| Submitted by: Mark Leeper United States |
| Submission Date: 09 February 2005 |
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We decided to cut into a back alleyway and there was a noodle shop. That sure looked good. We had some problems making ourselves understood but Evelyn got a soba and I a jumbo soba for 800 yen total, huge bowls, very filling. Each has a big piece of tempura with vegetables and some shrimp. Oh, was that bowl welcome and was it good. Even at the weird time of 10:30 AM. The one problem is that we had been on our feet all morning and it was a stand-up restaurant.
We continued on to the Yusukuni Jinja Shrine, starting with two huge Torii gates, the largest in the world. I would guess they are thirty or forty feet high. In the days before and during W.W.II this shrine was an important nationalistic site. It commemorates and some say houses the souls of 2.5 million war dead, now called a peace park. Well, it depends on how you look at it. Both hawks and doves revere the dead. Hawks blame the enemy for causing the war, doves blame war and the enemies who cause it. The two points-of-view are not even mutually exclusive. The two will often act exactly alike and explain their reasons a little differently.
Near the shrine is the Yushukan Museum of military past dedicated to war dead. It is a small museum by American standards with uniforms, samurai armor, and commemoration of the Kamikaze. The museum is, of course, dedicated to the war dead. The term 'Kamikaze' is never actually used. They are the Jinrai Butai, the divine thunderbolt. Similar suicide mission volunteers have different names. They are called 'Tokubetsu Kogekitai,' and are commemorated for the sacrifices they made and 'the indelible impression [they left] on peoples of the world.' They have a Jinrai Batai suicide plane, basically a glider with three minutes of fuel, and a 1200 kilo bomb charge in the nose. It clearly had exactly one usage and was used at most once. It was a quick and dirty guided missile with a human being doing the guiding. They also had a captured mini-sub that was 'generously' loaned by the United States military. They are not treated so well in other parts of the museum. Nobody looked at us strangely, but I did feel a little funny with all the older people who probably fought in the war milling around. Actually they refer to W.W.II as being two different pieces. There was the 'Chinese Incident.' and the 'East Asian War.' Elsewhere (a documentary called 'Japan: The Electronic Tribe') I have seen a Japanese film suggesting that the Japanese army and the Chinese got along fairly well. A Chinese farmer and the Japanese army are depicted as being almost overly kind to each other. Somehow this is not how the Chinese depict the same incursions. I will probably talk more about this later.
Well we had an early start. We had done about a days worth of things to do and it was only about 12:30. What we really desperately needed was a place to sit. We sat down for ten minutes in the museum, very unusual for us but we are getting older. But again we were well and truly exhausted. We sat down on wet bench seats (the predicted clearing never came) and planned what to do next. We decided to see Ginza.
I guess I had thought of Ginza as being a big neon forest. An odd variation on our shopping areas. It turned out to be a lot more like our Fifth Avenue than I was expecting. Fancy clothing shops an less of real interest than I was hoping. It was a little strange to see people dressed very chic, men and women in suits, riding bicycles. Still there was not a lot of intrinsic interest.
We thought we would check out the Sony building. Evelyn followed the direction and got on the block, but then could not find it. She was leading me and just appeared confused. I did not know that was what she was looking for. When she told me I remembered seeing the skyscraper with the Sony name so I walked a few feet away from the buildings and simply looked up. Evelyn's comment was one I say jokingly occasionally, if it was a snake it would have bitten her. Major companies take out buildings as ads for their products. Sony is typical. You go the building has demonstrations of their products and directions their products may go in the future. The top floor was game-players. I tried one in which I was supposed to be through the magic of electronics kicking and punching some big guy. I found the interface a little hard to use and with a great theme like could I be a good kicker and puncher, I was not highly motivated. I think there was a floor with cameras and camera technology, one with PCs and access to Netscape. Of course the PCs did not have keyboards so there was not much I could do with Netscape. The first floor had a wall of TVs and a sort of personal TV you watched by putting a thing on your head and seeing two TV screen in goggles. That gives it a capability to have 3D images, but curiously they did not demonstrate this. Apparently the thing is a real product for sale called Sony Glasstron.
We tried a bookstore whose third floor was supposed to have Foreign language books. American books go for a little over twice cover price.
From there we took the train back, and found it packed even at 3:50 PM. Instead of going directly back we went around the full circle and got a free look at many parts of Tokyo. It was a little hard to see because we had our backs to the window, but if there were seats available we would take them because we were both exhausted. This may be in part the result of going 20 hours without eating. I don't have a lot to share with you about what we saw of Tokyo because it is mostly big boxy buildings, in big centers with a lot of neon. There are a few traditional looking buildings, but not many. It seems like a very functional urban city. But it is at one end of a spectrum and a city like Prague is at the other. Prague has character everywhere you look. On the other hand I like the food here a lot more than I did in Prague. All cities have advantages and disadvantages.
I saw a Salaryman reading a manga. He put it in an interoffice envelope so it would look like work. You rarely see Salarymen reading manga. I guess it is not good for the business. I should explain the terms Salaryman and manga. There are so many businessmen in business suits in Japan that they have made them almost a separate class of people like the samurai. And just like you can find books explaining to Westerners the way of the Samurai, there are books explaining the way of the Salaryman. And in ways they are similar. Both consider loyalty to their master very important. It is a little strange seeing them make take a class of people who get no special attention in other parts of the world and making them a separate class. Score one point for the woman from Portugal. This I do find strange.
A manga is sort of the Japanese equivalent of our comic book, but there are important differences. They are very popular. A manga is printed on cheap newspaper and is generally about an inch thick so you get a lot more. There is no color in the art other than the bright and sometimes garish cover and maybe a couple of inset pages. However they are printed on lightly colored paper stock. Typically the first third, the second, and the third will each have its own color, and I think they will change color in the middle of a story. They are inexpensive compared with comics, a lot of story for about $2 an issue. There are also more subtle differences in how they handle time in the stories. A serious manga will do things like devote more time to setting mood, slowly moving in on a figure over several frames. In some ways they are more cinematic. They also can be brutally violent and have what would be for us shocking scenes of rape. Others are written more to a younger audience. Much of the media has heavy, uncensored violence in Japan. Yet it is a fairly peaceful country with a low crime rate. The example of Japan is a constant thorn in the side to advocates of censorship since they are trying to censor the very things that are free in Japan and the excuse they give is to avoid the very things that the Japanese avoid very effectively. On the other hand Japan is a very different society from ours in a lot of other ways. From Samurai times it has instilled a very heavy respect for authority that we do not have. That is probably what checks the crime and violence.
In any case, there were a lot of different people on the train reading mangas and most seemed to be reading the same one. I would really think that there would be a market in our country. It is certainly a cost-effective form of entertainment. Here for the cost of a film you can get a four-inch thick stack of manga.
I have a few times gotten up to give my seat to an older person, but as time goes by there are fewer of those. Certainly Japanese teens don't give up a seat to their elders. it seems to be a courtesy of the older generation only.
I will say that the Japanese like music. Their traffic lights make music. Some seem to play a melody when it is OK to walk. Also when the train stops there is a little piece of melody then a voice announces the station. The melody is not the same each time. I haven't figured if it was chosen at random, if each station has its own theme, or if there is some other meaning. The Shinjuku station handles two million commuters each rush hour and the train is packed densely with commuters.
We got back to Ikebikuro and started to look for dinner. We got sushi really cheap from a grocery. 1200 yen made for a good dinner of sushi. For those who have been keeping track we have had two great meals today and we have spent a little over $18. This illustrates my thesis that Japan is an expensive place to buck the tide what the Salaryman eats. You can afford to do that once in a while because You can eat fairly cheaply and well by eating like a Salaryman. I could live in my three weeks very nicely off of noodle shops for lunch and sushi for dinner.
We get an interesting group of people meeting in our lounge. We talked for about travel for about an hour with a man from Bath, England.
After dinner it was back to the room to write and nod off a bit. Just for safety's sake we decided to get our reservations in for Kyoto. This meant trying to use the phones. The Japanese pay-phones are huge. They are bigger than ice buckets. You have to put in what you think is enough money and if you run out of coins it dies. Since you can't tell how much you will need to talk you can only make a guess as to how many coins to have on hand. Then if you do not know the code of gongs you can easily not put in enough money. Nevertheless with Evelyn's help I got a reservation made for the five night from the 16th to the 20th.
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10/10/96 Kamakura: Late Religious Foundations
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True story: A rabbi in Japan had a Japanese person come to him and ask to be converted to Judaism. This is a fairly unusual request in Japan and the rabbi asked, as the rule tell him to, why the man wanted to be Jewish. 'Jews are successful and I want to be successful.' The man would probably not have wanted to be Jewish if he realized that would have to be his only religion. Nor would he have ever realized, as many of us in the US seem not to, that a religion represents opinions on some deep metaphysical issues.
Japan's view of religion is one of most unusual of any country. My understanding is that many and perhaps most Japanese simply do not commit to a single religion. They bounce back and forth between Shinto and Buddhism, but Christmas is fun so in late December many are Christian. And every now and then there's Tao and Zen. Now that is absolutely marvelous. Can you imagine how that must drive missionaries crazy? (And anything that drives missionaries crazy is fine by me.) What must the average Japanese think of the fact that nations go to war and people die in the thousands over questions like does wine turn into blood during communion literally or symbolically. |
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