| Submitted by: Mark Leeper United States |
| Submission Date: 09 February 2005 |
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But it looks like we will not get much of a view of Fujiama.
We got off at Hokone but the weather was like it had been the previous Tuesday. Certainly not a day to plan to be outside. Well we had guessed wrong. We really need a better way to get weather forecasts. The town is a good deal less modern looking than Tokyo but it is well kept up, at least the part we saw. We looked at out options as we walked and decided to go to Nikko after all. We might go late in the day, but at least I was caught up in my log and we could use the whole day sightseeing. And it gave us a chance to ride the Bullet Train which would also save us time.
We got to the station about 25 minutes early. While we waited we planned our time. A woman next to me offers me a piece of candy. The Japanese can be a very solicitous and friendly people. We have to rush across the platform to get to an unreserved car. The first class cars are labeled green, second class is blue.
When the train left from the window I saw a mix of modern and traditional buildings with swept up roofs. The homes are very close together. There is no great feeling of speed or of the landscape going by quickly. The steel towers right next to the track do go by in a blur, but it is hard to judge speed from what I am seeing. The train looks faster and sleeker from the outside than inside. At each end there is an engine that looks a lot like the nose of a passenger jet. In stark contrast to a lot of their cracker-box trains with the diamond-shaped frames to pick up electrical power from lines overhead, this really looks like a sort of land-jet.
Inside the Bullet train (or Shinkansen) looks and feels a lot like airplane coach section, but without the seatbelts. And there is a lot more leg room. The major difference is the amount of smoking. The regular trains do not allow smoking, the Shinkansen does have smoking and non-smoking cars, and the Japanese take advantage of the smoking cars in large numbers. We are in a smoking car. A woman across the aisle from me drops a ticket on the ground lighting her cigarette. Later I see her looking though her wallet for something and pick up the ticket and hand it to her. Maybe improve the image of Americans a little. Americans probably do not have a very good image since three servicemen from Okinawa raped a schoolgirl a little while back. Then their commanding officer told the press that it was inexcusable and they should have gone to a prostitute instead. I think someone in the Navy must like them strong and stupid if this is the caliber of the commanders or the men. The Japanese don't want Americans like this posted to their country. Presumably they realize we don't want them back in the U.S. either. Also there was an incident of a football team from the U.S. who was over here and was caught shoplifting. On the news the mother of one of the players was complaining bitterly that the Japanese shop-owner was making a big thing over it. There seems to be a strong antagonism growing between blacks and Asians, particularly in the inner cities of the U.S.
The seats on the train recline, but by moving the seat forward. In this way you don't end up putting your seat-back in the lap of the person behind you.
I napped a bit on the train and we were quickly into Tokyo station. In Tokyo station we made reservations for the next train, and then went to a lunch at a place called Express Early. I had soba with something like bacon in it.
Another possibility would have been to buy a train lunchbox. These 'ekiben' boxes are sold in all the major stations and it is a divided box with a lot of different kinds of food in it. At first I thought it was wasteful that all these lunches came in nice wooden boxes that are then thrown away. They look like balsa wood. It turns out they are made of Styrofoam that just looks like wood. I should have known that the Japanese would not be so wasteful. It is standard to buy these ekibens and eat them on the train. In general the term 'bento' means 'lunchbox.' It is a divided box with a lot of different things in its compartments. At my local Japanese restaurant, my favorite dish to buy is the bento that has two kinds of pickled vegetables, some beef, rice, fried chicken, gayoza dumplings, six sushi maki-rolls, and three or four pieces of sashimi. (Sashimi is like sushi, but it is just raw fish.)
We stopped at a bookstore then headed for the next Shinkansen. Through the window I could see people on the rain, most eating their lunches. Presumably this is a service on the train. We board and within minutes are moving. The trains run to the minute here like they do in all really civilized countries. All but the U.S. Does the U.S. count as civilized?
From the window I see mostly factories and apartment houses go by. Occasionally there is a sports stadium. Again things are a bit dingy. Of course the day does not help. We have to switch trains in Utsunomiya. That is as close as the Shinkansen gets to Nikko. We ran into another American, one from San Jose. He is Doug Hill from San Jose, a fellow Stanford alumni. I was from the math department and he is from the computer science department. He is on a multi-year recess from his computer work to see some of the world. After Japan he is going to China and India. We talked to him about our experiences in each place. Actually what was most interesting was what he was working on. He was looking at a device that would listen to music and transcribe it into written notation. Effectively it would hear a performance and write sheet music. Some questions immediately come to mind. If you transcribed Seiji Ozawa's version of Beethoven's 5th Symphony, would you get precisely what Beethoven wrote? If not, where would the differences be? If you transcribed Ozawa doing the 5th two consecutive nights, would you get precisely the same thing? If not, where would the differences be? What are acceptable variations? Presumably you could use this to record impromptu music, like jazz. I wonder if you could make an intermediate piece of software that would translate from player piano rolls to sheet music. Charlie Chaplin is credited with writing the music for his films. In fact he had an assistant to whom he gave much of the credit. He hummed the music and the assistant wrote it down. This was a very easy way for Chaplin to write the music. He could almost go from thinking how he wanted the music to sound to having it written down. With Hill's device this may be how music is composed in the future.
In any case Doug was interesting to talk to. We gave him advice about India and told him about our China trip.
The train left us at the Nikko station and we took a bus to the area of the shrine. Darn few shrines are on level ground and when they are they are always steps to climb up. Worship requires sacrifice, I guess. We came to see the Tosho-gu Shrine and it is up a hill. There are multiple shrines on the hill, but this is one of the major shrines of Japan. And for good reason. I will get to that. As we pass the policebox we notice that even here there are wanted posters up. There seem to be wanted posters wherever there are police. Or even where they aren't. You see them in the subways. The police in Kamakura had a creative approach. The put the faces of wanted criminals on wooden bodies. Of course this holds wanted, but un-convicted criminals up to public ridicule. We could not do that back home.
The signs pointing to Tosho-gu Shrine seem to all be in Japanese, but I memorized the three pictograms of 'Tosho-gu Shrine' and the signs become easy to read. It requires more hill climbing but we find Tosho-gu shrine, among other things the burial place of Tokugawa Ieyasu.
At the start of the 16th century Japan was in chaos with several warring feudal generals. In the years from 1560 to 1600 the chaos came to an end. At this time there were three great generals (or daimyo): Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu all sharing a dream of a single government for Japan. Each would try in turn to unify the country. Oda Nobunaga was a great general who took it on himself to educate his groom, Toyotomi Hideyoshi. In the years from 1560 to 1568 Nobunaga won the victories to hold central Japan and especially Kyoto. He was, however, killed in a rebellion in 1582. Nobunaga was assassinated by one of his own generals for the sacrilege of building a temple to himself and for a mortal insult to the general. By this point Hideyoshi already was a great general and became Shogun in Nobunaga's place. Hideyoshi helped to advance his son-in-law Tokugawa Ieyasu. (Incidentally the Japanese family name comes first in the name, traditionally. And great people are referred to by their first name. So he is called Tokugawa Ieyasu or just Ieyasu, but his son would be Tokugawa something.
Hideyoshi had picked up where Nobunaga left off and brought the whole country under control by 1590. He wanted to extend his control to Korea and China, but Hideyoshi died in 1598, his dream realized only as far as Japan itself and with many internal enemies. He made Ieyasu promise to make his son, Ieyasu's brother-in-law, the Shogun.
Tokugawa Ieyasu, in some ways a competitor to his father-in-law with a similar dream, took on the same internal enemies and in 1600 defeated them in Japan's most important battle Sekigahara. In 1603 he was appointed shogun. He kept the office for only two years and then turned the office over to his son. From that point he worked to give his family power succeeding and founding the Tokugawa Shogunate. Hideyoshi's son, cheated of the Shogunate, tried to foment revolt for years, but was never successful. The Tokugawa family ruled Japan until the 1860s.
The Tokugawa Shogunate had its faults but brought a much-needed stability to Japan. Many would choose Ieyasu as Japan's greatest leader. I would he only continued what Nobunaga and Hideyoshi began and was the one who was around to win the final prize. His victories were indeed great, but he stood on the shoulders of those who came before and then it was his family who ruled.
The shrine sports a hefty entrance fee of 1250 yen, however it is probably the most ornate shrine we have seen. As you enter you pass a five-story pagoda. You then pay and enter through a gate that is incredibly ornate. It was designed so that wherever you look you see something else unexpected. There are dragons and lions, sages and birds. More than could be seen in an hour. Once inside there is another gate, guarded (or not guarded) by a sleeping cat, to the right and another long climb to the actual tomb of Ieyasu. The tomb itself is simple, And there is a shrine in front of it for praying. At the level of the gates are several buildings worth seeing. There seem to be people to explain what you are seeing, but in Japanese only. If you are not Japanese consider your admission the price to see things without the explanation.
About this time the rain started again and we walked back to town and the bus. We got back to the main train station and discovered it was not where we wanted to be. There is a second station for Japan Rail shown almost adjoining on the Lonely Planet map, it is really a good distance down the street. We got there after some confusion and discovered that we had just missed by five minutes the returning train and while they run fairly close together during the day, there is a break at dinner time and there would not be another train for about 45 minutes. We were cold and wet, but we sat down and wrote. There were plenty of vending machines but the only hot beverages were coffee and tea. There are many kinds of each, but I am not much of a coffee or tea drinker. In both cases they are in cans, but you can get them hot or cold, even from the same machine. The prices are listed on a red strip if they are hot and a blue strip if they are cold. All the vending machines seem to follow this convention.
The trip back was much like the one out. We switch to the Shinkansen in Utsunomiya. We also grabbed food from a kiosk, since we were hungry. I looked for the strange, being me. I got something that looked like a log of fish-cake with cheese filling. |
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