One such moment occurred one morning on a train platform in Kyoto. We were waiting for the train to Kurashiki; the platform wasn’t terribly crowded. At some point Sid noticed a maiko, an apprentice geisha, walking along the platform. Contrary to popular Western conceptions, geisha and their more conspicuously dressed maiko are not at all commonly seen wandering around in public during the day. There are shams that dress like maiko and pose for photographs with tourists, but the genuine artists and their apprentices are rarely seen, partly because they work mostly in the evening, partly because they have better things to do with their time than wandering around in public, and partly because there just aren’t that many of them any longer. This one was the first we’ve seen.

She was much the embodiment of the image of a geisha: her face was covered in snow-white makeup, her lips were vivid red, her hair was a jet-black sculpture decorated with a dangly silver ornament. She wore a royal blue outer coat over her kimono. I watched her through the window of one of the mini convenience stores that you find on train platforms. I don’t know what she purchased; it disappeared into either a fold of fabric or the small purse she carried. When she smiled at the cashier, framed by the racks of newspapers and glossy magazines, the digital displays on the platform, the concrete and the steel of the shinkansen station, the refridgerators full of Asahi beer and Pocari Sweat and bottled green tea, it seemed as though she existed on her own temporal plane, fully present in, but independent of, her modern surroundings. In that moment, it was as if I could see a glimpse of all of the centuries of the tradition she maintains stretching out behind her.

When she left the store and glided–”gliding” being the only way to describe the ambulatory movement of someone who makes an art out of walking on platform sandals in a dozen layers of calf-length fabric–along the platform, Sid pointed out her companion. She was an elderly, diminutive woman, dressed in simple, traditional clothes. She was probably the maiko’s mentor.

Of course it crossed my mind to photograph her, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t bring myself to reduce this fleeting look at a beautiful representative of an ancient, honored tradition to a mere digital snapshot among the 2000 others I took. It just seemed cheap, in short. Tracie told me later that she noticed that another tourist, seated near her on a bench and also watching the maiko, took a camera out of her purse, hesitated, and then returned it to her purse unused. Some sights just aren’t meant to be photographed. Instead we have to retain them in our own memories, fallable as they may be.

Sayonara, Japan!

Click here to go directly to the new photos. You can also always reach the gallery by clicking the Photo Gallery link under the heading “Adam’s Stuff” on the side of this site.

(Yes, the photo gallery doesn’t look like the rest of this site. It used to be more nicely integrated but I believe that the WordPress plug-in that provides integration for the Gallery software created the security vulnerability that was exploited the last time this site was hacked.)

Tracie has waded through the ~2000 photos I took and picked out the best ones, grouped by city. I’m in the process of uploading them to my photo gallery; I’ll post a note and a link when they’re all available.

The favor I mentioned was bestowed upon us by the proprietress of a little restaurant in Tokyo. I don’t know the name of the place or the name of the street it’s on, but here’s her business card:

It’s in Asakusa, on the narrow street that runs behind the amusement park near the Senso-ji temple. One end of the street meets a much larger street; it meets it directly across from the Asakusa View hotel. There’s also a pachinko parlor and what we think is an adult movie theatre on the same street. If you’re in the neighborhood and are looking for a nice bowl of soba, stop in and tell Akiko-san that the American tourists said to say hi and thank you.

The waitress took the last one, as you might guess. (Yes, the flash didn’t fire.)

I wasn’t able to post photos until we reached Kyoto. Here are photos from our day in Tokyo with Tamae, our guide. I described this day in greater detail previously so I’m just going to put in photos and very brief descriptions here. (Incidentally, I just noticed that some of these photo-heavy pages load kind of slowly. Sorry about that; I don’t know of an easy way to tell my blogging software to insert page breaks in a more intelligent manner.)

Here’s the sumo stable. As I mentioned previously photos are not allowed inside, so this is all I have.

Here is the location of the memorial shrines for Lord Kira:

If I remember correctly, this is the first well in which Lord Kira’s head was washed (after it was removed from his body, that is):

Here are a few photos from the neighborhood. Tamae explained that chanko restaurants cater to the huge appetites of the sumo wrestlers.

That last one must be the sign of a fugu restaurant. Here’s a photo of Tokyo Tower and several taken from the tower:

Moving on to the Sengaku-ji temple, this is the main gate as seen from the courtyard (i.e. after you go through the gate), followed by photos of the incense vending machine, the temple itself, and a statue of the founder:

It’s a nice place. The courtyard is very peaceful. I might well zen there if I lived in the area. Here are photos of the memorial markers for the 47 ronin and the shrine for their leader:

There is a nice garden area between the main temple and the cemetery:

Visible at the lower center of that last photo is the other well in which Kira’s head was washed. As we left the cemetery, we spotted a senbazuru, a skein of 1000 origami cranes, hanging on the back of the gate. Despite having sold numerous kits for senbazuru through Paper Jade, I’ve never seen one in person. This one was made from unusually small cranes.

While staring at the ceiling at about 5:00AM today I thought about things that happened in Japan that I haven’t yet covered in this blog but bear recounting. I realized that several of them have to do with food, so I’m going to lump them together in this post.

The first such event was dinner with Rafael and Richard on our first full day in Tokyo. We had shabu-shabu, which is what Japanese parents tell their children when they’re cautioning them to not burn themselves on a hot stove. Yes, I just made that up; I have no idea what shabu-shabu translates to, if anything. It involves an open pot of boiling water with a central pillar, sort of like a Bundt pan, in which you–as in you the diner–cook paper-thin slices of Japan’s famous marbled beef, vegetables, mushrooms, etc. We were waited upon by a woman in a green kimono who amazed us with her skill in keeping her kimono sleeves out of the platters of food, the boiling water, the tea cups, etc. as she reached across the table to put things down, pick things up, and demonstrate shabu-shabu technique. We had a delightful time. I didn’t have my camera with me but Richard took a few pictures. This is the appetizer. Rafael almost managed to trick Richard (and me, inadvertently) into eating the flower:

Here’s the main course:

(Now I’m trying to remember whether it’s shabu-shabu that is portrayed in “Lost in Translation”. I think that meal was cooked in hot oil rather than hot water, which means it was something else that was described to me but whose name I don’t recall.)

The next day the four of us had lunch at a sushi restaurant. I’m not exactly sure whether I understood what was said about the place, but I believe that it’s known in part for making food look like flowers. Or maybe its name has “rose” in it, or maybe I’m not remembering any of this correctly. In any case, I do know that one of the courses, shown below, involved a rose made out of raw squid. I couldn’t tell you what most of the rest of it was; even Rafael didn’t recognize all of it. I do know, though, that it was all very tasty.

Yes, in that last photo I’m contemplating the fact that I’m about to eat a piece of raw squid made to look like a rose. Actually I should state for the record that despite what most Americans would probably expect, raw squid has a nice, mild flavor and isn’t terribly chewy. I had it several times and rather like it.

The next day, our day with Tamae-san, we had lunch at a small restaurant near Tokyo Tower. Here’s what I had:

That’s a couple of pieces of tempura on skewers in the center (shrimp and some other sort of fish, if I remember correctly), some pickled things and a bit of octopus to the right, tuna and sea bream at the top, miso soup and rice at the lower right and left respectively, and some other pickled stuff at the lower center. It was all very good. I was asked several times by locals whether I liked Japanese food, and the answer is obviously yes. (Of course there are exceptions, but then I don’t like all American food either.)

(That photo reminds me that I haven’t posted any photos at all from some of the early days of our trip. Bear with me; I’ll get to them eventually.)

The last food-related event I’ve been meaning to describe was dinner with our guide Sid and his wife. Sid had invited us before our arrival in Japan to dine with him and his wife after our touring; we were, of course, honored to meet his wife and dine with them. We ate at a Japanese restaurant in Kyoto Station. We had a marvelous multi-course dinner, an almost endless stream of sushi, sashimi, tempura, mini shabu-shabu pots per person, and so on. Part of the meal was served in a cute little black lacquered wooden box with a drawer, one per person. We were waited upon with remarkable attentativeness and grace by a very cheerful young woman in a pink kimono.

I was a little self-conscious during parts of the meal because I was doing my best to be well-mannered in the presence of two Japanese people who are probably as old as my parents, and I wasn’t sure of the proper way to eat some of the things we were served. I was trying to fall back on the default basic rule of ettiqutte–do what your host/hostess does–but I couldn’t actually see what Mr. and Mrs. Makino were doing much of the time because my view was blocked by the cute little boxes. I was particularly concerned about how to approach a whole shrimp with chopsticks, but fortunately remembered reading somewhere (hopefully an authoritative source) that it’s acceptable to take one chopstick in each hand when necessary. I did that to remove the shell from the tail of the shrimp, then picked it up with chopsticks held in the usual manner and bit the tail off. Some time later I observed that Sid simply pulled his apart and ate it by hand, and Mrs. Makino apparently doesn’t care for shrimp at all. Live and learn.

Anyway, it was an excellent meal with excellent company. Sid’s wife is really a dear and was very enthusiastic about practicing her (already rather good) English conversational skills. Before we began eating one of those most moving moments of the entire vacation occurred. Mrs. Makino gave Tracie one of her kimonos and an accompanying outer coat. She explained that the kimono was a wedding gift from her mother but that she had worn it only once. Tracie was moved almost to tears by this gesture. (It’s beautiful; it’s white with patterns of maple leaves and other natural motifs.)

Unfortunately I have no photos at all of that meal. I didn’t even think to take the camera with me. Sid and the waitress took a couple of photos; perhaps I can get copies from him.

There were a couple of other minor food events worth mention. Vie de France, the oddly Japanese rendition of a French pastry shop, still has Special Curry Donuts although they’ve dropped the “Special” from the name. They’re still special to me, however; I had several while we were in Kyoto. They also had a mysterious “Soft Cookie (Black)” which I didn’t try. Yeah, I’ll eat rose-shaped squid but not black cookies; there are limits to my curiosity. There are also numerous mysterious-looking confections in shops which I haven’t tried; I think most of them involve bean paste.

Rafael was able to illuminate one mystery from our previous visit. Last year we observed several shops selling odd-looking blocks of some waxy-looking, dingy-yellow-colored substance. I couldn’t see spending money to find out what it was, but it did seem to be popular with the locals. I pointed it out when we walked through the Asakusa shopping area with Richard and Rafael; Rafael took it upon himself to buy some so that we could all try it. He said that it’s sweet potato, which I certainly would not have guessed from its appearance.

It tasted like sweet potato, though, for better or for worse. I wasn’t wild about it. The shiny ball-shaped things are also sweet potato, flavored with various things and covered with a distinctly rubbery coating. I wasn’t wild about those either.

Long-distance travel and the resulting change of time zones is just odd. We woke up in Kyoto at 6:00AM (Kyoto time), traveled by plane for about 12 hours, auto for a total of about three hours, and sat around in between for a bunch more hours, and arrived at home in Boulder at about 5:00PM (Boulder time) on the same day, even though our total travel time was nearly 24 hours.

It turned out that there were a few surprises waiting for us at home, and not the fun sort of surprises. Tracie’s mom, who sat with our house and cats while we were gone, had developed an abscessed tooth about a week before and was in the middle of having what we later learned was a very bad reaction to the antibiotics she had been prescribed. When we walked in the door she was essentially paralyzed with pain and didn’t know why. We ended up taking her to the emergency room about a half-hour or so after we got home. I had the presence of mind to grab a banana and a couple of mandarin oranges as we left; we hadn’t eaten much since breakfast. (After United poisoned me on the outbound flight I wasn’t terribly interested in eating anything on the return flights.) We were at the hospital for five or six hours before Tracie finally decided that she had to get off her feet and go to bed or she was going to fall down and then we’d have to admit her at the ER also.

We got home (again) after being awake for 30 or so hours and found that we were in that odd phase of sleep deprivation in which you no longer feel tired as such and were all wound up from the hospital adventures. Tracie decided to sort the mail and unpack. At some point it was discovered that the Paper Jade website had crashed sometime during our absence and was completely offline. Not good. Fortunately it didn’t take too long to sort that out, even in my completely whacked state of mind.

Sometime around midnight (Boulder time) I passed into a new sleep-deprived phase and realized that I needed to go to bed Right Now. So we did, and managed to get around five hours asleep before snapping awake to the sound of a cat puking. Said cat hopped up on the bed a little while later to express his joy at our return and inquire as to why we weren’t getting up and feeding him. I told Tracie, “there’s no place like home.”

Sometime after we got up it was discovered that water had leaked from somewhere in the laundry/furnace/storage room in the basement. Some investigation revealed that the pump that pumps condensation out of the furnace had failed, so the condensate was just running across the floor rather than being pumped through a little tube into a drainpipe as usual. Remarkably enough the local hardware store had exactly the same pump on hand. I bought it after we visited Tracie’s mom in the hospital and went to the shoe-repair shop to drop off the boots that Tracie wore out in Japan.

It’s now 5:36PM local time, according to the clock. I’d believe it was just about any other time of day if you tried to tell me so; my sense of time is totally shot. Once again I have great appreciation of Gibson’s brilliant description of jetlag in Pattern Recognition.

I’ll post some more stuff about Japan within the next day or two.

I have enough thoughts for a couple more posts about this trip, and I plan to put up lots more photos, so keep checking this site for another few days. Thanks for your interest!

One box of four packages of green tea KitKats. How could I resist? I couldn’t, obviously.

Instead we took a taxi to the Tojiki Kaikan, a fairly large shop that sells ceramics. Tracie hoped to find bowls that would make up for the absence of the ones seen in Tokyo; it took her all of five minutes to find some. It was a nice shop. We lingered over the tea pots and cups but managed to leave with a bag that is just small enough to be carried on the plane.

Next we went to Takashimaya, one of Kyoto’s most upscale department stores. I had it in mind that their toy department might have plastic figures. Unfortunately it didn’t, but it was still fun to wander around a bit. The place was huge and had sky’s-the-limit shopping, e.g. a Rolex mini-department. The housewares floor looked oddly like its counterparts in American department stores, although on closer inspection I found decidedly non-American offerings like a very well-stocked incense counter. Eventually we made our way to the restaurant floor. Yes, floor; there were around a dozen restaurants, I think. We ended up having lunch at an Italian restaurant which played awful lounge-music covers of old Carpenters songs but had excellent food. We had (among other things) a pizza margherita unlike anything we’ve had outside of Italy and a pair of excellent salads, one of which was the first “green stuff” Tracie’s had since we arrived here.

Photography is frowned upon (at best) in places like this, but we couldn’t resist capturing the odd name of one restaurant:

Tracie also snuck a couple of snapshots in the restroom, one of the completely incomprehensible (to someone who doesn’t read Japanese) toilet controls:

There was also a little seat in the stall to stick your baby in while you’re otherwise occupied:

Note that the sign explicitly forbids putting on makeup while your child vibrates in the seat:

After lunch we decided to wander down Teramachi Street, a long street lined with shops, covered with a high canopy and closed to motor vehicles. The side streets were also crammed with shops. The shop offerings ranged from second-hand clothes and trinkets to antique woodblock prints to expensive jewelry. There were tailors, hairdressers, art galleries, a Mister Donut, ice cream shops, a butcher, a vendor of realistic models of guns and U.S. military surplus clothes, and so on. The selection was vast and dizzying, and we saw only the main street. Here are some photos:

That giant crab’s eyes and legs moved, by the way. There was a small shrine off to one side:

Right near the beginning I hit the jackpot: a shop which specializes in collectible plastic figures. If you’re not familiar with this phenomenon, it’s a little bit hard to fathom. It’s hard to fathom even if you are familiar with it. Imagine that someone created plastic figures for every character in every cartoon series you can think of. Then add figures for all of the characters of major sci-fi movies, like Alien, Star Trek, Star Wars, etc. Then add all of the space ships and major artifacts of those movies. Then create different versions for the major cartoons and movies, e.g. R2D2 in several different sizes. Then make all of the cartoons Japanese anime rather than American, but retain the movies. Then put all of these figures in separate little plastic bags and hang them on pegs on the walls, from floor level up to about six feet up. Then add a good number of larger models and kits of various stuff. Then imagine that you have enough of this to completely cover every vertical surface of the walls and three store-length aisles in a store about 30 feet long, and you’re beginning to imagine what this place was like.

I managed to escape with only four of a particular series of posable, collectable, accessory-laden, almost-completely-unavailable-outside-Japan Gundam figures (out of a series of 30 or so), the purchase of which didn’t quite consume our remaining cash. If you need to ask why, you wouldn’t understand the answer anyway. I asked the store owner whether I could take a photograph inside the store. He apologetically declined which didn’t surprise me at all, so I snuck one from the outside:

Tracie, bless her heart, waited for me patiently:

We eventually wore ourselves out wandering around in this shopper’s nirvana. It definitely had the feel of a place frequented at least as much by locals as by tourists. Here are a couple of odd signs we saw. The first seems to forbid smoking in either of two positions:

This one seems to prohibit inserting hot sticks in children’s ears, and cycling towards pedestrians wearing crowns while you are spoken to in Japanese:

In truth, there are somewhat more clear signs telling people not to ride their bikes through the area; sadly, many people ignore those signs. However, this reminds me of another photo of a sign I’ve been meaning to post. It was on a wide sidewalk in Kamakura; I believe it says “Attention Cyclists! Beware of Flatulent Breakdancers”

We returned to the hotel laden with our treasures. The ceramics we’ll carry on the plane, but we had already established that our luggage is completely full. Fortunately the hotel can cheerfully mail parcels back to the States for us.

This is our last night in Japan. It’s been an excellent vacation, and we’ll be sorry to leave. We may wander into one of the hotel’s 14(!) restaurants and bars for a late snack and/or dessert. There will be another entry or two about our trip. Among other things I need to describe the wonderful dinner we had with Sid and his wife night before last.