| Submitted by: Evelyn C. LeeperUnited States |
| Submission Date: 09 February 2005 |
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After the tour (which took about forty minutes and was a bit of a let-down), we walked to the southern end of the Palace where they were getting dressed in costume for the festival. We were at the southwest corner and saw quite a few costumes, but it appears that the area where most of the really elaborate costumes were being prepared was to the southeast. However, we were able to position ourselves at the very start of the parade route, right next to the reserved seats. It happened that Mark went over to the other side of the route just before the parade started and got stuck there, so he got a lot of pictures of the groups as they came across his field of view, while I got many head-on as they turned the corner-we couldn't have planned it better.
For the festival, people and groups dress up in costumes of the various historical periods, starting with the Meiji Restoration (1868) and working back to the Heian Period (about a thousand years ago). At the very end are the palanquins (on wheels now, instead of being carried), and the offerings for the shrine. (The parade starts at the Imperial Palace and ends at the Heian-jinja Shrine.) There were a lot of very colorful costumes; I shot over a roll of film, a feat that usually takes me a week, and Mark also took a lot of pictures.
I was lucky in that standing next to me was a woman from Boston who was a graduate student of Japanese history and was explaining the costumes and periods to someone else there. So not only did I have a front row seat (albeit on gravel, not the most comfortable of seats), I also had a running commentary by a knowledgeable guide.
I got to talking to the woman. Her name was Abby and she was spending a year in Japan studying Japanese history before moving to Australia (she was originally from Boston). We talked a little about books about Japan, and she recommended a few: Re-Creating: Japanese Women (an anthology of articles; its sequel, Re-Imaging: Japanese Women, she said wasn't as good), Musui's Story, and Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto's Daughter Of A Samurai. (I said I had already read Tale Of Genji, and she also recommended Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book.) I'm adding quite a lot to my reading list; whether I'll still be as interested in a year when I get to them is another story.
We then stopped for a quick (and somewhat late lunch) and then took a bus back to Kyoto Station, from where we walked to Higashi Hongan-ji Temple.
Higashi Hongan-ji Temple was built by Ieyasu Tokugawa. Well, he ordered it built. Other people did the actual work. Its main claim to fame seems to be a rope made of human hair, woven from hair donated by women when it was discovered that ordinary ropes were not strong enough to raise the beams to build it.
Around the outside were several meditative poems, such as:
'As long as the tomato aspires to be a tomato
Surely something will come of it.
It's when the tomato aspires to be a melon
That it calls down grief upon itself.'
-Aida Mituwo
This poem can be interpreted two ways. It could mean either than a person must be true to their inner nature, or that a person should be satisfied with their position in life and not try to change it.
There was also a Fire Festival (Kurama-No-Hi-Matsuri) at the Yuki Shrine this evening, but we decided to skip it. First of all, we were tired. And secondly, it would take two hours to get out there (it's up in the mountains north of Kyoto) and longer to get back, and the Seiki locks its door at 23:00. (The festival is far enough out that it would be a little like being in New York City and going to a festival in Red Bank one evening.)
The shoe thing: I understand the idea of taking off your shoes when you come into a house. But putting on slippers seems like an unnecessary step, particularly since you have to take them off when you go into a tatami room, and change them for special bathroom (toilet) slippers when you go to the toilet. If you come back to your ryokan, drop off your coat, and go to the bathroom, you change your shoes six times by the time you're back in your room.
On the other hand, this is one country where I can manage to get a really hot shower.
October 23, 1996: No buns again today, and they seem to be dismantling the bun case.
This was a very low-key day, of the sort we could have used about halfway through the trip, but having it at all was good.
We started by taking a bus to Nijo-jo Castle (another one of the 'Historic Monuments of Old Kyoto' named as a World Cultural Heritage Site') (¥500). The usual Japanese tour buses and hordes of schoolchildren were all over. (All the uniforms for the younger boys include short pants, by the way. I suspect they start wearing long pants after their coming-of-age ceremony, but I'm not sure.) At the ornate Kara-mon Gate, everyone was posing for pictures, and one schoolmaster with five boys in his group posed them in front of the gate and then proceeded to take pictures of them with each of six cameras!
We took advantage of the popularity of the castle by staying close to an English-language tour group (whether a standing tour group, or just people on a city tour wasn't clear), and listening to what the guide was saying through her megaphone. A lot of it was in the handout (a fairly complete one in English), but not all.
This castle, like some other buildings of the period, has 'nightingale floors.' These are specially designed floors which squeak (sounding like nightingales) when anyone walks on them. This means that enemies (including stealthy ones like ninja) can't sneak in quietly. This is accomplished by having clamps on the floorboards and nails holding the clamps in place. When someone walks on the boards, friction between the clamp and the nail causes the squeaking.
The wall (screen) paintings are also particularly notable, being 17th century paintings of the Kano School (many done by the Kano brothers themselves). What the guide said that the handout didn't is that some of the paintings are modern copies and that the originals are in museums. This is to protect them from fire and general environmental damage, and the plan is to move all the originals to museums eventually and replace them with copies. (I don't know if this includes the ceiling paintings, but I doubt it.) This is expected to take twenty-five years. Presumably the copies will be faithful to the originals, but that still seems like cheating. (One reason the originals have lasted as long as they did is that the castle wasn't used regularly, so there was much less smoke from candles and so on. And now the outer doors remain closed all the time to protect the paintings from light, dust, etc.)
While the paintings are excellent, the ones of tigers and leopards are amusing. Because there were no tigers or leopards in Japan in the 17th century, the painters had to imagine what the animals looked like from the trophy skins brought back from China and Korea. As with many such extrapolations, they guessed wrong.
There was also damascene work around the walls featuring the three (heart-shaped) hollyhock leaves that is the Tokugawas' emblem, and panels between rooms consisting of cypress wood thirty-centimeters thick with different views carved on the two sides.
Some of the rooms had mannequins set up in court dress, including lords in formal dress which included pants with legs over a meter and a half long-awkward, but according to the guide, if one of the lords tried to attack the shogun, others could trip him by stepping on his pants legs. This seems like an unlikely reason for this style.
There were also gardens surrounding the castle. Actually, there had been a donjon (castle tower) at one point, but it burned down, so now this really more just a palace than a castle (sort of the reverse of Matsumoto-jo Castle, where the palace part burned down, leaving only the donjon).
This all took about an hour and a half. We then started walking toward the Japan Foundation of Kyoto and looking for lunch. The best places to look for cheap restaurants seems to be the covered shopping arcades that one sees. They are, I suppose the equivalent of malls, achieved by covered one of the narrower side streets for its entire length between main streets. The main difference between these and shopping malls is that cars and small trucks drive through these. The main problem is that it's not clear how to find them; they are scattered around and none of the maps I have indicate them.
We walked by the Kongo Noh Stage to see if it would make sense to try to see a Noh play, but since everything there was posted in Japanese, we suspected that we wouldn't get very much from it. My understanding is that many modern Western dramatists have been influenced by Noh (alternatively spelled 'No', sometimes with a bar over the 'o'), especially Yeats and Beckett, and it would have been nice to see the original, but not if we didn't understand it at all.
One sees a lot of strange English around here. One phrase that shows up on a lot of children's clothes (it may be a brand-name for all I know) is 'Hello Kitty.' Another popular product is 'Coffee Boss' which is a brand of canned coffee. We saw parodies of 'Coffee Boss' noren and T-shirts for sale at some of the souvenir stands-they seem very fond of parody T-shirts here.
So I tried some Coffee Boss. It's not the best of the canned coffee I've had here by any means; it's a bit watery. But we had some time to kill before the film at the Japan Foundation, so went into the Rokkaku-ji Temple, bought drinks, and sat on the benches there drinking and writing. Rokkaku-ji Temple isn't even listed in our books-Kyoto has far more temples than a guide book could cover unless it was specifically focused on the temples of Kyoto. I don't know the story of this temple, but its current notable aspect seems to be its pigeons, which will swarm anyone who feeds them. (They were landing all over one woman who had some crumbs for them!) We also watched the calligraphers at the temple use an electric hair-dryer to dry the ink on the calligraphy that was being done there.
After this we walked over to the Japan Foundation of Kyoto. This seems to be set up to cater to foreigners, with English-language newspapers available for reading (our first chance to check up on news, and to see that Lucent's stock price had gone up). And they also have a film series Wednesday afternoons. October was devoted to 'Fantastic World' (science fiction, fantasy, etc.); November would be 'Crime Month.' Today's film was Shi-Gatsu Kaidan (The Ghost of April). Other films this month were Ginga Tetsudo 999 (Galaxy Express 999), Gondola, and 1999 Nen No Natsu-Yasumi (Summer Vacation: 1999). All are shown with English subtitles and are free, but limited to non-Japanese nationals.
The Ghost of April was a 1988 film about a girl who appears to die but is really stuck between life and death. Another ghost tries to convince her to return to life, but when she sees that the boy she has had a crush on is more interested in another girl, she decides to stay dead. However, there is another boy in love with her, and the ending is somewhat predictable. It was nothing special, but it's always interesting to see films made in other countries not as prestige art exports, but ordinary films for domestic consumption. This reminded me of the sort of thing Walt Disney would have made in the 1970s or so-aimed at a teenage audience with a somewhat comic haunting (though with less comedy than Disney would have put in).
Afterwards we stooped at a couple of department stores Daimaru and Hankyu) to pick up take-out sushi for dinner. We had been spoiled by Tobu-neither of these had as varied, or as fresh-looking, a selection. Back home, we would have thought these great, of course, but here they suffer by comparison. We also picked up some pastries for dessert or breakfast and some soda.
One problem with the food departments in department stores is that they are in the basement. |
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