| Submitted by: Mark Leeper United States |
| Submission Date: 09 February 2005 |
|
 |
|
We will get a new bus in 10 years that will have digital displays and a lot of there changes. But for the time being our buses are perfectly good. The Japanese say if we can make this tiny improvement, do it as soon as possible. It is an intelligent policy. It means each improvement can be fine-tuned. Change comes in small packages and is never overwhelming. It forces them to reuse what was already developed, and that keeps expenses down. Competition with the Japanese has in many ways been good for the county which had gotten complacent. I remember noodle soup when I was growing up, as much as I would like to forget it. You didn't get much in the way of noodles, but you got more than enough, such as they were. They were a sort of soggy mush. But they were more expensive than the broth so you did not get very much. Then some country, probably Japan, started exporting ramen to us. Suddenly noodle soup started being mostly noodles. It could have been all along, but there was no incentive to improve the noodles in noodle soup. Suddenly we have brands like Oodles of Noodles making it sound like it was a new idea to put a lot of noodles in soup.
Our first stop was Kinkaku Temple. As we approached there were already a large number of tour busses there. It clearly was a popular site. It was built in Kamakura as the estate of Kintsune Saionji, an artist. Yoshimitsu, who was the third and most powerful of the Ashikaga Shoguns. When he retired and abdicated his throne in 1394 he retired here and devoted himself to making Kinkaku a stunning site. He created the Golden Pavilion, one of the most famous sites in Japan. In his will he left it to be made into a Zen temple. It was restored during Tokugawa period. A mad student obsessed with the Golden Pavilion burned it down in 1950, but it was once again restored 1955. Yukio Mishima wrote a novel THE TEMPLE OF THE GOLDEN PAVILION as a fictionalized story of the student who burned the pavilion. The entire building was at one time covered with gold leaf. Now just the upper two of the three stories are gold.
Admission is 400 yen and you are rushed through rather quickly with a one-way path that also shows you the pond and the garden. When we were near the exit we swam upstream, against considerable traffic, to get a closer look at the pavilion that we were expecting to get by the end of the visit. Nice looking building.
We headed out on foot looking for the next temple, and looking for lunch. We settled on a Chinese restaurant. I wrote down the name of the bento in the window and a bowl of ramen for Evelyn. (Well, Evelyn picked the dish. I didn't choose it for her.) All the times I have been writing down what I wanted, it has been understood every single time. I don't have a record that good with my English handwriting. My bento had fried chicken, beef teriyaki, over-breaded shrimp, gayoza, rice, pickled veggie. Remember a bento is a box with compartments and many different sorts of food in it. Generally it is a good way to sample many different dishes. The shrimp had about a quarter inch of breading coating. Fried chicken has taken Japan by storm. It is very popular. I am told it is most popular on Christmas day. Somehow the Japanese have become convinced that fried chicken is somehow traditionally connected with Christmas. It is news to me. The Fourth of July, maybe, but at least in my house Indian food is traditional for Christmas. Indian restaurants seem to be the only ones open where we are. Ah, there is nothing like a plump Christmas thali. But in Japan you cannot get into a Kentucky Fried Chicken place on Christmas Day, I have heard.
After the big meal it was a little hard to walk up the hills to the next site. For about the third or fourth time I saw a giant spiderweb with a very large yellow and black spider at the center. They have a spider with about a three-inch leg-span. Scary little sucker.
Ryoan-ji was an aristocrat's country villa, but it became a Rinzai Zen temple in 1450 under the lord Katsumoto Hosokawa. He was a man with a great appreciation for peace and tranquillity. He also liked war, apparently because he started a decade long civil war, the War of Onin: 1467-1477. The war started as a feud between him and another daimyo Yamana Souzen. I will say more about them later. Neither lived to see the end of the war they started.
The rock garden dates from the mid-15th century and is considered ultimate in dry landscape. It seems to suggest a sea with stony islands jutting out. The raked stones give the impression of waves. As we sat watching a large number of men came and started appreciating along with us. We were all sitting on the steps of the tunnel when a recorded voice came out of the wooden steps under us explaining the site. I think it was more for their benefit than for mine since it was in Japanese. I am not sure why this particular setting of stones is so aesthetic to the Japanese. Something about this particular setting is really exciting to them, albeit quietly.
The visit includes a walk around the premises which includes a walk around Kyoyochi Pond. This is a man-made pond that used to attract mandarin ducks. Of late there have not been so many ducks. We saw only two and the picture in the brochure also shows two ducks.. I think they may have been pinioned and are permanent features of the pond.
The Japanese seem to love things in English, though they don't always come up with a combination of words that makes sense or does not express the idea they think they are expressing. We saw a truck with the name 'Big Beans.' A department store has the slogan 'Be Bridal.' There is the Grand-Back big and tall shop. A vending machine is called 'Stevia.' There is a store called 'Today Discount--Big Off.' There is a brand of canned coffee called 'Coffee Boss.' A women's fashion store is called 'Nice Claup.' A sweatshirt bears the legend 'MAKE in a choice--recommendation.' A tee shirt says 'GET OR LOST--yellow blood line.' The pitcher in our room that keeps water warm says 'TEXTURE This gives rise to quite a luxurious emotion in your mind.' There is a type of chocolate labeled 'Mild.' I suppose that is in contrast to the harsh chocolate you would get otherwise. A sweatshirt bears the message 'Tier off. Not just on down all.' As long as a phrase sounds like English to the Japanese, it doesn't matter that it is verbal fruit cocktail.
On the bus we talked to an Indonesian businessman. We didn't know he was Indonesian when he started talking to us. As he said himself he looks Japanese to the Japanese. He had just come from visiting his mother in Edison, New Jersey. That is not very far from where we live. He actually lives in Sacramento, California and runs an Asian gift shop. We talked about American politics and welfare, which he thinks is out of hand. He may well be right. He suggested that there is a particularly good place to see the parade for the festival, to go behind the palace. He seemed to be a very bright and motivated person. You meet some interesting people when you travel. I mean you meet interesting people at home too, but it is a very different set who regularly travels the world. I tend to give my seat to older people on the bus. The Indonesian said that really is not done any more in Japan. The young don't have much respect for the older the way they used to. Also there used to be a convention that women gave up their seat for men, but that is ignored these days. He said he had seen a fight between an older woman and a man over a seat on a bus. I guess in Japan territory is power.
There was a long walk through the long narrow streets of Kyoto to get to our next site. It is, however, not an uninteresting one. You pass by food shops and see fruits and vegetables for sale. We are always on the look out for what might good places to eat.
Now if you thought that it was impressive that someone would fold 1000 cranes, where each crane takes maybe three minutes consider the temple of Sanjusangendo, dating to 1164 AD, where they have 1001 nearly identical statues of Juichimen-Senju-Kannon, each with 11 faces. They each have one main face and ten little heads sticking out of the top of the main head like growths. They also are supposed to have 1000 arms. Here the artist of the original statue was at something of a loss. It is just really tough to put 1000 arms on a statue. Ah, but faith came to the rescue. If each has 40 arms and each arm saves 25 worlds, that makes each count as 25 arms so there would be 1000 arms in all. This may make it seem to make sense to work in the other direction and say the artist should put 25,000 arms on each statue, but given the choice of having to sculpt 40 or 25,000 arms, the artist opted for 40. An arm counts as 25 if it saves 25 worlds. [The opinions expressed are those of the temple and do not necessarily represent those of the log-writer or his wife.] I am not sure where they find all these worlds. In any case there are these 1000 statues in 10 rows of 100 in one long hall. And it turns out to be a baker's 1000 since there is one statue at the back facing the other way. It must have taken a lot of faith to complete this task. It also takes a lot of faith on the part of the advocates to recognize that this effort was a worthwhile task. I think you have to be really into multiplicity. There are also 28 attending spirits represented by statues. These are often fierce faced Nijuhachibushu. like garuda, the bird-headed. In Thailand they are also bird-bodied, but not here.
The rows are staggered so that each Buddha has a view of the front. They stack up in rows going back diagonally but not straight back.
We did not have time to see the whole temple ground since the temple closed at 5 PM. It was getting cold so I took off my photovest and handed it to Evelyn to hold while I put on my sweater. A Japanese tourist flashed a picture of the proceedings then gave me a thumbs up sign. I am not sure what he found of interest, but it is a very different society.
We took a roundabout route back to the room. We stopped at a Lawson's not far from the room and got some sushi, some soba noodles with sauce, some raisin buns and a little chocolate. This we ate in the room while we worked on our logs. We watched a Japanese language cartoon. It seemed to be full of all sorts of ultimate battles and huge explosions. A steady diet of the ultimate must get dull.
Boy the room is cramped. The Japanese must be bumping into each other all the time. Evelyn did a wash. She found an hour in the drier left the clothing very wet. She hung it around the room and even this morning it was damp. So we left with our underwear hanging the room. The maid will see it, but then people see a lot more in Japanese society.
|
10/22/96 Kyoto: The Feudal Past Creating the Present
|
| Our room is right next to the sinks an toilets. About the first thing we heard in the morning was the sound of someone choking and spitting into a sink just outside our door. I tell you that is the way to start the day right! It is amazing how much noise some people make. I thought this hotel looked nice at the beginning, but in some ways it is the least convenient of the three. For some reason it is impossible to get a room that is dark at night. At least all three of our rooms have let a great deal of light in that was not celestial in origin. And there is not much privacy. The dollar does not go very far for hotels here. This place costs over 72 dollars a night and it is laughably inconvenient. A Motel 6 in the states would cost a little more than half of that and would be by comparison a palace of great luxury. I suppose the difference is the cost of real estate. The cost of labor is not all that much different here, I believe. Space is at a premium in Japan and real estate is very expensive compared with that in he US, even in places like Manhattan. |
|
| Copyright © - "Mark Leeper" |
|
 |
| Other travelogues by the same author: |
|
|
|
