| Submitted by: Mark Leeper United States |
| Submission Date: 09 February 2005 |
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Owning land in Japan is expensive and it adds to the price of everything else.
I told Evelyn yesterday I thought the room was small and she did not think it was. Now she is complaining how small the room is. Our first was eight tatami, this one is six. A tatami is about two feet by four feet. So this room is about six feet by eight feet. And not all that is useable because of the cupboard.
For breakfast Evelyn had a roll in the room. I wanted to wait and get a hot steamed bun. We got to the local Lawson's and found it was out already. It is strange seeing Lawson's here. When I was growing up we used to visit my grandmother in Akron, Ohio. At the end of the street there was a Lawson's milk store. I had not seen a Lawson's for years and years. It is surprising enough to see a store named for a bran of milk here. But it is even stranger that it be Lawson's. I think I will bring a pair of Lawson's chopsticks for my parents to see.
Chopsticks are different for Chinese and Japanese. The Chines do not see to have disposable chopsticks. They tend to have the more permanent bamboo ones (as well as ones more fancy). There are fancy reusable chopsticks here, but they also have the kind we find in Japanese restaurants at home. The come as one solid piece and you break them apart.
We grabbed the bus. The busses here have recorded voice announcements. That is impressive enough, but they have them in Japanese and in English. The English stop announcements are made in a woman's voice with a very prim and precise British accent. I really like the Japanese attitude that they have the technology to have announcements so they go ahead and do it. It is odd to look down from the bus and see a car with a Buddhist monk. He was gesticulating wildly to the driver.
We stopped at a 7-Eleven and they had steamed buns. Very good ones, in fact. I had a sweet bean paste bun and my favorite, a spicy curry bun. For those who have not seen these, they are buns about the size of a hamburger bun. They look like white bread without the pores or crust. The center packs a payload of meat and sauce. Generally the filling is generous. At their best, which they were this morning, they are hot and steamy. You have flavor here a pancake can't touch.
It was a fifteen minute walk to where you apply for permission to visit the palace. 'Applying' for permission means just that. To go on the tour you fill out a form complete with passport numbers. Once you do that, it is pretty much a rubber stamp that you get in (at least for foreign visitors), but you must be at the waiting area at least ten minutes prior to the tour. I think that if you could just walk in, you would not treat it with the proper respect. I have heard the Japanese have a place where you can buy coffee at two prices. One cup is at $2 and one at $100. Either way you get the same cup of coffee, but when you pay $100, you savor it much, much more. With that in mind, they make it more difficult for you to get into the palace to make it better appreciated. Actually I am told that Japanese do not find it s easy to get a tour of the Imperial Palace. It is really a rubber stamp only for foreigners.
Our guide had a very difficult accent to understand. Indeed I was not always sure when she was speaking Japanese and when English. Her l's were pronounced as r's. Japanese who have a good pronunciation of English are quite rare. The palace was first built in 794 AD and has burned down many times and has been rebuilt many times. Most recently it was rebuilt in 1855. Until better standards came along fairly recently for buildings, Japanese buildings all seem to have died by fire. When you read the history of a temple or a palace you read about when it burned down and was rebuilt. You see on many building that they have been rebuilt--sometimes two and three times--after having burned down. The Imperial family lives in the Tokyo Palace, but the most important ceremonies are carried out here at the Kyoto Gosho when a new emperor ascends the throne.
The tour shows only a little of 220 acres of the palace, gates, waiting rooms, and gardens. The palace has nightingale floors which is a poetic way of saying they intentionally squeak. There was the building where the emperor goes through a ceremony and becomes a god. Hirohito went through the ceremony, but then renounced his godhood as part of the settlement at the end of W.W.II. However his son went through the ceremony on schedule and is, in theory, a god.
What does the emperor really think of all this? Does he think of this luxurious palace as just his place? Or does he think of it as more something to impress the people while he retreats to his private office. What about his godhood? How does it affect his mind? What is it like to wake up one day and say to yourself, 'Well, today I am a god, and I'm still hungry for breakfast.' What does his wife think knowing he is a god and that he drools on his pillow in his sleep? Only the emperor's lady was allowed to touch him. But what did she think when he got pimples on his neck? If he is a god, it is not in any sense that is meaningful in our culture. It might have made sense in ancient Rome, but not any more. I suppose there is some question how mortals can elevate someone to godhood. President is something you become by consent of the people. Even king is just an office. But there is a qualitative difference between a human and a god. Of course this may be just to us. I had a very religious person--of the sort we get in the US and that I hope the Japanese are free of--explain to me that the Chinese dragons in my office were symbols of evil and really should not be put up in my office. This guy was a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories. I had to explain to him that even if he was right about Western dragons (and I tactfully avoided telling him he was a flipping loony on this subject) the Chinese do not think of the same thing when they see a dragon. The Chinese mythical beast is called a 'dragon' only as a sort of visual pun because they looked similar to Western dragons. These were different creatures symbolic of erudition. Perhaps the Japanese have a different concept that might really mean something like 'Most high ruler and really something special' that by analogy to what we in the West consider gods we inaccurately just call 'god.' The former is something you really could become by mortal means with a ceremony, but since we don't have anything really analogous in the West we say, perhaps inaccurately, that is being a 'god.' God is a concept we have in the West. And when we tell the Japanese they cannot put someone in this office, it would be like them telling us we can no longer make someone President. In any case there was a lot of ill-feeling when we made Hirohito renounce this office and it seems likely to me that it was over a misunderstanding. Of course maybe all Hirohito did was say he wasn't a god in the Western sense of that word. And that would have been a true statement. The problem is our vocabulary is not rich enough to have a term for his office and there was a good deal of ill-will generated over what comes down to a problem in translation. In a nutshell we first tell the Japanese the Western word for this high office is 'god.' Then we turn around and say 'that's ridiculous, you CANNOT make someone a god. Renounce your office.'
On the tour we had met a couple of men visiting from San Francisco. They were Ward and Warren. After the tour we went with them to see the parade for the festival. Warren knew all about the split of AT&T into three companies and realized we must work for Lucent Technologies. Evelyn was not wearing her pin. She brought a pin with the Lucent logo and has been wearing it frequently, but not today.
There is an annual festival, the Jidai Matsuri, celebrating the founding of Kyoto and there is a parade of people in traditional costumes marching from the Imperial Palace to the Heian-Jingu Shrine. We had heard that the parade route was crowded, but that there were much better viewing opportunities behind the palace where the parade assembles. That was pretty accurate.
People dressed as samurai, as peasants, as soldiers, and as a bunch of things I don't have the words for. There was a fair percentage of the horses who would not cooperate. They were less than keen to be in show business. A horse that will not behave they walk in a circle. Apparently they cannot fuss and walk at the same time.
I had taken off my shoes to get some pictures on some platforms that had been set up for spectators. The shoes were out of my sight. I wish I could say that I came back to the shoes and they were right like I left them. They weren't. They were moved a few inches under a platform and put neatly together.
The line of people passing seemed to go on and on. This was definitely a burn-film event. As people moved around I eventually got a front row seat. I had a really good seat for a lot of the colorful costumes from Japan's past. It is hard for me to judge how many people were in the parade, but it must have been two thousand. There were lots of colorful costumes.
As the parade was winding down I made my way back to the side Evelyn was on. She had gotten separated from Ward and Warren and was talking with Abby, a student from Kyoto U. originally from Boston, but soon to be moving to Australia. Evelyn had hooked up with her and she was telling Evelyn that the figures in the parade represented specific people from Japan's history. Abby teaches college students and had interviewed several of the people in the parade as well as filming them for the undergrad classes she teaches. So Evelyn may have been getting more out of the parade after all. Abby says the problems with the horses I had seen is common. These horses are not used to the riders or the handlers. The riders are more likely to be local officials than anyone who know anything at all about riding horses. The horse does not have any idea what is going on, but certainly knows that he does not like it. There is no Japanese equivalent to the ASPCA. As for the incident with the shoes, she fully agrees. If you take off you shoes you have to watch them every moment or somebody Japanese will 'organize' them. They will still be there but much better than you left them. I am reminded of the scene in THE TIME MACHINE where the Time Traveler recovers his machine which had been moved by the Morlocks. He discovered that they had taken it apart, oiled it, and put it back together in perfect working order.
Specific people in the parade were supposed to be Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Ieyasu. Also the parade ran in reverse chronological order. The figures you see at the beginning are from the Meiji and they work back to the beginnings of unification. To me they just looked like characters you might see in Japanese historical films. Many looked to me just to be types.
After a couple hours we set off to find lunch. On the way out of the palace grounds we looked for parade programs. Abby had recommended them to Evelyn. Unfortunately, they were all gone. The one or two sellers we found were all sold out. It took longer than we expected but eventually we found an inexpensive place for lunch. We had gayoza, ramen with omelet, and vegetables in white sauce. Evelyn ordered the latter but was disappointed with it. I traded and threw some vinegar in and it was fine. I should say something about water. Most restaurants seem to get their water from an electric unit that looks almost like a coffee dispenser. The water comes out quite cold. In the US, very often the water you get in restaurants is not all that cold. Some restaurants prepare pitchers of water with ice before hand, some do not. These electric dispensers seem to perform the same function.
We took the bus to the train station and from there walked to the Higashi Honganji Temple. It is a temple to the Ontani branch of Shin sect of Buddhism. The area started as a mausoleum built in 1272. Nobunaga had built another temple, the Honganji Temple. To check Nobunaga's power, Hideyoshi built this temple. |
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