April 30: Final tourist day in Japan

Today was our day to fit in a few final things before leaving, without quite the same rapid pace as in previous days. Thus, we decided to aim for one tourist site or shrine, then conclude with a relaxing walk (garden or river) to wind down.

We shared breakfast with two young American men, one who came here on a Fullbright scholarship and decided to stay and work as a kindergarten English teacher and the other his friend, just visiting before beginning a career as a physiotherapist. Interesting guys, and one of the places they mentioned that they were considering visiting that day was the Fushimi-Inari Taisha temple complex. This one is was sufficiently different from the other complexes we’ve visited that we thought it would be a good choice. There were three main differences from previous places:

First and very obviously, the complex is dedicated to the fox (kitsune), who is a servant of Inari, god of the rice harvest (and thus, by a logical extension given the importance of rice in Japanese culture, god of business success). I haven’t mentioned rice before, but it’s worth mentioning in this context because most of the Japanese landscape is dominated by rice paddies. It sometimes seemed that every flat space (and many steep spaces after terracing) was covered by rice paddies, often interspersed with small kitchen gardens. Foxes are an equivocal creature in Japanese mythology, since they combine aspects of trickster gods like Coyote and some aspects of western demons (i.e., they can possess humans). They’re not evil as such, but not necessarily spirits whose attention you want to attract either. At this shrine, some of the foxes carry a key in their mouth (to the granary where rice is stored) and some carry a ball (as in Chinese mythology, representing the demon’s power and possibly its soul); the two are usually paired.

The second unusual aspect is that this complex is covered by torii. Most temples and shrines have a single one of these gateways at each entrance, representing a transition from the profane or mundane outer world to the sacred or divine world of the temple, but the Inari shrine has hundreds of them. There are actual corridors of torii where you can walk for 5 minutes before reaching the end. In between stretches of torii-lined pathways, there are many small fox shrines. Each typically has a large (a couple feet) fox sculpture on each side. Some have additional small fox sculptures (an inch or two in size) as well as the usual shrine offerings, such as lit candles or incense and bowls of sake. There’s no English information on why there are so many torii or how each shrine differs from the dozens of others. Again, this is one of those places where it would help to have a local guide who not only understands the history but who can also read the signs and tell you what each one says, and thus its meaning within the overall context. A little googling suggests that the multiple torii result from donations by businessmen who believe their prayers were answered by Inari. Judging by the number and size of the major torii, Inari was singlehandedly responsible for Japan’s amazing economic success in the past century. But there are also many smaller torii leaning against shrines throughout the complex for lesser successes.

The third difference was that this was a woodland temple. Although all other shrines that we visited had significant garden areas and beautifully laid out “nature” areas, these were clearly domesticated: gardens, not natural. The Inari shrine was surrounded by woodland, and although there were signs of management here and there, particularly in terms of erosion control structures in the streams, the woods remained largely in their natural condition and that was the overall impression I took away from this temple. I love Japanese parks and gardens for their esthetic qualities, but it’s also nice to see what is essentially unadorned nature. There’s very little of that in urban areas of Japan, since the islands are dominated by mountainous areas, making all relatively flat land doubly precious for urban and agricultural development. The unfortunate side effect is that it can be difficult to find an unobstructed view of nature in many parts of Japan.

We walked most of the way to the end of the complex, then started getting hungry and headed back to the small urban area by the train station. The station is surrounded by the usual cluster of businesses that have gathered to extract money from tourists, domestic and foreign, but one nice thing about Japan is that the merchants are much lower key than in many other countries we’ve visited; there are eager invitations to come see their wares, but little or no hard sell. Among the shops we found a reasonably priced noodle restaurant, where we both had a donburi lunch: that’s basically a bowl of rice, often with a lightly scrambled egg dumped atop the rice (as in my case) and with miscellaneous other good stuff such as shallots or nori thrown in. The protein in that other stuff was roast duck for me, and eel for Shoshanna. We also ordered the “set” (set meal), which came with a huge bowl of udon noodles in savory broth; these are the thick, chewy kind rather than the thinner ramen or soba (buckwheat) noodles. We knew they’d be included in the set, but hadn’t realized how many we’d get. It was all lovely, but there was so much food that it ruined my appetite for grazing later in the day. I reluctantly passed up many enticing snacks along the way because of the lingering fullness from lunch and the desire to leave some room for dinner.

We decided to end our vacation with a stroll along the “walk of philosophy”, which runs through an older part of town a few blocks east of Yonbanchi. The walk runs alongside a small urbanized river, the water being about 10 feet across and running in a stone- or concrete-lined channel. Periodically, narrow stone bridges span the river to connect neighborhoods on opposite sides of the river, and there are many drainage channels that funnel water around the houses and into the river. The buildings on either side of the river aren’t particularly antique, but they are in generally good shape and some are sufficiently old to give a pleasantly antique feel. The river is lined with old trees and flowering plants, so it’s a shady, quiet, peaceful place to wander or to sit and philosophize. Several souvenir shops and restaurants have sprung up alongside the river to take advantage of tourists and local philosophers, and you can take a break from nature if so desired or pause to contemplate nature while sipping tea and nibbling a meal or snacks.

There were some really nice handicrafts, but also some cutesy stuff; the latter included a shop that was all about things cat-related (e.g., paintings, purses, jewelry, scarves) and a shop we didn’t look into, but that had a family of teddy bears sitting together beside the river, holding a fishing rod. We also came across a real fisherman, and looking closer, we noticed that there were some seriously big carp in the river (nearly 2 feet long in some cases). They were dark enough to be nearly invisible while in the shadows cast by the running water, but once you knew where to look and what to look for (specifically, the ripple created by their dorsal fin), they were easy to spot. Amusingly, we crossed paths with the same couple who’d stayed in the room next door at the temple earlier in our stay in Kyoto. We didn’t actually get to see them while we were there (our waking schedules didn’t overlap), but their voices were distinctive enough to make identification easy, and I recognized the guy’s shoes. (In Japan, shoes are left outside your room, and this guy had Really Big Feet.)

We briefly considered going to a restaurant called “Grotto” for dinner. Easiest way to describe this restaurant is that it’s like a tapas place but with a set menu, which is to say they serve a series of small dishes over the course of a few hours, giving you a wide variety of types of Japanese food to sample; I counted more than a dozen items on the set menu. However, it seemed likely to be a ton of food (more than either of us could eat after such a huge lunch), and at nearly $60 per person, it was quite a bit more expensive than we wanted. Instead, we returned to Goya and had another really good meal. My choice was a “chample”, which is a kind of Okinawan hash made of various veggies (including bitter melon), scrambled eggs, and tofu. It was topped with bonito flakes (dried shaved tuna), which I’m not fond of, so I gave most of it to Shoshanna. She had a rice dish with simmered pork. Both yummy!

May 1: Return home and final thoughts

After breakfast, Yasuko kindly volunteered to drive us down to the bus stop, which was nice because it avoided a 15-minute hike with full pack. Last thing I wanted to do was get all sweaty right before spending 24 hours on public transport. I spent the entire trip from the bus stop to Kyoto station and from Kyoto station to Tokyo gazing out the window, enjoying our last views of Japan before heading home. We had a long layover in Vancouver on the way home (a poor choice, but my recollection was that it saved us a few hundred bucks on airfare), so we’d originally considered renting time at the Fairmont hotel, since they charge only $15 to non-guests to use their gym. A workout and shower would have been nice, but in the end we decided to just sit and get caught up on reading, e-mail, etc. Should you find yourself in such a situation and with more energy than we had, I thoroughly recommend googling to see what hotels are attached to your airport and what facilities they offer. When I went to China in 2003, I hit the gym for an hour before getting on the plane and it was a lifesaver; it helped me sleep and endure a ridiculously long flight.

On the whole, a great vacation. We saw many fascinating things, and immersed ourselves in a culture that I’ve loved since I was old enough to start learning about Japan. The people are universally polite, and most of the bowing and apologizing for disturbing someone and thanking seemed entirely genuine. Some of the bows were a bit perfunctory (more a nod of the head), particularly for harried businessmen, but mostly everyone was very friendly and full of smiles to see us; a couple times, people even offered offered to take our photos using my camera so that both of us would be recorded for posterity instead of Shoshanna alone. My overall sense is that even if these forms of politeness have become reflexes in many cases, they’re not just empy gestures; they’re honestly a way of looking at the world from the perspective of reinforcing the relationships that bind people to produce a society that is more functional and civilized than most. The Japanese esthetic sense that I love was also clearly in evidence, though you sometimes had to look past the downright ugly structures created by the post-war boom (e.g., factories, apartment blocks) to see it.

We saw a decent-sized cross-section of the middle of the country without actually doing the “Europe in 10 days” type of tour. I’m increasingly convinced that it’s better to spend a lot of time in relatively few areas than to try seeing many areas superficially. That may seem counterintuitive if your goal is to sample a country, but it makes sense if you consider how much time it takes to get past the initial shock of difference when you enter a new culture and start to absorb some of what underlies the difference. It also makes more efficient use of your time, since you spend more time experiencing and less time traveling, without the additional burden of fatigue that comes when you add the stress of frequent packing and relocating to a new bedroom. For me, the perfect mix is about 2 weeks in total, divided more or less equally among three places, so you can spend around 5 days in each place, plus day trips radiating outwards from your home base. Three places is enough to see different aspects of a country, but not so much as to overwhelm. I wouldn’t describe our vacation as “relaxing”, because we rarely sat in one place for hours with our feet up or did the spa/resort thing, but the exhaustion came mostly from the amount of walking we did and the inevitable fatigue that comes from keeping your eyes open all day and actively thinking about what you’re seeing. That fatigue endlessly surprises me, but “active seeing” consumes enormous amounts of energy.

Though we certainly visited some primary, well-visited tourist areas (particularly Kyoto), it was a distinct pleasure being there during the “off” season, when the streets aren’t flooded with tourists. In addition to being less crowded (I don’t even want to imagine the congestion during peak season), it was a pleasure being in many cases the only recognizably Western tourists in a given area. That was particularly true in Hida-Furukawa, which seems surprisingly unknown to Western tourists. We also enjoyed being so able to function effectively despite my limited Japanese vocabulary. The biggest problem was explaining to a Japanese waiter or merchant that we really weren’t fluent, when they were clearly delighted with our ability to speak even a few words of Nihongo and our willingness to honor basic Japanese customs. (Even small things add up: the only time we used a knife was for a steak that didn’t come precut, and the only time we used a fork was for some chocolate cake.) The smiles and approving nods at our ability to basically fit in were an ongoing pleasure to me. My second-favorite moment was asking someone to excuse me when I bumped into them from behind, and seeing their delighted shock when they turned to say “ie, ie” (basically, “no, no, it was nothing”) and saw that it was a gaijin speaking. My favorite was greeting a Japanese toddler in Japanese, and watching his eyes widen in amazement. (The beard does it every time. *G*) I always have a ton of fun waving to or winking at toddlers, who are as cute as toddlers anywhere and endearingly shy with strangers. I suspect I’m going to spoil the heck out of my own grandchildren some day.

As always, we ate almost exclusively Japanese food. About the only specifically Western meals that we ate were breakfasts at Yonbanchi, and that was mainly a result of cumulative fatigue by the end of the trip. (Here, I’m excluding chocolate and ice cream; desserts get a free pass.) The rest of the time, we sampled almost every free sample that crossed our path, even when we weren’t quite sure what we were sampling; we ate most of the traditional Japanese foods that are available; and periodically tried mysterious things for which we lacked the Nihongo name and the vendor lacked the English to describe. That’s not to say we ate *anything*. Shoshanna, as always, had the wider palate (I tend to avoid seafood), but even she drew the line at the octopus on a stick.

Coffee was the other Western fare for which I made an exception; I love green tea (ocha), and drank it at every opportunity, but it doesn’t have enough caffeine to get me going in the morning. Canned coffee from vending machines was a decent substitute for the real stuff, which was pricey; two cans of coffee (about $3) add up to a typical North American cup, and at about half the price of coffee in mugs from a shop. McDonald’s coffee is even cheaper, but we avoided McDonald’s other than to poke our head inside once to see how it differed from its North American equivalents. Answer: not much. We also tried macha, which is finely powdered green tea that is added to hot water and then beaten into a froth with a wooden whisk. I find it too bitter to really enjoy, but it was an interesting difference from the usual green tea.

Getting around Japan was surprisingly easy, at least by North American standards. Airports are designed to support an international audience, and are therefore expected to be easy for an experienced traveler; Narita (Tokyo) was no exception. But the Japanese train and bus systems were also as easy to use as the European rail systems (the U.K. and France) we’ve used once we learned what to look for, and both buses and trains were frequent and on time; it was worth a remark when a bus or train was even a few minutes late because of how unusual this was. Basically, all you need to do is a bit of research to understand which train or bus lines run in each direction, and then it’s easy to choose the correct form of transport to get where you were going. The Hyperdia (http://www.hyperdia.com/en/) site is particularly helpful for train schedules. It’s also generally easy to find the right track for a train. We learned relatively few kanji characters before and during our stay, but quickly learned the symbols for entrance, exit, track number, and railway station so we could pick out the necessary numbers on a directional sign or on the electronic display boards those times when there weren’t English equivalents.

Both systems were good to excellent about warning you of the next stop, and some, like the shinkansen trains on a regional or national scale and the raku tourist buses in Kyoto, provided oral, written, or both English messages to tell you where you were going. (There was also much Chinese and Korean in evidence.) We already knew that “eki” means “station”, and learned (from context) that “mae” means “stop”, so after a while we began to recognize where we were simply by listening to the announcements; once you have heard enough Japanese, you start to recognize the syllables and can easily pick out station or stop names. It helps if you know that the suffix “ni” means “going to”, whereas “kara” means “from” and “made” means “ending at”. Signage on the platforms at train stations was particularly helpful because it showed the station name, plus arrows pointing left and right to the previous and subsequent station names to help you figure out where you were coming from and where you were going; if those directions ever proved to be a surprise, all you had to do was get out at the next station and head back the other way. There was enough English (romanji) labeling that we could figure out most things without assistance, and station staff was eager to help and very helpful those few times we got stuck; there was always someone around with at least basic English skills to set us straight.

The main risk of confusion was figuring out which trains were locals that stopped at all or most stops along a line, and which trains were expresses that went directly to a distant station. Most were clearly announced as local or express trains. But for those that weren’t, we learned a useful trick: if you noted the arrival time of a train and remembered that the trains were usually perfectly on schedule, you could find that time in the timetables posted at a station (though not always in English). These timetables provided a handy visual indicator because the hour and minute are shown in Western numbers, and the schedules are color-coded, so you could look at the time for the train, find that time on the schedule, and look for other stations labeled with the same color to figure out which stations that train would stop at. If the station you wanted to go to was colored differently from the time for the train that had just arrived, that train wasn’t going there, so you waited for the next train. I’m sure that if you’re tired or not paying attention you could get very lost by jumping on the wrong train, but once you get past the intimidation factor and muster the courage to throw yourself into the system, getting where you want to go isn’t hard.

Not much more to say at this point, other than that we really had a good time, with no significant problems, and always felt welcomed wherever we went. People were helpful, and very patient with our limited grasp of Japanese. Japan is still very much Japan, and recognizably not a Western country, but that wasn’t in any way a barrier to enjoying the country and the people. Next time, I hope to plan my work schedule further in advance so I have time to develop more of a working vocabulary, which will make it easier to talk with people; I also hope to look into finding local guides to deepen our appreciation of various things that remained mysterious to us, such as details of temples and shrines or explanations of the meaning behind various local customs that puzzled us.