April 27: First full day in Kyoto
Apr. 29th, 2012 09:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
blatherskiteOur goal today was to visit Nijo-jo, one of the forts created by Tokogawa Ieyasu, the first shogun, most famous to Westerners from James Clavell’s novel “Shogun”. Getting there is an easy hop (only two stops) on the local commuter rail run by Japan Rail, so it’s free for us (we have the pass) and easy. I haven’t really mentioned how wonderful the rail pass is: you have to buy it while you’re outside the country, and it’s not cheap (on the order of C$500 for 2 weeks), but once you’ve got it, there’s no barrier to hopping around the country both over short distances like this trip via commuter rail within Kyoto and longer distances like our trip back to Narita airport in a couple days. The trains run quickly and frequently to most places and at most times of day, so once you’ve learned to use the system, you become enormously mobile.
Nijo is an impressive structure, with thick walls (on the order of 15 to 20 feet) that stretch on seemingly forever, surrounded by a wide moat. It’s the kind of fort designed as much to intimidate everyone as to actually defend against a serious attack, and in practice, it was usually manned by only about 100 samurai and their attendants. Even by modern standards, with large construction equipment powered by fossil fuels, it would not be a trivial project to build such a thing; with only manual and animal labor to move the tons and tons of rock and earth, it’s a remarkable bit of work. Add to that the beautiful and lavishly landscaped gardens and it’s easy to see why this is a UNESCO world heritage site.
We wandered the grounds for a few hours, enjoying the site’s beauty and acquiring the start of a good sunburn; sadly, neither of us remembered to bring our sun hats or sunscreen, not expecting things to be quite so warm this early in the year. One problem with this site, as with many of the previous places we’ve visited, is that most of the English signage focuses on statistics (e.g., when a place was built, how many soldiers staffed it) rather than providing any insights into the deeper meaning of the site. For example, there were only a few hundred words about the start of the Tokugawa dynasty, very little about how it changed Japanese society in the following 260+ years, and nothing at all about the social context that preceded this period. Thus, without the benefit of a guide with a deep knowledge of history, or without obtaining that knowledge before you arrive in Japan, there’s little you can learn from most of the major sites. The visit remains enjoyable for its own sake, but there’s no way to obtain a more profound understanding and appreciation solely from what is provided at the sites.
Our next stop was the Nishiki market, which is a long covered market composed of two parallel lines of small shops. These shops focus on food; you can find anything ranging from butchers and produce stands to tiny fish markets, with all kinds of Japanese fast food (yakitori skewers, pickles, buns, etc.) available and samples available for the tasting from most stands. The main stretch spans something like 6 city blocks and seems endless; it’s also quite lovely because it has a stained-glass roof, so even though you’re out of the sun (which was quite intense today), you’re not out of the light. You can get quite a good meal just by sampling the free samples and adding a few skewers or buns for protein, and we did this for a couple hours. I tried my first skewer of grilled eel, and it was quite tasty. My favorite weird food that I plan never to try: octopops, which are lurid red baby octopus with a stick inserted in their head so you can nibble without getting your fingers sticky. *shudder* My favorite weird food that I might eat if nothing better presents itself: lightly pickled cucumber on a popsicle stick.
Strolling through markets is one of our favorite tourist activities, so a couple hours passed pleasurably just in the food part of the mall. But there’s much more to this shopping area than that, since the food area is surrounded a couple blocks deep on all sides by a huge shopping mall, also covered in places with skylights but open to the sky in others. We took a break between the two types of mall, sitting by a fountain in a triangular “square” open to the sky and filled with pigeons and toddlers chasing the pigeons. Then we set off to begin some of our gift shopping. Like any western mall, there’s a bewildering variety of wares, ranging from the latest western fashion trends to Japanese home-grown fashion, plus arts, crafts, and still more food, though the food is almost exclusively in the restaurant vein rather than freestanding stalls or small shops. Much of the décor is quite garish by Western standards, since there’s much wider use of bold primary colors and an enormously high information density (many, many signs, both large and small). We managed to check off most of our shopping list by the end of the afternoon, including several “that’s lovely but not at that price” shops that we enjoyed browsing.
One of those uniquely Japanese touches I mentioned earlier was in full evidence here: in the main wares part of the mall, away from the food court, there were both temples to commerce (the stores themselves) and temples to tradition (real shrines), shoulder to shoulder. A couple of the temples even had those bizarre tourist photo opp things where you can stick your head through a hole in a board and (for example) have yourself photographed looking like a geisha. This is all part of the overall mixture of the garish storefront displays intended to draw in the tweens and teens and the more restrained and elegant displays designed to draw in their parents. It’s one of those strange combinations of very new and very old that I don’t think I’ve seen elsewhere.
When we’d burned out on shopping, we still had an hour or so before dinner, so we wandered town to the Kamo River and had a seat by the bank to watch nature and people. A Japanese taiko drummer was playing some tasty rhythms about 50 yards away, and he was really good. Moms and toddlers were all over the place, and small flocks of teens wandered by periodically. Right next to us, one girl sat with her cell phone, oblvious to everything going on around her, texting her friends. One thing I forgot to mention is the Japanese love for small dogs, and particularly dachshunds; many are carried around in strollers or purses. We’ve seen very few cats, however, suggesting that they’re mostly house pets or that the ones who have made it outside do so mostly at night.
Though clearly domesticated, with man-made banks and bottom, the Kamo is still a live river, with fish and other organisms in it. We watched three pairs of hawks soaring overhead, clearly enjoying themselves more than hunting because we never saw them stoop on anything. One landed right in front of us for a drink before being dive-bombed by a couple of the local ravens, which chased him off. Some tiny black and white birds, very hyperactive, worked the banks on the far side of the stream, seeming to pick bugs or snails off the submerged rocks, and didn’t stay still long enough for us to get a good look at them. Swallows hawked after various insects. A grey heron walked past right in front of us, and there were pairs of ducks and a few white herons or egrets up and downstream from our position.
Because this was our anniversary day, we decided to blow a ton of money on dinner, and chose a well-recommended sushi restaurant to celebrate: Ganko Zushi. Took a bit of doing to find, since we were one bridge off from where we thought we were and had to backtrack a bit using our map, but we eventually found it. Shoshanna being logistics girl, she suggested we find the bus stop for the bus that would take us home, because we were planning on having beer with dinner and when the end-of-day fatigue hits, it hits hard and you don’t want to be blundering around in the dark in a strange city trying to find your bus stop. Together we found the bus stop without much trouble.
Back at the restaurant, we were welcomed both quietly, by waitresses in kimonos, and at full bellow, by the sushi chefs behind the counter. The chefs welcomed everyone as if they were an old friend returning after a long time away, so you never had to look to see if anyone new had arrived. We sat by the station of one of the chefs, an older man, so we could watch the food being prepared. The knife skills are impressive, and as he sliced slabs of raw fish and etc., Shoshanna observed that she would have left a few fingers behind working that fast. I wouldn’t have worked that fast, so no risk to my fingers.
He laughed and smiled when I told him (in English, but heavily supported by pantomime) that he had remarkably fast hands, but he really did have sushi construction down to a fine art. He was making nigiri sushi for Shoshanna (the kind where the fish lies on top of the rice) and within about 5 seconds, he somehow managed to scoop rice from the vat by his side, shape it (one-handed) into the appropriate length and width, dab the fish with wasabi, slap it onto the rice, and lay it elegantly beside the other samples. He also made hand rolls, where you press the stuffing into the center of the rice, wrap the whole in nori (seaweed), then press it all together before cutting it into mouthfulls using a bamboo mat that you roll into a cylinder. I’m not a fan of raw fish, but I had six natto (fermented soybeans) rolls and a grilled salmon served over rice flavored with green tea. The tea and rice were interesting, but the salmon was disappointing; it was tough and not very flavorful, though a dab of wasabi (the really good sinus-searing variety) helped rescue it.
The bus ride home in the dark wasn’t nearly as intimidating as I’d feared. The stops are all called out in English, and displayed in English on a display screen at the top of the bus. So even in the darkness, it’s easy to find your stop. (Of course, you still need to know the name of your stop to do that, but Shoshanna found a really good local bus route map, and we had little trouble recognizing our stop.) Back to the temple for sleep, since we had another busy day ahead.
Nijo is an impressive structure, with thick walls (on the order of 15 to 20 feet) that stretch on seemingly forever, surrounded by a wide moat. It’s the kind of fort designed as much to intimidate everyone as to actually defend against a serious attack, and in practice, it was usually manned by only about 100 samurai and their attendants. Even by modern standards, with large construction equipment powered by fossil fuels, it would not be a trivial project to build such a thing; with only manual and animal labor to move the tons and tons of rock and earth, it’s a remarkable bit of work. Add to that the beautiful and lavishly landscaped gardens and it’s easy to see why this is a UNESCO world heritage site.
We wandered the grounds for a few hours, enjoying the site’s beauty and acquiring the start of a good sunburn; sadly, neither of us remembered to bring our sun hats or sunscreen, not expecting things to be quite so warm this early in the year. One problem with this site, as with many of the previous places we’ve visited, is that most of the English signage focuses on statistics (e.g., when a place was built, how many soldiers staffed it) rather than providing any insights into the deeper meaning of the site. For example, there were only a few hundred words about the start of the Tokugawa dynasty, very little about how it changed Japanese society in the following 260+ years, and nothing at all about the social context that preceded this period. Thus, without the benefit of a guide with a deep knowledge of history, or without obtaining that knowledge before you arrive in Japan, there’s little you can learn from most of the major sites. The visit remains enjoyable for its own sake, but there’s no way to obtain a more profound understanding and appreciation solely from what is provided at the sites.
Our next stop was the Nishiki market, which is a long covered market composed of two parallel lines of small shops. These shops focus on food; you can find anything ranging from butchers and produce stands to tiny fish markets, with all kinds of Japanese fast food (yakitori skewers, pickles, buns, etc.) available and samples available for the tasting from most stands. The main stretch spans something like 6 city blocks and seems endless; it’s also quite lovely because it has a stained-glass roof, so even though you’re out of the sun (which was quite intense today), you’re not out of the light. You can get quite a good meal just by sampling the free samples and adding a few skewers or buns for protein, and we did this for a couple hours. I tried my first skewer of grilled eel, and it was quite tasty. My favorite weird food that I plan never to try: octopops, which are lurid red baby octopus with a stick inserted in their head so you can nibble without getting your fingers sticky. *shudder* My favorite weird food that I might eat if nothing better presents itself: lightly pickled cucumber on a popsicle stick.
Strolling through markets is one of our favorite tourist activities, so a couple hours passed pleasurably just in the food part of the mall. But there’s much more to this shopping area than that, since the food area is surrounded a couple blocks deep on all sides by a huge shopping mall, also covered in places with skylights but open to the sky in others. We took a break between the two types of mall, sitting by a fountain in a triangular “square” open to the sky and filled with pigeons and toddlers chasing the pigeons. Then we set off to begin some of our gift shopping. Like any western mall, there’s a bewildering variety of wares, ranging from the latest western fashion trends to Japanese home-grown fashion, plus arts, crafts, and still more food, though the food is almost exclusively in the restaurant vein rather than freestanding stalls or small shops. Much of the décor is quite garish by Western standards, since there’s much wider use of bold primary colors and an enormously high information density (many, many signs, both large and small). We managed to check off most of our shopping list by the end of the afternoon, including several “that’s lovely but not at that price” shops that we enjoyed browsing.
One of those uniquely Japanese touches I mentioned earlier was in full evidence here: in the main wares part of the mall, away from the food court, there were both temples to commerce (the stores themselves) and temples to tradition (real shrines), shoulder to shoulder. A couple of the temples even had those bizarre tourist photo opp things where you can stick your head through a hole in a board and (for example) have yourself photographed looking like a geisha. This is all part of the overall mixture of the garish storefront displays intended to draw in the tweens and teens and the more restrained and elegant displays designed to draw in their parents. It’s one of those strange combinations of very new and very old that I don’t think I’ve seen elsewhere.
When we’d burned out on shopping, we still had an hour or so before dinner, so we wandered town to the Kamo River and had a seat by the bank to watch nature and people. A Japanese taiko drummer was playing some tasty rhythms about 50 yards away, and he was really good. Moms and toddlers were all over the place, and small flocks of teens wandered by periodically. Right next to us, one girl sat with her cell phone, oblvious to everything going on around her, texting her friends. One thing I forgot to mention is the Japanese love for small dogs, and particularly dachshunds; many are carried around in strollers or purses. We’ve seen very few cats, however, suggesting that they’re mostly house pets or that the ones who have made it outside do so mostly at night.
Though clearly domesticated, with man-made banks and bottom, the Kamo is still a live river, with fish and other organisms in it. We watched three pairs of hawks soaring overhead, clearly enjoying themselves more than hunting because we never saw them stoop on anything. One landed right in front of us for a drink before being dive-bombed by a couple of the local ravens, which chased him off. Some tiny black and white birds, very hyperactive, worked the banks on the far side of the stream, seeming to pick bugs or snails off the submerged rocks, and didn’t stay still long enough for us to get a good look at them. Swallows hawked after various insects. A grey heron walked past right in front of us, and there were pairs of ducks and a few white herons or egrets up and downstream from our position.
Because this was our anniversary day, we decided to blow a ton of money on dinner, and chose a well-recommended sushi restaurant to celebrate: Ganko Zushi. Took a bit of doing to find, since we were one bridge off from where we thought we were and had to backtrack a bit using our map, but we eventually found it. Shoshanna being logistics girl, she suggested we find the bus stop for the bus that would take us home, because we were planning on having beer with dinner and when the end-of-day fatigue hits, it hits hard and you don’t want to be blundering around in the dark in a strange city trying to find your bus stop. Together we found the bus stop without much trouble.
Back at the restaurant, we were welcomed both quietly, by waitresses in kimonos, and at full bellow, by the sushi chefs behind the counter. The chefs welcomed everyone as if they were an old friend returning after a long time away, so you never had to look to see if anyone new had arrived. We sat by the station of one of the chefs, an older man, so we could watch the food being prepared. The knife skills are impressive, and as he sliced slabs of raw fish and etc., Shoshanna observed that she would have left a few fingers behind working that fast. I wouldn’t have worked that fast, so no risk to my fingers.
He laughed and smiled when I told him (in English, but heavily supported by pantomime) that he had remarkably fast hands, but he really did have sushi construction down to a fine art. He was making nigiri sushi for Shoshanna (the kind where the fish lies on top of the rice) and within about 5 seconds, he somehow managed to scoop rice from the vat by his side, shape it (one-handed) into the appropriate length and width, dab the fish with wasabi, slap it onto the rice, and lay it elegantly beside the other samples. He also made hand rolls, where you press the stuffing into the center of the rice, wrap the whole in nori (seaweed), then press it all together before cutting it into mouthfulls using a bamboo mat that you roll into a cylinder. I’m not a fan of raw fish, but I had six natto (fermented soybeans) rolls and a grilled salmon served over rice flavored with green tea. The tea and rice were interesting, but the salmon was disappointing; it was tough and not very flavorful, though a dab of wasabi (the really good sinus-searing variety) helped rescue it.
The bus ride home in the dark wasn’t nearly as intimidating as I’d feared. The stops are all called out in English, and displayed in English on a display screen at the top of the bus. So even in the darkness, it’s easy to find your stop. (Of course, you still need to know the name of your stop to do that, but Shoshanna found a really good local bus route map, and we had little trouble recognizing our stop.) Back to the temple for sleep, since we had another busy day ahead.