tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-63964472503855314192024-03-21T14:01:58.857+01:00Japan 2001Ed Ward's journal of a three-week trip to Japan in September, 2001.Ed Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17805932361842578943noreply@blogger.comBlogger24125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6396447250385531419.post-68378299439994066872008-09-21T16:04:00.003+02:002008-09-21T16:46:21.244+02:00Introduction: 2008The following is a journal I kept in 2001, when I went to Japan for about three weeks. I make no claims for it other than it is one person's view of an experience, recorded more or less in real time. I haven't changed a word (except substituting "cell-phone" for the German "handy," which is a word I like better, but nobody else is going to understand), despite the fact that I've since learned things that have modified some of what I say here, particularly about the place of women in Japanese society. (Thanks, Jim). I also don't apologize for the characterization of some of the people here, most notably Cal, who at the time was miserable, but who has adapted enthusiastically to his situation and is doing lots better, thanks. So much for me as advice-giver, at least in 2001.<br /><br />There's an epilogue to this tale. I was able to afford this trip thanks to a small inheritance. It was my intention, after I returned, to start work on a book which would require me to spend some time in the United States to gather material. Just before I left Berlin, I loaned a sizeable part of my capital to a friend who was on the verge of realizing a visionary project, and who was expecting to sign a lease for a large building here in which to realize it with the help of a major American corporation. This loan was not made lightly: I researched the hell out of the prospective partners, and everything came back good. The loan would have been repaid within a month, and I would have proceeded with my book. <br /><br />Instead, the events of September 11, 2001 intervened. The American partners, who were due in Berlin on September 15 to sign the papers, backed out of all projected non-American deals, this one included. My friend was stuck with a building which, because the world's markets contracted in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, nobody wanted. In short, we both lost everything we had. To this day, neither one of us has really recovered. <br /><br />I don't want to suggest that this is the last good time I had -- certainly it wasn't all a good time, as you'll be able to see between the lines -- or that I'm nostalgic or sentimental about this trip. It is what it is, and since recently, friends of mine have asked about it, I decided to throw it together in an afternoon. As I write, I still haven't finished adding the photos. <br /><br />And if it seems familiar to you, it did, for a short while, exist on a website designed and published by my late friend, Bob Watts, who died this January. Even seven years ago, he designed a much more elegant presentation than this text is getting now, but Blogger is easy and free, so that's what I'm using. <br /><br />There was a time, after this was written and I realized my money would never return, when I was consumed with ifs: if I hadn't loaned the money...if I hadn't gone to Japan...if I'd just written the book proposal first and had the advance to live on... And it's true: if I'd had the money, I would have left Berlin five years ago, when it became evident that there was, really, no reason for me to be here any longer. But there's no excuse for not living in the present, and there's no reason to regret the past if it was as amazing and eye-opening as this particular three-week slice of it was. <br /><br />A few explanations. Online life wasn't like it is now in 2001. I was carrying a laptop, but there was no in-room wireless, and I had to use dialup. Unfortunately, all the phone lines were ISDN, and my modem wasn't compatible. That, the lack of online news sources, and the fact that at the time I was using Compuserve, which fought a long battle against the Internet and the World Wide Web because it wanted to remain proprietary, resulted in my not getting the information about the attacks until a couple of days later. Fortunately, I'd joined <a href=http://www.well.com>the Well</a> earlier in the year, and when I finally could get to a computer, I was able to catch up through postings there. Not only was that community vital in helping me plan the trip, it kept me sane while I, an expat American in Germany on vacation in Japan, was trying to get a sense of balance. The reference to elvispresley.com is to an e-mail account I set up there -- they offered free web-based e-mail -- while I was in Japan because I couldn't get into my Compuserve account. I was especially anxious, because I was writing a lot for the <em>Wall Street Journal</em>, whose offices on Liberty St. in New York were in the shadow of the World Trade Center (my one and only visit, if you can call it that, to the now-vanished buildings was when I walked through the lobby on my way out of the subway station to visit my editors, Ray and Taylor, the year before), and I had no idea if they were even still alive. They were. <br /><br />Would I go back to Japan? I would, for a shorter time, with more clearly-defined goals. Sure, I'd love to go back to Kyoto and Tokyo, at the very least. I'd pace myself better, too, and not try to do so much. But even a mere seven years on, some things cannot be repeated. <br /><br />Coca-Cola no longer makes Water Salad, for one thing.Ed Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17805932361842578943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6396447250385531419.post-31632420743915203032008-09-21T14:53:00.001+02:002008-09-21T15:00:33.245+02:00The Introduction: 2001This whole thing has a couple of origins. <br /><br /> As a kid, I was always fascinated with foreign places, the more “foreign,” the better. Even living near New York, it wasn’t easy to find non-European foreignness, so family trips to Chinatown were really cool. Then Takashimaya, the Japanese department store, opened a branch on 5th Avenue right near 42nd street, and I used to go in there and look for exotic stuff for sale. At some point I acquired a box lined with Japanese cedar, and I loved the smell, which, I thought, brought me closer to that far-off place, which undoubtedly smelled just like the box. <br /><br /> Japan became a reference-point as I grew older. There was the Beats’ interest in Zen, which I tried to read about, but didn’t really get anywhere with (well, I was, like, ten), and once foreign films started getting American audiences, word about ones with obscure titles like <em>Rashomon</em> and <em>Kushingura</em>. <br /><br /> After having totally aced French in high school, I thought I had an amazing talent for languages, so when I got to college, I debated whether I should take German or Japanese, and figured, hell, I can pick up German any time. I lasted about two weeks: not having a hell of a lot of self-insight at the time, I didn’t realize that I had serious problems memorizing stuff, shorn of any linguistic touchstones with which I had had any experience, and this class was <em>all</em> memorization. <br /><br /> I persisted, though. On my first visits to San Francisco, I was lucky enough to stay near Japantown, as it was called, before the big mall was built there, and have a vivid memory of walking down Buchanan Street one sunny day in 1967 and seeing and hearing a young girl playing a koto in a window above the street. Just before I moved there in 1970, I was, I swear, offered an 18th century Japanese teahouse for $175 a month, rather above my means at the time, hidden away on a hillside overlooking the Bay in an area I can’t really name, just up the hill from Tower Records. I really, really tried to figure out how I could do this. <br /><br /> Once I moved, I found myself going over to the new Japanese Trade Center as often as I could, eating udon and ramen in the restaurants, and buying “Crazy Mix” rice crackers with whole little fish in it, which grossed out my friends. After a while, though, this just sort of bled into the general culture of San Francisco, and my Japanophilia waned. It could re-occur, of course, at a moment’s notice. Little Feat came to town once, and Lowell George, who, as a military brat, had grown up partially in Japan, took me to a Japanese restaurant where he dazzled the owner with his command of Japanese and knowledge of its cuisine. I can’t remember at all what we had, but I do remember the experience was amazing. <br /><br /> In 1979, I moved to Texas, and Japan went away. By then, I’d seen some of those movies, and heard the language spoken and, I guess, realized I’d never have gotten anywhere with it. I’d ritualistically go for my nabeyake udon when I visited San Francisco, and shop for avant-garde ballpoints at Kinokuniya Stationery, but that was about it. <br /><br /> I became the book reviewer for the Austin Chronicle, and began reading about Japan in the line of duty. I’d crack that there were places I read about -- India and Japan, most particularly -- so that I’d never have to go there. For the most part, I meant it. <br /><br /> Then one day Louis Black, editor of the Chronicle, called me. John Sayles was in town, and thinking of going to Louisiana to scout locations for his next film. Would I like to cook something for a get-together? So I set about making a jambalaya, and took it out to a park, where Sayles, Maggie Rienzi, his assistant/producer, and various Chronicle folk were. Sayles had long been a hero of mine, and I kept hoping he’d go back some day to writing actual fiction, to supplement his writing and directing films, an art I didn’t understand as well and in which I had trouble monitoring skill and originality. <br /><br /> At any rate, I got there, and we were talking, and Sayles said he’d just spent a month in Okinawa and was so happy not to be there any more. Apparently some film company had offered him a ton of money to come act in a film there and he couldn’t say no to them. “I think that would be fun,” I said, “going to a place where you couldn’t speak or read the language, just totally cut yourself off from that whole process. It would be like being on acid or something, with so many of the traditional guideposts gone.” <br /><br /> Sayles glared at me. “It was NOT FUN,” he thundered. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” I’d clearly made him angry, and he stopped speaking to me for the rest of the evening, although he did thank me for cooking. <br /><br /> More than ten years later, late last year, I heard from my friend, the American composer Carl Stone, that he’d been offered a six-month gig teaching at a college in Japan, and something woke up in my head. Now that I knew someone there, I could go visit! He mentioned that he’d be doing a tour in September, so now I had a date in mind. And, in March, he alerted me that a friend of his named Nick Palevsky would be in Austin at the same time I was, at the SXSW film festival, so I called him when I got to town and we went out to dinner. I mentioned to Nick that Carl was in Japan and I was thinking of visiting, and started babbling about a guidebook to the country I’d reviewed once at the Chronicle, which I considered the best guidebook to anywhere I’d ever seen. “Do you remember the name?” he asked. “Something like Door to Japan...” I said. “Gateway to Japan?” he countered. “Yes!” and then I remembered: I knew Nick’s last name through his father’s involvement with Rolling Stone and had found myself wondering when I had seen the book if this guy were related. The book’s authors are June Kinoshita and Nicholas Palevsky. He got a good laugh out of that. “June’s my ex-girlfriend. I really don’t have anything to do with it any more.” (And I can report, after this trip, that the book is every bit as good as I intuited it would be back when the first edition came out, although they do need to put a new edition together sometime soon: see Kanazawa.)<br /><br /> It turned out that Nick, too, might be in Japan at the same time as Carl’s tour, and also Eric Thiese, another person I’d met through Carl, and, like us, a food nut, was also thinking of coming along. I started making plans in earnest. <br /><br /> I left Berlin for Tokyo Narita Airport on September 5, 2001. <br /><br /> I would find myself playing back that exchange with John Sayles many, many times over the next three weeks. <br /><br />**********<br /><br />References abound to “the book,” which is the guidebook I used, Gateway to Japan, by June Kinoshita and Nicholas Palevsky, and to “Satterwhite’s book,” which is What’s What in Japanese Restaurants, by Robb Satterwhite. Both are absolutely essential to anyone thinking of any but the most superficial trip to Japan, and both are published by Kodansha International.Ed Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17805932361842578943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6396447250385531419.post-71989042472923887072008-09-21T14:46:00.004+02:002008-09-23T11:26:59.179+02:00Sept. 6: TokyoThe first thing I noticed on the Narita Express in from the airport was the bundles of dried grasses, both in the fields and arranged on drying frames. I wasn’t sure what they were, but it was the first sign that I was somewhere new. (It turned out to be rice, which gets bundled, and the bundles split on the frames. I’m not sure if the grain-heads are still on or not, although there are also fires set in piles of what look like dust later in the process).<br /><br /> Not that I needed a whole lot of reminding. If the confusion trying to exchange my voucher for a rail pass and the subsequent buying and using of a telephone card wasn’t enough, there were other sights -- pagodas, a monorail in Chiba, the Right-On sporting goods store -- to hint at it. <br /><br /> Carl was there at Shinjuku station, and we left my luggage at the hotel, a respectable and inexpensive business hotel called the Shinjuku Park, and I suggested we start walking around, because otherwise the jet-lag was going to kill me. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2UZtQgIk3XJRyc0b0bQDFj02lOoIY_2msrbZevDPyz3WPwldm6Bs1BSMSd_13zn4t-cmDPXFtlngfiFBH97EoGd5M3_MWbLIRegpehakSmk4w0hrjOemYJap72mllQ8KvBYTJgH3kLNQ/s1600-h/100-0114.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2UZtQgIk3XJRyc0b0bQDFj02lOoIY_2msrbZevDPyz3WPwldm6Bs1BSMSd_13zn4t-cmDPXFtlngfiFBH97EoGd5M3_MWbLIRegpehakSmk4w0hrjOemYJap72mllQ8KvBYTJgH3kLNQ/s400/100-0114.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5248459748768659170" /></a><br /><br /><em>Carl, me, and some poor guy advertising something at Shinjuku Station</em><br /><br />So we started down the street -- one of the few, he said, in Tokyo with an actual name, Meiji-doro -- and soon hit the entrance to a shrine. Walking in, we came upon a nice pond with koi swimming in it and some turtles sunning themselves on the rocks. Carl clapped his hands, the koi came gathering to be fed, and eventually figured out that it wasn’t gonna happen. He thought we were in a section of the Meiji Shrine, but as it turned out it was a much smaller one with a four-story building that was evidently used for weddings and receptions, the first of the elaborate wedding facilities I would see. I caught the sight of an ornate red-and-gold building that was probably a temple, but there was no way to get at it. Eventually we drifted back into the street. <br /><br /> Next stop was a giant complex of shops all aimed at teenagers, who were there in abundance, mostly girls, buying clothes. There’s an art museum on the top of it, but it was closed for a Sony product introduction for some sort of robot toy, so we soldiered on. The idea was to arrive at this famous ramen joint he knew, but it was too early, so we wandered here and there, eventually winding up at Takeshita-dori, a long, narrow, Carnaby Street-like lane filled with boutiques and coffee shops, another teen mecca. At the end of it was Yoyogi Station, and, beyond that, the actual Meiji Shrine. It was hot, and cicadas were singing as we walked up a long wide path towards the shrine, stopping just short of the entrance to do a ritual purification from a stand with water and scoops. You wash your hands and then take a sip (the water didn’t taste too good to me, but this may have been my debilitated condition). The shrine itself was huge, entered through a torii made from a 1500-year-old cedar from Taiwan (there being, I’m sure, no tree of that age left in Japan) that a patron had bought in 1958. At the shrine we saw some people doing something incomprehensible, dressed in white and walking up and down some stairs. <br /><br /> I wasn’t getting much out of this -- time to go back and consult the book on Shinto symbolism and so on -- so we exited down another long path and found ourselves back in the maelstrom of the city. We soon got to the ramen place, <a href= http://www.jangara.co.jp/ >Jangara </a>, and although I wasn’t as hungry as I could have been, it looked too good to pass up. You order from a little old lady sitting in a booth, and she hands you tokens in various shapes and colors, which denote the ingredients you’ve ordered. When they call you to sit at the counter you hand over your chips and in seconds a huge bowl of ramen with fatty pork, cod roe, a whole hard-boiled egg (a chopstick challenge), and much more appears. We’d ordered supplementary deep-fried garlic, but, as Carl noted, “the flavor of this stuff is so baroque you hardly need to add anything to it.” Elvis was singing on the soundtrack, and it was oddly quiet as people slurped their noodles. I immortalized it by buying a ¥480 keychain which depicted the bowl in miniature with, I think, the name of the place on the side. <br /><br /> This, expectedly, brought on the jet-lag, and after a bit of getting lost -- something I think you have to factor in for Tokyo -- we got back to the hotel, and I slept for three hours. <br /><br /> Carl had made dinner plans with a woman named Mari, who, he said, was a friend of Ornette Coleman’s, and she was offering a choice between a Chinese place and a sashimi place. On my urging -- hell, I didn’t want to eat Chinese food, no matter how good, on my first day in Japan! -- we went for the latter. It turned out to be on the third floor of a tall building in Shinjuku, overlooking the street and a building across the street with a company called NO Loans, a great name. <br /><br /> After protracted discussion with the proprietress on the part of Carl and Mari, a course of action was set. First came a large bottle of Kirin’s fall beer, a crisp, hoppy brew, which we enjoyed while we waited for what came next. I immediately came to grief with ettiquette, since I didn’t know it was polite to raise your glass while your neighbor filled it. The next point of decision was sake, since this place advertised regional sakes. A draft and a bottled one were brought, both with a lovely anise-like start, but then going different ways as to sweetness and finish, the bottled one being less sweet and with a stronger finish. This was the one we chose. Then came the parade. The woman came back with a wooden tub, in the bottom of which was a small, ugly, triangular fish, not looking too happy. It had huge raised spines on its back, and I recognized it from aquariums, although I thought it was called a sea robin and it was, in fact, a lion fish. The spines were deadly, and this place (which also served fugu) was licensed to sell and prepare it. We would have it as sashimi, including its skin and liver (which was exquisite, very foie-gras like), as tempura (six small morsels) and with its head cooked in miso soup. We also had other sashimi, a mix of octopus, abalone (again including the liver), and a fish called hatta, which none of us could identify. There was a course of a red fish, grilled exquisitely, some vegetable sushi (including rounds of eggplant with sweet miso), a savory custard with fish baked into it which the woman decided wasn’t up to their standards, and, thus, didn’t charge us for, and, finally, some simple udon noodles with a dipping sauce. The whole thing came to a whopping ¥18,000 each. It was worth it. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbpE_NP68qbTVWy7MCr8i3iJ_ntCqC7TjELBCpUBMk27i_UL7_A0vr1VLO9X2MjsN8JHeMjx7ZmLvmYv83yKRF9JytpP9Kazv6WYCuG8G1hWnzsKyDLpS_wuK1PF3IAC9xZQlOrWdXIhM/s1600-h/lionfish.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbpE_NP68qbTVWy7MCr8i3iJ_ntCqC7TjELBCpUBMk27i_UL7_A0vr1VLO9X2MjsN8JHeMjx7ZmLvmYv83yKRF9JytpP9Kazv6WYCuG8G1hWnzsKyDLpS_wuK1PF3IAC9xZQlOrWdXIhM/s400/lionfish.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5249145672872983810" /></a><br /><br /><em>Lionfish</em><br /><br /> Needless to say between the quantity of food and the sake, we were pretty gone, having gotten there around 8 and stayed to after 11, so we wandered around Shinjuku’s seamy streets being accosted by sex-show guys and “drink bar” guys -- many of them black Americans (or so I thought, but Carl seems to think they’re from Ghana) -- in search of a place where Mari could get a coffee. Things, however, tend to close at 11, so we had to settle for a weird upscale bar called éf. Before we got there, however, Carl spotted an amusement center with a taiko drum machine. He put his dough in and got to pound his way through two saccharine folk songs, accompanied by bizarre animations including what appeared to be a bunch of penises doing somersaults. This was the second-weirdest apparition of the evening, the first having been a huge video screen at Shinjuku Station on which digitized chihuahuas in various pastel colors wearing tutus and standing on their hind legs were put through choreography by a white one, also with a pastel tutu, and a halo. Kawaii: terminal cuteness, courtesy of Tower Records. <br /><br /> Mari found a taxi right outside the bar, we headed back to the hotel, and it was crashola.Ed Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17805932361842578943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6396447250385531419.post-30568987245459905562008-09-21T14:35:00.001+02:002008-09-21T15:20:13.469+02:00Sept. 7: TokyoUp in the morning and...straight to the vending machines. I’ve been on the lookout for a product called Water Salad, and bought a can of something I thought might be it, then followed with two cans of Coffee Jack Blue Mountain Blend. Blue Mountain coffee from a vending machine? But it did the trick. The other stuff turned out to be a very good V-8 kind of thing. <br /><br /> I was up early, jet-lag having had its way with me, so I read for a while and then called Carl, who suggested we try the Japanese breakfast in the hotel. This turned out to be a lacquer box with a slice of salmon, some mountain potato grated into goo, miso soup, rice, and tofu. We then headed over to Shinjuku Station to get reservations for tomorrow’s trip to Ogaki. <br /><br /> There being time for it, and since we were in the right neighborhood, Carl suggested we check out the food basement of a department store. We headed into Mitsukoshi, and it was like a museum. A museum of stuff you’ve never seen before -- and stuff you have. The first floor we went to was gift foods, stuff elaborately wrapped and packaged, something the Japanese have had down to an art for centuries. There was pastry, jelly candies, rice crackers (I succumbed), sakes, snacks for drinks, teas, beef (very, very fatty and sliced paper-thin for sukiyaki), seaweeds, and other confections and combinations. The floor below was more practical, a super-supermarket for the very wealthy. Your usual selections, only at a much higher quality than normal. There weren’t many people around, given that it was near noon, and no samples to speak of, although I did have half a grape which reminded me of the Concords which came off of my grandmother’s trellised grapevines. <br /><br /> There was still time, so we headed to another department store across the street. As we got there, we saw a line of women stretching around the block, which Carl couldn’t figure out. I had seen a little woman behind a screen telling fortunes on the street, and sure enough, that’s who they were waiting for. Dozens of them. This store, Isetan, was much livelier. We finally figured it out: they were offering samples. So we dove right in. Most of the people manning the departments were very friendly. I had a neat deep-fried meatball, passed on what Carl called “squid guts,” had a piece of what was advertised as “perfect tofu” (close enough), some killer kimchee, and I don’t know what all. I was also exposed to my first hostility to foreigners at a fish stall where the guy moved what Carl described as samples of “ruinously expensive herring roe” the minute we got there and also snatched a plate of little fish from Carl’s hand before he could grab one. He fumed about this for the rest of the day. I mentioned someone’s comment that foreigners in Japan were treated as half rock stars, half lepers, and he said you’ve never really empathized with minorities until you’ve had people change seats on a train to get away from you. (He also said, later, that he disapproves of Westerners using the word “gaijin,” which, he says, has the same resonance as “nigger.”)<br /><br /> It was later than we thought, and Carl had to be at the concert hall for sound check and so on at 3, so we mooched around Shinjuku and finally wound up in a fast-food joint where you look at the plastic food in the window, then buy a ticket for it from a vending machine, hand it to the guy inside, and receive your food by the time you get to the counter. Mine was fried vegetables on soba with some broth, and Carl had curry rice. Neither was particularly spectacular. I didn’t mind, though: I had found some <a href= www.cocacola.co.jp/watersalad/>Water Salad</a> in a vending machine and discovered it’s a product of the Coca-Cola company. I think I may write them a letter when I get back: it’s amazing stuff, very subtle, well blended, if just a tad sweet for my taste. If the pictograms on the front of the can are to be believed, it contains lemon, green pepper, apple, spinach, carrot, pear, tomato, celery, lettuce, grapefruit and grape juices. It’s a masterpiece. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiNLpxNMnoHK-i68eIpXJZRr9P_N-gHDytxcogj8uGoV3kqMZk_iSH8YmBu_dfTj46fIWzQD7DGdoBcL7UdmEmR52X-bWLNPiA9PkFipkMpuVDfDe09FvHmbZap_U47Qa9l1VF1Tn0AD4/s1600-h/watersalad.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiNLpxNMnoHK-i68eIpXJZRr9P_N-gHDytxcogj8uGoV3kqMZk_iSH8YmBu_dfTj46fIWzQD7DGdoBcL7UdmEmR52X-bWLNPiA9PkFipkMpuVDfDe09FvHmbZap_U47Qa9l1VF1Tn0AD4/s400/watersalad.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5248463668706692034" /></a><br /><br /> We headed back to the station and got on the circle line for Ueno. The concert hall turned out to be facing Ueno Station, which was easy enough, so Carl went inside and I headed into Ueno Park, where I sat and read my Japan Times, one of the New York Times/Washington Post collaborations (there’s an IHT/Asahi Shunbun also) on the stands here. It’s a weak paper, with lots of filler and not much content, although it would be okay for kids, given the large amount of fluff in it, like a column on animals. <br /><br /> While I was reading I became aware of a lot of people singing, who could be heard over the crows declaiming Aaa, Aaa, so I got up and went in search of them. Over where they were perfoming, I noticed some imposing buildings, so I backtracked to a sign and discovered it was the National Museum. The singers turned out to be led by a preacher, and were largely comprised of the contingent of homeless people who live all over the park. Each had a laminated piece of paper with the hymn music and lyrics on it, and another piece with prayers. The reason the crowd was so large was pretty apparent as I skirted the service: big vats of food were being stirred, and tanks of tea set into place. <br /><br /> The museum is pretty much the way Nick’s book describes it: filled with priceless treasures, but extremely inadequately captioned. Overall descriptions of each room’s contents are also very superficial and dry. Nonetheless, there’s not much you can do to diminish the effect of the three giant statues, a wrathful deity flanked by two attendants, or a number of serene Buddhas, or three statues of Kannon from the famous temple in Kyoto. One statue of a deity stands in front of an intricately-carved screen of crimson flames. Just about every facet of Japanese art is represented, including textiles and ceramics, and there is a great hall with a small but superb selection of swords, each of which is perfect and quite deadly-looking, and most of which are between 1500 and 500 years old. <br /><br /> Eventually one comes to the entrance to another building in which Japan’s past is described, although again there is much, much more documentation in Japanese than in English. I don’t think it would break the national treasury to print up -- and sell -- a booklet in various foreign languages for foreigners, but they’re not doing it now. One great thing in this building is the collection of haniwa, odd clay statues which were found at the openings of so-called keyhole tombs, named for their shape when viewed from above. Many are portraits, but there is a charming horse whose kawaii content qualifies him for endless reproduction in the souvenir shop. <br /><br /> I had missed the top floor of the main building, so I walked back there and saw the painting and calligraphy sections, although the lighting necessary to display them is so gloomy it’s very hard to make things out. It was getting late, and I was hurrying more than I wanted to, so I may go back when I come back to Tokyo. This didn’t stop me from noting the incredibly derivative late Meiji-era Impressionists, though. <br /><br /> It was nearly 5 by the time I hit the park again, and the homeless guys were all lined up getting haircuts from the Christians. Given that they have a pretty well-defined encampment there, the denial by the authorities that the homeless exist is pretty chilling. I hit Ueno Station with visions of the famous Tokyo rush hour in my head, but I was headed the other direction, and the ride was actually spent sitting down, for the most part. I hit the hotel, changed my shirt, threw my ticket voucher into my bag, and turned around to go back to Ueno. One nice thing about shows here is how early they start: 7pm, ending about 9, which gives plenty of time for an interval. <br /><br /> The show was in the recital hall, a relic, as Carl pointed out, of the Olympics in the ‘60s, with radical concrete walls in a rough but deliberate Japanese style I rather like. There were plenty of people, too, although it was far from filled, and lacking any more specific directions I just plonked down in the third row. Eventually, the lights went down, and Tomoko Yazawa, the pianist, came out wearing jeans and a backless top with stars and stripes on it, reminiscent of Wonder Woman. She sat down at a synthesizer and opened with one of the David Lang pieces, “Cage,” which had her hammering away such that it sounded like there was a digital echo, a very interesting sound, given the dry tone of the synthesizer. This was followed by “Far Away From Here,” which she co-wrote with Horkazu Hiraishi, and had a drum-and-bass component on tape, although the piano part was austere in an appealing way. Next up was the Frank Zappa composition, “Ruth Is Sleeping,” which, perhaps because of my jet-lagged condition (the Coffee Jack I’d had at the hotel was letting me down: it’s the damn sugar) I found incomprehensible. Hell, I think that about his “popular” music, so why not this? It was virtuosic -- scored for four hands, although she seemed to be equipped with only two -- but empty. Again, just like his pop work. Scott Johnson’s “Jet Lag Lounge” was next, and I was really drifting. It seemed pleasant enough, but I’d really have to hear it again. Another Lang piece, similar to the first, was next, and the first half concluded with Hirokazu Hiraishi’s “Fire,” which pitted live piano against taped piano and electronics. <br /><br /> I stretched some, talked with some San Francisco-based art administrators and a guy who runs a fellowship program to bring artists to Japan, and felt a bit more awake. The second half opened with Scott Johnson’s “Maybe You,” which began with that phrase, electronically manipulated, the piano tracing around it, and the track filling up with cello, electric guitar, and other electronics which might have been the words even more distorted. A collaboration with Masahiro Sugaya, “Gyration,” followed, pretty undistinguished, and then Carl’s new piece, “Tlapazola,” which he had described to the arts administrators as “a bagatelle” while explaining why he’d graciously ceded the concert’s finale for it. It’s nice, quite subtle, with a taped piano playing alongside the real one, but gradually doing things which show that it’s been manipulated electronically. The video for this one -- there was video for all of them, hard to make out against the grey of the concrete walls -- showed Japanese children playing in Ameican concentration camps during the War, a brilliant montage put together by Sugaya. It was, yes, a bagatelle, but it was a lively and pleasant one. The finale, “The Same Sky,” by Carolyn Yarnell, had its own color video, and a track which seemed to have been recorded on the same piano Tomoko was playing, giving the piece a great hall-of-mirrors quality which brought about quite a response at the end. Tomoko, clad for the second half in a sheer silk pantsuit, encored with “Far Away From Here,” although I think she may have improvised some of it differently from the first time around. <br /><br /> There followed the usual post-concert sit around and wait, and I talked to a director from New York who’d been at Bellagio with Carl, and with various others, and then drifted out for a cigarette, which finally caused the caffeine to kick in. This was good, because things always take a long tme after a show, and this one was no exception. I talked for a while with the director, and the arts administrators came out and we talked some, and finally we were shooed out by the usherettes. Outside, I began talking with Scott Johnson, who was over here for the event, and he started complaining about how the guys in the academy have ignored popular music for so long that a vital strain in what he called the “cultural ecology” was dormant and in danger of dying. This came from a remark I’d made about how he should sell t-shirts at his gigs (and I was only half joking, since I know Carl does well selling CDs at gigs), and I think this opened up for me the possibility of a panel at SXSW on the crisis in the avant-garde. I’ll e-mail them about this if I can ever get my damn e-mail to work at the same time as I’m around a telephone that also works.<br /><br /> The deal was that we were going to get a meal, and the good news was Noda-san was there. He’s kind of Carl’s road manager and advance man in Japan, and is a true foodie, an expert in Japan’s regional cuisines. In junior high, he’d been in an accident on his bicycle with a car, and after he recovered, he never went back, I later learned. He is nonetheless very well versed in avant-garde music and performs road manager services for a number of acts, both Japanese and foreign, when they tour the country. <br /><br /> A long, long discussion between Tomoko (who was now wearing a skimpy top and jeans open at the top to reveal a kind of black silk jockstrap with studs -- did I mention that she’s a complete babe?) and Noda and several others who were standing around as to what to do next resulted in a plan finally being hatched -- and a good thing, because it was getting on to 11 -- and we jumped on the train and headed to Shinjuku. As soon as we got off the train, cell-phones were put into action and Noda-san scored. A call was placed to Tomoko and Scott in her car and we headed off through streets lightly misted with rain to a cellar bar with what seemed to be hundreds of food options -- Japanese tapas, as it were. This sort of place is called an izakaya.<br /><br /> There were green soy beans on the table when we sat, and we gave Noda full freedom to order. Thank heavens. Some chicken cartilage (with some meat still on them) with kimchi, skewers of thin-sliced pork, Osaka-style pressed sushi with mackerel, tofu in a soupy cod-roe sauce, clams in a thin broth, a delicious simple broiled fish (“No word in English, it comes from very cold waters,” said Noda), a kind of Japanese guacamole with saltines, chicken gizzards and green peppers in a great mustard sauce (the gizzards were too stringy, though), tofu with tiny, tiny deep-fried fish, and I think there must have been more...all washed down with good cold Asahi beer. It was a great party, and clearly all those who had participated in the concert appreciated it. <br /><br /> It was also not very far from the hotel, and my SXSW idea kept coming on as we walked back, contrasting the way Kronos, Glass, Reich, and Adams were marketed almost as pop stars, and the idea that people like Tomoko, too, should be able to be marketed like that while giving exposure to new composers. Somebody should set up a record label with a relationship with a major or strong indie, put out a dozen records over two years, liberally salted with electronic and chamber works which are cheap to record, with one release by a star like Glass, and marketed to the avant-rock and dance markets. This, I think, is what Scott was talking about, although he didn’t have the idea, just an informed observation of the symptoms. <br /><br /> Time to leave Tokyo tomorrow, so I went back, had a nightcap while thinking on all of this, and crashed.Ed Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17805932361842578943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6396447250385531419.post-13636082635969053622008-09-21T14:26:00.001+02:002008-09-21T14:35:01.711+02:00Sept. 8: Ogaki, GifuWas it hot this morning? Texas-like; Karen had visited here last year in September, and warned me that I’d encounter “Houston Weather,” but I’d secretly decided it would be early fall, and had packed accordingly. Stupid. We headed out for a coffee and roast-chicken-and-mayonnaise-on-spongey-bagel sandwich, then went back, packed, went to Shinjuku, and rode over to Tokyo Station. <br /><br /> The first order of business, of course, was to buy bento for ourselves, and then Carl had to buy gifts for his girlfriend Yoshiko’s family. Then we found our seats on the famous Shinkansen bullet train, where Carl decided to hop off for a minute and get drinks to go with the bento. He got back on, and said he’d found Fuji-san-side seats up front, so we hustled down there. The train is not only fast, but remarkably steady, unlike the TGV. We rocketed through an urban landscape, with only little pockets of agriculture, and gradually mountains -- or at least large hills -- started to appear. The day, however, was too hazy for Fuji-san. Hope I’ll see it on the way back to Tokyo. <br /><br /> Carl worked nearly the whole way -- he says he has no spare time between now and leaving for the America-Barcelona trip on the 22nd, and it would appear he’s right. However, about 30 minutes out of Nagoya, he remembered the bentos, and we ate. Mine had vegetable sushi, fried chicken, an awful gray yam-jelly cube, cucumber pickle, pickled huge black bean, and he’d picked up another small side of fried octopus, chicken, and whole shrimp. The drink he’d gotten me was Grapefruit Water, which was unfortunately skewed towards the sugar side, not towards grapefruit or water, but it was okay. <br /><br /> We wrestled our luggage through Nagoya station and got the local to Ogaki, and it was, if anything, hotter than in Tokyo. My hotel was the APA, a nice place right at the station, and I had to “join” APA Hotels to qualify for a ¥1000 discount, but once that was accomplished, I went up to the room for a minute before we went back to the station to deal with my travel plans for tomorrow. The electricity didn’t work, and when I went back down, Carl laughed and pointed out that I had to insert the keychain in a slot in the wall to make it work. This saves energy, but would seem to defeat comfort, in that the air conditioning won’t work otherwise, nor will the refrigerator. <br /><br /> The guy at the station said I didn’t need reservations for the train to Takayama, so Carl went back to the house and I went to the room to watch TV and enjoy a cold can of Love Body, Coca Cola’s green tea in a can. Carl had suggested a nearby town as being colorful and interesting, but it was so hot I didn’t feel particularly adventurous, so I just sat around and watched TV until dinnertime. <br /><br /> Japanese TV certainly was interesting. I was looking for commercials, which are my usual barometer for a country’s commercial culture, but it was hard to tell what was a commercial and what wasn’t, except in very overt circumstances where the production values were far greater than what I’d been watching; for instance car ads. For a while I watched a channel where a couple of young women went here and there, ooohing and aaahing about everything in and around a totally over-the-top Swiss chalet kind of vacation spot: the rooms, the beds, the onsen, the food. It looked like an infomercial, but Carl claims that these are informational programs about vacations, and although some “promotional considerations” exist, they’re really not ads. I’m not so sure, myself. <br /><br /> From there, I found some news, with footage of the fire in Shinjuku which had killed 44 people a couple of weeks ago in a multi-story entertainment building with a mah-jongg parlor and a “sexual harrassment clinic.” There was also a piece which showed cops crawling along a highway and a rectangle outlined in dark plastic. This turned out to be news of the arrest of a schoolteacher who had killed a 12-year-old girl. She had called her mother on her cell-phone and told her she’d be home in a minute, and five minutes later she was found dead and handcuffed by the side of the road. Crime isn’t common in Japan, but when it happens, it’s weird, and this looks like a real strange one. (Later, I found out more about this case; it turned out that the teacher was running a dating service using middle-school girls, and she was part of it. This is apparently not an uncommon phenomenon, apparently not seen as immoral or weird, for some reason, and these girls make extra money having sex with these older guys. One disturbing detail I read in the paper was that she’d told him she was only 12, and he’d said that was okay, he didn’t mind. So...what was <em>she</em> thinking? And where are the parents in stories like this?)<br /><br /> Flip, flip, flip, searching for ads, and suddenly everything was food: a fishing show which seemed to be hyping a reel with a LCD display attached to it which gave you various data on what your line was doing, “sponsored” by the manufacturer, and a thing on “pimen” growing, ie, pimentos. And guess who wound up eating the pimen? The ooh-aah girls! Then there were two teenage girls visiting the site of the ‘98 Winter Olympics, doing their own oohing and aahing, and a report on exotic animal smuggling on the Vietnam-China border. <br /><br /> Carl called about 7:10 saying we were ready to go get some sushi in Gifu. As he called I was watching a commercial for a Pringles-like product in which the words “Angry European Potato” flashed by. I never saw it again, although Carl did: there’s a guy lying in a field eating these potato chips, and an animated potato comes up to him and asks him for one. The guy says no, and that’s when the flash happens. I want an angry European potato!<br /><br /> The sushi place was magnificent. When we walked in, all the sushi chefs started yelling greetings. “Oh, you’ve been here before,” I quipped. But it turns out that’s what the Japanese do whenever anyone enters a restaurant or a store. Makes you feel good, initially, although I would soon get very, very tired of it. They also say good-bye the same way, possibly with even more gusto, considering, in this place, how much money they’d just made. The old guy who ran it was in the hospital with a hernia, evidently, and the crew for the evening was mostly his sons, but they had all manner of great stuff, including a tank in the back which had fish swimming in perfectly clear water, as opposed to the sick fugu we’d seen while wandering around Shinjuku. We started out with a selection of sashimi, octopus, maguro, toro, salmon, shrimp and sweet egg omelet, then went on to the sushi: crab legs, whale, horse, huge shrimp, and I finished off with the Platonic ideal of grilled eel. I passed on crab brains and squid guts, though, and, although he made fun of me, I notice Carl did, too. <br /><br /> The night landscape of Gifu was so much like America, with its neon and chain restaurants and stores that it was a study in cultural confusion: what were all these Japanese characters doing there? And why were we driving on the wrong side of the road? There were just enough American chains mixed in to heighten the confusion. One pachinko chain I saw twice featured a huge Statue of Liberty flashing various lights and with a truly psychedelic torch. Back in Gifu we delivered a bottle of wine to a bartender at what Carl said was Ogaki’s only decent bar, Barrel, and I was rewarded with a shot of Old Fitzgerald 1849, which I haven’t seen in years. Outside was a bridge with a historical marker about a local stonemason who had erected a milestone there (it’s still there) in the 19th century telling people how to get out of Ogaki, which, I gathered, was Ogaki’s only historical monument, but a useful and thoughtful one. Back to the hotel and to sleep, sorta, although the pillow sure was hard. The solo journey starts tomorrow.Ed Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17805932361842578943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6396447250385531419.post-20401621643038844202008-09-21T14:21:00.003+02:002008-09-23T11:34:43.991+02:00Sept. 9: TakayamaCertainly getting to Takayama wasn’t too difficult. I jumped on a train to Gifu, was there in 15 minutes, and had a 40-minute layover there in a lovely covered, air-conditioned garden space, surely the most luxurious train station waiting room I’ve ever seen, before the big-windowed train into the scenic mountains left. However, ten minutes before it did leave, I noticed that all the cars were reserved, the man at the station in Ogaki notwithstanding. In a flash, though, I had not only a reservation, but one in first class, which went unchallenged. <br /><br /> The journey itself was plenty nice. The mountains started almost immediately, although I suspect these weren’t the Japanese Alps, as such. They were all below the tree-line and there was no snow, for one thing. But there was lots of agriculture, mainly rice, and soon we joined a river which produced some fine gorges with weathered rocks. The main problem was it was 90 degrees out there. Oh, and I’d run out of money. With luck, there’d be a cash-machine in Takayama, and the dire predictions I’d heard about the lack of them wouldn’t be true.<br /><br /> So the first thing I did when I checked in at the Best Western was ask about a cash machine. There was one across the street. I went over there and...the bank was closed, but the machines in the part that was open sure didn’t look useable. I asked again and received a map, on which the desk clerk indicated a couple which she thought would work. <br /><br /> I walked down to the first one, several blocks away, and it didn’t seem to work at all. I tried two cards and nothing. This was bad: I had only ¥1000 and some change in my pocket, and time was ticking away. I consulted my map and found to my delight that the Takayama Jinja was quite near, and after much circumnavigating the thing, I finally found my way to the entrance. It cost ¥400 to get in, but I was sure I’d find a machine soon, so I paid. The Jinja was where the regional administrator lived and worked during the Edo period, under incredible pressure from the capitol to produce revenue from the local agriculture and mining, something which kept the entire region poor, and led to the occasional riot, which usually cost the administrator his head, particularly if, as some of them had, they’d sided with the rioters. It had sumptuous rooms with tatamis on the floor (I had to remove my shoes and carry them with me as I toured the place), and a torture chamber for extracting those last tiny coins from the populace. <br /><br /> Back outside, I noticed a ricksha with a guy dressed as a samurai waiting. This is a tour service (only in Japanese) that’s run here for the tourists. But I was panicking now: I had to find some dough. I followed the map to where the bank should have been, but found nothing, so I crossed over the bridge to Sannomachi, the described in the tourist literature as “old private houses.” This is picturesque, sure, but lined from one end to the other with tourist shops -- and tourists. I was starving by now -- I hadn’t had breakfast because I’d slept too long the night before, hadn’t bought a bento in Gifu because it was so hot I wasn’t hungry, and it was now catching up to me. Just outside the Jinja, I’d bought some mochi balls dipped in shoyu and grilled on a stick (mitarashi-dango), which helped fuel me up, and then on the samurai street, I’d bought a similar thing, only Popsicle-shaped. I also found a place where big discs of rice cracker were dipped in shoyu, grilled, and served with a big pice of nori, which was fantastic, but now I was dying of thirst. I did at least have presence of mind enough to snap a few photos, including one of a wonderful little doll of a guy with a box in his hands, who, powered by a water-wheel driven by what I guess was once an open sewer that runs down both sides of the street, raises and lowers it, revealing a different plastic food model every time. Very ingenious. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjP2sDKqljy2jR03IPrgJYtQknbkB4-ovw6Or2NECgz7n1pv5t7apvZz2Mykt1lPkQp8YLesQlzVIV7JdfdyrgFBWrc8xEgCQRolYX_1sbDzYZpPOAKYkEuN3jkezT-ZnDtC2h8DaAyXB0/s1600-h/mitarashi-dango.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjP2sDKqljy2jR03IPrgJYtQknbkB4-ovw6Or2NECgz7n1pv5t7apvZz2Mykt1lPkQp8YLesQlzVIV7JdfdyrgFBWrc8xEgCQRolYX_1sbDzYZpPOAKYkEuN3jkezT-ZnDtC2h8DaAyXB0/s400/mitarashi-dango.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5249147502184604018" /></a><br /><br /><em>Mitarishi-dango</em><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-cDTquQf6bLLGcwkpxd_pUCy2TcL0jALeLI8IE-7OT3DvY1ma7Uffx1Rl5_Wjtzm7VKYDI5QrrymJg3tZRVtJLQI9F-HevFSfxzahnORP_4AcIENUK8YbrF4SsJdokCtGWmNkRZ_HcBw/s1600-h/boxguy.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-cDTquQf6bLLGcwkpxd_pUCy2TcL0jALeLI8IE-7OT3DvY1ma7Uffx1Rl5_Wjtzm7VKYDI5QrrymJg3tZRVtJLQI9F-HevFSfxzahnORP_4AcIENUK8YbrF4SsJdokCtGWmNkRZ_HcBw/s400/boxguy.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5248460654878444786" /></a><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRJiqNEXhjMNLfokQTaAPoS_90gGq-BEe3KIjMP4_eVOQtJBQxynJBSbVY0haFpLL_-CNjtX9I9rYqauLaXd4koAA-LT9BhQUZ9SKlnOGRlhBlYy3GGMcBgEaLoBdwLc3V6NqFpg1lRbs/s1600-h/boxguy2.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRJiqNEXhjMNLfokQTaAPoS_90gGq-BEe3KIjMP4_eVOQtJBQxynJBSbVY0haFpLL_-CNjtX9I9rYqauLaXd4koAA-LT9BhQUZ9SKlnOGRlhBlYy3GGMcBgEaLoBdwLc3V6NqFpg1lRbs/s400/boxguy2.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5248460863591558066" /></a><br /><br /><em>The little box guy</em><br /><br /> Things tend to close at 5, and it was getting to that point, so I wandered up a street to find a huge temple complex with a stage with a giant bell in the middle of it (not explained in the book, for some reason), and, finally, a vending machine with ...Water Salad! I walked down the hill, to the place where the bank was supposed to be and discovered that, approaching it from this direction, a small kiosk with an ATM was, indeed, visible. I went in and got my dough, and, feeling better, walked back along the street it was on and found a sake shop which also featured a number of hand-crafted beers from the Hida Takayama Brewing Agricultural Corporation, Ltd. (since 1996), of which I bought their dark ale. (Carl told me later that the stuff in a blue bottle with a bird on it, which was also on sale there, is like Christmas ale, brewed with spices). A man in the shop rushed out to ask me what I was going to do with it, and I told him I was headed back to the hotel to drop it into the refrigerator, which soothed him. Microbrewers take their craft seriously. <br /><br /> And that’s what I did, too. It was nearing 6, and time for some down-time. Nick’s book seemed to indicate that restaurants closed at 7, which was hard to believe, but at least now I had money to get some grub. Around 7:15, that’s what I decided to do, so I walked out of the hotel, turned the corner and saw a bunch of dark restaurants. There was one, however, which looked open, and it had an Engrish menu -- lots of “flied” things -- outside, so I went in. A bunch of locals sat at a bar, drinking sake and choshu and eating various pickles and side-dishes displayed in front of them in huge bowls, but there was also a tatami area where one couple was eating, so I took off my shoes and sat down there and ordered a local specialty, miso grilled on a “big leaf” with sliced beef (hoha-miso). This came accompanied by some pickles, miso soup, rice, iced tea (!), and a raw egg in the middle. The bartender looked at me and said “You scramble,” so I did. It was lovely, although it was something of a race to cook the beef and fern stems before the leaf started to burn. I’d ordered a beer, and as I was finishing it, an old guy at the bar turned around and smiled at me. <br /><br /> He then ordered a bottle of beer and weaved over to my table. The waitress came over and started translating. “He says he doesn’t speak your language, but he sees you have good eyes and maybe you can talk with the heart.” So I poured him some beer, he poured me some, and the place turned into a circus of serial translations. He was a tourist, too, who’d driven from somewhere I didn’t catch, “far away,” according to the waitress, and the next day he was getting up at 6 and driving to the Noto Peninsula. The restaurant folks thought he was crazy to take such a long drive, but he was going to do it anyway. I had noticed a data-port at the hotel, and was kind of chafing at the bit to get back and see if I could get my e-mail to work, something I’d been unable to do so far. But manners dictated that I stay, and I finally pried myself away at about 9. The waitress walked outside with me and we noted how hot it was. And, at that hour, it still was. <br /><br /> Frustration back at the hotel: my goddam software still wouldn’t detect a dial-tone due to the busy-signal-like tone the hotel phone generated. So I got a Kirin from the vending machine, my ale was waiting in the fridge, and I read until 11, when I turned in, determined to get to the Morning Market the next day, and forge onward to Kanazawa.Ed Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17805932361842578943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6396447250385531419.post-51641903595226206972008-09-21T14:12:00.003+02:002008-09-23T11:31:54.387+02:00Sept. 10: Takayama, KanazawaThe tail end (actually the front end, as we’ll see) of a typhoon hit late last night, sort of breaking the heat wave. At any rate, it was definitely raining when I woke at 7:15 this morning, making me wonder if I was actually going to be able to do any further exploration in Takayama before my train left just before 1. But the first order of the day was breakfast. I headed downstairs to the Baker’s Field coffee shop (which advertised itself as a California restaurant), resigned to a Western breakfast because when I’d checked in, the girl assured me there was only American breakfast to be had. The pictures made it look semi-appealing, however, so I didn’t seek out any other places, and frankly don’t know where I would have looked. <br /><br /> You’d have been hard put to make a decent American breakfast out of what was on offer, though: some horrid-looking scrambled eggs and a few pastries, plus coleslaw and potato salad. Instead I went for the miso soup, a cup of rice, a wide assortment of pickles, some smoked fish, and a tiny cup of that legendary substance of debate, natto. Folks, natto is gooey. No getting around it. There was a tiny packet inside the well-packed cup with some mustard and something that sort of looked like shoyu, and I mixed that in, but I gotta say it didn’t do much for or against the flavor, which was not unlike baked beans as invented by the Japanese. But gooey? I later found a slime trail down my t-shirt, which must have gotten there from an ill-aimed jab of the sticks. <br /><br /> It was getting onto 8:15 after I’d nabbed some coffee from the vending machines and typed in yesterday’s notes, and I had decided to investigate the north end of town, starting, of course, with the Morning Market. I was starting to get a bit wet by the time I got there, but at least I’d beaten the bus-driven crowds I saw later. What was on offer was what was seasonal. One lady offered me a generous slice of apple from a pile she had, each not only perfect (all Japanese apples are perfect; I guess the rest get made into applesauce or something) but with a trademark, probably put there by applying scotch tape with the trademark in black letters so it doesn’t ripen as dark as the surrounding skin. Amazing. Another granny lady insisted I take an odd green sweet, which was barley sugar and ...something. I eventually gave it to the river, because there was so much else to taste. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNHjZPUOP5-ZE0NeSFFTF3ILfHETOweD2gGRjze7BPq4W1oEofr030rqTEukbwXhZvM42VOJK6uNxfRVenwprPYsVbDePoVxb_aneCi47PR973hv1f-5_Mxv6z0J36rnxF7IYjOf2SkJ0/s1600-h/100-0125.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNHjZPUOP5-ZE0NeSFFTF3ILfHETOweD2gGRjze7BPq4W1oEofr030rqTEukbwXhZvM42VOJK6uNxfRVenwprPYsVbDePoVxb_aneCi47PR973hv1f-5_Mxv6z0J36rnxF7IYjOf2SkJ0/s400/100-0125.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5248461441740396162" /></a><br /><br />One lady was putting the finishing touches on a turban squash, which she’d made into a funny face, and I shot her picture. Another guy insisted I try one of his not-too-sweets, made from sesame (“This one peanut, sesame; this one peanut, sesame; this one peanut, sesame” he said of three different colored varieties of the same thing, each of which tasted differently, and none of them of peanuts), and there were also eggplants in sizes between thumb size and the length of my hand, okra, those peppers that look like large serrano chiles but are mild, some early gourd squashes, some really sick-colored tomatoes (reminiscent of the ones I grew in the Bay Area before I learned you can’t ripen them there), and several miso and shoyu merchants who were grilling those leaves like I’d had for dinner last night. <br /><br /> Past the market was the road to the two houses, the Kusakabe Mingeikan and the Yoshijima-ke. The former Nick’s book describes as a “folk art museum,” but it’s hard to tell what exactly is on display here, since the little English sheet they give you doesn’t really say and there’s no other English documentation. It’s a nice enough house, built in the 1880s by a master builder for a guy whose family made most of its money loaning money to the local government, after his ancestral home burned down. They serve you tea and rice crackers after you pad around the tatamis in your socks, but I wasn’t too impressed, especially since a video downstairs which explains the house in Japanese has some of that horrible fake classical music the Japanese seem to do so “well,” cf. the hall music in the hotels, and you could hear it vaguely from just about everywhere in the place.<br /><br /> Since it was next door, I went to the Yoshijima-ke after watching some guys across the street make tatamis for a while. This house is notable for what’s not in it. No collection of ceramics and kimonos, just great bare lines, amazing light, a scroll or two, and, at the moment, some contemporary artist’s ink paintings. It was built in 1905, and after looking at the pictures of the Hamburg art collectors’ houses in the teens and ‘20s at a show earlier this year, I tried to imagine the impact something like this would have had on a European who was used to the clutter and chaos of lines that, even in the ‘20s, were the norm. Any architect with any pretensions towards reform would have had his brain strip-mined by this place. It’s still avant-garde. And they insisted I have some coffee afterwards, so now I was full as could be. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh01BwNF9Y0aH2ke9oRB-TYQgTWoAM9URYJI4mnM3FwrEllLCEaquU-XeXhdsjWmWRSFwEZQ4xDE4bicklCpwvUI4sEL-a7V5ln-NKldE-ajcmq4fxqyxRWLvXbCIV2MXDj2po67cNJVr0/s1600-h/teahook.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh01BwNF9Y0aH2ke9oRB-TYQgTWoAM9URYJI4mnM3FwrEllLCEaquU-XeXhdsjWmWRSFwEZQ4xDE4bicklCpwvUI4sEL-a7V5ln-NKldE-ajcmq4fxqyxRWLvXbCIV2MXDj2po67cNJVr0/s400/teahook.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5248461993140178338" /></a><br /><br /><br /> There was still a lot of time left before I had to grab my bags and head to the station, so I headed back to Sannomachi, where, not being desperate and hungry, I took things much slower. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-zS58sGFxgs3-BQsUsi8ZreE5YZ-xczbsC4A8PAXCBb-57LE5ZdEy2ANSstMjnS59QFUu-CVc5q4k7co6h3FPYu_qZoUlYa95e8_xAABk6o_SABibtfMGCbIeSGpGigU6oYLG7czXeNw/s1600-h/sannomachi1.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-zS58sGFxgs3-BQsUsi8ZreE5YZ-xczbsC4A8PAXCBb-57LE5ZdEy2ANSstMjnS59QFUu-CVc5q4k7co6h3FPYu_qZoUlYa95e8_xAABk6o_SABibtfMGCbIeSGpGigU6oYLG7czXeNw/s400/sannomachi1.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5248462310379903074" /></a><br /><br />This time I noticed the globes of cryptomeria above the sake brewers’ shops, looked carefully at some of the weird food items (mostly pickles), and found that you can buy miso and leaves for grilling (of course this means you then have to buy a charcoal burner and a little screen to put the leaf on), checked some of the lacquerware and ceramics on sale, and just dawdled around. Takayama is famous for its spring and fall fesivals, which involve a dozen or so floats being carried through the streets. The rest of the year, they “live” in sort of garages throughout the town, and there’s a plaque in front of each explaining its history. Before each, there’s a little box with a rubber stamp. I guess Japanese tourists carry a book with them and, having found each float, stamp the book with its image. Voila: the origin of Pokemon: gotta catch ’em all!<br /><br /> Still having time to kill, I walked down to the street where I’d bought the ale the night before and strolled it slowly, checking out what Takayamans really buy. At one place, I saw a guy making vegetable sushi, just about to start dealing with some he was unwrapping. He saw me looking and waved me in. He was a young guy, in his 30s, and spoke impeccable English because he’d hung out some in San Francisco. We talked food (“Indian food is the best: I went to Calcutta and Benares to eat it.”) and he showed me how this pressed rice was covered with ginger and then layered with pickled daikon. I didn’t want to delay him, since the lunch hour was coming on and people would be in to buy bentos, but I left feeling good, once again. <br /><br /> That street stretched on much further than I’d thought and pretty soon I was walking under a New Orleans-like covered sidewalk checking out this and that along the way. Best was a record shop with a poster for what might be a battle of the bands, with the words “Pizza of Death Crap” at the bottom. Definitely worth a pic. And, opening up off of this street was what was evidently the “entertainment quarter,” jammed with bars and places with names like Ruby Snack, which sure didn’t look like they served many snacks. But the bars all seemed to be tiny and they were jammed together like nobody’s business. Weird: in America, you’d try to have as big a bar as possible and attract a lot of folks to it. Here, a ten-man bar would seem to be the norm. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihorJzfU2WkHyj-TBUi0m_OKsbH-fyvtsxAqMtV_JYeJ7xVb7UVbf3XVEzWiuuVlbBskNELWfn3lOQeOPtlOUL3d1j3IxcA1IhpB25KBEJP3QbMfPEwJNRDzdNFhYz7CLJJP3bpjRq-d8/s1600-h/DeathCraps.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihorJzfU2WkHyj-TBUi0m_OKsbH-fyvtsxAqMtV_JYeJ7xVb7UVbf3XVEzWiuuVlbBskNELWfn3lOQeOPtlOUL3d1j3IxcA1IhpB25KBEJP3QbMfPEwJNRDzdNFhYz7CLJJP3bpjRq-d8/s400/DeathCraps.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5249146449856640402" /></a><br /><br /><em>Death Pizza Records turned out to be an interesting story: started by a guy who'd financed it by being a pizza delivery guy, who said</em> "Desu pizza" <em>-- "Here's your pizza" -- each time he delivered one. "It sounded like 'Death Pizza' to me,' he said, so that became the name of the label. Oddly, it featured wispy folkie acoustic stuff, for the most part.</em><br /><br /> Trouble is, that took me out from under the cover at a point when it really started coming down. I was pretty soaked by the time I got to the hotel to claim my luggage, and I noticed that I hadn’t closed the flap on my shoulder bag and some of my reading matter was the worse for water. Ugh. <br /><br /> Finally made it to the station, waited a few minutes, and here came the train to Toyama, where I’d change for the 45-minute trip to Kanazawa. Great trip, too: nearly all agricultural, especially once we climbed out of the mountains and got into the coastal flatlands. Rice predominated, in tiny fields stuck anywhere they could be stuck. Often, a small cemetery looked out over the rice-fields, which I found moving. Farmers in conical hats and the traditional jackets were working them, too, right out of Hiroshige’s Manga. There were orchards, several kinds of squash growing here and there, lots of taro, with its elephant-ear leaves, and other stuff I couldn’t identify. The scale of the fields -- I don’t eat much rice, but I probably could empty one of the smaller ones in a year if you count restaurant food -- made me wonder where the giant agribusiness was. Surely it’s there. <br /><br /> Certainly other kinds of giant businesses have imposed themselves on Toyama. It didn’t look like such a hot place and doesn’t get many words in Nick’s book. Pretty soon the Thunderbird, headed for Osaka, came and I headed to Kanazawa. <br /><br /> Kanazawa greeted me with more rain, and although I could see my hotel, I couldn’t seem to get to it, which was frustrating. I eventually plowed through the station’s bus depot and found my way there. The Holiday Inn, recommended by Nick’s book, was...a Holiday Inn. I’d hoped it was the ideal combo of East and West the Best Western had been in Takayama, but it turned out to be the good old green and shades-of-brown Holiday Inn of the ‘60s, from which it almost certainly dates. It being way too early for dinner, I decided to find the market, which had been recommended (the sushi guy in Takayama called it the “Fisherman’s Wharf of Japan”), and took off uncertainly towards it. This city, for certain, wasn’t as tourist-friendly as Takayama, which, to be fair, probably makes a good deal of its living off of tourism (and as such is a pretty good orientation spot for this country). There are no maps, no tourist brochures, in English, and no tourist office in the train station that I could ever find. But I eventually found the market and it was hopping at 5 o’clock as people jammed it, searching for late-day bargains. What was evident was that the crab were in, several different kinds, in fact, including one which looked like it was covered with hair, as well as the more famous snow crab. There was also a weird medicine stand with dried snakes and turtles. But people were pulling up their stands, and I’d gotten a good idea what was there, so I made my pass through and decided to head back. Since the Miyako across the street from my hotel had a good skyline profile, I decided I wouldn’t get lost if I deviated from my previous route, so I walked down a street and found another market. This was a covered one like the food market, but had other kinds of shops in it; some marked with what appeared to be the seal of some organization which specialized in certifying the place’s adherence to tradition. One made shrines for the home, another cloth. The place was almost deserted, although some shops were still open. I left, walked down a road leading to the hotel, and passed a huge shrine which abutted the covered market. <br /><br /> Back at the hotel, I was wet, sweaty, and badly in need of a shower, which I took, phoning the front desk for a reservation (which it turned out I hardly needed) at the recommended seafood restaurant in the basement. I typed the first part of this, read about the town in the book, and wondered if I’d be able to venture out at all tomorrow. At 8:30 I went down for dinner, and got a “set” of mixed seafood with something resembling mayonnaise; a soup called jibujibu which was brought to the table raw and mounted on a brazier, which heated the iron pot and boiled the soup, cooking the duck meat, mushrooms and vegetables within; sashimi, including the local “sweet shrimp”; a small portion of crab; various pickles, miso soup, and the piece de resistance, a fried crabshell filled with crabmeat and breadcrumbs, resembling an American “stuffed crab,” right down to the mayo and frozen green peas. Weird. <br /><br /> After that I headed to a beer-store nearby I’d found on my walk and got a couple of cans of that Kirin autumn beer, which had a light sourness to its usual ricey crispness that was hard to place. Very nice stuff; I saw Sapporo also makes one, so that’s for tomorrow night. Bed at 11:30 (good heavens), only to discover the infamous Japanese buckwheat-husk pillow. Ow.Ed Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17805932361842578943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6396447250385531419.post-69521737498944114222008-09-21T14:01:00.002+02:002008-09-23T11:39:13.440+02:00Sept. 11: KanazawaWant to avoid those annoying Japanese tour groups with the flags and bullhorns disrupting the serenity of a famous garden? Sight-see in a typhoon! But before you set out, be smart and go to the railroad station and score yourself an umbrella. Not that it’ll do a whole lot of good.<br /><br /> I think that describing today as a complete and utter fiasco would be accurate enough. I got up at 7-ish, went downstairs, and hit the breakfast buffet as opposed to ordering from the menu they put in front of me, which included “breakfast salad.” There was some decent stuff, although I forewent the natto this morning, thanks, as well as the mountain potato. Then I headed out, buying the umbrella which, although it wasn’t raining when I left the hotel, looked like it might be necessary. <br /><br /> Found my way to the market just fine, thanks (I can always seem to find food), and looked over the early-morning crop of crabs and lobsters and octopus legs, as well as vegetables marinated in kasu, but realized that there was a hike ahead, so I left and headed towards Kanazawa’s giant park. It started to rain, and so I stopped at the shrine that I thought was one of the gates. It wasn’t, but the rain abated enough for me to forge forward and I twisted through some streets until I hit a real gate. There were these cute yellow whales (by cute, of course, I mean kawaii) advertising something, and as I got closer, a rock band started to play. They had a very pretty girl singer. I know this because although I never saw the band, she couldn’t sing. My goal was the reconstructed castle, or the part of the castle that’s been reconstructed, it having been huge (1000 tatamis). Nobody among the iridescent green-suited admissions folks spoke any English at all, but one told me the ticket they were selling was because “garden is green,” and I remembered the website saying something about a garden festival. Okay, I wasn’t interested, so I went back down the hill and continued circling the grounds. The castle eventually loomed above me, and I admired its defenses: I couldn’t figure out how to get into it. Finally, I saw a bridge high above the main street I was walking along, so I backtracked, crossed the street, and found the bridge. Sure enough, that led to the back gate, which was the entrance. (Or an entrance: turns out I could have gotten in at that first gate).<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-2MV3d0YGhiYPlDazTGfwzbKhcTBlmWk7DwrD_0Z9XYlRdyem9x0Gt-hh1PIuwsYk53g7wyRSNRchoAV6uFZPoS6IVmmHN5AIh2zDnfft2kFSu_nLE1RbL68sJP40c6PB6Hyp8KhoX-M/s1600-h/kanazcstl1.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-2MV3d0YGhiYPlDazTGfwzbKhcTBlmWk7DwrD_0Z9XYlRdyem9x0Gt-hh1PIuwsYk53g7wyRSNRchoAV6uFZPoS6IVmmHN5AIh2zDnfft2kFSu_nLE1RbL68sJP40c6PB6Hyp8KhoX-M/s400/kanazcstl1.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5249148441957766866" /></a><br /><br /><em>Kanazawa Castle</em><br /><br /> After a little confusion due to the fact that the tickets weren’t sold at the point where they were collected, I got in, and headed first to the watchtower I’d seen from the road. The guy who let me in actually spoke some English, and showed me how parts of the floor lifted up so that you could shoot arrows down on unwanted visitors. I asked him if the castle had ever been taken, and he said “No, this wasn’t a castle of war. This was the lord’s castle.” Sounds like an invitation to invasion to me, but hey, I let it pass. I then wandered towards the main building, shooting a couple of pix along the way. At the entrance, I had to line up with some other people until a guide came. She talked to me, and I admitted I knew no Japanese. No big deal to her, she ignored me. We were then admitted, and removed our shoes and put our umbrellas in plastic bags. <br /><br /> I have no idea what was said after that. At one point she played a tape from a machine which had a button marked “English,” but the main thrill was when we got to see a short video presentation (on DVD) about how the castle had been constructed. Apparently the thing had burned, although I’m not sure when (Kanazawa wasn’t bombed, for some reason), and archaeologists had found foundation stones. Using 19th century photographs and other documentation, they had craftsmen rebuild the thing with traditional techniques (except, I assume, for the nails in the flooring, there, no doubt, for safety reasons). The intricate shaping, nesting, and pegging of the various components puts Western cabinetry to shame. It was awesome watching the computer-generated pieces fly together. But I have no idea what the rest of the tour was about. Since the guide was reading from a script, I found myself wondering if it would be a terrible imposition to get someone at the nearby university to translate this script into several other languages, put them on a laminated card for the foreign tourist to read as the tour proceeds, and hand in at the end. But I don’t think Kanazawa really wants a non-Japanese tourist industry to develop. As we left, the guide shook my hand and said “Sank you veddy mosh,” as if I’d done anything. Fortunately there were bare-bones translations of the major points of interest on the rest of the grounds, and I wandered through the hill where the main castle had stood. At one point there was a godawful noise by my feet and I saw a huge cicada on the ground. I stepped threateningly towards him and he repeated the performance. The rain and wind was picking up, and my umbrella was getting tossed around. I had to use both hands to steady it a number of times. <br /><br /> The next place I wanted to go was the samurai quarter, where, after the Meiji Restoration abolished their trade, they lived in poverty. I could find it on the map, but it looked like it made more sense to go across the street to the gardens, where there was also a Meiji mansion and the museum of local arts and crafts. But what to do after that? How to get to this neighborhood? I sat in a dry area and stared at the book. Where on earth was the castle? Then it struck me: the book had been published in 1998, and one of the things I’d enjoyed was the smell of the place, which I remembered from childhood. That was the smell of new wood, Japanese cedar, is what it was. Chances are this had all gone up since anyone had revised the book. While I was figuring this out, a song was playing over the loudspeakers. It was a children’s chorus singing a simple short melody that was driving me crazy. It went like “Dada zaza nana ricky --Icky!/Dada zaza nana naaa...” and so on. After the ninth pass, I decided I’d leave anyway, even if I had no idea where I was going. Perhaps I’d throw myself into traffic from the bridge. Anything to get away from it. Well, I did know that if I left via the bridge I’d come in on there was an entrance to the pleasure garden, and in there was the arts and crafts museum, so I did that. I paid my admission and the woman asked where I was from. “I’m American, and I live in Germany.” “America?” she asked. “Yes, but I live in Germany.” Blank stare. Memo: don’t make it complicated.<br /><br /> The gardens are formal, and, thus, obey the six principles of formal gardens, explained in the brochure you’re given with the admissions fee. They were once attached to the castle, but because the dates are given as “the rule of the13th lord of...” and so on, instead of Christian dates, I can’t tell you much about it. There was a basin by a teahouse made out of the fossil of a cedar and its roots, Japan’s first fountain and first artificial waterfall, a famous stone lantern which sticks one foot in the water, many, many artfully deformed pines, and a lot more, but the typhoon was really kicking in at this point. Time to go inside. Unfortunately, the museum closes from 12-1 for lunch, so I hit the mansion. It wasn’t as spare and interesting as the houes I saw yesterday, although there was a lot to admire in the decoration of the rooms, which included stained-glass paintings of birds imported from Holland. I put my shoes back on and went next door to the museum. There was a desk at the entrance with a girl at a desk, some money, and the admissions fee posted so I tried to attract her attention, and when I got it, I handed over my money. She pushed it back, giggling, and waved me in. Hey, maybe it was free day. But inside, there was another desk with two girls, also giggling, and they took my dough. Behind them was what looked like a gift-shop, although the book says that none of this is for sale, for some reason, and there’s also a space where a craftsman works. Today’s was putting gold leaf on lacquer chopsticks. Upstairs the local crafts are explained in clear, simple English in such exemplary fashion that I wondered who’d done it and why they weren’t working on any other tourist attraction in Kanazawa. I stayed some time and developed a lust for Tsurugi steel knives and Wajima lacquerware. (I never did find the former, but I later saw what may have been a set of the latter, miso soup bowls including covers and matching trays, three to the set, for a mere ¥540,000. Just $4500! I always did have good taste). The other thing I saw was an education: fireworks from Nota. They had several cut in half so you could see how the various bombs were interconnected so that when the outer shell was blown off the timed explosions of the rest were effected. Always wondered about that. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyCYwpP1ytmin0d2fmtougYQQeMGjNpZQDknREPMlAOkDjz_UhoRIX-C7nMmaq_If09_-z3ZtP_jHRkunY2JBs-rEl3r8hk6QzuFAk_qmN2k1Ozy2PnFW5Nhw39pD5em6BQ4J4efsSb5Y/s1600-h/kanazpk.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyCYwpP1ytmin0d2fmtougYQQeMGjNpZQDknREPMlAOkDjz_UhoRIX-C7nMmaq_If09_-z3ZtP_jHRkunY2JBs-rEl3r8hk6QzuFAk_qmN2k1Ozy2PnFW5Nhw39pD5em6BQ4J4efsSb5Y/s400/kanazpk.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5249148840350506690" /></a><br /><br /><em>Kanazawa: the park</em><br /><br /> So I went outside and inquired from the lady at the exit which way the samurais were. She pointed me back into the park, which I am not sure was correct. Whatever, I walked through and got a good picture of gardening ladies in traditional gear working by the teahouse pond. When I got out, I decided I needed lunch, so I stopped at one of the souvenir shops with upstairs restaurants which line the area. <br /><br /> It was at this point that I must have lost it, or my brain fried or something. It was very hard communicating with the waitress. I wanted cha-soba, green-tea soba, but she pointed me to a “soba set” of normal soba. Okay, so they didn’t have cha-soba, so I got normal. There was cold jibujibu soup (was it supposed to be cold?), miso soup, rice, pickles, and soba and dipping sauce. It was certainly okay. I mean, how can you ruin it? I called her over and mimed scribbling and she ran and got a pad. No. I pulled out my money, and she pointed downstairs. I really can’t explain what happened next. I almost left without paying, but the various salesgirls blocked the door and I turned around to find the proprietor smiling at me. Oops. It was ¥1400. Okay. I reached in my pocket and pulled out ¥140. Completely stupid. He said no, and then I realized my mistake and handed him ¥1040. What an idiot! One more time, and I got it right. I mean, I’ve been doing fine since I got here. The lady at the beer shop last night was boggled at my ability to pay with exact change! <br /><br /> Oh, but it got worse. I had determined that I could reach the samurais by walking down the road, turning right, and, after a while, turning left. The rain was awful, and I was noticing that I was getting soaked despite the umbrella, which was doing a good job of keeping my back dry. It was raining too hard to whip out the book and consult it, but I thought I had myself pretty well fixed: the castle park was to my right, and I should be headed back to the market, except I had to turn off before then. I walked along the castle park, watching an inch-long hummingbird sucking from the flowers planted by the side of the road. The road ended, though, before I came to the main road I was expecting, so I just kept walking. Before long I realized I was lost. The map had shown nice even parallel lines, so I wasn’t worried. There was a neon-filled commercial section with Cartier and Gucci boutiques, so I figured I wasn’t too far from the station and the expensive hotels. Then the commercial landscape degenerated into more of those small bars I’d seen in Takayama. Some were clearly brothels of some kind; one had a picture of a fat salaryman tied up with rope while a pixie-like girl tugged it tighter. Things blanded out again. The rain was awful. One thing I knew: the Sky Hotel, the Apa, the Miyako, all had their distinct skyline imprints, and would guide me to the station. The skyline may have been a bit blocked out by the rain, but those behemoths surely would be visible. I kept walking. I knew I was parallelling a river, which was good because that’s where the station was, but no dice. Finally, I came to an intersection and turned left. This took me up a big hill. My thought was to turn left again, since I had clearly made an error, and this would bring me back to the castle. It was useless asking anybody. <br /><br /> After two hours, I stumbled on a temple. In front of the temple, as with all temples in Kanazawa, there was a map. Why the mapmakers couldn’t manage to orient the maps north-south I cannot tell you (a very common problem throughout Japan, as it developed), but I assumed that’s what it was, and all I had to do was walk a few meters to a main street, turn left, and I’d be there. Which I did. Walking down the sidewalk through huge crowds of schoolgirls waiting for the bus, seeing convenience stores, funeral parlors, beauty salons, the usual city stuff. Finally I spotted a parallel street with a vista. I went over and stared. Nothing I recognized was there: no Sky Hotel, no APA, nothing. I went back onto the main road and reversed direction. It was now pouring, the wind whipping the umbrella, and I was miserable. All I wanted was to get back. Fuck the samurai. The Meiji Restoration had. Aha! Up ahead was another temple, down a small side-road. I went there and in drenching rain stared at the map. It was here that I finally noticed that the map’s orientation wasn’t north-south, so I turned my head upside down and eventually worked out that if I went back to the main street, and turned first right, I’d be headed towards the station. Hooray! <br /><br /> Premature. The road ended at the Kanazawa College of Art, the source of the horrid faux Rodins in part of the castle park. There was an area of dirt ahead, and a sheer drop off the mountain I seemed to be on. But as I drew closer, I saw that there was a brand-new modern stairway down the hill. I headed down it, glad to be out of the typhoon, and saw a main street running at a 90-degree angle just ahead. A road sign indicated that, as I’d thought, a left turn would take me to the station. I’d seen some tall buildings as I’d come out of the stairway, so I knew I was all right now. Right: turn a couple of corners and...<br /><br /> And I came out at the entrance to the gardens, right where I’d started three hours and some ago. But I knew how to get back from here, so I forged on, and, thinking I spied a short-cut, went down a street and...right into the back end of the market. Desperately thirsty and with the reverse of my Takayama dilemma -- I had only ¥40 in coins and some ¥10,000 bills -- I headed to a woman selling rice-crackers (had to replace the chili ones I’d bought in Tokyo and eaten the other night with my Takayama ale) and paid for a ¥280 pakcage with one sodden ten-grander. She made a face, and I pointed to the outside. She sort of grinned. I boogied, stopping only at a vending machine to whip out some of my change and buy a half-liter -- a half-liter! This town isn’t all bad! -- of Water Salad. <br /><br /> Back in the room, I tossed it down after taking off my clothes and spreading them around to dry (the air-conditioning does a good job with that, if yesterday’s jeans, doffed at about the same time, are any indication). I put on the yakuta that comes with most Japanese hotel rooms, and lazed until I had the energy to stand up and take a shower. A hot shower. A long shower. I had been walking for eight hours, for the better part of four of which I was lost.<br /><br /> Dinner downstairs in the seafood restaurant again, because I was damned if I was going to leave the hotel again, although I did go out for that Sapporo autumn beer, which wasn’t as good as Kirin’s.Ed Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17805932361842578943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6396447250385531419.post-78171586801942968102008-09-21T13:57:00.001+02:002008-09-21T14:01:53.820+02:00Sept. 12: Kanazawa, NagoyaIt takes a day like this for me to realize how dependent I am on full information access, and how deeply frustrating it is when it is thwarted. I remember a couple of years ago when Kathleen Maher and I went out for dinner in San Francisco the night her partner Jon had his sort of salon, where he and his friends pick a non-work-related topic and discuss it, and afterwards we joined them. The night’s topic was whether access to information was a basic human right. Good question; I’ve certainly formulated my personal answer. <br /><br /> There were Japanese newspapers all over the place this morning, which hadn’t happened before, and a picture of buildings and what looked like clouds. I assumed that the typhoon had hit Tokyo, (which, in fact, it had) and this is what I was seeing (which, of course, I was not). So I went in to breakfast and then went back to the room and decided to go find that samurai quarter. Very scared after yesterday’s getting lost -- and I didn’t want to miss my train at noon -- I gingerly picked my way to the market and then kept walking down that main street. The map in the book seemed to indicate that there was a more direct way, but I wasn’t taking any chances: this was something I knew. I was looking for the Grand Hotel, and although it sure wasn’t all that grand, it was there. So I picked my way through small streets in the general direction I thought I was supposed to go and was rewarded by a sign pointing right where I wanted to go. There were, it seemed, a lot of old houses in this part of town, but nothing like the photos I’d seen on the website. I even found a signpost with arrows. The one for where I was going pointed 45 degrees to the southwest. This was the location of my feet. <br /><br /> I was still nervous about the time and very insecure about where I was, so I didn’t deviate too much from where I was sure I was oriented back to the hotel. Forget it, I told myself, and walked down a street with pleasant tile-roofed houses to a main street, where I turned right and sure enough, not only did I find myself back at the hotel after a while, but I discovered that this was the road that ran right in front of the damn thing. The weather was threatening rain again, it was muggy, and I was going to be in a bad mood if I let myself go that way, so I just went into the station, got my reservation for a noon train to Nagoya, and went back to finish packing. <br /><br /> I glanced harder at one of the papers when I got to the hotel, and noticed that the picture looked like New York. In the foreground, a well-dressed black man with a briefcase was hustling away from what was clearly an explosion. This meant it wasn’t Japan: no corporation would send over a black executive if they expected to do business with the Japanese, who wouldn’t talk to him. The site seemed to be the World Trade Center. Another bombing? But there was nothing in the copy of the Japan Times I’d bought at the station. Curious. <br /><br /> I checked out, spent an hour mooching around Kanazawa Station, and eventually boarded the train. It was a pleasant trip through a Midwestern landscape, with mountains in the distance and quite a number of tunnels, which indicated that there were other mountains around. We got to one station, where people got off to get on the Shinkansen, and then everybody in the car stood up and wheeled the seats around! I was completely mystified by this, and a couple of young women behind me helped show me what to do. Pretty soon, I began to recognize where we were: Ogaki, Gifu, and...we stopped. A couple of Railroad Police had gotten on in Ogaki, and they walked through the car with radios going. A suicide on the tracks? Maybe. <br /><br /> We sat for an hour, and it got pretty warm, despite our air-conditioning. Eventually the train hauled itself towards Nagoya, and I was pleased to find a tourist info center, complete with an English-speaking woman who took the piece of paper with the hotel name on it and wrote, for the benefit of the taxi-driver, “Take this man to the Garden Palace Hotel.” <br /><br /> I got in the taxi, and as we pulled away, the driver said “American?” I said yes, and he pointed to the radio, where the word “America” kept repeating. I said I didn’t understand, and he reached into the glove compartment and pulled out a tiny color television, tuned in a station, and I saw tiny pictures of a disaster. Hard to tell quite what it was, though. It wasn’t until I got to the palatial hotel and turned on the television that I began to figure out what was going on in the outside world. It was perfect nightmare material, combining my fear of flying with my fear of heights and tall buildings. But it was also impossible to stop watching.<br /><br /> Fortunately, Carl called from his house, informing me that they were headed to Nagoya and that once they got there, we’d all be going out for dinner. After he arrived, he caught me up on what information there was, and then we agreed to gather in the lobby for the trip to the place Noda-san had chosen, specializing in a local pork dish. I changed my shirt, got onto the elevator, my head filled with the horror images I’d been seeing on television, and the elevator stopped and on got a couple in full wedding regalia and an older woman who was holding the bride’s train. (The poor groom, however, didn’t look so hot in his brown polyester suit). Just the touch of surrealism I needed. In the lobby was our party. There was Otomo Yoshihide, Sachiko M, Hako, the vocalist for tomorrow night’s performance, Noda-san and his girlfriend, Carl and Yoshiko, and a Japanese woman with bleach-blonde hair whose function I wasn’t sure of.<br /><br /> I’d been so distracted with the little television and trying to simultaneously tune it in and make sense of the picture on it that I wasn’t at all sure where I was in the city, but we marched into a Shinjuku-like area and around and down and into an alleyway, at the end of which was a tiny little place. Much shouting and voting on orders and so on ensued, then we took off our shoes and went upstairs. As I am told will happen in joints like this, the food appeared sporadically, but we wound up with rice bowls topped with many pieces of deep-fried breaded pork, mixed with miso, and a raw egg broken into the middle of it, finished off by miso soup with many, many clams. It was delicious. <br /><br /> Afterwards, Carl and Yoshiko and the vocalist went back to the hotel, and the rest of us went into an apartment building which seemed to be full of clubs instead of apartments. After much discussion, we headed towards one on the 4th floor called Chique Fou, but it turned out to be closed. Noda-san and his girlfriend and I went back to the hotel, and Otomo and his bunch headed somewhere else. Noda revealed his passion for Tejano accordion, Cajun and zydeco music (and he knew the difference, unlike most Americans), and Brave Combo, although he’d never heard their Japanese albums. At 9:15, I found myself back in the room, and, unwilling to watch the airliners puncture the towers over and over again (let alone watch it and then be switched immediately to a commercial with a purple kawaii bunny sitting in a field, as had happened earlier), I got a beer from the machine and sat down to read The Russia House until sleep overtook me at about 11.Ed Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17805932361842578943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6396447250385531419.post-28193461177302632812008-09-21T13:51:00.002+02:002008-09-23T11:41:36.559+02:00Sept. 13: NagoyaBut not for long. Another buckwheat pillow (much too late, I discovered that if you turn it over you get another filling), and I woke up at 5 with a brilliant idea in my head about how to finally get my e-mail and web access fixed. It was so obvious that I got excited, but I tried to keep myself in bed until 6:30, and pretty much succeeded. These early bedtimes will kill me. <br /><br /> There was a very elegant Japanese breakfast downstairs, with taped birds tweeting over the sound system in the breakfast room. I hereby anoint anyone who can pick up a cube of egg tofu with chopsticks as a virtuoso. I was saving room, though, because Noda-san was taking us out for eel at 11:45. My brilliant idea still rattling around in my head, I went back upstairs to implement it. Suffice it to say that it didn’t work. And that this is Compuserve’s fault, I’m almost certain, because of their damn proprietary software. I desperately wanted to get an e-mail out to the Journal to make sure my editor Taylor and all were okay, and I also wanted to check the Times on-line. Maybe even the Well. Wasn’t gonna happen. <br /><br /> Neither was Noda-san taking us to lunch: Carl called to give me the plan for the day -- doors open at 6:30, gig at 7, just like Tokyo -- and told me he was kidnapping Noda to set up in the hall. Lunch was still on, though, but it would be other people. <br /><br /> Just who, I never got to find out. I decided to take a walk and let the maids get to the room, and figured out where the castle was. I got there, and there was a good 30 minutes until I had to be back, but better safe, etc. etc., so I turned around and figured I’d use the time between lunch and 6:15, when Yoshiko would be in the lobby to take me to the gig. It was also getting quite hot, which had all happened in less than an hour. Somehow, I did it again, circling and circling and never finding the hotel, which, in my defense, is very understated and subtle. But still, I’d just left and I’d made notes on landmarks, so you’d think I could have found it. By the time I got back, it was 12:15, and everyone had gone. <br /><br /> This has brought up another question I find myself asking myself with increasing frequency: do I want to be here? I’m finding the country, excepting the food, rather monotonous. This makes me feel like a boor, and it’s not completely true, because there are things I enjoy seeing over and over: the little gardens behind people’s houses, where they make a lot with not too much, the crazy pop culture (I saw a girl with a tour t-shirt for the Bape Heads, whoever they are, today), the wild variety of the streets. But the official culture is pretty incomprehensible, Shinto is a total void (and I haven’t seen much Buddhism, although I guess that’ll change in Kyoto), the history is as opaque as anything I’ve ever encountered that wasn’t written by A.E. van Vogt, and some of the social stuff, the position of women being foremost, is getting me down. Plus, with Eric not being around to at least share the confusion in my language and two more weeks of mostly solo touring, how much more do I want to see? If I were back in Berlin, I might be able to get some work drummed up, I’d be around friends and a language I can at least start to comprehend and a culture that makes sense. I guess I’ll just put it off until I get to Kyoto, see if Nick shows up, and decide then. Needless to say, I wasn’t looking forward to the trip back, nor was I particularly anxious to be flitting around temples and formal gardens while George W was declaring World War III. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEip6Ai7GZ4iiYUWrXuLEmWGBZZFL1HDslx4CMr4Yp4Ey5DNG1_cSGjJOQqO5OYiF2h2Yc863WL7qLmGszVLjHMmRMaBLkTf-S3m1BTyhvwfkQfH1SyhvQFDER95kNCMVs4YCmR1PIsKx80/s1600-h/nagcastl3.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEip6Ai7GZ4iiYUWrXuLEmWGBZZFL1HDslx4CMr4Yp4Ey5DNG1_cSGjJOQqO5OYiF2h2Yc863WL7qLmGszVLjHMmRMaBLkTf-S3m1BTyhvwfkQfH1SyhvQFDER95kNCMVs4YCmR1PIsKx80/s400/nagcastl3.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5249149459651603890" /></a><br /><br /><em>Nagoya Castle</em><br /><br /> So I launched myself out again, to Nagoya Castle, which, its reconstruction in concrete notwithstanding, had well-displayed exhibits and good English documentation, and lost a couple of hours there. Then I found my way back easily enough, and spent some time watching the bilingual channel with ABC News (Carl had pointed out the bilingual button, which, of course, was labelled in Japanese), which, to my surprise, had Barak and that Palestinian woman at the end of a discussion which sounded good. The Palestinian woman was gently chiding America for its isolationism, its refusal to engage much with the outside world, and implying that this was something other countries resented, a very good point. The anchor, though, cut her off, saying he had to go to a local story. Then he said something which made me realize why Americans are as poorly informed as they are: “It’s sometimes hard, during mind-numbing discussions of foreign affairs, to remember that the real story here is the people, and the losses they’ve suffered in this terrible tragedy.” Excuse me? These losses were part of something which is included in the term “foreign affairs,” and if the media don’t make an attempt to explain and give the viewers the larger context, if they’re really going to be that solipsistic, we’re completely fucked. I watched some of the “color,” and then, the Tokyo Stock Exchange having just shut down for the day, they switched to business news. I never thought I’d miss CNN, for heaven’s sakes. <br /><br /> But soon enough, it was time for the concert. Yoshiko met me in the lobby and we walked towards an Eiffel-Tower sort of building, which turned out to be in a small park, the other side of which was the art museum/concert hall. It seemed very sterile, and yet when we got in, it was humming. The small hall turned out to be completely sold out. I was introduced to numerous of Carl’s colleagues from the university where he’s teaching, and exchanged “name cards” with them. One had even participated in the sound-installation event in Berlin I’d missed because of moving five years ago. Eventually everyone sat down and the show began. <br /><br /> “Modulations for Voices and Sine Wave,” by Otomo Yoshihide, was really avant-garde, but I’m not convinced there was any content. Two vocalists, Yoshida Ami and Sagara Nami (the blonde from last night), were up front, and Otomo and Sachiko were in the back. It started so quietly I wasn’t sure it actually had started, and Ami began to make little slurping and kissing and sucking noises. Eventually the sine wave came in, and Nami duplicated its tone, eventually going a bit out of tune with it so she was making beats. I think Otomo was sampling something, but it was hard to tell what he was doing. Eventually it died down -- after about 30 minutes -- and that was that. Then the hyper-efficient stage crew whipped out the desk with Carl’s equipment and a music stand for Hako, his vocalist, to use, and within minutes he was on stage and starting up some samples in loops. I found this piece quite fascinating, since they were feeding back each other’s information without the audience hearing it: Hako was singing against what was going into her earphones, which the audience couldn’t hear, Carl was dealing with it while sending her other samples and providing sounds for the audience to hear. Hako is possessed of excellent technique, doing jazz scatting, weird noises, low tones, and “trained” voice. The audience loved it. There was an intermission, and then Otomo, Carl, and Nami came back for what was essentially a jam. <br /><br /> There was the usual post-concert stand-around-and-wait, exacerbated by the fact that the CD money seemed to have come up short. I talked to a guy from Bordeaux who’d just published a sort of reference book on Japanese independent music of the past 20 years, which was apparently selling like hotcakes despite a pan in The Wire this month. Dang, those guys just don’t seem to get it. Or they’re as provincial as the other British music magazines. (Later, I read the review, which wasn’t nearly the pan he’d told me it was, and, in fact, said that the book was quite useful and the accompanying CD excellent. I still think they don’t get it a lot of the time, though).<br /><br /> We finally all jelled, everybody got their money, and a fleet of taxis went back to the hotel, where we changed clothes and got ready to go out to another izakaya, this one famous for its chicken wings, which they make two ways. There were lots and lots of other dishes: various sashimis, including chicken two ways (one boiled for just an instant), thin-sliced pork with kimchi, those famous pepper-dusted wings, and a beef-and-potato stew (rather sweet) that’s apparently pronounced something like “Mick Jagger.” Nami was astonished that I was eating what I was eating, and she and I finished off with broiled fugu fins in sake, which isn’t as bad an idea as it sounds. Nor as good. Carl, having to get up and teach the next day before heading on to Kyoto, left early, and the rest of us were there til 1. I must say, I slept better than I had the night before, but we had a 10 o’clock call the next morning to check out.Ed Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17805932361842578943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6396447250385531419.post-90356111545981456392008-09-21T13:46:00.001+02:002008-09-21T13:51:10.043+02:00Sept. 14: KyotoYes, I slept, but not, it seemed, for very long. I was pooped after only 6 1/2 hours of sleep, but we had the Shinkansen bullet train to Kyoto to catch. It was raining again. Is this why I’ve found it so easy to get hotel rooms here? Because any “old Japan hand” would know better than to travel here in September? <br /><br /> After breakfast, we checked out and stowed our baggage at the hotel, and then everybody went shopping. I went with Noda-san, who first went to a bank to get some dough and then hit a gourmet store which I found utterly fascinating. He was after some Nagoya specialties -- noodles, in particular -- and I roamed the aisles seeing old friends like De Cecco spaghetti and Best Foods mayonnaise and even some flour tortillas, which the salesman was trying to explain to a distinguished-looking older gentleman. I really do wish I’d been able to understand that conversation. Noda got his stuff together and I picked out some rice-crackers which he approved of, and we headed out, only to return to the hotel. I spent a half-hour reading in the lobby and one by one the rest of the crew trickled in. Some cabs were obtained, and we hit the station. <br /><br /> I spent most of the trip trying to make sense out of the Japan Times’ coverage of the WTC disaster, but it had clearly been superseded by the TV I’d watched while packing. I continue to be impressed by the Shinkansen, although the view from it was mostly grimy industrial towns and block housing. <br /><br /> We certainly did make it to Kyoto fast, which was good news. Carl had gone back to Ogaki to check in at the university, and would be coming later with Yoshiko. We were met at the track by two guys from the Club Metro, where tonight’s performance would take place. I still can’t get over how formal and polite everyone here is with each other. Although these guys are the equivalent of nearly every young club owner I’ve known in the States, there’s still lots of bowing and polite language exchanged. We threaded our way down a crowded main street and wound up right across from the Imperial Palace at the Palace Side Hotel. Looked pretty low-key, but the woman who took my reservation was clearly Japanese-American -- or had spent time in the States or had one hell of a teacher. I observed pretty quickly that they did a good trade in the international young folks’ crowd, and there were -- hooray! -- two internet terminals in the lobby. At last I could contact people, check the Web, check in at the Well, and so on!<br /><br /> There was also a laundromat in the hotel, which was good because with all the places I’d been, my socks took a beating, not to mention the way my clothes got soaked in this weather. But I went downstairs and started hitting the net right away. I sent mail to Taylor, Susan, Chris, Ray and Natalie to see what was up from elvispresley.com -- thank heaven for free e-mail websites! -- and then went to the Well to see how the attack had shaken people up there.<br /><br /> Noda-san of course came downsairs pretty quickly and asked if I were hungry. A pretty stupid question when he’s around: he seems to know great places everywhere in Japan, a walking compendium of regional delicacies. There was a cafe down the street, where, because it was so hot, I just had some cold soba while Ami, Sachiko, Noda, and his girlfriend all had soup. Then they headed to the 7-11 to load up on snacks and so on for later and as we left we saw Carl and Yoshiko on the other side of the street blithely strolling in the wrong direction. Noda and Carl and the others went off to the club to rehearse and do sound-check and I relaxed. There wouldn’t be dinner tonight. <br /><br /> An 8:50 call got us to the club in time to witness the end of a rather pointless vinyl-terror group’s messing around with records, mostly sliding the needle around to make screeching sounds, sampling them, and using the samples to make other horrid noise. Club Metro is in the entrance to a subway station, weirdly enough, although appropriate for the name, and it’s a long, dark, smoky joint that was getting filled with young folks (all, again, bowing to each other) who seemed to know each other and the artists and hovered around the CD stall without seeming to buy anything. Eventually Sachiko and Ami went on with pretty much a recap of the previous night’s stuff, after which the DJ filled in for a while and a guy with a Powerbook came on and did some fairly interesting, if disjointed, sample work which ended with an endless string-quartet sample which he didn’t seem interested in modifying or playing with until he distorted it slightly, then a lot more, and then turned himself off. <br /><br /> After more DJ, Otomo went on, starting with a really loud bass tone and working up to 20 minutes of extreme noise terror of just the sort I’d been expecting in Japan, from what I’d read. Frank, the French guy I’d met in Nagoya, was there, too, and I marvelled at his capacity for this sort of thing. I was really pissed off that I’d left my earplugs back at the hotel (as had Carl), and spent most of the time in the lobby of the club, from which vantage-point I could hear everything perfectly well. Carl was worried because Yoshiko had disappeared (“This is just the kind of place she hates,” he said, and it was easy, with all the smoke and noise, to see why), and now he was getting worried at having to follow Otomo. He certainly rose to the challenge, providing plenty of volume, but, I thought, a lot more structure and coherence. Otomo’s set had mostly been a roar and a thrash; this seemed more thought out, although it was, in the end, just an improvisation. He got good applause, and then he and Otomo went on to duet. At one point, Carl was feeding a bunch of dripping sounds into the mix, and I began to feel I was in a dank cave, what with the oppressive smoke and humidity. It really got into a battle for a while, and then they found a way to end it (pull the plug: Carl commented later to Frank that “I have trouble with endings, but I always remember what Aaron Copland said: ‘Be sure to use the big bass drum at the end.’”). There was the usual post-gig hang-around although this show was going on til 5 am -- and Frank, who’d been unable to find a place to stay in Kyoto, was going to stay til the end and then take the first train to Osaka, where someone was putting him up. I spent a lot of time outside talking to Frank, and then Carl came out to chat, and finally he went inside, got his stuff, and we took a cab back to the hotel.Ed Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17805932361842578943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6396447250385531419.post-70074115800960897052008-09-21T13:38:00.002+02:002008-09-23T11:47:23.592+02:00Sept. 15: KyotoToday is the start of the second solo part of the trip, but not before I had breakfast with Carl and Yoshiko, after which he sat down to settle accounts with Noda. They’re working on the hotel, drilling into the walls, which is certainly Berlin territory, and I can attest they started this morning at 8:20. (So can Otmo, who appeared all dishevelled in the elevator at one point looking like a pissed-off samurai). It’s a fairly seedy hotel, but three nights here cost little more than one night at some of the other places I’ve been staying, which, for a week, if they can do it, is almost bearable. There’s certainly a lot to see here, and I’m thinking to take it slow, see what I can, and take a day of down-time. One weird thing about yesterday: I swear that twice I saw a woman here who looks like Margaret, the woman who used to live down the street from me in Austin. It wouldn’t surprise me, knowing her, but I didn’t call out to her, and I hoped I’d catch her again. (I later saw her again, and, although the resemblance is uncanny, by the time I’d asked her if she were from Texas, I knew it wasn’t her). <br /><br /> We decided that after the reckoning and check-out, Noda, his girlfriend, Carl, Yoshiko, and I would go to lunch, and then we’d go check out the castle, Nijo-jo, which is a UNESCO site. Noda announced that our goal was a Taiwanese place he knew, so off we went, down some back streets. For all its size, Kyoto seems to have some mellow corners in it. At one point, we found a temple, and peered inside. There was a large stature of a woman dressed almost like a Catholic nun, holding a trident, and I have no idea who that might be. We eventually found the place, and the sign on the rolling steel curtain announced that it was closed for lunch on Saturdays, predictably enough. But across the street, Noda’s eye caught a sign offering regional soba dishes, so we went in there. I got one that featured shiitakes and grilled cakes of mochi, the name of which apparently could pun on the word for “jealousy,” a pun the proprietoress gleefully made. Carl was unhappy that they wouldn’t start serving oysters until next month, but Yoshiko really got the prize, which came in a large round container, which, when the top was taken off, revealed a tray of condiments including a quail’s egg, and when that was removed, a tray of some other stuff I couldn’t identify to mix with the soba, which resided in a bowl beneath. I don’t think this was on the English side of the menu, to be honest. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuNHAMh-WuGsvM8AKfPLzFBWY6tOw5UnLj2czK8TdeNb-jNItVtKlXowRwbmjTwmKOpRMZq1jTrPqhl1gY7TwVfnVPlQDwT12Kf45qYIwf262q_CLdDSd2ugHrvreNXwbvO8YUKFTs1Xw/s1600-h/soba!.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuNHAMh-WuGsvM8AKfPLzFBWY6tOw5UnLj2czK8TdeNb-jNItVtKlXowRwbmjTwmKOpRMZq1jTrPqhl1gY7TwVfnVPlQDwT12Kf45qYIwf262q_CLdDSd2ugHrvreNXwbvO8YUKFTs1Xw/s400/soba!.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5249150779649073714" /></a><br /><br /><em>Soba!</em><br /><br /> I was full, but Noda insisted that we take tea, and a few doors down was a Kyoto institution, <a href= www.ippodo-tea.co.jp/>Ippodo</a>, tea merchants since 1717. It’s not a tea-ceremony kind of place, but there is, on the side of the commercial part, a tea-room with three tables, and we took two of them. You order a given sort of tea, and eventually the waitress brings out little teapots with your selection of leaves in them, a big container of boiling water, a sweet for each person, and then instructs you in how each one is done. Carl’s involved pouring a cup of water then turning it into a second cup, from there to a third, and thence to a fourth before pouring the contents into the teacup. I’m not sure what the reasoning behind this was. Yoshiko got the full gourmet macha treatment, which involved a thick paste of green tea in a large bowl, which she drank, after which she got a cold cup of a rougher tea, houjicha. I got genmaicha, which I’d seen outside, with rice and barley in it, funky and country-tasting. Carl then bought a bunch of tea to take with him on tour and some to give to Yoshiko’s family. And now it was pouring. <br /><br /> Fortunately, the next stop, the castle, was far enough away that a taxi was in order. It was also time to say good-bye to Noda, whose wisdom and guidance I’ll miss, but whose insistence that we eat every hour or so I can probably do without, tempting though it is, and gratifying though the results tend to be. How do these skinny guys do it? And how do the Japanese consume such massive amounts of caffeine and sodium? I’m going to have to go on a desalinization project when I get home. <br /><br /> Nijo Castle is, frankly, worth the hype. The Ninomaru Palace’s massive rooms have gold-painted walls, all done by the highest masters of the 17th century, with giant tigers prowling around to drive home the power of the shogun. The famous “nightingale floors,” which actually chirp as you walk on them (supposedly to warn the Shogun if any enemies are coming, although Nick’s book says that the clan was so poweful in Kyoto that nobody would dare attack anyway) surprised me because I was expecting some sort of creaking noise, and now I wonder how in the hell they did it -- it’s not explained in the place, but, I found later, it is on the sheet they give you to guide yourself. Unfortunately, Carl marched rather quicker than I would have liked through the thing, probably worried about getting back to the hotel and grabbing his stuff in time to catch the train back home. And it was still pouring after we got out. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5-8kUhyphenhyphendiOWD6X3X_WbpEzoQNBtJNtzrurlt6akPFKipHdMM9_6ULqNcPgVlvug9E3y05ytFSJvJvOalIVsdnJU1k-mcxsZZ-71A2vf6W0pKWQ8qQDGW8JAldMXCXHs6JILmEqYoWZno/s1600-h/nijo-jo1.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5-8kUhyphenhyphendiOWD6X3X_WbpEzoQNBtJNtzrurlt6akPFKipHdMM9_6ULqNcPgVlvug9E3y05ytFSJvJvOalIVsdnJU1k-mcxsZZ-71A2vf6W0pKWQ8qQDGW8JAldMXCXHs6JILmEqYoWZno/s400/nijo-jo1.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5249150454845964594" /></a><br /><br /><em>Nijo-jo</em><br /><br /><br /> A quick trip to the hotel, and I joined them at the station, hoping I could get a Herald Tribune there instead of one of the useless local products. After they left, I noticed it was still raining, and after a search failed to turn up a paper, I decided to walk a bit. I found a way out of the terminal and crossed the tracks by a bridge, and found myself approaching this tremendous office building/shopping mall/hotel that’s the main part, as it turned out, of the station. This was promising, and I went in, finding myself in the company of several thousand people, and eventually found a kiosk with the paper. After that, I wended my way to the subway, and, after a few minutes studying the instructions, figured out how to buy the right ticket, get on the right line, and get back to the hotel. I felt like a master. But I wish my mastery extended to getting it to stop raining!<br /><br /> In fact, after I got back, the weather stayed lousy. I spent some time on the computers downstairs, found I’d received some e-mails, and then went back upstairs to settle on a plan, which was pretty easy: I’d been wanting tonkatsu, deep-fried breaded pork filet, and Nick’s book said a place not far away, Yamamoto, was one of the best; gave it two stars, in fact. So I carefully plotted a map from the map in the book and then noticed that it was raining Texas-style, with a fury I hadn’t seen even during the typhoon. But it finally relented at about 8:30, at which time I knew I had to get out before the restaurant closed at 10. Anyway, it seemed to have vented all its fury at long last. <br /><br /> Finding the place was easier than I’d thought, which meant that, because there was no transliteration of the restaurant’s sign, and I’d gotten to the front door and turned around because there was a fish-tank of some sort by the entrance, I spent an additional 30 minutes criss-crossing the neighborhood in search of it. Finally, I got to another restaurant where some young people were leaving and I asked them if they knew where it was. Turned out they were looking for a cab, so they weren’t even from around there, but the restaurant’s proprietor was hailing the cab, and when it came, they asked him, and the words “Yamamoto” and “tonkatsu” got tossed around. After they’d departed and he’d bowed at them until the cab disappeared into traffic, he told me to walk to the light and it was “near.” This took me back to the place I’d first found, so, emboldened, I asked a teenage girl who was consulting her cell-phone, and she confirmed that I was there. I walked in to find a beautiful interior, a young couple eating at the counter that stretched around the place, and a very surprised couple running the place. The woman was doubtful that I wanted to eat there, and pointed out that they’d be closing in a half-hour. I made her understand that I understood, but I wanted a tonkatsu, so she resigned herself to serving me and sat me at the bar. The menu wasn’t translated, of course, so I whipped out Satterwhite’s book, and she was astonished at what was in it. The idea that there was their specialty in there made her realize I was serious, and so she decided to give me the “set.” <br /><br /> She (Mrs. Yamamoto, as it turned out) did, in fact, have rudimentary English, and as I watched the other two customers, I began to wonder what I’d gotten myself into. They were eating something quite elaborate, and after the chef pounded and breaded my cutlet, he set about grabbing an abalone from a tank full of them, dispatching it cleanly and turning it into sashimi in a matter of a minute or two. This was not cheap fare, and the place was so well-appointed I was scared that I’d fallen into something deep. I had a couple of hundred dollars in my pocket, enough to cover that sashimi place we’d gone into in Tokyo, so it wasn’t that I was scared I wouldn’t be able to pay the bill. In any event, the cutlet was sizzling in the big brass vessel filled with oil, so it was too late. Mrs. Y was rubbing some kasu off of some pickled vegetables, which she brought, and the chef was taking some abalone parts and getting ready to deep-fry them in another bowl. Other parts he was grilling on some aluminum foil. Finally, it all arrived, and I have to say, it was exquisite. The outside was crunchy, the inside delicate, there was a bowl of superb soup (not miso: this is made from a different kind of broth, and has chunks of pork in it), and the pickles were very subtly flavored. <br /><br /> After I finished, the male customer asked in perfect English who I was and where I was from, and how I’d heard of the place. He relayed some of this info to Mrs. Y, and the chef brightened considerably when I told him (exaggerating just a bit) that Nick had said this was possibly the best tonkatsu in Japan. He introduced himself as Narita, and, as the chef was sauteeing some beef filets for them and finishing them with cognac (!), I decided to let things get back to normal, and paid the bill: ¥3700. High for tonkatsu, maybe, but easily worth it. <br /><br /> Naturally, I decided to go back a slightly different way than I’d come, and got lost, although I seemed to be on the periphery of the park which contains the Imperial Palace, so I knew I wasn’t too lost. I eventually got to a subway station with a map, and saw the way back. It was starting to rain again by the time I finally found the hotel, but at least it wasn’t a Kanazawa-style nightmare, so I read a little bit and fell asleep quickly in the narrow bed.Ed Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17805932361842578943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6396447250385531419.post-13952319985242389192008-09-21T13:34:00.002+02:002008-09-23T11:52:12.430+02:00Sept. 16, KyotoToday was going to be the down-time day, but while eating my bizarre “Western” breakfast (inch-thick toast, “morning salad” with pasta and ham, fruit cup, two fried eggs, microtome-sliced pink stuff that’s allegedly ham, and five -- count ’em! five! -- french fries), I realized I’d still have to get out of the place while they did the room. So I walked across the street into the park, where zillions of boy scouts, girl scouts, cub scouts and little girl scouts in light blue uniforms were, I dunno, experiencing nature. There was no way to get into the palace, which I decided to walk around, and suddenly last night’s relief from the heat began to give way to a relentless sun. So I figured, hell, as long as I was walking, I might as well walk to some end, so I left the park.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglm1il4BJpE8kgkXRYDcbryLe7I214tDJDjHvtd50YYA9y2zZpGMUOzDVTwDIP6BizK_md1sn4e355QaTOQayWo-6mS6OeYGnVUJLE8TqzBkUKCVyTUOkv25GxgCmfuJf23GhG30p-gfM/s1600-h/goo.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglm1il4BJpE8kgkXRYDcbryLe7I214tDJDjHvtd50YYA9y2zZpGMUOzDVTwDIP6BizK_md1sn4e355QaTOQayWo-6mS6OeYGnVUJLE8TqzBkUKCVyTUOkv25GxgCmfuJf23GhG30p-gfM/s400/goo.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5249151481308305538" /></a><br /><br /><em>Goo, where pig is king</em><br /><br /> Somehow, I’d managed to go out a gate that was considerably above the one I’d gone in, but at least I knew how to deal with that, so I headed down the street the hotel was on. There were a lot of wedding hotels on one part of the strip, and a shrine which was apparently doing wedding business, although it was also a historic site, the Goo Shrine. Apparently, in the 800s, a crazed monk tried to take over the country, and a general loyal to the king did battle with him and was repulsed. Wounded in the leg, he made a retreat, but he wasn’t doing too well. Suddenly, out in the country, 400 wild pigs appeared to him and guided him to a place of safety. He recovered, defeated the monk, and built this shrine, which, instead of the traditional lion-dogs guarding it, has pigs! There were also hundreds of toy and ceramic and wooden pigs, no doubt donated by satisfied customers who’d used the shrine. Back in the street, I passed the hotel, hopped on the subway, headed to the station, and went from there to my second UNESCO site in two days, To-ji, the temple which is Kyoto’s symbol. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhT2fEkAhXp9b7qJocapufZU1c00vgld9PR8Zb8G2nkxI0a11NWxuW9CDPZslYBTObYidA5agTIVYh1olPW0eYImt9kvBBhNWfpfwz-aE2zi2N5594VTl2Fmf76_CfQOI6zZXApiskU_a8/s1600-h/To-jigarden.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhT2fEkAhXp9b7qJocapufZU1c00vgld9PR8Zb8G2nkxI0a11NWxuW9CDPZslYBTObYidA5agTIVYh1olPW0eYImt9kvBBhNWfpfwz-aE2zi2N5594VTl2Fmf76_CfQOI6zZXApiskU_a8/s400/To-jigarden.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5249151968075309186" /></a><br /><br /><em>To-ji</em><br /><br /> It feels redundant and silly to set down impressions of a place like this, which overwhelms and confounds them, especially in a superficial traveller like myself who lacks a lot (although not all) of the background to go in deeper. I must say that the so-called “lecture hall,” with all the statues supposedly carved by the founder, would be hard to lecture in, since nearly the entire interior, a considerable volume, is filled by them. I don’t know what he was like as a theorist or theologian, nor do I know much about the Esoteric Buddhism he introduced, but he was a hell of a sculptor. There was a caption in English which said that the statues were working together for peace for all nations, and I hoped they were doing their job. The feeling inside was certainly peaceful, but I also detected a tension, which might have been my own. The next hall had three more statues flanked by renderings of lotuses, also spectacular. I wandered the garden some, checked out the working buildings (four monks were standing chanting sutras), saw that the museum was closed until the 20th, and walked around the 200-foot pagoda. <br /><br /> The book said that the “Rashomon site” was nearby, but I couldn’t find it. Perhaps it’s just there and not marked; been a long time since I saw the film. I wandered the streets behind the temple and found the sub-temple to its north, but it, too, was closed, as it is most of the time. It was getting hotter and hotter, and I reflected that I had, after all, resolved to take the day off and take care of some menial business, like washing my socks. So I walked back to the station, found the subway, and came back to the hotel, stopping off at the neighborhood 7-11 for a couple of those triangular rice-and-nori things Carl had said were so good. They were, although the fillings were meager enough that I had no idea what they were. <br /><br /> Did the laundry, checked the internet for news -- not much -- and then cruised around for a possible replacement for this hotel, which I planned to move from tomorrow. Either the ANA or the Kyoto would be both affordable and better in terms of service and room. Also browsed the book for a dinner recommendation, and found a place that’s both good and has an English menu. What the hell, after last night I was a bit cowed by dining, so I decided to go there. After I move, I can also start exploring again, and maybe I will, after all, be able to see a lot of this city. <br /><br /> Which I certainly got to do tonight. Not a lot in terms of geography, but I think I know where everybody in Kyoto was. I’d chickened out, as I said, and gone for this place with the English menu, but to get there, I had to take the subway two stops and then walk down what looked like a long street. I saw from the map of the area in the book that it had a number of the listed restaurants and shops, but I wasn’t prepared for what was there: it was Shiji, a long, brightly lit, covered-sidewalk street lined with the noisiest, busiest places I’d yet seen here. Restaurants, fast-food joints, stores of every description, and lots and lots of people. <br /><br /> As it turned out, I was walking towards the river and Pontocho, one of the two geisha districts, and when I checked the little map I’d made from the map in the book, I noticed that the restaurant I was heading to, Yamatomi, was up the next-to-last of the narrow streets which transect the main street. These are lined with restaurants, bars, and clubs, and people patronizing them. I walked and walked up the thing, and didn’t see the place, which I (again) assumed would have a bilingual sign, but there was a restaurant worker smoking a cigarette on a break, and I asked him, and he said, in perfect English, “Right over there.” Walking in, I was exuberantly greeted by a chubby older woman, and urged to sit at the counter, which I did. She snapped “English menu!” to someone and one appeared. I started out with a soup with fried tofu in it, followed up with two pieces of eggplant with two different kinds of miso (one blonde, one dark and sweet), then had the tempura vegetable combo and the tempura squid. Too much, I guess, and definitely too greasy, but the woman and I communicated in broken English, she pointed out her daughter who was helping her run the shop, and, when she went to take a telephone call (I think she may have been some kind of ex-geisha, although I might be wrong here), the cook behind the counter came up and turned out to speak pretty good English. <br /><br /> As I was finishing up, a whole bunch of Japanese tourists came from upstairs, pretty drunk, and one man came over and introduced himself. I’ve forgotten his name, but he was from Hokkaido, specifically Sapporo, and told me he was on vacation, too. He advised me to come to Sapporo, saying it was Japan’s most beautiful city, and told me he had a friend from Texas in Sapporo who taught English. Mama-san and her daughter, meanwhile, were giggling German at me, and the whole experience was pretty much fun. Finally, I disengaged myself and threaded my way back through the crowd, which by this point was gaining lots of busking young Japanese guys with rock and roll attitudes, attended by adoring young girls. They were playing very competent rock and roll with Japanese lyrics, and there seemed to be a lot of competition among them for attention from the crowd, which was nonetheless going its own way, for the most part. I finally got to the subway and went back to the hotel.Ed Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17805932361842578943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6396447250385531419.post-88509396871726893212008-09-21T13:25:00.002+02:002008-09-23T11:54:38.284+02:00Sept. 17, KyotoI’d made a reservation at the Kyoto Hotel, figuring if it was good enough for Palevsky (who hadn’t yet shown or communicated), it was good enough for me. A bit of a budget-stretcher, but not too bad. And the chaos and dirt, not to mention the tiny room, at the Palace View was getting to me, along with the suspicion that it was run by a religious organization or a cult or something; there was an odd “meeting place” and a “communal kitchen” on the same floor as the vending machines and the laundry. Maybe I was freaked by the Midwestern-style St. Agnes Episcopal Church I could see from my window. But I still think there was more than met the eye there. <br /><br /> I checked the news and the Well after breakfast, and people on the Well seemed to be having a mass therapy session. Someone had asked me why I’d said I might bail early on this trip, and I replied that, among other things, I was feeling pretty isolated (after all, besides Nick, Eric hadn’t shown up, and I was counting on at least one of them to provide some company and, in Nick’s case, expertise), I was finding it impossible to read Japanese characters, and I was generally uncomfortable. A symptom of this, I said, was that I hadn’t bought anything or been tempted to, which, I later realized, was a symptom of perhaps not wanting to remember this place, although I noted as I packed that I’d saved all the booklets I’d been given at the various attractions. <br /><br /> At any rate, I had to get out, so I packed and checked out and realized that one night at the Kyoto would cost what three nights at the Palace View had including breakfast! Wow. But, like I said, I’d been a good boy so far, things had been much cheaper than I’d expected (I hadn’t realized that Noda had negotiated the room-rate at the Garden Palace in Nagoya from ¥8000 to ¥6000!), and maybe a bit of pampering was in order to salve the damaged psyche and produce a more positive attitude towards the rest of the trip. <br /><br /> The cab dropped me at the Kyoto, and imagine my surprise when they had no record of the reservation I’d made over the internet the night before. They weren’t very friendly, but they did have a room, so they reluctantly stored my luggage and told me to come back in an hour when checkout started. My shoulder-bag was heavy, and it was, again, very hot outside, but I started walking and soon found myself at the Terimachi Market. At first, it was like the place in Kanazawa, covered, with an odd mix of total garbage and treasure. There were, for instance, several shops carrying religious goods, prayer beads, Buddha statues, and the like. An entire shop devoted to fans, very refined. I was doing better at keeping my orientation together, though, and so I realized that the market had several branches. One of them I turned down -- a very long one -- turned out to be the food market, Nishiki. It was hopping. The usual fish, including one place that was shaving bonito with a machine, loads of places with fine bentos on display, lots of pickle shops, which always had kasu pickles, one place I couldn’t figure out, which had a paste made from miso, sesame, and chili peppers that I sampled and flipped over, a store with knives to die for, places with exquisite tea sweets, and people shopping everywhere. <br /><br /> It was here that the comparison I’d heard between Kyoto and Paris made sense. Not that elsewhere in Japan I’ve noticed an indifference to food as is the case in Berlin, but these people really had that Parisian “prove this is worth the price” attitude as they carefully inspected the goods. If I’m in the neighborhood, I know where I’ll be eating lunch. And I’m in the neighborhood. On the way out, I even bought something: a cigarette lighter meticulously shaped like a video camera, whose “lens” is a flashlight. <br /><br /> And, as I write this, I’m in the Kyoto Hotel. When I came back at about 12:30, they were all smiles, and I even found out I had a 10% discount, for no apparent reason, which at least negates the consumption tax. Nick, however, isn’t here, and I suspect he’s bypassed Japan entirely and headed back to Bangkok -- if he could even get out of the States. The answer is very likely sitting -- along with 2000 other messages -- in my in-box back home. Eric, I now realized, even if he hadn’t bailed a month or so before I left, would also never have been able to get out; he was due here on the 13th. <br /><br /> Going back to Nishiki for lunch was such a seductive idea that, naturally, I was no match for it. I marched back into Nishiki (which, wouldn’t you know it, has its <a href=http://www.shouten-i.com>own website</a>) and suddenly realized that the oshi-zushi place I wanted to go didn’t have a place to sit, and I didn’t want to march back to the hotel again to eat a bento, so I went a little further on and discovered a place which only seemed to have two or three specialties, all of which looked gorgeous. I pointed at a bento in the window, and then pointed to the counter inside, and the guy took the menu, showed me that it was going to run ¥2000, and I said okay, so I was in. What I got, thanks to the guy’s daughter’s fine English, was Anago Thirashi, a bowl of cold rice mixed with something vaguely sweet, topped with shredded omelet, nori, chopped shiso, and finished off with cubes of grilled sea-eel, anago. (“Unagi is river eel,” she informed me.) It was just enough, and it was truly exquisite, because each of its ingredients was in balance. I didn’t even want the miso soup which came with it, but I drank it anyway, to be polite. Profuse thanks, and back into the maelstrom. <br /><br /> Two more stops I wanted to make: a liquor store, where I’d noticed some “Autumn Ale” on sale from a local brewer, and the knife shop across the way from where I’d eaten, Aritsugu. They were fairly surly at the liquor store, but Aritsugu produced a smart young saleswoman who explained the knives to me. I’d had my eyes on some lovely ones in a showcase, but she informed me that they were sushi knives, with one flat side, which, of course, makes sense given the task they’re made for. There were only about 80 different types. I got a fairly Western-looking one, a small chef’s knife which will do a good job of filling in between the two I already have, and that’ll be it in the knife department for me. I declined having my name engraved on it, which was appealing in a way, but maybe a bit much. I should at least have inquired if they’d do it in kana, dammit. After I’d made the selection, I was seated at a counter and a cup of cold tea came out immediately. So did the master, who set about doing the final sharpening and cleaning. I was also given very specific instructions for its use. This for about $65. <br /><br /> Going out at the top of Nishiki into the main market, I noticed that the main market street seemed to have a parallel street. Having seen the rest of the market, however superficially, I decided to explore this one, too. It was far weirder than the rest of the market, mostly because, I think, it was aimed at young people. Oh, it had its pachinko parlors and the occasional classy shop, but it seemed to specialize in what I began to think of as “schoolgirl” shops. These are all laid out the same: on the left you find tons of trinkets, in particular the sorts of doo-dads one hangs from one’s cell-phone. Further back, there’s a selection of pop-group memorabilia and fan stuff. Then, moving to the right and back out again, there’s a selection of what appear to be teen tea sweets. In the center, out front, there’ll be all sorts of stuff, probably the latest things everybody’s gotta have. Every store has somewhat different stuff, all are laid out like this, and there were twenty of them on this street (which, admittedly, was long) if there was one. For the boys, there are clothing shops with expensive Japanese hip-hop and skater wear, sneaker shops, and action-figure shops for the hopeless dweebs who’ll become computer wizards. There was also, of course, a Mister Donut (“San Francisco Chinatown,” they all say -- true?) and a variety of other fast-food places. I shot a gigantic bean omelet hovering over a plastic food display in front of one of them. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhR314aDmlTHUzaTdBShQowZUVbYH7Wx2JdTU2OUIBbkRl4efla8AFa1KRO1FiKdC-xLOOhVfndYuBDMZPc2-SO2q8dQ7SkKyvZkvGi-p8EY-ErgQuVk9G3j86fdoA3J1QvTQbItjglGio/s1600-h/beanomelet.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhR314aDmlTHUzaTdBShQowZUVbYH7Wx2JdTU2OUIBbkRl4efla8AFa1KRO1FiKdC-xLOOhVfndYuBDMZPc2-SO2q8dQ7SkKyvZkvGi-p8EY-ErgQuVk9G3j86fdoA3J1QvTQbItjglGio/s400/beanomelet.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5249152769502985282" /></a><br /><br /><em>A bean omelet looms</em><br /><br /> Another thing this street had was tons of temples and altars. I came upon one which seemed to have as its main deity a water buffalo, whose bronze statue had been made glossy on the nose and horns by people touching it and which also featured a machine where, if you put in a coin, a puppet dressed as a person in a water-buffalo costume with a mask would do a number of different dances. (I assume they were different dances because there were four buttons you could press.) A young family with a 3-year-old was entertaining him with it, and then they moved him over to the altar, where he rang the bell and they showed him how to make a prayer. Another temple down the road was owned by a sect which encouraged women to become involved with Buddhism, and which also had had as a priest the man they credited with inventing the Japanese comic strip, to which he had made pioneering contributions. Too bad he couldn’t have patented it: the temple would never have had to ask for another donation ever again. And what appeared to be a Shinto place seemed to venerate an octopus. <br /><br /> I finally staggered back to the hotel at 3:45 and realized that I’d gotten my down-time day. The only temples I’d gone to had been minor and probably fairly new, and I’d gone to them completely by accident. I’d done some shopping (I also scored a beautiful yakuta, thanks to a very helpful saleswoman who was shocked that I wasn’t as big as she’d assumed, and a large Japanese size did very nicely, thanks), and seemed to be back in the groove. Tomorrow I’d try to find the 1001 Kannon temple and do some other stuff, but it was too late to “do” anything except go back to the castle, so I decided to kick back, and download the photos in the camera before I forgot what they were -- which I almost did: I’m going to have to go back and look at them again to see if some of the “Kanazawa” photos aren’t maybe Nagoya ones. These castles and so on are beginning to merge into each other.<br /><br /> Dinner was a disaster, though. I headed towards a recommended yakitori place, found it easily enough, but it seemed to be out of business. The only other place with a bilingual menu I’d bothered to note was a place called Fable Table, which I’d passed on the way to the other place. It seemed mostly to feature a black guy singing “soul and jazz,” which didn’t bode well. It was supposed to be a beer cellar with a lot of different varieties and an “international and Japanese” menu. It was horrid. The guy was your typical professional black guy overseas, but he (or someone) knew how to program the electronic keyboard he had, and when I came in, to complete the stereotype, he was murdering “You Are the Sunshine of My Life.” Of course. I was seated in a place where I had a tile wall for a neighbor and a commanding view of the walk-in refrigerator. The waiters all looked like junior yakuza, and the food was beyond awful. I started with a Korean cold noodle dish, which wasn’t too bad, given that it had a kimchi base, and then I ordered grilled beef and vegetables, since everything on the menu seemed to cost the same: ¥500. (This included mixed nuts, incidentally, as well as ice cream and chocolate). The beef and vegetables were two hunks of gristly meat, two small eggplants, and a slice of red pepper stuck on a metal arrow, sitting in a red sauce of indeterminate tomatoeyness. With two beers, this cost me ¥2300, a total burn. Back to the hotel in a bad mood, drank the Autumn ale too quickly (nice and hoppy, but not much else), went to bed at 11:30, slept fitfully.Ed Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17805932361842578943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6396447250385531419.post-67073513474594241622008-09-21T13:17:00.002+02:002008-09-23T12:05:33.626+02:00Sept 18: KyotoI resolved to get off today in a better mood. Went to the17th floor for the Western breakfast buffet, which I wanted to do once, given its price, and the view snapped me into an orientation for the eastern part of the city. I could see the old transport canal running behind the hotel, which made sense of a line on the map which wasn’t clear, and I was able to see approximately where I was going to head today when I checked it with the book back in the room. The buffet was a farce, although they had a live chef preparing eggs, which I didn’t want. I did, however, take a slice of the so-called quiche (which was baked scrambled eggs, no crust), got myself a morning salad (all iceberg lettuce, although there was okra available!) with an excellent thousand island dressing, and took a bunch of pastries to see how the French influence here was. They were pretty bland, and the pain au chocolat managed to transfer chocolate from my mouth to my napkin to my jeans. Ugh. <br /><br /> But the big goal today was the Sanju-Sangen-Do temple with the1001 Kannon statues, and I figured out from the city’s tourist brochure, which makes an excellent supplement to the book, how to get there using public transportation. This proved quite easy: I bought a two-day transport card from the concierge, and went down into the subway. The train came, lots of people got off, and I got on. I sat there while a recorded voice said something over and over, and then someone knocked on my head with his fist, like I was a door. Turned out the train was out of service, and I wasn’t supposed to be on it. So I got out and finally the real train came. Guess that’s how they treat blockheads here, although all the other signs in the subway are bilingual. Why wasn’t there a sign telling me not to get on? After all, I noticed later, there were bilingual “Out of Service” signs in the Tokyo subway.<br /><br /> From the subway to the bus, which was an imitation cable-car, and thence to the temple. But across the street was the city museum, and I thought maybe that would provide a better orientation as a starter. I was right: although the collection isn’t as filled with stunning masterpieces as the one in Ueno Park in Tokyo, the captioning is simple and easy to follow, and so I was able to make sense out of the progression of eras for the first time since I’ve been here. (It’s been all downhill since the Heian, if you ask me). <br /><br /> One caption really got me: in discussing Zen painting it said “Before we can appreciate the painting, we have to locate ourselves in it.” I realized in a flash that that’s something I’ve been doing forever, and that it works with Western painting, although I’d also bet this kind of theory is way out of fashion at the moment. Anathema, even. But what a wonderful thought. <br /><br /> After making the fortuitous discovery of a lot of sculpture and inscribed stones in a sort of garden by the toilets, I left and headed across the street to the temple. There’s only one thing here, but what a thing! This huge long hall (120 meters long) is filled with literally 1001 statues of Kannon, one huge central Kannon, 28 guardian deities (I liked the guy playing the guitar-like instrument), and two gods of wind and thunder flanking the whole shebang. It’s also a working temple: there’s no sign to the “exhibit,” but to “worship.” And people do. They’re praying, writing things on candles, burning incense, writing things on slats of wood to burn, and generally doing the thing the temple was built to do. The whole thing dates from the 12th and 13th centuries, and it’s pretty overwhelming. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwx0X-BFUSeAOD5WQMXqHhTMCKW4TS_FMmFiuz9zy9-Of7ORs-nL-MXnG-jDYxTjNGNr7OojVshuW4igpF7bRuEJXg2lzo3DHXbPjzG5qaJSQxz7urBQGtAmpltp3k2n4cd5Cf589V-Yw/s1600-h/100-0155.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwx0X-BFUSeAOD5WQMXqHhTMCKW4TS_FMmFiuz9zy9-Of7ORs-nL-MXnG-jDYxTjNGNr7OojVshuW4igpF7bRuEJXg2lzo3DHXbPjzG5qaJSQxz7urBQGtAmpltp3k2n4cd5Cf589V-Yw/s400/100-0155.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5249153735725833058" /></a><br /><br /><em>Sanju-Sangen-do</em><br /><br /> So was the heat when I got out. Still, there were lots more things to see in the vicinity, and it seemed pretty easy to get to them. Kiyomizu-dera, the temple on the hill, seemed to be a good bet, so after superficially looking at a couple of places on the way, not paying to go in, I headed up a narrow street that went up the side of a hill. It was jammed with souvenir shops, so I knew I was headed the right way, and knew even more when school groups, led by shouting women with pennants, started appearing along the way. This temple is a complete and total mystery. Like Sanju-Sangen-Do, it’s another UNESCO landmark, in part because of the way it hangs off the hill, supported by beams in a very modern way. As I got there, a group of geishas was hanging around, and given that it was about 95, I felt very sorry for them. They had bewitched some teenage boys, though, who were giving them stuff, and were mincing along on their high-rise clogs. Who would ever choose this life? And what does it consist of? (I’d been warned by old Japan experts not to read the Memoirs of a Geisha novel, and I hadn’t). The whole admixture of modern and ancient in this culture just gets more and more confusing the longer I look at it. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnuITN5L1ehSR-wcpsAx_XnLEtp1Lk47xa9IfI-Bf3hFqqsVGGN0d4k0o9oGE5vWadvlyM-joeJH4KKFUfL-NWzGSed6qUxFKezclFy9eFV8f58FefbWkh0Mx9vY7CvhsBxyhDBJGT2Nc/s1600-h/Kiyomizu-dera.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnuITN5L1ehSR-wcpsAx_XnLEtp1Lk47xa9IfI-Bf3hFqqsVGGN0d4k0o9oGE5vWadvlyM-joeJH4KKFUfL-NWzGSed6qUxFKezclFy9eFV8f58FefbWkh0Mx9vY7CvhsBxyhDBJGT2Nc/s400/Kiyomizu-dera.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5249154670600193010" /></a><br /><br /><em>Kiomizu-dera</em><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj219bAQiz8Vof8MCRuLWDAQQmVVG4i4EyRgvkACyZc5ZPvrFE6ySwTTJqLR0JfkjGAGxkJY79-DqVP6onyaNXsbRIdqTGwEpxlr9GochbjIPQ4o8Srhv8iHKfsOAWiva6SM-9bKXtJjv4/s1600-h/Geishas.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj219bAQiz8Vof8MCRuLWDAQQmVVG4i4EyRgvkACyZc5ZPvrFE6ySwTTJqLR0JfkjGAGxkJY79-DqVP6onyaNXsbRIdqTGwEpxlr9GochbjIPQ4o8Srhv8iHKfsOAWiva6SM-9bKXtJjv4/s400/Geishas.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5249154275090669170" /></a><br /><br /><em>Geishas in the heat</em><br /><br /> And it was certainly in full force here. Again, this is a working temple, with zillions of sub-temples around it, and even tiny rocks carved with Buddha images with red cloth adorning them. People have clearly come here to fulfill vows or to make them. One feature is many stands where you pay some money and they hand you a cylinder which you shake for a while, then extract a chopstick-like stick from it and read the number on it to the attendant, who takes a fortune out of a cubbyhole with that number. Another thing was a place where several streams of water were coming out of a series of pipes which went into a shrine-like building. Hundreds of schoolkids were standing in line for this, then getting on a platform, extending a cup on a long pole, catching some of the water and drinking it. This produced a lot of giggles. No idea what was going on. I apparently missed some sacred groves and a sacred waterfall, but the heat was getting to me. <br /><br /> Eventually, I found my way to the exit, and went down the hill on another street, which was even more clogged with shops and tourists, although I didn’t see much of quality. As the book mentioned, it drops you at a shop called Shichimaya Honpo, which specializes in a chili-powder mixture and also little ceramic vessels to put it in. It’s delicious stuff, and powerful, too, from my sampling, and some of the vessels are wonderfully made. I bought one, and of course it came with a packet of the stuff. From there, you head down some steps onto a street called Sannenzaka, paved with stones and lined with very refined tea-shops. Unfortunately, I didn’t want tea and tea-sweets, and this seemed to be all there was there, although I’d sampled a triangular ravioli-like thing with a bit of red-bean paste in it which was a typical tea-sweet earlier and found it nice enough. The tourists turned off to head to Maruyama Park, but I went towards the bottom and found a sushi-shop with an English menu posted outside. I went in and found myself alone with the chef, ordered some rolls with pickles inside, and had a nice lunch, although the chef seemed pretty drunk and managed to spill his glass of sake while he was making preparations for the evening crowd. It was quarter of two, so I guess the rush was over. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiUSR2JWefDh_JZKSP3VUgjS6mvtxUTPXdKydmqn3_SjAztyAd5N7aiGunxYQxkdgz5mHSA1kb3TKPfNc_k1C9YdSfDHL2f4kLkvGEK0feGhzY6UJzt_J_x4QnM8pRx79EvE1lRThFHnw/s1600-h/Ninenzaka.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiUSR2JWefDh_JZKSP3VUgjS6mvtxUTPXdKydmqn3_SjAztyAd5N7aiGunxYQxkdgz5mHSA1kb3TKPfNc_k1C9YdSfDHL2f4kLkvGEK0feGhzY6UJzt_J_x4QnM8pRx79EvE1lRThFHnw/s400/Ninenzaka.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5249155440919881458" /></a><br /><br /><em>Sannenzaka, I think</em><br /><br /> At the bottom of the hill is another pagoda, but there was no info and the book was also unsure of exactly what it was, and I turned right on a main street and walked until I got to the park. There, the main temple was under construction so I continued to wander around and, knowing I was at the top of the Gion district, decided to go down into it. The book says it’s charming, but nothing was charming in this heat. I turned onto a street called Hanami-koji, which is lined with historic tea-houses, and walked straight into what must have been a funeral. Way up ahead, I could see what looked like a wooden boat, and there were scores of people dressed in black suits and kimonos. Police were everywhere. The street emptied out fast after the cars left, and I found myself at what I found later was Kennin-ji, one of the earlier Zen temples, but one which is not viewable. Also, there was no documentation, so I had no idea what it was. I was getting delirious in the heat, so I was very happy to see the mystery pagoda looming up at the top of one street and headed up to a main artery where I knew the 100 bus, which would take me back to the station, would be. Unfortunately, school had just let out, and I stood there inches from the street with dozens of giggling, screaming schoolgirls and boys. The bus stop doubled as a taxi-stand, though, and when a taxi came along, I decided the hell with the bus-pass, and jumped in and went back to the hotel, where I figured a shower and some lounging around would be a very good idea. I’d heard of Kyoto temple burn, and I was feeling it. Incense had gotten inside my nose, and I was reeling from an overdose of imagery (which is what you get looking at 1001 anythings, I guess). Time to calm down.<br /><br /> And that was a good idea. I lazed around in a yukata after the shower, typed this up, and started thinking about dinner. I had an idea for a place I wanted to go, so I went to the concierge and asked her if she’d call to make sure they’d take me, that I wouldn’t have to sit on tatami, and maybe someone had some rudimentary English. She placed the call, but got an answering machine, so she checked her extensive records and discovered they were closed Tuesdays. I told her of the place I’d tried to find the previous night, the yakitori place, and she said “Oh, I know a good yakitori place, called Agatha.” This was the same place I’d found closed. “They moved,” she said, and gave me their card. They were about 100 feet from the awful place I’d eaten at last night! <br /><br /> Agatha is a very odd place, but quite worthy of the two stars the book gives it. Yakitori is a deal whereby stuff is threaded onto a wooden skewer and charcoal grilled. It gets painted with glaze, dipped in miso, all kinds of things, but the main thing is grilling to the perfect point. I knew it was going to be okay because this time “You Are The Sunshine of My Life” was being sung by Stevie Wonder, on a CD, the way God intended it to be. The restaurant is named after the late Dame Christie, and, indeed, the set menus are named Poirot, Marple, and Christie. I took the Marple, because it had the most skewers (10) and didn’t include dessert, which looked odd (pear sherbet, yeah, but “milky sorbet with sweet balsamic flavor?”). In no particular order, I got octopus, an asparagus spear wrapped with ham, amazing beef, chicken meatballs, “wheat protein” with two kinds of miso, a huge prawn, a ham and cheese roll which was resistant to the chopsticks and had to be popped in my mouth at once, one which escapes me now, and then the piece de resistance, a thing of salmon with a garlic mayonnaise-y sauce in a pocket made of thinly shaved potato, which used two skewers to hold it together, and which I considered cheating until I tasted it. I was thinking of ordering another of the beef skewers, but this was such a perfect end I passed. The flavors lingered with me well into the night, which I mean in the best possible sense.Ed Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17805932361842578943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6396447250385531419.post-70186939507491871952008-09-21T13:11:00.002+02:002008-09-23T12:14:55.673+02:00Sept. 19: KyotoONE! Annoying thing! I’d heard of! About Japan! SOUNDTRUCKS! And damn if one didn’t set up just outside my window at 8 am to harrass the workers on their way into Kyoto City Hall across the street. This guy in an immaculate grey suit was standing on top of the truck talking into a megaphone while the loudspeakers amplified his voice and bounced it off of the stone walls. Got me out of bed, anyway. <br /><br /> I’d discovered a bakery nearby, which seemed like a good breakfast alternative, as well as a way to probe the weird fascination and interpretation of the West that is rampant here. I bought too much stuff, including a potato-salad sandwich (well, who could resist that? It wasn’t bad, and provided insight into those inch-thick pieces of toast you get here because they’d taken one of those slices of white bread and sliced it about 7/8 of the way down before adding the filling.), an odd cheese roll covered with hot chili powder, and some boxed coffee. I avoided sugary stuff because I knew the coffee would have plenty, and this turned out to be a good strategy for a day that involved a lot of physical exercise. <br /><br /> My intention was to hit the Philosopher’s Walk, a place where a noted thinker of the post-war era had taken his constitutional every day until his death in 1958. It was supposed to be lovely, although mostly in the spring when it’s loaded with cherry-blossoms. There were also a lot of temples in the area, and it seemed like a good idea to do both. What was really cool was that the whole thing was just a short subway ride away from the station just under the hotel, which was quite convenient. <br /><br /> First stop was the Museum of Traditional Crafts, which was almost impossible to find. It turns out to be in the basement of the local convention center, and is only identified by its Japanese name. But, like the one in Kanazawa, it was brilliantly annotated and had some excellent videos illustrating some of the craftspeople in action. I saw a guy put together a little chest of drawers without nails which fit so perfectly that he had problems with the last drawer, because when he slid it in, the displaced air would puff another one out. He had to deal with this several times before it sat still. That’s precision: these people work without plans. There was even a room where some people were banging out gold inlay, but the products were so garish after what I’d just seen that I did a quick turn and left. I guess the reason places like this are more tourist-friendly is that you can leave them and actually buy the stuff they have on display. You just can’t go out and buy an Important Cultural Property on the open market. <br /><br /> It would be easy for me to criticize myself for doing these nice air-conditioned museums first thing, before the heat of the day really gets going, but whereas yesterday I could easily have visited the temple beforehand, then gone to the museum, this really seemed like the first logical stop today. The Heian Shrine was just up the street, and I went to look at it, all red and garish, and wasn’t much moved, although it seems to play a significant role in local affairs. After a quick turn, I headed off to yet another temple, Nanzen-ji.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOMB0iDS6QnQi3vaO8nUuw3DzgI2OYj6Lz5uyCXQtZ1SCe9Rr9QrGHeu5rNxYWCscFEH1VqH_nr5DgCUZD0fW246AQ31Hfnwqt7iOwDmM9i3foWXcB7uRxucyDM7ca5vdGnA0cRjSsRXk/s1600-h/nanzen-jigarden.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOMB0iDS6QnQi3vaO8nUuw3DzgI2OYj6Lz5uyCXQtZ1SCe9Rr9QrGHeu5rNxYWCscFEH1VqH_nr5DgCUZD0fW246AQ31Hfnwqt7iOwDmM9i3foWXcB7uRxucyDM7ca5vdGnA0cRjSsRXk/s400/nanzen-jigarden.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5249157032201663346" /></a><br /><br /><em>Garden at Nanzen-ji</em><br /><br /> It was here that temple burn set in definitively, although this is yet another UNESCO site (does anyplace in the world have more of them thant Kyoto, I wonder?). The gardens were astonishing, and the paintings on the screens, too. It’s a Zen temple, so of course the gardens are going to be challenging, and the paintings, which were largely of tigers, with the occasional lion or leopard, made me wonder: were there ever big cats in Japan? Where did these people get the models for these (admittedly not all that accurate) depictions? But I was beginning to feel dragged, and the last temple on my list would do me in. <br /><br /> The Philosopher’s Walk beckoned, though, having come highly recommended. The heat was now upon us, and so, dammit, were the school-groups. Chatter, chatter, chatter, giggle, giggle, giggle. These kids, of course, are part of the tradition, and an active one, at that. But there’s something really oppressive about their conformity, their uniforms, and their behavior. Of the adults I’ve seen, the vast majority of the Japanese have been women. Apparently a few years ago, JR had a slogan for the Shinkansen: “Let’s go to Kyoto!,” the idea being that if you didn’t have anything to do, you could hop on the train, take in a temple or two, and be home for dinner. Thus, the commercial streets leading to the attractions tend to be lined with tea and coffee places that are often Western in aspect and aimed at the ladies who like calories and French names and appointments. You can’t but start to think of the bored women whose lives are centered around workaholic husbands who die of stress-related illnesses well before their time has come, Japan being a notoriously long-lived country. Hubby comes home, dumps some money on the table, and says “Here, go do something.” Thus the profusion of luxury stores (even Kanazawa had a high-end mall), the endless tea-sweets, the high-end fashion. And the Philosopher’s Walk was no exception. Had I wanted coffee and eclairs to relieve the hike, I would have had no problem finding them. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqOs1X9s608SjVebnzN1mO__7VQ2ZXBWM4I23pcrjhMNV3OHLaDYcCWDhTeBC9RZLnX1FlQHVfPdU58KIi1lpmpusAwovaFb9IjafU3KonSh5dJ6NBgZxKbaRzU9q27D2jPjc03U0uXM8/s1600-h/roundhouse.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqOs1X9s608SjVebnzN1mO__7VQ2ZXBWM4I23pcrjhMNV3OHLaDYcCWDhTeBC9RZLnX1FlQHVfPdU58KIi1lpmpusAwovaFb9IjafU3KonSh5dJ6NBgZxKbaRzU9q27D2jPjc03U0uXM8/s400/roundhouse.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5249157422884972674" /></a><br /><br /><em>Round house on the Philosopher's Walk</em><br /><br /> It does, however, go in a straight line through an upscale neighborhood, and you get to peek into the lives of normal rich people, some of whom have exquisite gardens in the Japanese style (when it’s work you do yourself, or your own home, you don’t try for the French formal approach, I guess), and at least it’s shady and runs along a canal, so you have running water for a companion. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkcTL8suUTA7qnRGkOORlTVm0VIKJLCZtkVPv1vatUUpkWlw_HUwAPnOARE4YYA9loG_LJBDRIBR43L8EloeEoOZWWfGkyi4MxJRZwaSV3GFQ98o5K4CmR3fh2pTVWXC8cCggtmfFJ_tk/s1600-h/Ginkaku-ji1.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkcTL8suUTA7qnRGkOORlTVm0VIKJLCZtkVPv1vatUUpkWlw_HUwAPnOARE4YYA9loG_LJBDRIBR43L8EloeEoOZWWfGkyi4MxJRZwaSV3GFQ98o5K4CmR3fh2pTVWXC8cCggtmfFJ_tk/s400/Ginkaku-ji1.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5249158040906989074" /></a><br /><br /><em>Ginkaku-ji</em><br /><br />And you end up at the approach to yet another UNESCO temple, Ginkaku-ji, which is also Zen. It’s got a great garden, but there’s no access to any of the buildings, and the walk takes you way the hell up the hillside so you can see the ozone layer settling over Kyoto. (Ironic that this is where the global warming treaty was hashed out, because Japan’s got a particulate pollution problem that reminds me of L.A. thirty years ago. On the other hand, if someone made me come here, I’d sign anything they put in front of me, particularly after dinner). I finally decided that this was not where I wanted to be, amidst the schoolgirls (too bad these women all marry and settle into these pampered lifestyles by the time they’re 30: they’re amazingly attractive for the most part, but I wonder just how many rebellious intellects there are in this country), so I found my way out and walked philosophically back along the trail, watching the fish in the canal who swim against the current (well, at least some organisms do that here!). Eventually, I discovered that if you turn right where I’d turned left a few hours earlier, you reach a subway station which deposits you under the Kyoto Hotel, so I could have ended up at the nice air-conditioned museum. Ah, well. As a bit of poetic justice, I got on one of the trains that ends at my station, the same one I’d gotten knocked on the head for yesterday. <br /><br /> Dinner was at the place I couldn’t go last night, Kurokawa, and for the most part it was pleasant. Little tiny place with a counter, a family-owned izakaya yet again. Dad and son doing the cooking and Mom and sis doing the serving. The concierge must have done a real number on the guy, because when I poked my head in he welcomed me effusively and made it known that he would serve me real Kyoto food. I started out with some mixed vegetables, sort of salad-y, and then we moved on to a soup with fried tofu in it. Various other concoctions followed, including squid with that awful grey yam jelly and, of all things, potato salad. There were two women sitting to my left, one rather young and mostly drinking choshu, the other, who didn’t look Japanese, had some English and helped translate. A sullen couple from Hokkaido was also there, but they didn’t contribute much, despite our host’s trying to liven them up. After the sort-of-English-speaking woman left, and I knew I was getting to the end of my meal, because I’d been served a sort of rice casserole, a guy in a suit came in. I’m of course not sure what he said, but the word “gaijin” appeared in his speech. My guess is he came in and said “What, Kurokawa, you’re serving gaijin now?” The host, from what I could, again, infer, said “He’s American, and he eats with chopsticks like a real Japanese person. No knife, no fork.” This last was in English. “You doctor?” the guy asked me. “No, journalist,” I told him. I’d been served some slices of nashi, and a tiny fork, but the host grabbed a very small chopstick and handed it to me. “Japanese chopstick,” he explained in English, so I impaled the nashi slice on it, looked inquiringly, and he nodded, so I ate it that way. This seemed to mollify the newcomer, and right about then, the vegetable delivery came, which seemed like an odd time -- it was about 10:30 -- to have that happen. The son tore into it like it was Christmas, though, and the host regaled me with the uniquely Kyotoan ingredients in the bag: spherical eggplants, kabocha squash (which he said was pumpkin, and, in fact, the word translates like that), and one or two other things. Eventually, I took my leave. I realized, though, that I’d been patronized, treated like the pet foreigner. This may be the price one pays for authentic food, though.Ed Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17805932361842578943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6396447250385531419.post-41372749824166017832008-09-21T13:06:00.002+02:002008-09-23T12:17:11.170+02:00Sept. 20, KyotoDid not feel too good this morning, and had nightmares at night which seemed to be fever-dreams. I blame one of the two potato salads I had yesterday; in fact, the first one did seem a bit off. I’m probably rationalizing; if there are times which will bring on bad dreams, we’re in them: an unelected president and his right-wing crew aching for war, when, in fact, war doesn’t seem like it would accomplish anything. Not that that’s ever stopped anyone before, of course. <br /><br /> Today’s idea was to go to Himeji-ji, cited in the book as the perfect Japanese castle, yet another UNESCO site, but one out of Kyoto about an hour on the Shinkansen. At least it’s not a temple, and the book says it’s worth a trip, so why not? The first thing was to go to that odd bakery for more weird pastry. I got a bun which turned out to have red-bean paste inside it, a thing marked “Spicy!” which had bacon and hard-boiled eggs in it (not spicy at all) and a bun with potatoes on top of it. The bakery’s motto is “Your good times have just begun,” and I have to admit, it is fun trying to figure out what the fuck they’ve baked. <br /><br /> The idea was to take it slow, and I did. Got to Kyoto station just after the train had left, so I killed an hour in the mall there -- not at all hard to do -- and got on the Shinkansen. Fifty minutes later I was in Himeji. The castle was clearly visible at the end of the street leading from the station, but the book had said it was a better idea to hit the Museum of Local History first. Not a bad idea, given my propensity for nice air-conditioned museums before the hard work, and, since this thing sits on top of a huge hill, I already knew it was going to be hard work. As I was walking, two guys on bicycles came up and asked in mid-American accents how I was doing and what I was doing, and I told them. It was only as they cycled away that I saw the Mormon badges they were wearing. One wasn’t even white, poor guy. He won’t be joining his buddy in heaven. <br /><br /> The museum was all the way past the castle, and not at all well-marked, but it did the trick of filling me in on local history. There was a tribute at the end to a professor who had collected things which related to the castle, and it said that in one of his publications he had deduced that “castles represent humanity’s desire for safety.” Especially the rulers of said humanity. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9cN-R0_jsEX8g79ADP06U0xmZPf3-WihyT57preFXTcZBsvjzGnIzIhaJwiexUmDVxY4mF_ofw8RNKsQCPxm_FMMXECIp_XPBC5cMm-Th1p7fuHthgjmfTwx0lDkQwMBI5NXh1LCXIk0/s1600-h/Himeiji-ji2.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9cN-R0_jsEX8g79ADP06U0xmZPf3-WihyT57preFXTcZBsvjzGnIzIhaJwiexUmDVxY4mF_ofw8RNKsQCPxm_FMMXECIp_XPBC5cMm-Th1p7fuHthgjmfTwx0lDkQwMBI5NXh1LCXIk0/s400/Himeiji-ji2.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5249158569258928034" /></a><br /><br /><em>Himeiji-ji, with fireproof dolphins</em><br /><br /> The castle, let it be said, is spectacular -- from the outside. Inside, it’s dark, you climb very high-pitched stairs (after having climbed even more to get to the entrance), but at least a nice breeze was filtering in the windows. The exhibits are pretty good; one of the rulers was a bit of an aesthete, and they had some of his paintings, calligraphy, and writings on view. But the only thing you get for going all the way to the top -- not that you have a choice -- is a shrine, which had apparently been there since before the castle. They moved it to build the castle, and, as the booklet said “afterwards people felt Nature’s curse,” so they put it back. It has plenty of bottles of sake before it, and another of those places where the tourist can rubber-stamp the pamphlet you get going in. Another curious bit of signage was in the “West bailey,” whatever that is, a long dormitory which you see backwards so you only figure out that it was the aesthete’s wife who had her quarters there, building a tower with a bit of her dowry so she’d have a place to put on her makeup and also perform a ritual, plus, of course, house her 30 or so servants. The doors to the servants’ quarters are huge and the sign says something like “it seems odd that these doors are so formidable when the occupants of these quarters were only women,” which is a nice way of putting it. Of course, I don’t know what kind of women, so maybe it wasn’t so odd. I missed the house where people could commit harakiri, although apparently it was never used for it. <br /><br /> It was a pretty arduous trek, and given that my t-shirts were nearly wasted, I bought another one, horrible tourist thing, on my way out because it’ll come in handy, I’m sure. Got back to the train station and of course I’d just missed the train, so I killed an hour in the adjoining market and of course immediately found the food department underneath the big department store, which I cruised amusedly as the vendors whisked the samples out of my reach. Damn, I was actually feeling hungry, but it was almost 5, and I decided to wait til I got back to Kyoto and hit the tonkatsu place one last time. <br /><br /> They were glad to see me, but I sensed the master’s mind was elsewhere this time. There were ten bowls of all kinds of stuff lined up on the counter, some huge shrimp-like things being very active in the same fish-tank that had held the abalones last time, and some rather demanding customers next to me who looked like a successful businessman and his girlfriend, or maybe even his wife, and apparently a big party dining behind the shoji screen. The girlfriend spoke in a little-girl tone that I found immensely annoying, and they seemed to be having some very expensive food, including a mushroom stew which had five or six different kinds of mushrooms in it, including oyster, shiitake, and enoki. The crust on my tonkatsu kept coming loose, which it hadn’t last time, but the missus made me feel like she was telling the truth when she said “I’m so glad you came back here.” It was a good way to end the stay in Kyoto.Ed Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17805932361842578943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6396447250385531419.post-57943021983025319132008-09-21T13:01:00.001+02:002008-09-21T13:06:43.556+02:00Sept. 21: TokyoTook the Shinkansen to Tokyo after checking out, massacring a bento along the way (maybe it wasn’t fresh enough: everything kept falling apart), and it wasn’t such a big deal until I got there and realized that this one didn’t go to Shinjuku, but, rather, to Tokyo Station itself. Damn, I knew the hotel (the Aoyama President) wasn’t far from Shinjuku (actually it was, but not as far as from Tokyo), but the driver was good and aggressive and whisked me along at a good pace, nightmare traffic notwithstanding. Got to the hotel and found a message and a stack of guidebooks from Calton Bolick, and a fax from Noda-san telling me that Evan Parker (whom he spelled “Perker”) was due to play tonight with Otomo and Sachiko and a guy playing the sho, which sounded interesting. I took a walk down Aoyama-dori, the big street near the hotel, to get my bearings, then came back and talked to Calton for a while, and left a message for Noda, and made plans to go to see if ol’ Evan really was a perker. <br /><br /> He was. I’m so used to the sterile, airless improvisation of German musicians (and, to be honest, some of the ’60s and ’70s British stuff I’ve heard) that this really got to me. Parker is no virtuoso in the commonly-accepted sense of the term, but he’s an extraordinary listener. The show was at the Pit Inn, a Tokyo jazz landmark for over 20 years, and although the vibe was weird (before they let me take a seat, I had to hand in a ticket for my free drink, even though I didn’t feel like one at the moment), the seats were okay and there were actual sightlines and all. Parker started out solo, circular-breathing his way through a number which started out like bagpipes, but soon picked up on the “accidental” overtones produced by his “bad” fingering and blowing. Thus, the rhythmic underpinning remained the same while the texture kept changing. <br /><br /> Next up was the duet with Ishikawa Ko, the sho player. The sho is often shorthanded as a “Japanese harmonica,” which doesn’t really get it. It’s a collection of bamboo tubes bound together, each with a reed inside which sounds when the player opens or covers one or more of a number of holes on the front of the instrument. It’s essential to gagaku, the highest form of court music. Ko did a great job of listening to Parker, who gingerly essayed legato phrases, feeling his way around Ko’s cluster of notes -- not exactly a chord in the Western sense -- while Ko made his instrument behave in some rather non-traditional, but nonetheless very musical, ways. <br /><br /> Sachiko was up next, and I must admit, I still have trouble with what she does because it’s so minimal. Parker was up to it, playing high-pitched squeals, overblowing at the top of his range, and finding ways to create beats against the sine tones she was producing. She really doesn’t seem to use much variation in pitch or deal with rhythm at all, but he seemed to be forcing her to get a little busier with her machine, and in the end it, too, was a worthwhile performance, albeit a bit shorter than the other two. <br /><br /> Next in the box was Otomo, who started out by hitting some Tibetan temple bells and taking the tones they produced and making feedback from them, while Parker circled those notes with another of those legato explorations. Eventually, they hit on a common ground and once again the duo took off, as Otomo began putting a contact mike around the bells, then making a tuning-fork interact with them while Parker stayed right with it, commenting on the timbres, pitches, and tones. It was a wonderful show of communication.<br /><br /> I was, however, dubious about how the quartet setting he’d announced for the second half of the show would work. The two guys sitting next to me, a Brit named Simon and an American named Steve, were talking about the whole thing, Simon being a major Parker fan who said he’d seen him about 100 times. (Oddly, but appropriately for this sort of improv, he didn’t own many of his CDs). Steve was a total virgin to this whole scene, and it was interesting to see how someone who was such a deep fan tried to explain what it was to someone who was open to it, but without many reference-points. I was feeling them out about the difference between improv and jazz, and it was all quite a fine intellectual exercise, and enlightening in that I’d never met anyone who was so much into this sort of stuff before. <br /><br /> But the quartet was amazing. Parker started off solo, very quiet, then Ko breathed softly into the sho, Sachiko hit the occasional note, and Otomo picked up a guitar (which I find he plays regularly in what Simon described as a “kick-ass post-bop band”) and produced some bell-like tones by picking below the bridge. This provoked kind of a trio between Ko, Parker, and Sachiko, who weaved in and out of their long-held notes, as Otomo went back to the bells, finding similarites between their sonorities and those he’d been producing on the guitar. He then did some blocks of fairly normal rock-guitar feedback, which encouraged the others, and things got so intense -- yet without any high volume -- that I just stopped taking notes. Everybody was listening to everybody, and that included the audience, which was as hushed as I’ve ever heard in a club. There was one point where Otomo squeezed the last bits of sound out of a feedback loop, making it go uh-uh-uh, and Parker was right on top of him, doing the same with the sax. There was another point where it would have been perfect to stop; Parker had taken the sax out of his mouth and Ko had stopped playing, but Otomo started firing up again and I was afraid that this would get tedious because it would go on too long. Not to worry: although it only was another five or so minutes, it all held together, and finally once again it landed. The whole thing had lasted about 45 minutes. The audience wouldn’t stop clapping, so they came out and did a short encore, which actually got Sachiko going wild and playing a lot of notes! She then did a fast blip and everyone stopped. <br /><br /> I was awed, and I talked with Simon and Steve for a while, then noticed that Noda-san was standing at the bar, so I asked him if he were hungry and he agreed that he was. But instead of leaving, he went over to the organizer and asked him if Parker would like to go to have a meal after the show. In fact, Parker would like to do just that, as it transpired, and we endured the usual post-gig windup, as they broke down the equipment, and finally Parker, the woman he was with, Sachiko and Otomo, the organizer, and another guy I didn’t recognize, all went to this funky soba place Noda knew about deep in gayest Shinjuku, which was the first time I’d seen any gay stuff happening in Japan. There were tater-tots made of mountain potato with nori or shiso leaf on them, then tempura shrimp, then tempura melon, then soba of various kinds, although Noda opted for miso soup with a kind of local noodle called houto. <br /><br /> Afterwards, we tried to deal with the taxi situation, and I found a guy who drove like a maniac back to the hotel. Slept very, very well.Ed Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17805932361842578943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6396447250385531419.post-12820059117381686202008-09-21T12:55:00.001+02:002008-09-21T13:01:30.518+02:00Sept. 22: TokyoToday started with a “breakfast set” downstairs. I see that they offer 20 each day which are all-organic, and much more expensive, which seems a bit weird, but this one was perfectly okay, even the “corned beef hash” which looked like refried beans but tasted just fine. Been a while since I’ve had that one; memories of Duke’s at the Tropicana. <br /><br /> I decided that I should get a paper after breakfast, so I headed into the subway to go to Shinjuku to get it, and was on my way down the stairs when I saw that the lady at the kiosk there had IHTs in her selection! Amazing, I’m not in Kansas -- or Kanazawa, or, for that matter, Berlin -- any more. But I’d bought a ticket for Shinjuku and figured it should have something going on at 10:30 in the morning. They were setting up for some sort of street fair when I got there, and one of my goals, Tower Records, was closed until 11, but I noticed that some of the electronics shops were up and running. I went in one and figured out that there were 5 floors, so, seeing an employee in an elevator, I got on. He started shouting at me. I indicated that I didn’t understand, so he shouted louder. This has happened on a number of occasions here, and gives the lie to the well-crafted myth of the polite Japanese. Sure, they bray their hellos and goodbyes when you enter a shop, and it’s all surface polite, but I’ve been hit when people wanted me out of the way (to catch a train), knocked on the head the other day in the subway, jostled aside by a hefty schoolgirl at a convenience store, and, of course, yelled at for being an uncomprehending barbarian, as I had been here: customers have to use the stairs. <br /><br /> So I decided fuck that shop and went into the one next door, figuring that now I knew the drill, I could do what I needed to do. And I did: walked the stairs from floor to floor and was amazed at how little interested me. It may be due to the fact that these shops are packed so tightly with stuff, and I’m just not seeing it all, of course, but the fabled wild gadgets just didn’t seem to be on display. I went to several, and, while one had a huge selection of mysterious Game Boy Advance games (all labelled “for sale and use only in Japan,” which second part is mysterious enough) and a Game Cube on display (great graphics on the demo, but what’s it play like?), and another had several sizes of that remarkable 3/4” thick Sharp TV (complete with a picture of a traditionally-dressed housewife carrying it, showing that it was so light that even women could pick one up), there was nothing particularly mind-blowing. Of course, I haven’t been to Akihabara, the real electronics wonderland yet, and Calton says that’ll be the place. Hope he’s right. <br /><br /> Anyway, this easily burned up the 30 minutes I had to burn, so I went to Tower, and headed to the top floor, which had a great, if odd, selection of books and magazines. I got a New Yorker and the latest Wired, just to have something to read on the plane on the way home, and noted a wide selection of beat literature, which must have some fascination for their core customers. This was also the DVD floor, and while waiting for the elevator I watched a bit of a film called Battle Royale, which appeared to be a gangster movie starring schoolgirls. During what I saw, one blew the head off of another with a MAC 10, in what seemed to be home ec lab. <br /><br /> Downstairs was the classical, jazz, world, and avant-garde/new age floor. The jazz section gave me fits until I realized that it was filed by first name. Thus, John Coltrane and John Scofield shared space, Don Cherry and Don Redman, and so on. Somehow, filed in with the Coltrane records was one by some guy surnamed Pontiac, recorded in a mental hospital in Michigan, and with encomia from everyone from Iggy Pop to John Lurie. (Of course, I found later that it was John Lurie on some elaborate jape). I didn’t think to bring my Palm to jot down notes, so I’ll probably forget most of the other stuff I saw. I picked up an old favorite, Don Cherry’s Mu Parts One and Two, and then headed over to classical, where I was confronted with seven versions of Messaien’s Turangalila Symphonie. Shoulda figured that’d be a local favorite. Avant/new age was interesting; there was a CStone section, and it was empty, and labelled like I typed it. Picked up a cheap copy of Monteverdi’s Orfeo here, just to have something to listen to. <br /><br /> Now I thought I’d go back to the hotel and figure out what to do next, and maybe find a place to read my e-mail. Calton reported nobody calling in for dinner, but I kept my hopes up. Read the paper, and realized this fine, cool day was going to waste, so I inquired about an internet cafe downstairs and they pulled out a sheet of paper for a Yahoo! Cafe just off of tony Otomesando. It turned out to be over a Starbuck’s, a truly Satanic marriage of American institutions, and you had to register first (they wanted a passport), and the sheet they handed you said they suggested strongly that you use Yahoo’s e-mail. I handed it back and decided to go to Kinko’s, but a girl working there said that it was only a suggestion, so finally they processed me and I was given an USB key. I was also told that I could only use it for 20-30 mintues. I was, in fact, told this about every two minutes as I sat there. It was extremely annoying, especially the first time when I was busy reading something and the girl said it in Japanese, I indicated I didn’t understand, so she yelled at me. Goddam it, I should see if Air France has earlier flights. In fact, I needed to check their website anyway, but thanks to the constant interruption, I forgot. <br /><br /> I left, got my registration card, which I will never use again, and proceeded down Omotesando, which was an orgy of conspicuous consumption. At Meiji-dori, it was a sea of teenagers. Some in colorful Afro wigs were hyping Macy Gray (wonder if she knows about this charming marketing strategy), and as I walked back up to Aoyama-dori, there were various other marketing crews out monitoring the teens. I finally got back to the hotel, feeling too old, too big, too foreign and very angry, and called Calton, who said nobody had checked in still. So I called Noda-san and set up a meet at Shibuya to go see Otomo’s jazz group. <br /><br /> He had me meet him at the statue of Hachiko, the faithful dog, at Shibuya Station. I don’t have any idea how he manages to find people in a mass like that. The sheer numbers were overwhelming, even at 7 in the evening. Two huge screens blared music videos and commercials, and there was another in the middle which seemed to be advertising cellular service. But he found me, and we set off for the club, Quattro, part of a chain with locations in a couple of other cities. Turned out there were three other bands plus a DJ on the bill, but we got there in the middle of the second band, Boat. This was one of those bands with no idea what they were doing -- although it turned out they have something like five albums to their credit. (I found out later that this was their last gig, and they’d broken up because their label had dropped them, which really seems to indicate that they weren’t interested in what they were doing in the first place). Boring jams, all of which seemed to fit the same pattern, melodically and rhythmically. We walked out and went to the lobby and waited them out. Next up was Dr. Funk, which consisted of three Japanese guys and a Westerner with a Flying V, a bunch of effects boxes, and no discernable talent for doing anything but making random noise. The other three pounded away stiffly at a mechanical funk groove of sorts, while this jerk showily made noise, sometimes putting the guitar on the floor. They were, hands down, the worst band I’ve seen in about the past five years, unless I’m mercifully forgetting someone else. Again, they had a couple of CDs out, for sale downstairs. I was getting angrier and angrier. Since the DJ was next and only then would Otomo appear, I tried to make Noda understand that I used to do this for a living, but had since sworn that I’d never do it again, and I’d also never stay around bad music when I had an opportunity to go elsewhere. I had him convey my apologies to Otomo, and, in fact, the nine-piece group he was in seemed intriguing, but I just felt I’d been through this too many times. <br /><br /> Back at home base, I went to an Indian vegetarian restaurant I’d seen in my peregrinations. It was good enough, expensive given the very small portions, North Indian in style, but they sat me right under a speaker which was blaring alternating filmi and operetta. Anyway, the dinner wasn’t bad, and the chef was sitting by the cash-register while I paid, and I asked him in English if he were from the north. He glared at me. I asked the cashier-waitress (who did speak English) if he did, so I could compliment him, and she said no. Fuck. He’s probably Afghani. (Robb Satterwhite thinks this place is owned by a cult, and I can, in retrospect, see how he could think this).Ed Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17805932361842578943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6396447250385531419.post-37468550969359086082008-09-21T12:49:00.001+02:002008-09-21T12:54:55.842+02:00Sept. 23: TokyoSo, what to do today? Sightseeing has lost its appeal, and there’s not a whole lot of it to do here in Tokyo, at least nothing I either haven’t done or done better in Kyoto. Shopping seemed to be the thing: shopping for stuff to bring the folks back home. <br /><br /> First, though, I went to Kinko’s to really do some internet stuff. The manager there was an American guy with red hair -- actual hair-color, not dyed, which was refreshing in a country that’s gone dye-mad -- and I managed to spend over an hour there, at ¥200 for ten minutes. But nobody harrassed me, and they actually had a Mac to work on, so I felt at home. After that, I decided to see about going to the Akihibara electronics district, “Electric City,” to see what was up. I started walking down the street, and figured, hey, it’s a lovely day, crisp and sunny, so I’d just walk all the way down Aoyama-dori to Shibuya. <br /><br /> Which I wound up doing, stopping at the Kinokuniya food shop to take a look around at all the stuff they had there (including lots of Western stuff I can’t get in Berlin, of course) and then just sauntering on. A lovely tree-lined street which was far more reminiscent of Paris than Otomesando dumped me into Shibuya, which was every bit as nutzo as it had been last night, even though it was noon. I was going to get on the circle line, because the station I wanted was there, but then remembered that last night on my way out I’d caught sight of a Tokyu Hands department store, and that had come highly recommended. <br /><br /> What a place! Basically, if it’s not food, furniture or clothing, they’ve got it. I started out looking for one of those lighters in the shape of a video camera to give Susan, and found some rather avant-garde ones instead, which I picked up. Then I headed up to the top, and wound up in the pen department, where I discovered that Japanese shop help is every bit as helpful as German shop help. Or maybe it’s just that the guy couldn’t wait on me and the extremely demanding, wealthy-looking woman who was also vying for his time simultaneously. But I finally found a few cool items, and bought them, then headed downstairs to the cookware department, where I scored a ginger grater (after seeing the woman grate the wasabi that first night in town, I finally figured out how to use one) and a number of lovely sets of chopsticks. Fought my way to the first floor again, and made it back to Shibuya Station, and got on the circle line and headed to my station.<br /><br /> I was actually pretty disappointed overall by this legendary place, but I guess I didn’t explore much. I did run into a guy with a booth in the street selling a whole shitload of weird lighters, including a canteloupe-sized silver head of Hitler (?), and, I was happy to see, the video recorder one. I got another for Calton, who seemed fascinated by my description. As I understand, the plastic food district is also near here (actually, it’s not far, but it’s not exactly near), and I have Tuesday free, so I could go back. But the megastores with their tax-free departments were where I was headed, because the sales help spoke English. There simply weren’t many things on display that were too different from what you’d see in any other electronics store, though, and you have to spend ¥100,000 before you get your break. One nice item was a GPS watch Casio is making, which will give you latitude and longitude, but also synchs to a cradle on your desktop which connects with a CD-ROM in your computer with maps on it. Thus, you can load in where you’re going and get detailed info on your watch. Trouble is, one of the guys explained that the map feature’s only available in Japanese and the only map available is Japan. Too bad. I could use something like that on my travels around Europe. <br /><br /> All I wound up getting was a pair of headphones for the CD player, because I’ve come to hate the ear-buds. As for the GPS watch...I’m not going to be exploring in Japan much any more. I now, however, had shopping fatigue, and it was a long ride on the circle back home, so I packed it in for the day. <br /><br /> On my way back, I was waiting at a light and there was a kid across the street wearing a red sweatshirt with a white circle and a black swastika inside it. Basically, a Nazi flag. I was astonished: was he crazy, or just stupid? I glanced at his back as I crossed the road and saw that it had come from SS Enterprises of Fresno, California. Figures. But he could have been wearing it in all innocence, as a protest or a gesture of nonconformity, since he probably knew it was something that pissed people off and thought that was cool. Or he could, I guess, have been a Nazi. They may well exist here for all I know. <br /><br /> At Shibuya I made a mistake. I started riding on the Yamanote circle line, and found that where I was was about half-way around from where I was going. Feeling impatient, and knowing I was only three stops away, I got off at Shibuya. That’s where it went wrong. I spent 45 minutes looking for the Ginza line, which turned out to be on the third floor (and why shouldn’t the subway be on the third floor?), and then bought what seemed to be the right ticket, only to have the machines refuse it. I went looking for another line and couldn’t find it, and found I was walking around in circles. I was already tired, and now I was getting angry as well. Finally I decided the only thing to do was to walk all the way back up Ayoma-dori. And that’s what I did. <br /><br /> I called Calton when I got back, and he reported that Robb Satterwhite had checked in, so after a torturous round of phone calls, we all agreed to meet and go to an art opening in a bar called Radio On. Robb and a friend of his from London met me on a bench in front of a fancy department store called Bel Common, and we walked down a small street to the bar, which was on the 7th floor. Good view, dull art, a fine Tokyo Ale, and nice folks hanging out, a very mixed crowd, which made me feel comfortable. They have a low-wattage radio station, too, which Robb says is both legal and not uncommon in clubs here, broadcasting pretty much to the immediate neighborhood, and played in a number of other clubs around the area. Calton lives out in the burbs, so it took him some time to get in, and by the time he arrived, Robb had plans to go meet some folks for dinner. He recommended a a tofu restaurant on the top of Bel Common, where, he said, they make the tofu right at your table. Sounded odd, but we headed off there. <br /><br /> Calton is half-Japanese, grew up as an Air Force brat, and came to Japan because a girlfriend -- a French girlfriend, no less -- wanted to study Japanese. Not long after they got here, she decided to marry a Japanese guy, and for the past year poor Calton’s been obsessing about it. He doesn’t speak Japanese, doesn’t go out much, doesn’t know a whole lot about the place, and seems to be stuck on what happened to him. I’ve been there, and it’s not a place to live, and I’d like to communicate that to him, but he’s going to have to find his way out of it himself, I’m afraid, like we all do. We got to Bel Common, and it turned out there were a lot of restaurants there, but the tofu place was closing in 20 minutes, so we took what appeared to be a soba/tempura place instead. They didn’t have Japanese menus, and didn’t seem to want us there, plus Calton wasn’t particularly hungy, but I sort of forced the issue with them, and they grumpily took our order, as we pointed to some photos in the menu. My “set” involved a lot of small dishes up front, some sashimi, a salad, assorted pickles, some tempura, and some soba laid out neatly on a large box, plus some soup with what appeared to be fish dumplings in it. I think the guy was happy to see us go, but what the hell, I had dinner. <br /><br /> Cal walked me back to the hotel and vanished into the night, I read some, and went to bed.Ed Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17805932361842578943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6396447250385531419.post-87850870627823466122008-09-21T12:39:00.001+02:002008-09-21T12:48:41.142+02:00Sept. 24: YokohamaRobb had suggested I head to Yokohama for the Triennial down there, and that seemed to be a good plan. He said I just had to get to Shibuya and then it was an easy fast train from there, so that seemed simple enough. I left the hotel about 11 and headed into hell again. But this time, I vowed, I’d negotiate Shibuya more efficiently. <br /><br /> Trouble was, although I found the line the lady at the hotel said would take me to Yokohama, it wasn’t a JR line, so I couldn’t get in. Nick’s book had said you could get there from Tokyo Station, which was yet another ride around the circle, but in the end, I got there and a nice woman at the tourist info booth told me that the trip from Shibuya required a change of trains somewhere down the line, and JR was faster -- 25 minutes, against 45 with a transfer. And sure enough, there was a train leaving almost immediately, as they seem to do every few minutes.<br /><br /> Yokohama has it over Tokyo in one aspect: it’s got a dramatic skyline, probably because there’s a large harbor to frame it against, and it seems to have been built all at once. And I must say, nobody does skyscrapers like the Japanese. Here, the big attraction is the Queen Towers, three buildings connected by one little walkway each, with a scalloped effect at the top. Thre’s also a very oddly-shaped building next to them, a hotel that looks like a salt-shaker with a big V cut out of one side of it. To enhance the surrealism, a couple of Japanese artists had hung their Triennial piece, a mammoth inflated cricket, in the V. <br /><br /> A helpful lady in the tourist office in the train station showed me which bus to take out to the Triennial, which is in two buildings, one the convention center, the other an old red brick warehouse which must date from the 19th Century. It was expensive to get in, something like ¥3000, but next to most of the contemporary art shows I’ve seen in the past year, it was light-years ahead. <br /><br /> Some notes on the Triennial:<br /><br /> * Forced into Images, by Destiny Deacon, Australia. Photos of Aborigine souvenirs of various sorts frame a video installation of Aborigine kids putting on masks and other commercial images of Aborigines. Display cases show a wonderfully-laid-out panoply of souvenirs of the Aborigines Deacon’s bought in Australia, each labelled with its country of manufacture -- mostly India and China.<br /><br /> * Arena, by Anri Sala, Albania/France. The first work of his I’ve seen since “Finding the Words,” although I missed a one-man show in a gallery on Chausseestr. earlier this year. This one’s a mysterous video which pans around some sort of place that’s hard to figure out. Thre are lots of dogs lounging around, plus dirty cages which seem to contain apes and big cats. There are a couple of palm trees on the grounds, plus deciduous trees. Hard to figure out where or what this is, and the whole effect is odd and disturbing.<br /><br /> * Endless Narcissus Show, by Kusama Yayoi. A mirrored room filled with mirrored spheres, which induces vertigo while reflecting the viewer all over the place. I wonder that more people don’t walk into the walls, and there are spheres for sale in the souvenir shop, along with t-shirts showing the artist lying around the installation. <br /><br /> * A number of works by Orimato Tatsumi, the Bread Man. As the Bread Man, he walks around various places with a mask made of various breads on his face, while a photographer documents the reactions of the people around him. He’s also the guy behind Art Mama, which the Aktionsgalerie in Berlin has been showing. This odd-looking little woman turns out to actually be his mother, who has Alzheimer’s. Despite the fact that his younger brother lives a ten-minute walk from her, he refuses to see her, so Tatsumi has taken over her care. He’s photographed her in various weird situations, which she doesn’t seem to mind at all, and he even took a picture of me shaking her hand after I introduced myself as someone who’d seen his work back home. He also has a couple of series called Pull an Ear and Wear a Bracelet, where he’s photographed people wearing ear-clips and bracelets he’s made with the names of colors on them. Weird, but appealing.<br /><br /> * Berg Series, by Florian Claar, Sweden (I think). These are simulated mountain landscapes made of some gritty material with shiny stuff in it, on which he projects changing colors in shapes whose contours react with the shape of each landscape, producing a sort of moire effect. <br /><br /> * Pillar of Civilization, by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, China. Disgusting! But fun: these guys went around the world collecting human fat from liposuction clinics, then “purified” it and cast it into a cylindrical column about ten feet high. It’s yellow and doesn’t smell, at least.<br /><br /> * Unrecallable Now, by Mariele Neudecker. A huge construction with white mountains emerging from a glass sea, which is made from some kind of white acrylic solution. Very eerie, very effective .<br /><br /> * Two Kinds of Food, by Huang Yong Ping. Two 20-foot long fishing lures, reproduced exactly. Sort of a dumb idea, but the size is still impressive. <br /><br /> * The Chinese artist who was showing the installation with the large dresses with water running down them at Asia Fine Arts in Berlin has another version here where the dresses are about 40 feet high. Wow. <br /><br /> In the warehouse:<br /><br /> * Save Paradise$, by Sergio Vega, Venezuela. Two sort of Jeff Koons-y kitsch leopards, male and female, rearing up in front of the warehouse with “shrines” in their stomachs centered around bottles of Rain Forest Mango Tea and Forbidden Fruit beer, with collection boxes in front of them saying “Clean your Guilt.” <br /><br /> * Man To Man, Mats Hjelm, Sweden. A video installation with pictures of people walking along the street, a speech by someone who may be H. Rap Brown, pictures of the Swedish countryside and coast, a brass band in some Third World country playing, an interview in black and white by some Swedish guy...it looks like it’s going somewhere, but the longer I stayed, the more incoherent it seemed to get. I might want to see it from the beginning, but I don’t think Hjelm himself knows what the hell is going on here, to be honest. <br /><br /> * My Grandmothers, by Miwa Yanagi. An elaborate installation of huge, staged photos of various old women doing odd things like riding in a motorcycle sidecar on the Golden Gate Bridge, goofing with a lesbian lover, being a guru on the Japanese coast, and standing on a runway-cum-gravestone. There are captions which purport to be statements or explanations by the women about what we’re seeing, but they’re as obviously faked as the photographs, and the whole thing looks like it cost tons of money to realize. Still, a very witty work, a postmodern Auntie Mame. <br /><br /> * St. Sebastian, by Fiona Tan. A big, two-sided screen showing close-ups of Japanese girls on their Coming of Age Day doing their archery. Moves quite slowly, although it’s real-time, and with the spooky soundtrack I found it much more effective than anything she’s shown in Berlin.<br /><br /> * Petite, by Dominique Gonzales-Foerster. My favorite in the show. There’s a room made out of glass, through which the viewers have to look. Projected on the back wall is a video which seems to show big windows, as if we’re looking into a building. In the lower right-hand corner, a little girl eventually comes into focus, looking melancholy. She pretty much stays there, although she goes in and out of resolution, while other images appear and disappear. It seems very sad and very charming at the same time: at one point, what looked like the branches of a tree came out of the girl’s head and vanished quickly, which seemed to give her a lot of dignity, At other times she seemed to be yearning for the world beyond the window. Complex, and I wish I’d stayed with it for more than the 20 or so minutes I spent there. <br /><br /> * Angel Ears, by Grönland and Nisunen, Finland. Two parabolic reflectors placed on either end of the warehouse’s courtyard, emitting a very high-pitched tone which changes volume and texture as you walk around its field. Actually could be dangerous, I think.<br /><br /> There were plenty of other pieces, of course, but since I wasn’t working, I didn’t note down the ones I didn’t like, although in the park outside, Yoko Ono had that hateful Boxcar work, the Deutsche Bahn boxcar riddled with bullet holes shot from inside. I really wonder about this. Is it some sort of Holocaust comment? If so, how does someone from a country like Japan which barely even acknowledges the war dare to make such a comment: is this some fantasy of Jews shooting their way out? It was, I guess, less obnoxious sitting in a park in Yokohama than it had been in Schlossplatz in Berlin, by virtue of having been decontextualized, but only by a few degrees. <br /><br /> All in all, it was a pretty wonderful show, even if they didn’t give me a map, or give any indication how one got from one hall to the other. Okay, there were a few signs, but they were all in Japanese, which given the internationality of this show and the likelihood of its attracting international visitors, is totally inexcusable. But I was very, very glad I went, although the fact that it was a holiday (first day of fall) meant that as the day went on tons of families with noisy and disruptive kids showed up, pushing and jostling and making it difficult to see the stuff, and I almost forgave Robb for his misdirection. <br /><br /> I even got back to Tokyo and back to the hotel easily, only to find a message from Robb that a narratation job had come up and he couldn’t make dinner. I called him, and told him that if he finished before 8:30, I’d meet him, and if not, not. He called at 8:15, and said the gig was over. It turned out to be narration for a documentary about Horiyoshi, the great tattoo artist, but he didn’t seem to know much about it except that it was headed to the Rotterdam Film Festival. Hell, I didn’t even know they had a film festival in Rotterdam. <br /><br /> We met again at Bel Common, and he demonstrated how the doCoMo phones work, by selecting his own <a href=http://www.bento.com>Tokyo Restaurant Page</a> and going throught he menu, which was fascinating. We then went looking for a restaurant he knew in the vicinity, but it was closed due to the holiday. Next place he chose was, he said, a chain based in Kyoto which specializes in chicken of various sorts, and they had a table. It was amazing, and since the courses were small, we had lots of them: tempura of those huge expensive mushrooms I’ve seen around (disappointing: didn’t have much flavor), a couple of kinds of skewers, a magnificent dish which was a big thin flat sheet of something which turned out to be a paste of chicken and chicken skin rolled extremely thin and deep-fried -- amazing! Fried chicken without the chewy stuff! -- and a dish of tofu lees in a sesame-flavored cream. The whole thing, with my having had several beers due to the application of chili powder on some of the dishes and the appearance once again of those Kyoto-style chicken wings redolent of black pepper, came to ¥8000 and change for both of us. <br /><br /> Robb impressed me, someone who’s been here 18 years and made a decent living at it, a committed expat, unlike poor Cal last night who really needs to get outta here and find some place to get his head back in shape. Robb moves between two worlds easily, and seems to have fun doing it. More power to him. <br /><br /> Naturally, after a meal like that on top of all the walking I’d done, I went back and crashed.Ed Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17805932361842578943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6396447250385531419.post-73923179472697068222008-09-21T12:33:00.001+02:002008-09-21T12:39:47.499+02:00Sept. 25: TokyoOne last day in Tokyo, and what to do? Well, check the e-mail at Kinko’s, which I did, then go back to the hotel and work on this some, and then, I guess, head off to “Kitchen Street,” Kappabashi-dori, to see the plastic food, and, maybe, buy some.<br /><br /> In the lobby of the hotel, on an obscure rack stuffed with tour brochures, I found an actual Tokyo subway map, inserted backside-out in the rack so that its title wasn’t visible. Had I had this earlier, it certainly would have solved some problems, I think. But I also saw that it’d be relatively easy to head to where I was going, so I struck out for the far reaches of town. It’s true that the temple at Asakusa had been highly recommended, but with the stress of the news and the daily wearing-down of the journeying, I wasn’t in much mood for any more culture of that sort. <br /><br /> Instead, the place I wound up gave me a lot more culture, of a different sort. Basically, if you are opening a restaurant, you can get every single thing you need, except, of course, a chef, waiters, and the food itself, on Kappabashi-dori and a few of its side-streets. Crockery, cooking equipment, a few wholesalers of some of the more exotic (ie, foreign, mostly Indian and Chinese) foods, order pads, chairs and tables, signs that say “open,” neon, and noren, those white half-curtains you drape across the entrance. Oh, and the plastic food, sampuru, although as it turned out there were only a few places selling them, and only two looked like they catered to the trade rather than to tourists. I was fascinated by the crockery shops, but the ware was really heavy (good for a restaurant, not so good for a guy with a suitcase) and I wasn’t sure what the minimum purchase was. Bought a sushi watch in one place catering to tourists (hell, it was less than ten bucks), and a glass of Kirin beer (extraordinary detail: light condensation on the outside, excellently rendered bubbles) and a small (toy sized, actually) bowl of tempura udon in a place that was trade-oriented. They also had much better stuff, including a sashimi’d fish for about $140 that was so good I really had to stare at it to see it wasn’t real. The profusion of stuff on this street is dizzying. <br /><br /> An ad on the subway now led me to my only really stupid purchase on this trip. Casio has these “Wave Ceptor” watches, and I’d been struck by how nice they looked when I’d been in Akihabara, and on the long trip out to Kappabashi, I saw an ad in the train that made me check to see how far Akihabara was from where I was going. Not far. My intention was to go back to the big store I’d cruised on my first trip, and to look in the duty-free part, because I’d noticed they didn’t have those GPS watches there because they were only good in Japan. But on my desk in Berlin, I have a radio-controlled clock made in Poland that I got for about $15, so I figured this thing would work in Berlin. Thus, I hit the first Casio discount place I found, made a selection, and bought it. The salesman, of course, said nothing about it, and it wasn’t until I got back to the hotel and unwrapped it that I saw the big map of Japan on the front of the all-Japanese instruction booklet. I figure I can eBay it to a collector. <br /><br /> That aside, though, what impressed me was that today I was actually able to navigate the subways easily, paying the right fare and finally figuring out that tickets that get rejected, as had happened in my nightmare in Shinjuku, were for competing subway lines. This, more than anything else, is the hardest part of the Tokyo rapid-transit thing to figure out: there are two subway lines, plus the JR lines, and they each use separate tickets. Even back in the old days in New York, when each of the three lines was privately held, one token worked for all. Tokyo could figure a way to make that work, I think. <br /><br /> I experimentally packed back at the hotel -- it was just after 5 -- and realized I hadn’t had lunch, so I ate some chili rice-crackers and had my last Water Salad. Weirdly, everything fit nicely, the bag wasn’t too heavy, so I left it packed. I was going to have dinner at the tofu place, and had to get there early because they closed at 10, and last orders were at 9, so I called Cal to see how I could get his books back to him. He said he was teaching, but would be free by about 7:45, so I asked him to join me. <br /><br /> This place was again at Bel Common, and I later found out from Robb it’s a chain, but the food was exquisite in taste and presentation. We should have had reservations, I discovered, but the place was largely English-speaking, and had a very clear English menu (with calorie counts on all the “sets”) that made my stomach growl. Given the delicacy of the food, that was an odd response, but, as it turned out, justified. Cal wasn’t all that hungry (he’d been at McDonald’s when I called), so he ordered something with “bento” in its name, which came largely packed in a picnic-basket. They cooked up a soup for us to share, and then someone came with a large pan of soy-milk and set it in the center, part of my “set.” It was astonishing what they did with tofu: one of my items was a shumai with tofu wrapping instead of pasta, and later in the meal, when a skin formed on the heated soy-milk, a guy came out, poured some sauce into a bowl, grated a bit of what he said was Japanese mandarin orange peel into it, deftly lifted the skin, and plopped it into the bowl, a wonderful treat. There were tons and tons of tiny things, including three drawers’ worth in a small chest they brought to the table. There was minced whitefish rolled with tofu into a jelly-roll sort of thing, two pieces of mochi with different toppings, small vegetables, and...writing this three days later, I realize I should have taken notes. Management panicked as 10 drew near -- again, Robb says this is due to their being in a department store building where the security goes off duty at 10, although come to think of it the other place in this complex we’d eaten at closes later -- and I had to gulp my beer and dessert, which was black-bean “sherbet” made with soy milk. <br /><br /> Walked back to the hotel with Cal, and as we said good-bye, I pretty firmly told him I thought it’d be a good idea if he moved elsewhere. The ex-girlfriend continues to stay in touch, which he says is okay, but I don’t think is -- I think it’s passive-aggressive -- and since he doesn’t speak any Japanese after two years and apparently isn’t too interested by the culture or anything, it’d probably do him good just to ankle the whole shebang and go somewhere else. <br /><br /> Back in the room, I started clearing things out. Tomorrow, I could leave, and you know? I was looking forward to it.Ed Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17805932361842578943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6396447250385531419.post-78564331760071749272008-09-21T12:32:00.001+02:002008-09-21T12:33:46.602+02:00Sept. 26: Tokyo and outSo now that I had a routine, it was time to leave: get up, get dressed, go into the subway station for an IHT, stop at the convenience store for some sushi rolls and a bottle of Blendy coffee, back to the room. I was done and packed in almost no time, and even remembered to put my Swiss Army knife in the suitcase instead of my pocket. <br /><br /> In the subway, I’d noticed that the elevator dropped you off behind the fare-gate, so that, I figured, would make a problem explaining to the guard and such -- or maybe it wasn’t possible to go down to track level -- so just to minimize problems I called a cab. Bad move. The guy knew where Shinjuku was, but had no idea where to leave me to get the Narita Express. We circled and circled, the fare going up, and finally, he saw the airport bus and asked the driver where the best place to leave me was. I have no idea what kind of answer he got, but I ended up where I’d started, at the West Entrance. He was so apologetic that he offered me no receipt (which gets printed out automatically) in exchange for shaving ¥400 off of the ¥2400 fare. Hell, that was okay by me. <br /><br /> I had to wait close to an hour for the train, though. They are incredibly convenient, but they don’t really run as often as you’d think. I was worried once I got on because I’d wanted to get there at 10:30, and as it developed, the train took 30 minutes longer than I’d thought. But at Narita, boarding went smoothly, and pretty soon, I was sitting in the 747, happy to be heading back home after three weeks in Japan.Ed Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17805932361842578943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6396447250385531419.post-19551906821897090572008-09-21T12:12:00.002+02:002008-09-21T12:31:51.698+02:00Last Notes: Oct. 5, 2001Generalizing about other cultures is dangerous, as we’ve certainly seen in the weeks following the World Trade Center attack. Generalizations involving a single observer are even worse; they’re one person’s subjective opinion, nothing more. <br /><br /> But I have to deal with the question people ask me: “How did you like Japan?” The following should be taken only as a response to that question, how I, and only I, felt about what happened to me, and what only I observed. Japanophiles (and, indeed, Japanese) may take offense at some of this. To some extent, I don’t care: these are my values against which I’m putting the observations to the test, and I still hold to them. But nobody should feel personally attacked, as I’m not criticizing individuals by any of this. <br /> <br />***********<br /><br />Japan is an island -- or, rather, a series of islands, most of which are joined together by bridges by now. This explains a lot of things about the place: the persistance of trainspotters, for one thing, a hobby I was astonished to see going full-bore, particularly in places like the small towns the train passed between Gifu and Takayama, for instance. But lacking a track to off-island, the number of trains is finite, and thus can be catalogued. <br /><br /> It also explains its insularity. We all know that Japan was sealed off from the rest of the world by Imperial decree for centuries, and only “re-opened” in the mid-19th century. From your stereo system to your car to any number of other things, you can see that Japan re-engaged with the world enthusiastically and successfully. But I think the insularity is still there. <br /><br /> It’s a lot like an insularity I’m well familiar with: American insularity. There’s a sense of entitlement, a feeling that what your country does is its own business and thus not accountable to the rest of the world, and that, by some mystical process, you’re entitled to do what you do. In Japan, one good example is fishing: the Japanese continue to scoop up every fish their nets can grab, with the result that the majority of the fish (and other creatures) thus netted are thrown away, dead, because they’re inedible. This strip-mining of the sea (as well as the whaling they continue to do -- and lobby to expand) is an ecological disaster. Another example is the use of wood. How many trees do you think it takes to make the disposable chopsticks everyone takes for granted? Or the lovely bento boxes that come with some of the higher-priced bentos? <br /><br /> That, of course, is just the tip of the consumer madness you see everywhere. It’s odd to see brands which most of the world considers luxury (Chanel, Harrod’s) as everyday brand-names there. Although there is poverty (albeit not much) and homelessness (more than you’d think, although the encampments are very neat and well-maintained), spending much time in a place like Tokyo, you get the impression that everyone is rich, from their clothing to their cell phone gadgetry to the prices in stores and restaurants. And this stuff gets consumed, by which I mean used up and discarded, much faster than elsewhere. There are no garage sales in Japan, and few second-hand stores. The only place I’ve seen a faster turnover is the Jamaican record business, where I’ve gone there two weeks after a friend got back telling me about the top record of the moment when he was there, only to be told “that finish” the day I arrived. <br /><br /> The consumer fervor is of a higher level, in terms of expenditure, than it is in the U.S., but it’s every bit as intense. The wasting of natural resources reminds me of the sudden and inexplicable rise of the SUV in the US, where suddenly everybody seemed proud of wasting the diminishing supply of gas. Like Americans, the Japanese don’t seem to get it: there’s no more where this came from. This said, there’s an attempt at recycling and garbage sorting, and people seem to be taking it well. <br /> <br /> But the things that really got to me that don’t resemble American or European society are also worth pondering. <br /><br /> High on this list, of course, would be uniformity. The Japanese, of course, don’t “all look alike” any more than any other people do, and in fact within a couple of days you start to notice a wide variety in facial and body types there. But starting with the school uniforms, particularly the girls’, and going on to the salarymen in suits, you can, in a crowd like Shibuya or Shinjuku, feel like you’re seeing the same person over and over again. The girls’ uniforms are particularly interesting: one crowd was wearing thick leg-warmers despite the heat. Now, I’m pretty sure that this isn’t something the school decreed, but, rather, a modification of the dress-code that the school allowed. But rather than do little modifications of the uniforms so that each girl could express some individuality, they chose a uniform rebellion, if you could even classify it as a rebellion.<br /> <br /> I’ve read that those who choose not to fit in, avant-garde artists, for instance, pay a high price for their unconventional behavior. And, while I can understand what might motivate people down that road, societal horror notwithstanding, I didn’t see much evidence of their existence. This, of course, is as much my fault as anything. Of course, I was actually hanging out with avant-garde artists for a good part of the trip, although I never really got the sense of a “scene” or a community among them. I suspect that, were I in Tokyo for long enough, hanging out at a place like Radio On would introduce me to various subcultural beings. But I never got a feeling that there was a neighborhood with suport systems of the sort you’d find in Greenwich Village or Mitte in Berlin during the classic times of ferment. If there is, my guess is that it’d only be in Tokyo, that, like France, Japan is a country which “really” only has one city, and that’s where you’ve got to go if you want to pursue a life apart from the mainstream. <br /><br /> It could be, of course, that the need for uniformity is tied in with the need for the much-vaunted Japanese politeness as a means of keeping a society with far too many people living in far too small an area together. But in many cases I felt that the politeness was only ritualistic, and felt the constant yelling of greetings and farewells in stores was not only insincere, as it has to be, but oppressive. So were the hordes of schoolkids in uniform, and the incessant parade of suits. <br /><br /> You’d get used to it after a while, I guess, although I wasn’t there long enough for that to happen. It probably gets to be a part of the landscape like the incessant noise. I don’t mean the traffic and the sirens and the normal sounds of a city, though. I mean the blare of music and the things that talk. There seems to be a horror vacui in Japanese life that exceeds anything I’ve yet seen. I joked that, in Akihabara, the electronics district in Tokyo, it was bad enough having to hear the new Mariah Carey album everywhere, worse hearing a different track every time you turned around, but hearing all the tracks simultaneously was excruciating. But at the center of that joke is a truth: everything was blaring all the time. I pity anyone trying to buy a sound system there, because you simply can’t hear for all the noise. But there’s music in the subway, in the stores, along the sidewalks, in the halls in the hotel, in the restaurants -- everywhere. <br /><br /> And, rising above it, or mixed in, there’s the talking stuff. I guess ostensibly some of this is for blind people. The train welcomes you aboard, tells you the line you’re on, its destination, and the next station, and then repeats it -- at least in Tokyo and Kyoto -- in English. It tells you when you get there and tells you to watch your step as the station plays its own distinctive little digital melody, which is often cut off by a live announcer. You then proceed to the escalator which tells you to hold on to the railing as you get on, and, just before it ends, that it’s ending. You walk out into the street and a dozen stores are yelling at you, either through recordings placed in boom-boxes outside or through wall-mounted loudspeakers or actual people standing outside with bullhorns. You get to the hotel, there’s music in the lobby, in the elevator (which announces the floor), and in the hall. Parking lots talk, warning pedestrians that a car is leaving, while telling the departing parker how much is owed on the ticket. The lot also generally has a honking siren as an additional warning. At temples and shrines there are recorded voices, often on a continuous loop, telling you what you’re seeing and warning you not to smoke. In public places like Shinjuku and Shibuya there are huge video screens, sometimes several, all with audio. It is, in short, the loudest country I’ve ever visited. Even America. <br /><br /> Another thing which disturbed me pretty much from the beginning through the end of the trip is still very messily organized in my mind, but exists at the nexus of kawaii, infantilization, and the whole subject of women. These seem to exist at least partially as one phenomenon, although they each have their own discrete places. <br /><br /> The kawaii thing is legendary, and it’s also inescapable. Nearly everything is advertised with some degree of it. I wouldn’t at all be surprised to see a funeral parlor making use of it. If you’ve seen Hello Kitty, you’ve seen a tiny tip of the iceberg of kawaii. Bunnies, kitties, puppies, and kids, cartoon girls with big eyes, these are all standard icons in Japan. The sign saying the elevator is out of use has a cute construction worker on it. Cutting from the umpteenth replay of the United plane going into the side of the World Trade Center to the commercial with the cute purple bunny in the field felt like a punch in the stomach to me, but maybe it’s a transition a Japanese person could make more easily. <br /><br /> But I connect kawaii to infantilization. We give our kids cute things because they’re not threatening. A teddy bear that was anatomically correct, with teeth and sharp claws, not to mention the smell they give off, wouldn’t be such a hot idea. Eventually, though, a kid can start to deal with reality: you go to Yellowstone and yes, the baby bears are cute, but you also (should) realize that mama bear would be just as happy to disembowl you as not. They’re not toys, they’re complex animals. But meanwhile, as a kid, the cute world is a nice place to retreat, to feel unthreatened when a world you don’t understand seems to be on the verge of hurting you. Hell, adults do it, too. If you want to retreat to bed with a hot cup of cocoa and read Winnie the Pooh after a brutal emotional shock, I’ll defend you, as long as it’s the edition with the original illustrations. The Disney ones are too kawaii, you see. But infantilization is a way not to take someone seriously, and that’s where I think it’s dangerous. <br /><br /> Which brings me to women, who, as girls, are the largest consumers of kawaii (I even came upon a group of schoolgirls at a pet store’s window, pointing at the puppies there in and yelling “Kawaii! Kawaii!”) and are, for the most part, married at 25. Marriage is big business. As I mentioned, the hotel we stayed at in Nagoya specialized in it, but the Holiday Inn in Kanazawa had not one, but two wedding chapels (one was the lobby, the other was called Aspirare), and the entire area around the Goo shrine in Kyoto seems to be a wedding district. Even better, though, are the chapels. There was a hotel I could see on my way out to Ueno in Tokyo that was I guess 20 stories high. On its roof was a perfect replica of a New England brick church, with one telling difference: although there was a front door, there was a much bigger one on one of the sides, with broad steps so that every member of the wedding party could be assembled there and photographed. Presumably after the wedding you went downstairs into one of the banquet halls and celebrated. Carl and Yoshiko seem to think that a half-way decent wedding would cost you $50,000. Ads for wedding-related services are everywhere in the subways and on billboards. Oddly, most of the photos show Western women, usually blondes. <br /><br /> No doubt there’s been some sort of advance in feminism in Japan, but, as in Germany, I don’t think it really caught on, or caught on enough. With German women, dealing with issues such as career-and-relationship turns inward, resulting in the self-loathing I’ve noted so often in bright women I’ve known. But I don’t know what to make of the situation I observed in Japan. You marry a guy and he all but disappears into his work. Eventually, the kids go to school. That, apparently, is when you enter the women’s culture. <br /><br /> Shopping, taking coffee in elegant coffee-houses, and taking part in religious observations (particularly as you grow older) would seem to be your fate. Japanese women are elegant. I think this is by default: there isn’t much cheap crap out there. Department stores are worlds to themselves, with entire floors filled with restaurants of one sort or another, departments dedicated to the complete faux British or faux French environment, and then, of course, there’s the food floor. Coffee shops with elaborate displays of pastry and, usually, French names are all over the place, and my guess is that that’s where the elegant ladies go to compare their experiences after shopping. Or you can do the “let’s go to Kyoto” thing, and do your shopping somewhere else, and perhaps take in a cultural spot or two. As I noted, the vast majority of non-group tourists I encountered were women, and they were in their 30s and 40s, as far as I could estimate.<br /><br /> Not that there was any contact. No, I didn’t bring home that ultimate souvenir, a Japanese girlfriend. Anyway, that’s <em>so</em> downtown New York ’80s. In fact (to get serious again), although there were beautiful women everywhere, I wasn’t attracted to many. But then, what attracts me to a woman may not be very mainstream, and I certainly got the feeling that it was almost beyond the pale in Japan: I am attracted to a certain degree of aggressiveness, to intelligence, to a certain indefinable residue of tomboyishness, and to the ability to define and execute a plan with autonomy. The intelligence, I’m sure, is present in plenty of Japanese women -- Yoshiko, for instance, is plenty smart, and, I would be willing to bet, the exception to a lot of rules. (She also, I believe, has spent a lot of time in the States). But I don’t get the feeling that for most Japanese women the rest of those attributes are considered desirable in the slightest. Okay, that’s the American cultural imperialist in me. But there was the night, early on, when Carl told me that Noda’s girlfriend wanted to practice her English on me, but was too shy to do it. Then when I tried to talk to her, she was too embarrassed by having that revealed to me that she wouldn’t talk. I can’t deal with that. And a lot of these attributes I look for depend on a certain amount of life-experience, which just isn’t going to be achievable if you get married at 25. Could it be, then, that when a Japanese woman turns inward, it’s to a societally-approved degree of infantilization (the little-girl voice, speaking very very quietly, pampering yourself and buying lots of toys) which has been started early in your childhood with a hearty dose of kawaii?<br /><br /> Okay, let’s leave the ravings of a bitter old involuntary bachelor behind, and finish up with some musings on language. Not the Japanese language -- I could hardly do that -- but other people’s languages, as appropriated by Japan.<br /><br /> English, as everyone knows, has been subject to countless outrages in Japan. Some of the very best of these are lovingly collected and updated almost weekly at <a href=http://www.engrish.com>engrish.com</a>, so I didn’t bother to assiduously note down every weird sign I saw. Some, however, were irresistable: in Takayama, a beauty parlor, offering as many do to “cat” your hair, gave further reassurance by stating “Member of an association.” In Himeiji, an otherwise healthy-looking teenage girl walked past me with a t-shirt that had a stars-and-stripes design and the logo “Heroin chic.” And Calton tells me he was out in Tokyo one day and saw a girl with a t-shirt saying, in huge letters “FUCK ME.” Since I doubt she meant it, she may have been following the logic of the guy I saw in Akihibara with the Nazi shirt. <br /><br /> As far as I can decode it, English means being up-to-date, French means elegance, and Italian is where the two meet. What’s weird about English is that everyone studies it -- six years, I’m told -- and yet nobody except in the most obvious places, like tourist information booths, speaks it. Sometimes, as happened at Yamamoto or the eel place in the Kyoto market, people will shyly reveal their limited abilities, and then be embarrassed when you praise them, as happened with the teenage waiter at the tofu place my last night in Tokyo. But, as is evidenced by the labelling of a lot of products, people can read it. One specialty of the teenage girl stores at the moment is parodying products on t-shirts, spelling out the Japanese in Roman letters. I have no idea what’s going on, but the popular Coffee Boss is parodied as Coffee Bosu, which is apparently worth a giggle. <br /><br /> There’s also German. I don’t know if this means that the Special Relationship is still in force, but I saw lots of it in odd places. The first was a bilingual t-shirt, which I saw twice: in big letters it says ICH MÖCHTE... and then, underneath, in tiny letters in English, “I think it’s time to do a little shopping.” There was an apartment house called Volks Haus, one of several apartments I saw with German names. Kanazawa, though, seems truly Germanified through and through. There, at the Grand Hotel, you can drink in the Bar der Dichter, or send your kids to the Private School of Der Meister, which is located in a men’s haberdashery. But my favorite bit of German -- bilingualism, actually, and for this to be funny you’re going to have to know German and English -- was a truck I saw sitting in the rain as I was almost back to my room in the typhoon there: LECKERE HAM. To balance all of this, though, Toyota has a car model called the Levin. <br /><br /> So, have I offended everyone yet? Like I said, these are musings of one person based on three weeks of observation. I’d be happy to discover that I’m wrong about a lot of this, but I can’t undo what I saw and felt. Almost every day I’d see something that completely blew me away (for instance? How about license plates whose numbers are illuminated from behind at night: what a great idea!) and then get slammed by rudeness or discrimination or ignorance. <br /><br /> Would I go back? Maybe. Not immediately. And not for a vacation: I’d go back to do a story or for another business reason, and I’d make sure, since such a thing would almost certainly be in Tokyo, to have a short trip out into the country planned if at all possible. All in all, this wasn’t the horrendous mix my trip to Italy in the early ’90s was, the one I decribed as “either the worst good time I’ve ever had, or the best bad time,” but then, there weren’t so many personal things going down on this trip, either. <br /><br /> Let’s just put it this way. I’m glad I did it. And I woke up every morning for a week glad I was back.Ed Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17805932361842578943noreply@blogger.com0