay here for eight nights, and explore Kyoto (a short train ride) and Nara.

I tried to book a few nights in Kyoto, but it was very full. The proprietor at the Nakazono Ryokan in Kagoshima was extremely helpful, calling a dozen places in Kyoto and half-a-dozen in Nara to find me a place to stay. (He didn’t want to find me a place in Osaka, which is also close – and larger – because “Osaka is not a nice place”.)

It is definitely a high season in the Kansai region!

Moving On

I ride the Shinkansen (Bullet Train) from Tokyo to Kagoshima, tomorrow. Actually, it is four trains. The distance is half the length of Japan!

I revisited Ginza, Shinjuku, and Shibuya today. One word of advice: if you are a compulsive clothes shopper, do not go to Tokyo! You will quickly become broke, for two reasons:

1. There is so much choice. Anything you want to get, you can find a boutique or department store selling it.
2. It is all expensive. Whenever I flipped over the tag on a nice looking shirt (even sweatshirt), the price was around $400!

I have only bought one t-shirt. Partly because I don’t want to spend much money, and also because I don’t want to carry more stuff for another two weeks.

Also, most of the stuff is international brands, so you can buy it all at home. Tokyo just groups it all together into a few shopping districts, so it is very easy to troll.

Tokyo is Great!

Out of all of the cities I’ve visited on this trip, Tokyo is by far the best.

Tokyo is the city that Shanghai wants to be. It has a long way to go. The big difference is: Tokyo pays attention to the details, and it keeps working at them until they are 100% correct. 99% is not good enough. Shanghai, on the other hand, often stops at 80%.

Sunday is Shopping Day

Tokyo shops on Sunday. So did I.

I had planned to see the gardens at the Imperial Palace on Sunday morning. Unfortunately, it was raining quite hard, so I had to change plans. I also bought an umbrella. It cost $3. I don’t expect it to last very long.

I headed back to Roppongi Hills. It is enclosed, so I was out of the rain. When I was there two days ago, I spent all of my time in the museum, so I didn’t really see the shopping area.

The bad thing is that I saw a frame for spectacles there that I really love. The design company is called Parasite. They did not have lenses to match my prescription, which is the only factor that stopped my from buying them.

I bought some small and inexpensive souvenir items, then headed to Shibuya, which is another shopping area. It didn’t have anything of interest for me, so I walked up to Harajuku.

Harajuku was on my “must see on Sunday” list because of:

Cos-play Zoku

Which is: Costume Play Gang.

A striking pair.

Free hugs.

Posing for the tourists.

Tourist zoo.

As you can see, this spot is more popular with the tourists than it is with the zoku.

Harajuku

Harajuku is also the area for boutique shopping. There is a huge assortment of boutiques. The only theme amongst them is: expensive. I bought a t-shirt. It cost $60!

Tokyo is certainly a great place to shop. You can probably find anything, if you just know where to look.

Well-dressed

Tokyo is a well-dressed city. Even when people are casual, they still look nice. The only slobs walking around are the tourists, like me!

This is another notable difference between Tokyo and Shanghai. When men wear suits in Tokyo, they fit. In China, most men wear ill-fitting suits – almost always too big! This is surprising, since tailoring is available cheaply in China.

It was very nice to see ladies dressed in kimono at the Kabuki theatre! They were mostly older women, and the kimonos were very understated, but beautiful. I thought these must be real Kabuki lovers, who would be in the best seats. I was surprised that some of them were sitting in the cheapest seats!

Trains

Tokyo has a fantastic system of trains and subways. They get you where you want to go quickly and cheaply. You never wait more than a couple of minutes to catch one, either.

They also have a great idea: fare adjustment machines. I have no idea how much fare to pay. It varies depending on distance, transfers, etc. But, what I can do is pay the lowest fare, do my travel, then feed my ticket into the fare adjustment machine and pay what I owe.

In a couple of days, I will ride on Shinkansen (Bullet) trains, which will be interesting.

The subways have information screens, which tell you what the next stop is, and other information, which is where I learned about:

Earthquake

One of the information boards this afternoon said: such-and-such train delayed because of earthquake. The delayed train was a Shinkansen.

Sure enough, when I logged in to Yahoo, the first headline was: Earthquake in Japan.

It was outside of Tokyo, so I was safe.

Senso-ji at night

I’ll sign out with this photo, taken a few minutes ago:

Kabuki

I went to see some Kabuki theatre, yesterday, and was very enjoyable. Kabuki is a traditional form of theatre. It is very stylized, but it is also a theatre “for the masses”.

I went to the Kabuki-za theatre in mid-afternoon. I thought I would just buy a ticket for another day, but a performance was starting in 40 minutes, and the doors opened in ten, so I bought a ticket to go immediately. I got a seat on the third floor (second balcony), towards the front. It was the second-cheapest seat, but it still cost Y4,200 (about $42USD).

The performance started at 4:15 and ended at 8:55. There was three parts, and two intermissions. The second intermission, at 7:00, was for 30 minutes, and I pre-ordered a sushi bento-box for dinner. The food was waiting at intermission time.

The first two segments made up one story, which involved a noble masquerading as a peasant, a “good-for-nothing”, a sushi shop, a few beheadings (and gags involving the head in a sushi barrel), and some fights and stabbing. It was rather Shakespearean in plot.

The last segment was the fourth part of the play that started in the matinee. Fortunately, it also stood alone as a story by itself. One of the actors in this segment was described in the program as “a living national treasure”, so I reckon I was seeing Kabuki performed by the very best!

The theatre rents a small radio box with an earphone, so you can listen to English commentary and translation, which allows you to understand what is going on. It does keep the commentary fairly sparse, so you can listen to the actors and follow their intonation.

More Cherry Blossoms

There are a few more early bloomers.

Check out this one very lonely tree in Ueno Park (to the left, along the shoreline):

There are many, many more cherry trees around it (all of the greyish trees to its right), but they are holding off. A few are developing buds.

You can also view some blossoms up high, in the Mori Tower in Roppongi:

It is clear that everyone is getting ready for sakura-frenzy.

No Phone

It seems that no company in Japan uses SIM cards, so I can’t get my phone running here.

Tokyo – First Day

I’ve already had one action-packed day in Tokyo.

I first went to the Senso-ji Temple, near where I am staying. I discovered there that some cherry blossoms have already started. It is very early! Apparently, this was the first winter in 136 years in which Tokyo got no snowfall.

Then, I took a short cruise down Tokyo’s main river, Sumida-gawa. At the start, you can see Phillipe Starck’s famous building with the giant poop on top:

I disembarked at Hama Rikyu, which is a large Japanese garden. It used to be reserved for the Shogunate, but it is now a public park. While the Chinese like twisted rocks in their gardens, the Japanese seem to prefer twisted trees:

I also had “green tea and a sweet” in the teahouse:

Then, I strolled into Ginza for lunch, and to find the Nikon and Contax photo galleries. The galleries have both moved from the locations in my guidebook. A local camera shop was able to help me find the Nikon gallery.

After that, headed for Yebisu to visit the Contemporary Museum of Photography. One surprise I had there was to see Joel Robochon’s restaurant. It is the European-looking building at the end of the mall.

If you watch Iron Chef, you might remember that Joel Robochon is frequently mentioned.

Finally, I had dinner at Kirin World restaurant, in Shinjuku. Kirin is one of the big beer companies, and the restaurant had their beers on tap. While only Kirin Lager is available in North America, they do actually make some more interesting beers.

Tokyo Time

I arrived in Tokyo, last evening. I have only travelled from the airport to the ryokan where I am staying, so I don’t have much to say about Tokyo, yet.

I had to wake up in Auckland at 5:00am, which was 2:00am Tokyo time. I finally arrived at my ryokan at 7:00pm. It was a long day of travel!

The “premium economy” class on Air New Zealand was very good. As well as the bigger seat and more legroom, we got the same meals as business class, including wine. Each passenger even had their own interactive terminal with movies and tv on demand – but the system had the crappiest user interface and controller I’ve ever seen! It was also running on Windows CE. How do I know? Because it crashed! When rebooting, the Windows CE logo flashed up, for a moment.

Now it’s time to go explore Tokyo….

Auckland

Auckland is an ugly city! The parts I’ve seen, at least, are strikingly unattractive – especially the CBD (downtown) area. I guess no one in Auckland bothered to hire a good architect.

I am just chilling out, and mostly planning and making arrangements for Japan. I have booked my lodging in Tokyo. I will get a JR Rail Pass, which gives a good discount for long-distance rail travel; but only foreign tourists can buy it, and it cannot be purchased in Japan.

Black Sheep

I am going to miss the movie Black Sheep! It opens in NZ on March 22 – the day after I leave. I have seen the trailer for it a few times, and it looks to be pretty funny. It is basically a zombie movie, except that the zombies are sheep, which start attacking the people.

The movie was made in NZ, and Weta did the creature effects.

Fugly Car

This is the Toyota Will VI. I’ve seen them around NZ. I guess that Toyota was inspired by the VW New Beetle to try to create a “cute” car. This is what they ended up with!

Most of them seem to be dented up, too, like this one.