Kyoto Aug 1-4,2008

Masami had some business to do for a few days in some less interesting parts of Japan, so Theo and I went on our own little adventure, spending 3 days in Kyoto. Kyoto is really the epitome of traditional Japan. All of those rock and moss gardens, temples and so on that one thinks of when they think of Japan are in Kyoto. It's also a big city, so it was a kind of a shock to us. Foreigners (gaijin) are nothing special there, and some people really don't like them, probably having bad experiences with the foreign horde that is always present there. It felt odd just seeing all the gaijin after 6 weeks of hardly seeing any, surprisingly even in Okinawa. So we were back to being just a couple of schmos in a big city. I had a hard time finding our guest house, again, one of those places where you have to stand in front of it to see it. I was in a good location, with a little shrine across the street and the imperial park a couple of blocks away. Although Kyoto can be as big and ugly as any Japanese city, there are still all these little pockets of beauty everywhere, which you can see just by wandering around. For example, there are some 2,000 shrines and temples in Kyoto, some pretty small and run down, some major sights. Our guest house was another funky gaijin house, but cheap, with free AC. We decided the people who invented AC should get the Nobel Prize, since we couldn't have survived without it. It was even hotter than in Okinawa, which didn't seem possible.
Not really wanting to deal with the city just yet, Theo and I escaped to the hills the next day, to hike along the Kiyotaki river gorge and go swimming. We had to wait 45 minutes for a bus connection, and after a long winding bus ride to the end of the line, we were in Takao, a tiny village nestled in the green hills. There was a major shrine there, Jingoji, which was a long walk down stairs to the river, then a longer climb up many steps (we didn't even count this time) to the shrine.


There wasn't much to see there, as most of the buildings were closed to the public. We hiked to the top of the hill to someone famous's grave, I guess, but we had no idea who it was, since there was no English info. The big tourist attraction was tossing clay disks off a steep cliff into the gorge below. Kind of like littering for good luck.

We were soaked with sweat and ready for some river time after that. Once we got past the touristy tea houses, the river bed was unusually natural for Japan, with very little cement. We would hike along until we found a promising swimming hole, one with water trickling down a mossy rock wall or one with good rocks for jumping off of into deep pools. We would hike in our swimsuits until we got hot, then stop to sample another swimming hole.





We didn't see many people until we got to the little town of Kiyotaki. It was packed with people barbecuing, seemingly camped out with tons of stuff. there were some remains of abandoned barbecues, too, piles of garbage on the bank. Restaurants were built up to the cliff edge. One was abandoned, the windows falling off, into the river it seemed, as there was nowhere else for it to go.


After that one little inhabited spot, it was a natural walk through a beautiful river gorge, with nice rocks and trees and moss.

The hike ended at a train station, and it was only one stop to my favorite part of Kyoto, Arashiyama. This is the Kyoto that I long for, walks along stone streets, through bamboo forests, past traditional buildings, shrines, and temples, bordered by a river that winds through the green hills.


I decided to brave the city the next day. Our guest house had bicycles for rent for $5 a day, so we did a bike tour of the city. Things seem so far away when you go from train station to train station, walking up and down endless flights of stairs, or are always waiting for a bus to come, so it was great to have wheels. We toured some of the major temples, some of which were major disappointments, like Ginkakuji, the silver pavilion, which charged $8 a person to look at a construction site. The pavilion isn't even silver, unlike the golden pavilion, which is actually gold. They did have a nice collection of moss, however. I didn't realize there were so many different kinds of moss, including "Moss the interrupter." With the bikes, we were able to get a little off the beaten track without all the walking up the long entrances that shrines and temples usually have, so we got to enjoy some of the quieter places without the hordes of tourists. The expanses of gravel at the big shrines were too much to take in the heat. I felt like I could see with my eyes closed, the reflection from the white gravel was so bright. The path of philosophy, a shady lane along a canal, lost some of its charm in comparison to the river of the day before.





Finally, the heat got the best of us, and we headed to the river. It was decidedly urban, but the locals were hanging out, so we figured it couldn't be that bad. It was kind of depressing, a shallow, weed choked trickle. Still, it was a great relief from the heat. The Shimogamo shrine was nearby, which encompasses a small patch of old growth forest in the middle of the city. That's really the great thing about these old shrines, since many of them preserve the landscape much as it was when the shrines were founded, some 1500 years ago. Later we found our favorite restaurant, Raju, an Indian restaurant with great set meals with mango lassis for $14. Best Japanese food I had all trip.



I wasn't in any hurry to get to Osaka, so we spent the next day seeing a couple of sights before we went to the conference hotel. We lugged our luggage to Nijojo, the most beautiful castle in Japan. Most of Japan's castles were bombed out in WWII and are cement reconstructions. Even the original castles look impressive on the outside, but there's really nothing to see on the inside. They are basically museums shaped like castles. But Nijojo has preserved (or recreated) the original decorations and artwork. The details are impressive, from the squeaky "nightingale floor" that warned of intruders, to the painted and carved ceilings. It also has one of the best water and rock gardens that I've seen.


Nijojo had refreshed me to do some more sight seeing, so I decided to check out a shrine that I had never been to, Fushimi Inari taisha. Inari is a popular god, the god of the harvest, or in modern terms- money. This shrine is the headquarters for countless other shrines all over Japan. It takes up a whole mountainside, with many little shrines dotting the hillside.


The pathways are lined with torii, the red gates that are entrances to all shrines. But here, the pathways are lined with these tightly packed torii donated by people who wanted the god to help them out with their finances. There are tens or even hundreds of thousands of them. Some are rotting out at the base, and some have been removed. I don't think anyone really knows how many there are. We imagined one of them falling and knocking down hundreds of thousands more in the world's biggest domino effect. Walking through these tunnels of torii was a hallucinatory adventure, sort of like being lost in a maze, which I find an appropriate metaphor for Japan. These tunnels of vermillion wind though the hills for miles. You become disoriented after a while; even though there are maps every so often (in Japanese), it seems like you're going around in circles. They could be a grand entrance to something, but really they just lead to tiny altars here and there with their fox messengers and donations of small torii stacked by lesser endowed wealth seekers.


The real point of going there is to take the journey through the torii tunnels. We spent hours there, and it was dusk by the time we left. It's really the best time to visit shrines, when almost everybody has left and you can enjoy the forest and the quiet, an experience that takes you out of time.

The Big Nawa 6/28-7/1/08

We had a nice ferry ride to Okinawa. I didn't get sick, which I was really worried about, since I remember one awful endless night on a ferry from Amami to the mainland, heaving over the railing all night. But I took a pill this time and was perfectly fine, slept well with the boat rocking me to sleep. The sleep was short lived however, as the harsh cabin lights came on at 4:30 am to awaken us for disembarking. We had planned to wait around in a coffee shop until our guest house opened at 9am, but there was nothing open in the deserted ferry terminal and nothing around that area. (It was the new ferry terminal, not the old one conveniently located near our guest house.) So after about an hour of waiting and realizing it was going to be a long, boring, 4 hour wait, we decided to take a taxi to our guest house to see if we could get in early. I had a map, and the taxi driver took us to the place where it should have been, but we still couldn't find it, which was not a good sign. We couldn't call until 9, so Theo and Masami just sat around on this abandoned city street while I walked around the streets looking for the place. We finally found a coffee shop that was open at 7, had breakfast and waited until 9. The guest house turned out to be where it should have been; they just took the sign in at night, to avoid people like us wandering in at 6 am, no doubt.


The Okinawa guest house was a funky gaijin house, cheap but serviceable. Our room was completely stuccoed with a big trowel, including all the walls, ceiling, sink, and bar. It gave the place a drippy, surrealist look. The important thing was that it had AC, as it was HOT.
We rented a car and drove around the south of the island to see the WWII monuments, of which there are a lot. There is a huge American military base on Okinawa (that covers 12 % of the island), and they have a checkered history with America, being invaded, then ruled by America until 1973. The battle of Okinawa is a pretty famous one, 82 days of slaughter as the Japanese military fought to the death or committed mass suicides. But the thing that struck me about the war monuments was the perspective that the Okinawans took of being victims not so much of the Americans, but of the Japanese military, who were brutal to the Okinawans. The people of Okinawa, as most of the smaller islanders, were seen as second class citizens, or worse, by Japanese mainlanders.

Paper cranes for the dead nurses.
We went to the cave hospital site where the military forced student nurses to work in terrible conditions taking care of the soldiers, then kicked them out of the cave into the line of fire when the Americans overtook them. There is a cave where thousands of soldiers committed suicide. And there's a large peace museum and park, where you can learn more about the atrocities and read first hand stories, like forced suicides of civilians and worse. It was all pretty gruesome, but Masami wanted to see it. I guess the lesson is the horrible things that militarization produces, but not really a lesson I needed. One day of all that and the heat were enough.


Suicide cliff where Okinawans jumped at the encouragement of the Japanese military.

After all the death and brutality, we were ready for some beach time. Okinawa really surprised me. I had been expecting some kind of laid back beach community, and maybe it was, for Japan, but compared to Amami Oshima, it was really urban, with over a million people, and a third of that in the main city, Naha. We drove for an hour in heavy traffic from our lodging until we got out of town. We stopped at a beach that looked promising on the map, but turned out to be artificial, and what's more, closed. Coming from Amami, where you can't close the beach, this was a shock to us. We definitely weren't in Amami anymore.


The nice thing about staying in gaijin houses is that you meet a lot of other travelers and Japanese who want to meet other travelers. We invited a Japanese college student to go with us to the aquarium the next day. Masami had some work to do, so we didn't get started until 11am. It was a long 2 hour+ drive through traffic, past the American military base, then past megaresort after megaresort with their private beaches. Not only are there hardly any public beaches, but the few there are charge entrance fees and keep regular business hours.
It was blazing hot again as we arrived at the aquarium at about 1:30. We took in the outside dolphin and false killer whale show, then retreated to the safety of the air conditioning. It was an impressive aquarium, with the largest tank in the world, which housed 3 whale sharks, among other things. We got to see them feed these huge animals (krill), opening their massive gaping mouths to filter the shrimp from the water.
There was a park around the aquarium with an traditional Okinawan village, and a botanical garden along the ocean front. We walked through the gardens and watched the sun set. We saw two of the little Ryukyu Scops Owls, who just sat there looking at us. We also flushed some massive bats, which must have been Ryukyu Flying Foxes. They looked huge, but I looked them up and found that their fat bodies are only seven inches long. Still, pretty big bats.




Megalodon shark jaw.

On the way back to Naha, we stopped for dinner at a low key resort, which meant we finally had beach access! Theo and I went for a little swim in the dark.


Okinawa was the seat of a kingdom once upon a time, and they have a castle there called Shijo. We visited that on our last day, walking along the stone streets in the area. I have seen alot of castles in Japan, but this one was interesting as it was more Chinese influenced. I had the Okinawan champluzu with bitter melon, which I can't really recommend. The Amami dish using the same bitter warty cucumber is better, if still puzzling as a food item.



Since it was so hot, Theo and I decided to try out the nearby (free!) city beach. There was a homeless village in the adjoining park, with tatami mats, tarps and junk art made out of old tvs and furniture. The homeless in Japan are as polite and well organized as you'd expect. The beach is described in tourist brochures as a good place to watch the sunset. I don't know how that would be possible, as the swimming area was sandwiched between the beach and a bridge, so that you couldn't even see the ocean. They were actually building another bridge, so there was all this rusty scaffolding in the ocean next to the tiny roped off swimming area. It was pretty disgusting, the water not least.
On our last night we got a taste of the nightlife of the island, on Naha's main strip, Kokusai dori. It was a bright stretch of neon, souvenir shops and restaurants. Masami wanted to go back to a particular pottery shop that she had gone to 15 or so years earlier. She had tried to buy something, but they didn't take credit cards, so she tried to get some money form a cash machine, but wasn't able to. The woman who owned the shop ended up giving her a small piece for free. So Masami wanted to go back to thank her and buy something. We found the shop and the woman, and Masami told her story, which the woman remembered. She gave us tea and sweets. Masami bought some things, then the woman gave us a bag of sweets for free. That's what you get in Japan when you try to repay someone for a kindness, you become more indebted.


We walked along the bright, garish street, looking at all of the plastic souvenirs, Okinawan lions in every size and color, and deadly habu snakes in alcohol (they have them there, too). We had a good time in Okinawa, but it was a bit of a disappointment for me. Okinawa seemed a little like a pale imitation of other places in Japan. I could think of other places with better (or more interesting) food, beaches, castles, even war memorials. The heat didn't help either. Anyway, I can say I've been there, to Okinawa, which means, in Japanese, the big nawa.

Last Days in Amami

Well, it's been a while since I posted an entry. We were traveling for two weeks after the last entry, and I've been home for about two weeks. It's been a bit of an adjustment for all of us, from living out of a suitcase to suddenly having a house and jobs and things to deal with. It's been hot, with temperatures hovering around 100 degrees, and everything is incredibly dry and brown. We have been enjoying fruit from the farmer's market, strawberries and peaches that make you realize why taste buds evolved. 

I was kind of sorry to leave Amami this time. Although Big Chico Creek and Bidwell Park is amazing in its own right, I miss the warm ocean and the coral reefs. I didn't accomplish one of my goals, which was to bike around the entire coast of Amami. It's probably good that I didn't, with all the getting lost I did. I don't know exactly how far it is, but I estimate that it's about 200 miles. That's a lot of riding with the steep hills there. I don't have a good map of Amami with mileage, and google doesn't have any directions for the island (although I did manage to look at satellite images of the island and find more roads than were on my map). I think the ride would take 3 days. I didn't have a mountain bike until the last two weeks or so, so I didn't have much time. I did the short northern loop, an epic ride of about 62 miles, in the 90+ degree heat. I stopped to swim every couple of hours and cool off, sampling some of the north coast reefs. It was about 7 hours of riding and three hours of swimming. The last 10 miles or so were really painful. The tops of my knees were sunburned. That was the easiest loop, with the easiest hills. I'll have to plan it better next time, if I'm going to tackle the whole island. At least I should have a bike, since we moved all the bikes to the second floor of the house so that they wouldn't rust out. I don't think Masami's mother will be able to throw my bike away this time.

Masami dropped her friend Kodama off at the 5:30 AM ferry on July 24 and picked up a group of six Americans at the same time. There were two teachers and three students (one with her 7-year old son) who had come to Japan for an international art education conference and came to Amami to visit for a couple of days. There was one professor from North Carolina and the rest were from Chico. Masami found some host families to put up two people each. 

We took them to the small Amami museum with exhibits on the nature of Amami, sugarcane farming, and old Amami villages. Theo and Maxwell posed for a picture in a well. Theo was excited to have an American kid to play with.

We spent the day at the beach, snorkeling and playing in the sand. Masami and Alice, one of the professors, went to the Talasso Therapy building where they did exercises in a big pool and enjoyed the jacuzzis ("therapy"). 

We went to a restaurant/dive resort for a fancy multi course dinner (Japanese Italian food maybe?). At one point some raw rubbery octopus and pasty chalky rubbery squid showed up on my plate. I tried my obligatory piece of each, just to say that I'd done it. People always ask if I eat octopus, but no one asks about squid, which is the really weird one. Somehow I had managed to avoid eating raw squid up to then and it will definitely be a goal for me in the future. The closest I can come to describing it is that it's like white Elmer's glue that has been left out and is almost dry, but still not crunchy; you can chew it, but it sticks to your teeth and won't let go. It was like that except not as tasty as the glue. The restaurant had a traditional Amami folk music band who made all of us dance, of course. I asked a native Amami person what they were singing about, but she said she couldn't understand the dialect in which the songs were written. 

The next day we went to a junior high school for a classroom tour which consisted of sitting in a classroom for three hours. School was out for the year, so there were no students. Theo and Maxwell wrote Kanji on the board and we were stuffed with okonomiyaki and takoyaki, dough balls with bits of octopus inside, a Japanese kids' favorite. 

Blackboard full of Kanji.

The cooks.

Octopus balls.

There was a group of about 10 Japanese women that were cooking food the whole time, stacks of squid and octopus pancakes and takoyaki. We were wondering where it was all going. One woman showed us how to do the tea ceremony and whip up the tea powder. Just as we were leaving, a group of high school students showed up to talk to us. Oh well, maybe next year (a common refrain).

Next on the agenda was a pool party  where we got to watch the swim team practice for their next swim meet (my favorite!). This was a a little different, as we actually got to swim afterwards. We competed in team races where four of us pushed a taped together string of two liter bottles  across the pool. I really appreciated how hard these kids work on swimming. I couldn't keep up with them. The adults definitely had the height advantage for the water polo game, where we creamed the kids. I was the basket for the first half. We had to take showers before entering the pool, which for the boys consisted of running a gauntlet of about 6 shower heads as quickly as possible to avoid getting wet. 

After slurping up some cold noodles at the pool party, we went to a festival at a shrine near the school. I guess they must have this festival every year, but I didn't even know the shrine was there. There are advantages to having visitors, as it gets Masami out of the house to do things. Normally I wouldn't even know about this kind of thing. The streets were crammed with stalls selling toys and food, and carnival games, like the one where you try to catch fish with a tissue paper net before the net breaks. The shrine was decorated with paper lanterns designed by kids. The shrine was giving out free cups of watered down sake for good luck. Here's a picture of some cute girls trying to get Theo drunk. There was a stage where old ladies had their big moments of fame doing hula dances, fan dances, or singing sappy songs. (See video below.)

Everybody went kayaking in the mangroves the next day, but I met up with them later for a tour of the Oshima tsumugi (Amami silk fabric) factory. We watched people dying the fabric with tree bark and mud, weaving the cloth, dying it some more, taking it apart, and reweaving it. It's an incredibly involved process, reflected in the price of the items made of the cloth. They sell things made of the fabric at the gift shop, where you can buy a shirt for $650. Here's Masami's colleague Teresa modeling a ridiculously expensive jacket.

We had a nice treat there, seeing a Ruddy Kingfisher, which is a bird you hear all the time, but usually only catch a glimpse of if you're lucky.  Theo has been trying to see one for years. This one sat there and posed for pictures, and we got to see it fishing.

Everybody came to the ferry to wave goodbye to the Americans. It was a night ferry, luckily not a 5:30 AM one. Masami's friend Hisayo was really sorry to see her guests go and said she'd be lonely without them. They waved goodbye until their arms were sore. 

We had one more full day in Amami, and Theo and I spent it riding the motorcycle around the island, taking in the views, snorkeling, walking in the forest, and enjoying one last sunset. We found a nice place called Gomozaki where I hadn't been before, a kind of forest preserve with the requisite observation tower (with great 360 views), shrine, and wood walkways. We took a long walk down the beach past the expansive tidal flat at Ose beach to Tomori, which is the best place to snorkel. The distant typhoon was whipping up the sand and sandblasting us. There were some impressive thunderheads over the ocean. It felt like an appropriate setting for our last day. 

 

One of those monster spiders with a beetle.

Shrine guardians.

We had our own little farewell at the ferry to Okinawa the next night, although not the kind of big sendoff the Art ed folks got. The boat we took was too small for the walkway, so we had to walk up these ridiculous stairs to get in the boat, carrying Masami's massive suitcase. A guy on the boat had these paper streamers that we threw down to the people on the dock as the boat sailed out to sea. We each held on to our ends of the streamers until they broke, and yelled goodbyes across the water that carried surprisingly far as we headed south, leaving Amami for another year.