| Submitted by: Mark Leeper United States |
| Submission Date: 09 February 2005 |
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10/06/96 Departure
10/07/96 Arrival
10/08/96 Tokyo: Museums: Japan Explaining Itself to Itself
10/09/96 Tokyo: The Palace and the Military: Japan and Honor
10/10/96 Kamakura: Late Religious Foundations
10/11/96 Tokyo: Stores, Offices, Entertainment; Japan's Economy
10/12/96 Tokyo: Feeding the Nation: Tsukiji and the Kitchen Supply
10/13/96 Tokyo: Modernization and Modernity
10/14/96 The Railways
10/15/96 Matsumoto: Feudal Castle I
10/16/96 Arrival in Kyoto
10/17/96 Hiroshima and Miya-jima: War and Peace
10/18/96 Himeji: Feudal Castle II
10/19/96 Nara: Foundations of Buddhism
10/20/96 Hikone and Nagoya: Disappointing Feudal Castles
10/21/96 Kyoto: Variants on Buddhism
10/22/96 Kyoto: The Feudal Past Creating the Present
10/23/96 Kyoto: Haunts of the Past, Ghosts of the Present
10/24/96 Kyoto Temple Walking Tour
10/25/96 Kyoto: A Temple Too Far
10/26/96 Kyoto: Artifacts and Eels
10/27/96 Osaka and Trip home
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You can always tell the late-night DJs on the classical radio station. I would like to pretend it is 6:50 PM since that is really what it is in Japanese time. Unfortunately I have the radio on and the disk jockey is describing in deep and sepulchral tones the music he is playing. For him it is 5:50 AM. I am going to try as much as possible give myself the illusion that it is Tokyo time until it is no longer an illusion. Hey wouldn't it be nice if when you held a fantasy for long enough it became true. Maybe it does when your party is elected.
So why are we going to Japan?
I think it is fair to say that the first foreign country about which I felt a real curiosity was Japan. Why Japan? Well like much else in my life it came out of my interest in science fiction. When I was seven-years-old my father took my brother and me to see a double feature of RODAN, THE FLYING MONSTER and THE RETURN OF DRACULA. I must have seen other monster movies at that time, and from them it was natural to me that monster movies took place in the U.S. What few I had seen took place in not very exotic places. It seemed odd that RODAN would take place in another country and the characters would all be from that country. I probably commented on this and was told that the film was Japanese. It was made in Japan. Now this started to bother me. I now knew there were monster movies I might never see because they were being made in other countries and I could not see them and would not understand them if I did since didn't know the language. Somewhere near where I lived I had heard that there was a Polish movie theater that showed only Polish movies. This started to prey on my mind. There were probably people watching Polish monster movies and I would never get to see these films because of the culture barrier. I decided all counties must make monster movies for their own people and I was missing something really good. That was how my young mind worked. I know now that many countries do make good films for their own people. Perhaps they are not monster movies, but some of the best films I know of are foreign films. But from about the age of seven or eight I have felt that there must be real treasures in Japanese culture, if only you can get by the language barrier. For a long time after seeing RODAN, THE FLYING MONSTER and a little later THE MYSTERIANS when I heard Japan the first thing I thought of is that this is a country that makes science fiction and monster movies. There must be more interesting over there. Not that I heard very much about Japan in school. We learned about the continents, but very little about Japan. Perhaps a little more about China, but generally our education about Asia was weak. That may have been for the best. What you learn about in school is forever a dull chore.
Every few years I discovered a new fascination that had its origin in Japan. I was about ten when I discovered origami. I had experimented with paper airplanes before, but this was the first I realized there was a whole art of paper-folding.
I must have been about 12-years-old, maybe as much as 15, when I was in an art museum and I saw something very unexpected. I saw a suit of armor, at least it looked like armor, and it had a face-plate. And coming out of the face-plate was a brushy mustache. I thought of suits of armor in very functional terms. It seemed strange to me that anybody would bother to put a face on a suit of armor, much less put a mustache on the face. But there it was looking at me. Well, this turned out to be samurai armor. And sometimes there was a face on the armor. Maybe there was more of interest about Japan than just monster movies and paper-folding. Years later when TV broadcast SHOGUN a lot of people suddenly discovered that samurai stories were pretty nifty. I think by that point I has seen a few samurai films like THE SEVEN SAMURAI. Again I was a little ahead of the pack in recognizing that Japanese films could be interesting to people outside of Japan. As I got older I found more and more that was fascinating and enigmatic about Japanese culture. In college I discovered netsuke. Japanese culture seems so different from any other culture. The European cultures I have seen are different from each other, but in many ways they are also similar. These days it seems that Japan has picked up a lot from Western culture. At least superficially and on a high level the Japanese have a much more comprehensible culture than, say, the Chinese or the Indians. Still they have a society that is full of cultural assumptions different from those in the West and that is the best reason to travel to a place.
So this year we are finally going to travel to Japan. We have tried packaged tours twice before only to have the canceled. This year we are just going to plan the trip on our own and guide ourselves.
Our limousine came at about 6 AM local time. In my usual way to fight jet lag, I have kept myself up so that when I hit that plane I am exhausted. That makes the flight seem shorter (and when you are flying almost half way around the world that is no minor consideration). It also helps fight jet lag for me. As long as I keep moving I don't really feel tired. Of course if I get too comfortable it is all over. I used this on our trip to Amsterdam and we got there early in the day. We filled out the day going to the Reichsmuseum. While I was walking around I was perfectly alert. Every time we sat down for a rest I nodded off. I am now going to convert to Japan time. We were picked up by the limousine 7 PM on the 6th. We got to the airport at about 7:35 PM for a 10 PM flight. We are standing in the check-in line and I am desperately trying to ignore the fact that the sky is getting lighter behind me. This whole flight the sun will be up. From 8 PM Sunday to about 4:15 PM Monday, and the sun will always be overhead. Of course it is moving in the same direction we are and even a little faster. That means we are really traveling west to east, but the ground under us is doing it even faster.
Generally the worst moment of the trip are just as we leave the house. This is when I start to torture myself with everything I could have left behind. And did I lock the door? Now I have a fairly foolproof method for making sure at least I take everything I need. I have a checklist that I update pretty much every trip. I collect what I will pack in a laundry basket and leave it in the middle of the floor in the den. I pack there. And leave the bags there until I am ready to leave. Anything that is to go with me stays where it is in the way. If I have to take something out of my bag, it goes on the den floor. If I want to know if everything I wanted to pack has really been packed, I just look at that patch of floor. So as I was in the limousine I suddenly asked myself why wasn't my pocket knife in my pocket. By pure logic I knew it could not have been left behind, but I could not find it. Then I remembered it was made of metal. You see I find going through security checks a real pain. There is always this business of taking all the metal out of your pockets. I try to do that but when I walk under the security gateway that buzzer always goes off making rude noises. Then some guy comes along with this detector device --It looks like an electric fly-swatter, and starts running it around my body and it starts making rude noises. Well I cheat. I take all the metal out of my pockets, put it in a sandwich sized ziplock, and drop it into my luggage. Until I am in the gate area and past security. I feel somehow that I am cheating and that if they catch me with all that metal in my bag I will be in big trouble. I am not sure with whom, but you better believe it is big and horrible. I developed this technique on Indian domestic flights. There if they catch you with batteries you are in big trouble. In India you pretty much have to bend over and take ten of the best. I had big problems with my palmtop. Oh, yes. That is metal I do hand around. But my palmtop computer is like an extension of my arm and I cannot bear to be without it. For the record it is an HP 200LX Palmtop computer. There is little chance of leaving it behind, but if I did I would go back. In fact, that is what I am writing on right now at the airport. I have that and this trip I am carrying a new piece of technology, something called a Voiceit. It is a lot like a tape recorder, but its memory is on a chip, not tape. That makes it a lot smaller. It is about 3'x2'x1/4'. It is not a versatile as a palmtop, but it makes it really easy to take a quick note. That I can be without long enough to put in my luggage.
This line is long due to people checking luggage. We won't be doing that. I have a suitcase with knapsack straps and a small vinyl bag we got with the tour going to China. Any luggage that doesn't hang on to me gets left behind next time. This way I can be writing in my trip log even as I walk between gates.
Well we sat by the gate and I alternately wrote in may log, snoozed, and tried myself on some Japanese flashcards I had made. It is the best way I know of getting a bit of the language down before you get to the country. While we were waiting the flight next to us got canceled. It seems like that is what usually happens to us on a trip. Bad luck seems to follow us. Already we are at the airport and we have had nothing worse happen to us that having to stand in a line.
Uh, they called our flight and as I was putting on my knapsack my watch fell off my wrist. That is not supposed to happen. The pin that holds the watchband on slipped out. I slipped it back into place and got into line. The pin shot out of my watch and the watch fell off again. Now I saw what happened, the whole assembly cracked and the pin won't stay in place again. Well so much for us not having bad luck. I have stuck the remaining band into a zippered pocket on my photographer's vest with the watch hanging out. It hangs upside down, but that is convenient since I am looking down at the face so I see it right side up.
We got on the plane and we were told by the Captain's PA system that the plane would land a little ahead of schedule. That sounded too good to be true. A few minutes later he came back on and said the ground crew found a little leakage on the ground and that our flight would leave about 45 minutes late. Good news doesn't last long around us. I wonder what we are leaking.
After a while the captain was back and said what was wrong was part of our skid breaking system. There is no word on how long it will take to fix. And thank you for flying United.
It is now 10:45 PM and the plane is sitting on the ground. |
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| Copyright © - "Mark Leeper" |
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