Yet Another Japan Post

It occurs to me that travelogues are primarily interesting to the person giving them. This is one of the things I find so fascinating about travel--you can't really share. Photos and videos are nice, I guess, but there's just nothing to compare with the heady cocktail of excitement, nervousness, tiredness, and just plain being there that one can only get first-hand. On that note, I'm probably going to stop doing Japan trip posts after this one.

I have vastly more photos and videos than I've posted, but despite my considering them very interesting, I imagine that most others do not. So, in keeping with the general theme of travel-posts-as-narcissism, all of today's photos will be pictures of me.

The first one was taken in the gardens in front of the old imperial palace in Kyoto. It's a very nice palace; its main downside is that, being built entirely of wood, it has a habit of burning down all the time. As such, it's fairly new. The palace buildings themselves are very nice--they build the roofs out of a special kind of cedar tree bark, which is great for natural air conditioning. The roofs are fairly hardy as untreated wood goes, but they do need to be replaced every 20-30 years. The inner gardens are beautiful as well.

Speaking of gardens, the silver shrine has, I think, the nicest. The golden shrine gets its reputation from being plated in gold, whereas the silver shrine's silver plating was one of those good intentions that ended up disappearing in the face of a wartime budget (something medieval). Despite never having been plated in silver in its entire history, the name stuck. To make up for the lack of metallic sparkle, the shrine goes all-out on their large gardens. There is both a zen rock garden, which consists of big piles of rocks raked into razor-sharp precise shapes, and then grounds filled with flowers, carefully sculpted trees, rivers, and colorful bushes.

Incidentally, the silver shrine is generally famous as a cultural development center. Among other things, this shrine's culture is largely responsible for the development of the tea ceremony and flower arranging as quasi-religious experiences in Japan.

The final picture shows me outfitted in full tourist regalia--camera pouch, sweatshirt tied around the waist, and water bottle in hand. Most of my wardrobe isn't fashionable enough to compete with your average Japanese person, and I didn't really try. In the background is the Fushimi Inari Taisha, or at least a miniscule part of it--there is a large main shrine, dedicated to the fox-god of rice and prosperity, and that's not it. This photo was taken in front of one of the thousands of small shrines lining the trails. The trails are probably several miles all told, most of which are bridged by large orange shinto gates. At first this is impressive, but after hiking up the steep trail for a while, it blurs into kind of an orange haze. This shrine will punish you for slacking on your exercise program, it seems.

By the way, those little statues off to the side are, in fact, frogs wearing bibs. I'm not sure which god this is, but I asked about the bibs, and they really are bibs for eating. Since Japanese gods are frequently given gifts of food, I guess there is probably some relation between the bibs and the offerings.

Anyway, it's late, and I'm never going to get over the jet-lag if I don't go to bed. So good night all, and thanks for tolerating the travelogue. The videos were a bit too big to post, but if you're curious, try to catch me sometime when I'm near my laptop. I have a walking tour of some underground tunnels, baby dolphins, close encounters with a whale shark, cute children feeding deer, juggling, and panoramic shots of both an 11-floor train station and downtown Osaka. I think they're cool, but who knows -- maybe I'm just biased.

We're in Kyoto!

First observation about Kyoto: It is much easier to find coin-operated laundromats here. I am not sure why this is, but there are lots of them. Next observation: There are these large, amazing shrines all over the place. After putting on our laundry, we found a big complex less than a block away. Then walked past another one holding some kind of carnival on the way back. All told, I think we walked past half a dozen or so shrines today.

So, it is possible to take a bullet train from Osaka to Kyoto. Indeed, we actually passed through Kyoto on our way to Nagoya about a week ago. It's worth observing, however, that on a bullet train, the distance between Osaka and Kyoto is maybe ten minutes. Which is to say, it's not very far. So, figuring we'd save some money to spend on food or books or something, we bought regular tickets, and loaded up all our luggage onto a regular old train. The train was packed, which meant we had to stand for forty-five minutes, but we arrived in Kyoto a little footsore and about fifty bucks richer--the tickets for the both of us cost (roughly) twelve dollars on the regular express train.

We bought breakfast in the train station. Rachel had a big old sushi/onigiri tray, and she bought me a bag of bread sticks while I watched the luggage. Add in a carton of milk each, and voila: breakfast. It left us a little full for lunch, so we just grabbed snacks from a Circle-K across from the laundromat. Combie [convenience-store] food is a little predictable and processed, but since we're tourists, it's still new and interesting. I ended up with some kind of cream cheese/caramel concoction and a Calpis water (a lightly sweetened milky-white soda), while Rachel had some kind of tapioca-strawberry milk and some manner of bread.

I forgot to dig my camera out the luggage before we went exploring Kyoto, so all the photos on this post are actually from yesterday, when we went to Nara. The first one is Rachel pretending that she's holding something to catch the deer's attention--they sell special crackers formulated for feeding deer. They seem to like them, but these are some of the fattest deer you've met--they get a bit overloaded sometimes. The second one is a picture of Todaiji from the outside. I was told by our friend who met us in Nara that it is the largest wooden structure in the world. This seems possible; those little white specks just below the door are the people standing around, waiting to enter. The building contains a really large statue of Buddha (not the world's biggest, but it's up there), and various other very large statues as well.

After visiting the statue, we were joined by some of our friend's family members, which is where we have this third photo from (I'm leaving out stuff for privacy reasons; if you ask me in person, I have more photos and videos). This is a little boy who was taking a picture of his aunt. I thought he was kind of cute, handling the gigantic camera, so I took a picture of him. His aunt, struck by the general humor of the situation, in turn took a picture of me taking a picture of him. It was one of those recursive moments.

As three-year-olds are wont to do, he got a bit tired and cranky after a while, so our guides headed home. Rachel got some more photos of manhole covers--there are lots of neat ones, many of them colored--and we shopped around for souvenirs. Eventually, we headed back to Osaka, and since we went past Dotonbori, I decided to stop and try get a night-time shot of the big central area.

Dotonbori is something like Osaka's Times Square, and fittingly for the city, it is all about shopping and restaurants. There is a mind-blowing number of shops here--they just go on for block after block, thousands of stores of all different types. The nicest of the shopping arcades have rain shields over the top, creating a weird, hybrid indoor/outdoor feel to the place, something you can only pull off with year-round pleasant weather. This advertisement of the running guy is one of the classic symbols of Osaka. It's an ad for a candy company, who appear to have gotten really lucky with the popularity of this ad. The advertising in this area is entertaining and over the top -- huge animatronic crabs, dragons, drum-playing clowns, giant octopuses wielding cleavers, that kind of thing.

We spent ... quite a lot of money here.

Aquariums and Sundays

Despite it being the single most- photographed thing I've done on the trip so far, I somehow managed to completely miss mentioning the Kaiyukan in my last post. We've been going at a pace of about two tourist attractions a day, which is pretty exhausting but fun.

Kaiyukan is the name of a really big aquarium found in Osaka. It is themed around the ring of fire, and has a lot of fish in it. This is actually my second time going, and I was sad to realize that after the first time, the only photo I have of the first time is of a block of acrylic glass that's on display. I repented, and now have an enormous number of photos and videos of fish. I've included one where I'm hanging out with some jellyfish, thanks to the magic of acrylic glass.

Another highlight of Friday was eating Okonomiyaki for dinner. The traditional okonomiyaki involves putting it together yourself and cooking it at your own table. Apparently, this ideal is a little too free-form for most Japanese restaurants, so they find various ways to subvert it. In this case, the okonomiyaki was delivered to our in-table grill fully cooked, ready for sauces to be stuck on top. The grill itself was only slightly warm, and really just served as a way of keeping the food hot. This isn't really a complaint though--this stuff was amazingly delicious. I had some kind of pork/noodle/cabbage mix that was great with soy sauce, and Rachel's was a squid/onion mix that tasted good with mayonnaise.

It was a bit interesting trying to find church -- there are only a handful of wards in Osaka proper, and they don't exactly locate the buildings in the major tourist centers. After fighting with lds.org a bit, which insists on giving driving directions, we figured out a method of getting to church that involved a bit of walking. It ended up being not too bad--we did need to walk ten blocks, but these ended up being very short blocks. I'll also note that most streets in Japan are narrow -- I think I might be able to jump between sidewalks with a good running start. Maybe I'd have to get in slightly better shape first, though. The photo here was taken as we approached the church building.

Church was good, and I found I was able to follow along with the testimonies and the lessons pretty well, which is great progress. I'm still missing a lot, but at least I can follow along. Lots of members and an investigator or two kept us company, and the ward has a friendly, family-like feel, a point mentioned in a few of the testimonies. Several people expressed surprise that I hadn't served a mission in Japan, and subsequently wondered how I'd manage to learn the language; I guess that's a compliment.

While we still needed food and travel, we did our level best to only mildly crack the sabbath, and spent much of Sunday in our room or walking around the neighborhood. I've also used some of the time to update the last few blog posts with long-promised pictures; if you've already read them, you can run back through and browse. While walking around, we did run into an honest-to-goodness grocery store (something like Macey's), so we'll definitely be heading down there tomorrow to load up on candy and so forth. Bye for now!

Lots of Ramen and a Castle

It's pretty late, and I don't want to miss church, so just a quick update. I've gone through and added photos later, so if you read the original post, just scan for pictures this time...

First thing in the morning, we went to a ramen museum. Most of the activities were free or reasonably priced, and we ended up only spending money on a T-shirt. The museum would be a lot more fun if our reading skills were better, but we did borrow audio guides, which at least gave us an audio track for two of the exhibits. I'll note that we're talking specifically about instant ramen here; the museum is basically a giant advertising stunt for Nissin, the original makers of "Cup Noodle" and inventors of instant ramen in general. The original shack in which Nissin's founder invented instant ramen is one centerpiece, and there's also a movie theater where they tell a heavily animated story about how ramen was invented. You can sign up for a course where you make your own ramen in a big, commercial kitchen upstairs, and there's a make-your-own Cup Noodle, heavily geared toward little kids. We did neither.

Of course, I left craving ramen, so we picked some up at the tourist trap ramen place conveniently nearby. It was good stuff, although I think Rachel prefers the pork broth to the soy broth that I ordered (she wasn't hungry, and just ordered gyoza). I've got a photo here now -- this was really good stuff, possibly even worth the ten bucks I paid for it. The noodles are decorated with green onion, a bit of seaweed, crispy onion bits, several slices of grilled pork, and an entire soft-boiled egg. There are a further half-dozen things you can add to adjust the flavor along the back counter.

Next stop was Osaka castle. It's got enormous stone walls around it's base, and a windy entrance path that traverses fully two moats, both wide enough to sail a steamboat down. There are ramparts overlooking the path all along the way, loaded with murder holes and all the usual castle features. The castle itself doesn't have any windows for the first several floors, and the walls are made of enormous stone blocks. The lowest ornamentation and windows are perhaps 60-70 feet off the ground. There's a well out front, covered with a heavy wooden grill which also, presumably, is defensive. Of course, the one time it was invaded, the castle fell, but it looks impressive, and the defenses did kill quite a lot of people before eventually not working well enough. There's probably a message in there somewhere.

Incidentally, we finally tried takoyaki. They're kind of like fritters, but with octopus and onions in them. They're also not deep fried, but rather shallow fried in cup-shaped pans. Alas: the dough was raw. We'll probably try again some other time, but probably not in the same place. The frying trick is really interesting, and probably both uses less oil and goes faster. I wonder if the same trick would work on fritters.

Anyway, church tomorrow, and I need to sleep. The images on this post were added after the fact.

Doing business in Japan

I'm going to lump days 2 & 3 of our Japanese trip into a single quick post, because it's getting late and I need to get to sleep.

On Wednesday, Rachel and I went to Nagoya to get ready for the seminar I was helping to present on Thursday. I ended up spending a lot of the time developing subtitles for the two videos we wanted to show -- the last of the subtitles were typed out on Thursday morning, while the first sessions of the seminar were running. The final system we worked out was for me to take a machine transcription and fix it to be proper English; then, Luna would convert it to Japanese, and I would fix any linewrap and timing problems in the Japanese. Doing it that way, we managed to get about 4 minutes of subtitles done in a little less than an hour.

Lunch in Nagoya was "Hokkaido" cuisine, I think. In my case, that meant slices of seasoned pork on rice, and in Rachel's case that meant fried chicken. Probably the most interesting dish was the "Hokkaido Oyakodon." Oya means parent, and ko means child, while don is short for donburi, which refers to a rice bowl. Normally, oyakodon is chicken with egg, but Hokkaido oyakodon is salmon and salmon roe. Luna thought the name was funny and clever, so she ordered it. By the way, Luna has been a huge help this trip; I did my best to give her a pile of gifts, but it's really hard to say thank you enough.

After we were done with business stuff in Nagoya, we went sightseeing with Ikeda-san. He took us to see Nagoya tower, and then we went for kaiten-zushi (that's conveyor-belt sushi, the first time we've had it!). It was good; I've discovered that tuna sushi can indeed be delicious, you just need to get the high quality stuff.

The next day's seminar went fine; I did some of it in Japanese, but the modeling I did in English with Luna interpreting. I wanted to do it in Japanese, but I just didn't have time to memorize enough terms. It was a pretty big stretch just getting the videos ready. There was one glitch ("Matches perfectly, you can join it! Oh, apparently you can't, sorry"), but we worked out what was going wrong before the end, and use it to illustrate a common mistake ("This is what compatible mode is for! So if you also see this problem, switch to compatible mode!").

After the seminar, we wandered around Osaka with Luna, visiting the massive shopping district of Dotonbori. I have a video of Dotonbori, but no photos, sorry! Various random things were bought, and we ate dinner at Luna's teenage hangout, a kind of all-you-can-eat pizza place. Available pizzas included ham/pineapple, squid ink/squid/onion/tuna flakes, chicken/corn, and shrimp/corn. Yes, the Japanese really do put corn on pizza. It tastes fine, really--the squid ink on pizza probably deserves more attention, although it mostly makes it black and tastes vaguely of ocean (of course I tried it, don't be silly). We're planning on meeting Luna again in a couple of days for a trip to Nara, her parents' current hometown.

A new word for you: Shokuchuudoku

Here it is in kanji:　食中毒. It's pronounced shoku-choo-doku and the literal meaning of the word parts are food/by means of/poison (food poisoning), and it's a pretty good summary of my flight over the Pacific from Sunday night to Tuesday morning.

It might not have been food poisoning -- it might have been me getting too hot in the overly warm plane cabin -- but at any rate, I had a miserable time which I won't describe in detail. As a sidenote, I have discovered one way to get transferred to a business class seat! If you just get so miserably sick that you can't sit up anymore, and if there's turbulence so you can't lie down in the back anymore, they'll move you! I cannot recommend this method, however.

I was still unable to walk for more than a few seconds at a time when I arrived, so they bundled me into a wheelchair and we went running around Haneda airport, with a rapidly shifting escort of similarly uniformed Japanese women pushing me around. We only had about an hour to get to our next flight, and the stewardesses felt that I was so badly sick that I needed to be reported to quarantine, so I had an interview with a doctor as soon as we landed. The doctor decided that whatever I had probably wasn't infectious (he guessed it was probably food poisoning as well), and said I could go ahead and catch our next flight.

On the following flight, they moved me to a row where I had 3 seats in a row, so I could lie down and sleep a little more. All the sleep helped, I think. Then they stuck me on a wheelchair when we reached Itami airport as well, complete with a fresh complement of helpful uniformed Japanese women to push me around.

We had been going to take a series of trains to get to the airport, but that sounded too complicated by this point, so we went by a direct bus to Osaka train station, which is very close to our hotel. While at the train station, Rachel spotted an escalator that looked cool, producing the only photo I have from this section of the trip. Sorry about that, but I was really not in a good state of mind for taking photos. Once we got to the hotel, I decided to try and eat something; if I could do so without dying, then I thought I'd try to keep going for the rest of the day. We had planned to go and see the cherry blossoms in Yoshino, a high-altitude area where they bloom later, and I still hoped to go. We went and bought breakfast at the hotel cafe, wherein I dropped about twenty dollars for, um, a tiny glass of apple juice, two small croissants, and a glass of warm milk. Rachel had a brief episode of sticker shock and decided to go for the six-dollar croissants only. After that cafe, all the food has looked pretty cheap!

I was still a bit woozy from the flight ordeal, but I felt better after breakfast, so we decided to risk the trip to Yoshino. We called Luna (normally a resident of Seattle, but visiting her parents), who had offered to be our tour guide, and set off. She had never been to Yoshino either, so this was new for everyone.

The cherry blossoms here are at least partially growing wild, so there are many different types, and they bloom at different times. Most of the forest consists of enormously tall cedar trees, with little tufts of greenery at the top, making it look like you're driving through a vast hall of pillars, but every so often there are cherry trees blooming among them. We went for a short hike to get to the best area, called the "upper thousand trees" (okusenbon), which is where a passing man dressed entirely in purple took a photo of the three of us.

The purple man was very friendly, telling us about his wonderful trip to the Atlanta Olympics, and the friendly Georgians who told him that they had been told by God that they should be nice to visitors. He said they were indeed very nice. He gave Rachel a cat-shaped bookmark as a memento.

The photo here is a pretty good idea of what most of Yoshino looked like -- scattered cherry blossoms among the cedars. Mind you, some of these cherry-blossom trees are over 100 feet tall, so they're by no means an insignificant part of the forest.

One last thought: In Utah, when you go hiking, you're on your own. We don't have bathrooms on our mountains. We don't have running water. We don't have a little cafe at the top where you can kick off your boots and sit down to chat with the other hikers over a cold Gatorade. This, then, would be a difference between Utah and Japan. The last photo is the takoyaki stand at Okusenbon. So once you're done traipsing around the mountains, you can stop here for some fried octopus dumplings and a can of green tea. It's a pity they weren't carrying water, or we'd have bought something!