| Submitted by: Mark Leeper United States |
| Submission Date: 09 February 2005 |
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Evelyn and I were mystified but it was kind of nice.
A vending machines on the path was selling a can of carrot juice. That was a new one on me. We got a little lost but eventually fount our next site.
Eikando Temple was founded in 855. Another monk enshrined another image. The name it eventually got means 'eternal view.' It adapted the Seizan School as of Kamakura period. Then it was burned to the ground in Onin War. But of course it was rebuilt. It was 300 yen admission. We would have thought that would be sufficient, but the halls are connected and you see only the outside for the entrance fee. You must pay an additional 500 yen to see the inside of the halls. This was way overpriced considering the meager historical significance of the temple. Of course we had seen the interiors of several temples already and did not feel really disappointed at not seeing these. We walked the grounds for a little while but Evelyn was irritated at not seeing the interiors and felt just a bit cheated. We left in a less than sanguine mood. We have seen a lot temples and shrines over the last three weeks. We are not really seeing enough differences to make seeing one more all that exciting. Perhaps we are getting 'templed out.' They are all running together in our memories.
The next order of business was lunch. We wandered around for quite a while just looking for a restaurant. We ran into another group of Americans who were lost. We at least could tell them what was the way to town. Eventually they found a fancier restaurant than we wanted. We went into a sort of workingman's noodle shop. There was no apparent English, but we figured we would order by pointing. No problem, they did have an English menu after all. They just don't make it obvious from the outside. I had soba soup with a herring, Evelyn had cold soba with soy sauce. I had seen this (or plastic facsimiles of it) in windows for a while. Evelyn though to would be a problem eating because of the bones. I said it might not have bones, but Evelyn figured if they removed the bones they would have removed the skin also. Actually it was filleted. It was boneless but not skinless. I liked what I got. We discovered we were very close to the Heian-Jingu shrine with its huge orange Torii gate. So we were near to town after all.
Well we could have gone to more temples, but we were are really starting to overdose. Instead we went to Kawaramachi Street to shop a little. Out front of Maruzen Bookstore I found them selling film publicity materials for films released in Japan. There were 8-1/2 by 11 film ads laminated for 200 or 300 yen. I decided they would make interesting room decorations. We had to look through a huge collection but we got some interesting ones. Then we went inside to see the bookstore and there were a lot more to go through. And Evelyn got a book on the Salaryman from the English book section.
That done, we were not really sure what we wanted to do. Finding a place amid the hustle and bustle where we could just work on our logs seemed like a good idea. We had still eaten too recently to have dinner, but we could scout restaurants for when we were hungry. Evelyn had read about an African restaurant called the Couscous. We found it, but considering the price we are probably better off eating Japanese. This was along a side road and there were some good restaurants. One seemed to have the food in the form of a pancake, a local specialty. We found a place to sit and work on our logs at the arcade on Kawaramachi Street. There were a lot of teens, many dressed in counter-culture ways meeting at the arcade. Also there are young looking parents who are there to smoke and look after the kids.
When it gets too dark to work on the logs we go for dinner at Mr. Young Men, an oddly-named place that specializes in okonomiyaki. This cuisine serves dinner up as a sort of grilled pancake. Mine had pancake of nondescript binder, seafood, noodles, ginger, onion, and a salad with a scoop of potato salad. Evelyn had their French pancake: pancake binder (still no idea what it is) corn, squid, other odd ingredients with a 1000 Island dressing. What makes this French is anybody's guess. The food is tasty, mine perhaps better than Evelyn's. The claim that this is really international food is as fraudulent a our claim that French fries and French dressing are French. Or that Chop Suey is Chinese. Of course there is one popular Japanese dish that was originally supposed to be what Westerners eat. That is Sukiyaki (actually pronounced 'skeeyaki'). It is a good dish in itself, but it is fraudulent as an import.
We walk back to the room, about a 20 minute walk. A sure sign of cinema withdrawal symptoms is my running a movie in my mind as I walk. As I walked back I 'watched' exerpts of THE OUTLAW JOSIE WALES.
I find that when I get back to the room at the end of the day I am always in a rush to get to plumbing. It seemed much more so on this trip than on previous trips and I was concerned. I finally realized that I was having two or three sodas each day, and lunch was a big bowl of soup with several glasses of water. This trip is probably bad for my blood pressure--lots of sodium--but great for my kidneys.
At the room I work on my log. At 10 I turn on the TV and they are running SANJURO by Akira Kurosawa with Toshiro Mifune as Sanjuro. It is a favorite Samurai film. Of course there are no subtitles, but it is still fun to watch. I guess it is like listening to opera without a libretto. An interesting note on SANJURO is that after it was made it became a sequel to YOJIMBO. Kurosawa had used a similar characterization for Mifune and had used the name the same name 'Sanjuro' for the character, but he was not intended to be the same person. When people started calling this a sequel, he realized there was no good reason for it not to be. So the two Sanjuros became the same samurai. Of course the style is quite different. YOJIMBO is a grim film, SANJURO is really a light action comedy. Hey, why are these things called Samurai films? They are almost invariably about Ronins.
Japanese TV seems to have more commercials than American TV. Of course I am not really used to sitting through commercials. I almost never watch commercial TV as it is being broadcast. I watch it on tape and fastscan commercials. One thing I am sure about Japanese TV, there are a lot more programs about food preparation. They even have contest programs about food preparation. I cannot figure out the rules but three different chefs are racing to make recipes with chestnuts on the program I am watching. Why am I watching this? I am hoping another movie will come on one of the eight stations we get. One last check and then I go to sleep.
11:45:49 PM No movie. Good night.
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10/26/96 Kyoto: Artifacts and Eels
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Here is something to note about the Ryokan Seiki. I was up at about 1:45 AM No doubt it was too much Coca-Cola. There were definite playful noises in the wall. It is an outside wall so it may not even be in the building but I suspect there are rodents somewhere nearby. I think they wait until things are quiet.
I watch a little of a fantasy cartoon on television. Japanese fantasy cartoons have become really popular at home. There are adds from a pizza chain for Funky Egg. It looks like it is scrambled eggs with meat. Our pizza restaurants don't serve funky scrambled eggs for some reason. Japan is an amazing mirror of our society, picking so much up but putting a different emphasis and twist on it we would not expect. We are left saying, 'wait a minute, this isn't how it was supposed to be.' It is a misunderstanding like cargo cults but much more creative.
The weather has returned to what it was the first week, gray and perhaps rainy. this is kind of a laid back, end of trip sort of day. We may go to our third festival in three weeks. Evelyn has found there is a local festival of blessing eels. I am not sure the significance of eels. but I like the concept of an eel festival. Maybe there will be concessions serving eel dishes from around the world. From Italy we might have Eel Duce. Then there is Eel d'France. The shrine may not be just a house of worship, from the custom of blessing eels it may also be a house of eel repute.
On our way down from the street from the hotel I stop and pay 80 yen for a red pepper chopstick rest.
We stopped by the Lawson's to get snacks for the room including another dried squid. Evelyn got a chocolate pastry and I got my usual buns. They put in some mustard in a tiny pack. Whoa! That was good mustard. From the folks who brought you wasabi. Powerful stuff. We also got some snack for the room. One is six packs of an assortment of Japanese crackers: soy crackers, cracker coated peanuts, tubes of something, fried peas, but the prize inside is little whole fried fish. They are maybe an inch long. They are sort of salty and sweet. Very tasty and not something you would see in the US. I didn't eat any right then, of course.
We headed then to the Kyoto National Museum. We stopped dead when we saw a sign that said the main hall was closed. We figured that was probably most of the museum. We had to do a quick refigure on what to do for the day. While we were sitting there the ticket-seller came over and gave us a map of the museum. It seems that the main exhibit is not in the main hall. The main hall was just for special exhibits. That was the information we needed. We bought a ticket from a machine and went in. The ticket taker took our ticket and put it on a scanner. It read a bar-code off the back. Apparently it remembers what tickets it has seen and which it hasn't. It is a good way to keep their pretty ticket undamaged. It is a nice ticket that can be used for a souvenir.
Rather then build a protected walkway between the buildings, they provide special museum umbrellas, not to be taken from the grounds.
The museum is in chronological order. The start with prehistory and have obsidian spear-points, earthenware bowls, there was an earthenware fire holder with flame-like handles, the inevitable mirrors, of course. There was a model of the mysterious keyhole-shaped graves. Actually the latter make more sense. Obviously the body was put in the center of the circle and the Shiva-sitters had their seats in the other part which is perfectly shaped for an audience. There was an earthenware coffin. All this was from the Tumulus Age.
As we moved on we saw a 'cinerary' urn. I have to look up to see if that is a real word, but its meaning is obvious. This is an urn for ashes of the cremated. There were more of the tubular tiles that have clan symbols on castles. There was a nice stone pillar with two dragons circling around. There was a collection of Buddhist art including some now familiar Kannon statues. A ceramics room included ink blocks. A Chinese and Korean ceramics room included some Buddhist art. One familiar piece, though not from this trip necessarily was a T'ang camel in green and orange-ish-brown. Another piece just showed a Chinese woman with a Pekinese dog in her arms.
What I found the most interesting was a Buddhist stele with two dragons entwined around each other. The dragons were facing in opposite direction with their bodies twisted together. Each was grabbing a front leg of the other with a hind leg. The two were absolutely symmetrical so each had its hind legs off the ground. It was a great concept.
There was a room of Kannon statues with fierce and fiery looks, a Buddha with very realistic articulated hands (though Evelyn pointed out that the artist gave him webbed fingers).
Also included were paintings on silk and landscapes on screens. One scroll showed people and small sheep-sized elephants. There was a silk scroll of puppies, one looking appealingly, but the artist showed the white of his eyes. I seem to remember that on a puppy the iris is so big you really don't see the whites, but I won't say that for sure until I can see a puppy again. Another scroll shows what look like chubby horses. There are rooms with calligraphy, textiles, and lacquer-ware. The metalwork room changes its exhibit every three months. We catch it at time when it has mirrors instead of armor, unfortunately. Actually in spite of no showing any armor, a major oversight, I thought that this was a fairly good museum. We got done and we thought we would get in the mood for the eel festival by seeing if we could find a restaurant that serves unagi. There was a Benihana very near the museum. But when we went there it seemed to have mostly Western-style food. There was a Curry-Rice shop across the street. I had yet to have Curry-Rice, a very popular favorite with the Japanese and one of the few that comes neither from Japan nor the US. I have a squid curry-rice and Evelyn has a cheese curry-rice. They give you a spoon to eat with. Available condiments include pickled cabbage, soy sauce, and a really hot red pepper. It is pretty good. The two of us ate for 950 yen. Not too shabby.
Evelyn was concerned we might not be able to find the shrine in spite of her instructions. I told her if all eels fails we could still see more temples.
The woman at the desk at our hotel said that Mishima-jinja is just north of the of the museum. We went and nothing seemed to be happening. Eventually Evelyn asked me to ask. (She does most of the navigating and most of the planning.) We got another set of instructions, with an X on our map. More wandering. It was about a 20 minute walk but we still had about 45. On the street I almost asked an American woman on a bicycle, but on second thought what were the chances. So I just ended up smiling at her and she smiled back.
We passed by a shrine that looked wrong, it was too small, but I suggested we should ask directions. Neither of us wanted to make fools of ourselves. There was a big temple at the top of the hill and I decided that was it. Evelyn pointed out there was no Torii gate. Now what? Let's go back to the little shrine. There was a priest (if that is the right word) out front. 'Mishima-jinja doko?' [Where is Mishima-jinja?] 'Mishima-jinja koko.' [This is Mishima-jinja. Have a cup of cocoa?] Actually it turned out to be tea, not cocoa, for the visitors. It was on some red, low tables. There were some seats nearby in the shrine. I took the tea and down. A monk motioned me back to the table. But there was no place to sit at the table. We sort of stooped on the ground. The monk invited us to sit on the table. Well it really was a sort of platform, not unlike the ones we sat on to watch the parade. Well, it looked like a table with the tray of dishes and the hot-pot of tea. It was now about 1:50 and still no other guests had shown up for this blessing of the eels. I have always said that if you want to feel really strange the way to do it is to sit by yourself in a Shinto shrine with nobody else around but monks, hoping that other people will show up to get their eels blessed.
To my tremendous relief another American showed up. It was the bicycled woman we had seen in the street. Her name, I found out later, was Sonya. She is from Virginia just outside of Washington (MacLean?) And she had been in Japan for six years. She was soon to go back to the US so she could return to Japan where she wanted to settle. She teaches English and has decided she wants to live in Japan permanently. She too read about the festival of the blessing of the eels and wanted to see it. It is apparently an annual event, but this time they gave it a little publicity.
We sat there drinking hot tea. A few more Americans or Europeans showed up and some Japanese, mostly businessmen in suits. It should be explained that eels have a very delicate meat called 'unagi' used for sushi, donburi, and other seafood delicacies. I take it that by contributing an eel to the shrine and getting it blessed, it helps the whole years crop of eels.
The ceremony started late by a few minutes. The priest motioned us into the shrine. The priestly robes are fairly unique for Shinto. Actually not the robes, but the shoes are like shiny black wooden clogs with particularly bulbous toes. The headgear, is also large and black. It stands tall on the head looking like a flattened cylinder with a crease at the front and the back. The hat extends two inches behind the back of the head. At least some of these hats look to be made of plastic these days. Three Americans came in ten minutes into the service. One of them kept taking sips from a can of tea. The priest came out and waved some sort of fronds over people to bless them. There was a sort of chanting in Japanese to the tune of mournful-sounding Japanese music. This sort of thing went on for about half an hour. There was sort of a ceremony in front with an eel in a glass case. At some point various people in the audience dropped eels into a pool to the left of the shrine. There was also something were various members of the congregation bowed and clapped at the alter then took what looked like pieces of wood from their pockets and burned them off to the right in a fire under a Torii gate. The fire really looked like it might take the Torii gate and I began to understand (better) why so many shrines had burned down.
Eventually the ceremony ended and the priest and one of the attendees made speeches. According to Sonya the speeches referred to the gaijin whom the attendees were stepping over. Finally the service was over and as each gaijin left he was handed a short bag with handles. Only Evelyn did not get one and that because she left last and they probably ran out. Some of the gaijin left but Sonya, Evelyn, a French woman, and I remained in the street and discussed the ceremony. People also opened the bags to find... three packets of green tea, a book explaining some of the history of Shinto in Japanese, and a wrapped box. Someone opened their box to discover it had sweet bean pastries. Sonya said she thought they had said something about sweet bean pastries in the speeches but was not sure why they mentioned it. She loves the pastries. I forget he name she gave them. I had really wanted to try them myself. I was not expecting such nice hospitality. The Japanese are noted for this sort of thing, gifts to guests. Uh... The same etiquette says you should not open the gifts until you get home, but I didn't want to tell the others not to open theirs. I did go back to the shrine and put 500 yen in the offering box and Sonya put in 200. I guess I thought someone should pay them back for their kindness. I asked Sonya about the barrels in front of the shrine. Many shrines seem to have white barrels. She said they were for sake.
We talked to Sonya about Japan. She likes it better in Japan than in the US. They really accept her as much as a gaijin can be accepted. There is much less back-stabbing and politics at work. People are less aggressive at work. They can be assertive but are not aggressive.
It was now about four in the afternoon, but we did not have a lot to do so went back to the room to work on logs and rest. I told Evelyn I would take her out to a nice dinner.
I napped a little and at about 6:30 we went out for dinner. We decided to walk around the neighborhood and pick the place that looked the best. In fact we found only one place that looked any good at all and it was just mediocre Chinese. Evelyn had Marpo Dofu. I had gyoza and vegetables with white sauce. This cost about 2100 yen. 300 yen went for a bowl of rice alone. I was a little disgruntled so we bought some chocolate with peanuts to take back to the room. At 8 PM there was a samurai program on which I watched and then went to sleep.
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10/27/96 Osaka and Trip home
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Let's see now. It is about 6 AM Sunday morning in Kyoto. That makes it 5 PM Saturday afternoon in Old Bridge. So I should start thinking of it as 5 PM. But this is the day they change the clocks. (It's 'Spring forward, fall back.') so by the time I get home it will be effectively as if it was 4 PM in Old Bridge. Boy! This stuff wasn't already confusing enough. Now are we on or off Daylight Savings Time? I think we are coming off of it. Well, that won't matter much. Well it means that I have to start thinking of the time as 4 PM. I didn't keep myself up all night since I have a big day ahead of me. I will just have to adjust with what sleep I can do on the plane. Now maybe the thing to do is try to stay awake on the plane. That is never very hard anyway. Sleeping on a plane is what is tough. Maybe I will pull my all nighter there. That makes for a long and very boring flight. But I don't have a lot of choice. I have to get caught up on my log, but then it is not very far behind anyway. I am up to looking for the eel shrine. Luckily since I started entering my long on the palmtop I have been able to enter some information out of order. That is why I am able to type this in real time while I still have not completed yesterday's entry.
Let's see. This is the 27th. At least here it is. That means that Evelyn gets breakfast in bed. It is our monoversary. That is like an anniversary but it works with months. Evelyn gets breakfast in bed on our monoversary. A little hard to arrange here. Let's see. I can give her green tea and ogura pastry. Not much. I should have gotten something from the bakery, but then it would not have been a surprise.
Well I made the breakfast. Now imagine what these pastries are like. Take something the consistency of marshmallow, but not sticky on the outside. It is not sweet however. That is what you get with beaten rice, mashed much, much more than you would do with potatoes. That is the outside of these chestnut-sized (but flat on the bottom) pastries. I think they powder the outside so it is not sticky. The inside is oguro. That is like the refried beans you get in a Mexican restaurant, But it is not quite so thin in consistency. The flavor is much the same but it is sweet like chocolate. Then on the top of the pastry there is something beige, perhaps a mix of the two ingredients. And there are black sesame seeds, three or four. That is what these pastries are.
Anyway it is an elegant breakfast for our last day. Arigato, Mishima-jinja.
Well we got up. And packed up. I have my heavy pack on my back. And I have a big travel bag on my chest. And I am setting out on the first step of the trip back in a space too narrow to turn around. And I am thinking to myself, that's one small step for Man, one giant leap for Mankind. We make it to the bus stop. The bus shows up at 8:20. I am fine until the bus starts up, then I realize I have a lot of mass on me. Tough to keep my balance. I find a seat and take a double seat. Well, at least there was nobody standing.
I got off the bus near the train station and took my last view of Kyoto. I shall miss it. We spent a little under an hour on the train to Osaka. We were not going to have enough time to see Osaka. But then Osaka Castle, which is what we would have really wanted to see, was undergoing renovation. We could have gone to see the Panasonic industrial exhibit but that hardly seemed worthwhile. We decided to just walk around, see the sights, and have the nice meal we did not have the night before.
As you approach Osaka you see a remarkable side-by-side pair of skyscrapers with a bridge connecting them at the top. There is supposedly a garden in the bridging section. Certainly here are more interesting buildings here than most of what we saw in Tokyo.
We arrived in Osaka and looked for the tourist information center which we found just inside the southeast corner of the train station. Looking around Osaka, it really looks like the Japanese have fastened on to the idea of the American Dream an implemented it here. Not just in Osaka, but all over Japan. But looking at the skyscrapers of Osaka it looks like a country that is making it. There has been so much construction here over the course of 50 years, there are so many beautiful cities where the average person is not afraid of crime and has a chance to make something of himself, it is just amazing. This is a country that is doing something very right. It is time for the US to start emulating what Japan has done. This seems to be a place where ideas can be implemented. In some ways Japan is to the US as US is to Canada. No offense, Canada. The US has the reputation of somehow being more vital than Canada and also a bit nuttier. Japan seems more vital and more nutty than the US. (I wonder if vitality and nuttiness go hand-in-hand.)
Like the US on a Sunday morning, most things were closed as we walked. But that is because we were on the surface. Osaka has built a huge mall underground and away from the elements. There are at least two levels below ground. We went down and while it was still mostly closed, there was a lot more happening. Most of the stores had sliding doors down. What is open is a bunch of video-game arcades and Pachinko parlors. From a distance it sounds like there are a lot of people at these but when you actually pass by them you see that at least the arcades seem to run on autopilot. There are all sorts of fights and races going on there with or without people to play the games. The machines apparently don't need people in order to have fun. I am picturing a city devastated by biological warfare and everyone is dead but the video arcade games continue to run and have fights and races without people to play.
There is a department store called Hanshin's and we go into the basement. Here there are people. Lot's of them buying and selling food at what is literally many acres of counters. There is nothing like the department store basements in the US. Just walk around and you see meats prepared and unprepared, pastry and baked goods, salads, ribs, buns, fish in all stages of preparation from raw to sushi to prepared. There is a counter that has 40 different fried foods. You pick the ones you want and they wrap them. Another counter has just broad cut French fries. Then there is candy. Nowhere that I know is the American economy this healthy. Even Hong Kong's economy at its height never produced anything like this food display.
This underground mall is one end of a spectrum. We would see in Tokyo (and many other cities) where they would have underground walkways and someone would get the bright idea to put in some stores. This is the other end of the spectrum. Where the walkways lead is unimportant. The stores have taken over. Nobody cares where the walkways go.
We decide to go for lunch. There are places to eat in the mall, but we decide to try to wander the streets to the southeast of the train station. We find what looks like a good place to eat. I think we are both in the mood for eel and are really looking for a place that serves an unagi dunburi. We find it and have a nice lunch, though it turns out we had found the dish considerably cheaper in the mall. But I tell you that eel was tastEEE!
Near the restaurant is a cafe called 'Cafe, isn't it?'.
The streets are cluttered with electrical lines going everywhere. I tell Evelyn it looks like the back of our friend Kate's VCR rack. I think they cannot put electrical lines underground without a lot of work because they would have to untangle each first.
We go back into the underground mall. We pass a place called 'Manhattan Massaje from New York.' It is funny that after all that time in New York they didn't know how to spell 'massage.' It is also strange how they idolize America. It is like if it comes from the US it is authentic and real. Maybe it is like we have French Toast, French Dressing, and French Fries. They can't idolize America for long. Japan has a greater vitality. The underground seems to have just one electronic arcade after another. We go into a Pachinko Parlor and take some pictures.
One wall in he underground is decorated with about ten different reliefs of musical instruments. Each has little metal plates over the keys or strings. You touch the metal plate and it makes the sound of the instrument. You can play a tune on the piano.
Well finally we have had enough of the underground. We come out near a travel agent who offers an Audrey Hepburn tour. You go to the places where Audrey Hepburn movies were filmed. I guess Hepburn is very popular here. I had heard Marilyn Monroe is.
We have about an hour wait for the train to the airport. We are really killing time now. Back in the underground once again, I find a Daruma at a good price. Finally we just sit down to write. At 2:30 PM local time we pick ourselves up and begin the long journey home. It is 12:30 AM Sunday in New Jersey and we expect it to take us the next 23 hours to travel.
I took some pictures on the way to the airport. I had finished my roll and there were shots on Evelyn's so was using that. I dozed a bit on the train. Osaka has a very fancy new airport, only about two years old. It has a lot of clever designs. It has push carts for luggage and they are designed to work on the escalators. They straddle multiple steps and in doing so sit back on their own rubber heels so they don't go bouncing down the steps. Only problem, it is not obvious that the carts are designed this way. They have to put someone at each escalator to show people how to push the carts on.
The line for check in is very slow. We are standing in line behind a guy with a buzzcut haircut. He has odd glasses that don't curve down over his ears. The stems of his glasses put dents into his head. Boy these Americans are strange looking. There is a Marine with a tee-shirt that says, 'It's not that we have an attitude.' In back it says 'It's just that we're THAT GOOD. Marine Corps, Okinawa.' Ummm. Yes.
One problem with the new airport is the acoustics. You can hear the screams of children echoing over airport. But the guy at the desk can just run the passport through a scanner to get the info he needs. They are into mechanical solutions to problems. They have an airport tax of 2600 yen (wow!). They handle it like the train ticket machines. You start slinging money into it press buttons to get tickets saying you have paid your airport tax. They also have a machine that you put your boarding pass into and it takes the part it needs and hands you back a stub. They have to free up people, I guess, to tell you how to wheel your cart onto the escalator.
We change money and wait. The waiting area has several wide screen TVs, each with a company name provided as advertising.
We wait at the gate. There are fifteen straight minutes of every minute or so announcing the last call for the flight to Manila. My guess is that somebody checked a bag then did not get on the plane. They didn't want to find the bag and remove it for convenience reasons. They didn't want to fly with the bag and not the passenger for security reasons. What they most wanted was to fly with the passenger on board. But he was probably having a leisurely drink somewhere. They must have found him to the great relief of everyone waiting for that plane or others.
We boarded the United Airlines flight. We went through the usual announcements. They said they had three 'language-speaking' attendants. Two that spoke Japanese, one that spoke Spanish. I guess we English-speakers were sort of out of luck. The other attendants must have spoken only in grunts.
The plane had smoking and non-smoking sections. For the benefit of smokers in non-smoking seats there were two seats reserved for smoking. Please limit yourselves to 15 minutes in the shared smoking seats. How about putting them out on the wing? Evelyn complained to the attendant that she still was smelling and breathing smoke. The attendant was quite nice about it and explained it was coming from the smoking section. The attendant said she looked forward to the day there was no smoking on the plane.
I noticed from the passport of the guy next to me that he is a Peruvian. Over dinner I talk to him in Spanish. My Spanish is not so good, but he is a teacher of history at a university in Lima. I tell him about our visit to Peru. Dinner is Teriyaki chicken, salad, and chocolate cake.
I ask for lemon tea when they come around with tea. They give me tea with three little shavings of lemon peel like you would put in some alcoholic drink.
The first of the two in-flight movies was MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE which was better than the first time I had seen it since I knew more of the plot and could figure out some of what I had missed on the first viewing. It featured Jean Reno, the actor whose face is plastered all over Japan in cigaret ads and in movie posters for LEON: INTEGRAL VERSION.
I slept a little. We have had darkness and light and the date has not changed. On the way out it was constantly sunny and the date changed. Ah, international travel.
Breakfast is orange juice, a little fruit, and a greasy raisin pastry. The policy on how much food to give must have changed. On the way out they could not feed you too much. Now on the way back they can't feed you too much.
We talked to the wife of a serviceman whose family was returning to the US after having lived basically all their lives in Japan. As we were getting off the plane one of the kids mentioned that the front compartment got better service. Another said that they had paid better money. The mother corrected they had paid more money. 'Well,' said the daughter 'more and better are the same thing.' I beamed in 'She'll LOVE American restaurants.'
We landed at Los Angeles. Customs was the wave-through we get at Newark, but seemed friendlier.
It was about a two-hour wait on the ground, then we had our last leg on a B-757, a narrow plane packed with six seats across. This makes the aisle less than 18 inches wide. This is not what they call at science fiction conventions 'size friendly.' The crew cannot get a cart down the aisle so hand-delivers everything.
The movie comes on, but I am not interested enough to pay the $4 or whatever to see MULTIPLICITY. The woman who has the window seat tries to pull down the shade and it jams. It cannot be moved either up or down.
Dinner was a choice of Sesame Chicken (Evelyn's choice) or Tortelini (my choice). It was OK. Dessert was a brownie.
Well, I have gotten pretty well caught up in my log writing, leaving me somewhat at loose ends. I had brought the novel MUSASHI by Yoshikawa Eiji, or at least the first fifth of it, but Evelyn has started it and I won't try to red it at the same time. Instead I will finally get around to reading A TRIP AROUND THE MOON by Jules Verne. I have had it on my palmtop since I read FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON last year on the trip to Scotland. I got about half read, but it is one long expository lump, at least in the first half. FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON was at least exciting for the engineering task. This one is just a list of what Verne thought were the things he thought not obvious about cannons and space travel turned into novel with seemingly endless dialog. Finally we arrived and were back in New Jersey. And I cannot say we were really happy to be back.
[Postscript I went to bed about midnight, my usual time, and woke up once at about 3:15 to notice Evelyn gone. I was thinking it was 3:15 when I looked at the clock again and it said 6:10. Not an unusual time for me to get up, so I guess there is no sign of jet lag. While I was up at 3:15 I had my disorientation episode. I get that the first night after a long trip when half asleep I look around wonder where I am. I was expecting it and quickly remembered, but it struck me as odd how high off the ground I was in this bed (having slept on futons for three weeks). Also the house seemed huge compared to the tiny rooms that had been my home. Not a bad place to live, really.]
Hmmm! It sounds like I am coming up on the time to summarize. Japan has a unique position in world history. They really closed out the outside world for a long time. Ironically this may have meant they were better adapted to the modern world. The late start meant they had a lot of catching up to do in a very short period of time. They got used to rapid change at a time when changes were not so rapid for the rest of us. They learned not to depend on the traditions of the past to answer modern problems much sooner than the rest of us did. They looked at the world with fresh eyes and learned it is better to puzzle things out for yourself than to apply dogmatic approaches to problems. This leads them to come up with tremendously different approaches to problem solving. Some of the solutions, like the multiple pairs of slippers, seem cumbersome by our standards, but most work just fine. The result is a vibrant economy. That has enriched many of themselves and a fund of new ideas and approaches that has enriched the world. Now a lot of their conclusions are down and out weird. But figuring out how they think is more puzzling and more rewarding than with any other people I know of. I think if I were to pick a foreign country to live in, of all the places I have visited, in spite of the inconvenience Japan would probably be it. Whether I could figure out the language is another matter but life in Japan would be the most intellectually challenging and exciting.
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