i took 6 months of Japanese long long ago. Here’s the sum total of what I remember: konnichiwa (hello), ohayo gozaimas (good morning), arigato (thank you) and I can count to five: ichi, ni, san, shi, go. Actually, in a game the other night with some students, I realized I can count to five in about a dozen different languages. Higher, only in Spanish. Hello & thank you has gotten me pretty far in all the other countries and so far so good here. Knowing how to count would have made other transactions easier, I asked for a ticket at the castle in Himeji, saying “ichi”, and it made me very proud!
Day 1. I woke up early for another port entry that turned out to be foggy and gray. It was raining. But, there were was a lot of welcoming hoopla in Kobe nonetheless. We were met by a fireboat spraying water around us, but it was really too rainy and windy and cold outside to enjoy. We also had a welcoming ceremony where some pretty immense drums were played. It was lovely. Then a group of us took the train to Himeji Castle. The train was very cool, starting with a monorail-like-thing from the port terminal. Very George Jetson-y.
Himeji Castle looks very unlike European castles. There was a fort on the site built in 1333 and the castle was built in 1580. It has a heavily fortified main tower (and we climbed to the top on steep narrow stairs). And a moat and lovely grounds around. And many many fewer tourists than the attractions in China.
Here’s a group photo of some of my favorite ship-people from that day:
Vladdy, Sue & Bianca, David & Phoebe, Robin, Mary & Michael, and (behind Mary and Michael) Giles & Kate.
For dinner we went to a restaurant where we had to take off our shoes and sit on not-quite-the-floor, but wooden benches that were pretty low with square cushions marking each seat. We ordered from a display window and did our best to communicate our desires to the waitstaff. It was a relaxed and enjoyable first day in Japan. I’m going to miss my traveling partners when we get off this boat.
Day 2 was a trip to Kyoto to visit various shrines and historical sites around the city. We started at the Golden Pavilion (Kinkaku-ji) constructed in the 1390’s by the 3d Shogun of Ashikaga. It was his retirement villa before his son converted it into a Zen Buddhist Temple. The three story pavilion is topped by a bronze phoenix and beautiful gardens with some very old trees surrounding it.
Next, we visited the Nijo Castle, built in 1603 as the official Kyoto residence of the first Shogun. Kyoto served as the capital of Japan up until the late 1800s when it moved to Tokyo. The main castle structure is only one floor, because it never served as a fort, and it is built in a zig-zag pattern like this:
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so that every room had a view of the gardens at the bottom. There were beautiful murals (no photos allowed). We took off our shoes to enter, as we have in most places in Asia. The wooden floor is called a Nightingale Floor and it squeaks as you walk -- to announce intruders. There’s a contraption underneath that controls the noise. It is a much nicer musical noise than my hard-wood floor which also squeaks …
Then we lunched (ship boxed lunch, yuck) in a beautiful, lovely, peaceful park. The incorporation of nature everywhere (and feng shui) is in clear evidence in Kyoto. We are in Japan just a little bit too late for full cherry blossom blooming, but there were still some flowers around. Children playing in the park:
After lunch we went to see a Shinto Shrine. Shinto is the indigenous religion of Japan and there is no human founder (wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinto). The Heian Shrine was very orange and we walked around there and learned how Shintos pray. On entry to the shrine, we passed through a gate which ritually purified us and then we purified ourselves further by washing our hands in mineral water. People then purchase little wood placards and they write wishes on them that are offered up to the gods, along with other offerings like sake and cigarettes.
Our last stop was the Kiyomizu Temple (Buddhist) which had beautiful sweeping views of the city.
As I think I’ve mentioned before, if we could do something about the tourists, I could totally be a monk. It was beautiful up there and peaceful and lovely. Most of the tourists on this trip were Japanese school children. Almost all in uniform, laughing and learning and saying “hello” to us as we passed. I remembered (almost) always to respond with “konnichiwa”. They would smile and laugh. We also got a Japanese lesson from our tour guide on the bus from Kobe and now I can count to 10 again. We’ll see how long it sticks.
Japan is so different than the places we’ve been to thus far. It’s all very orderly and planned. None of the madness of China or India. The train station has writing on the station floor so that you know where the doors will open and you can queue up appropriately before the train arrives. And the train arrived exactly the moment it said it would. There are vending machines everywhere that sell everything from soda to snacks to ice cream to coffee.
They are banks and banks of vending machines all over the place. Even the packaging is different. Part can, part bottle. Keeps the soda cold, like a can (yup, it’s aluminum), but twist-cap open and re-sealable like a bottle. I started calling them "canolottles". Why don’t we have these???
Everything is crystal-clean. On the highway today, we noticed the barriers that are on the sides of the road to contain the noise curve in at the top, instead of ours that are straight up. Does a much better job (or so they say) of preventing noise and exhaust pollution. Taxi cabs have doors that open and close automatically. The bus parking lots are in long numbered lanes. One bus pulls forward in behind the next. You remember your lane’s number. The buses can advance in the lane (the first bus pulling out and the rest advancing), but it can’t change lanes. With this, they don’t have to back in/out of parking spaces and it is easier for you to remember where to find your bus. The escalators stop when no one is on them. To conserve electricity. When you step just before the first step, they start moving again. Some of them are bidirectional. If you step at the bottom, it goes up. If you step at the top, it goes down. In some of the public toilets, you wash your hands into the back of the toilet tank rather than having a separate sink. When you flush, a spigot turns on and water flows for you to wash your hands into the tank which is then used to fill the toilet. Good for water conservation, also a good use of space -- you don’t need a separate sink. People queue up for the elevator. No jaywalking allowed. The traffic lights make bird-sounds when it’s time to cross. Public restrooms (though many of them are still squat) have noise-making machines in the stalls so that you don’t have to listen to everyone do their thing and many public restrooms (or many of the western ones) have toilet-seats that heat up because their buildings don’t have central heat. Some toilet stalls also have other buttons that do other things too … The whole place sets this tone of “we’ve got it figured out”. No worry, no stress, we know what to do, we’ve thought of everything. Meet George Jetson …
Many of the cars here have the side-view mirrors out on the hood instead of by the front windows.
I wonder if that’s something we’ll get too soon, on all those cars that are Japanese? … Looks kind of odd to us-Americans, but it also makes a lot of sense. Keeps you looking forward.
Our guide today was excellent, one of the best I’ve had on this voyage. She taught us a ton. The last thing she taught us as we arrived back into Kobe was: ichigo, ichi-e … once chance, once meeting. Every encounter occurs only once. No matter how many repeated meetings or events or occurrences. Each individual moment occurs only once. Several people on this voyage have sailed more than once. Someone said the other day though nonetheless: even if you get the opportunity to do it again, you go around the world the first time only once.
Day 3 was a trip to Nara for more temple-viewing. By the end of the day, I had to confess that I think I’m done with all the temple-viewing. They are beautiful and lovely and peaceful, but we’ve seen an absurd number of them all told on this voyage. The Buddhist temples here, though, are much different than elsewhere. The Shinto influence is clearly present. We went to two Buddhist Temples and one Shinto Shrine in Nara. The Shinto shrines are all about purification. There are gates (tori-i) as you enter to purify yourself and then you further purify yourself before entering by pouring water over your hands with a ladle. First you pour the water on your left hand, then on your right hand, then again on your left hand from which you can drink to clean your mouth and then you tip the ladle and pour out the excess water over the handle to purify the ladle itself for the next person. The Buddhist Temple we visited also began with this Shinto purification ritual. The Buddhist Temples in India and Malaysia and China were all about color. Beautiful painted color. Here, in Japan, they were much more natural wood-color, although the Shinto shrines in both Kyoto and Nara were bright orange. The Buddhist Temples here also incorporate nature in more substantial ways than those in any of the other countries. They are planned with nature in mind and the grounds are all meticulously manicured. We started at the oldest surviving wooden structure in the world (Horyu-ji), built in 607:
And moved to the next temple, Todai-ji, which is the largest wooden structure in the world.
It was built in 743 but destroyed by fire several times and the current building dates from 1706. It is considered the world’s largest wooden structure, but the original building was actually considerably larger. The park surrounding the Temple is called Nara Deer Park, because there are deer everywhere. They are perfectly tame and people feed them from their hands. As with previous days, there were groups of schoolchildren everywhere:
The big wooden structure contains a very big Buddha – a bronze statue of the Cosmic Buddha. It was immense. We ended the day in Nara with a visit to the nearby Kasuga Taisha Shinto Shrine. The pillars are bright orange and the building is surrounded by stone lanterns in a lovely forest:
Deer are considered messengers to the Gods in Shinto. The story goes that a white deer arrived at the Kasuga Shrine in Nara as its divine messenger. And so deer are considered sacred and free to roam. Mary, our trip leader today who teaches spirit possession, warned us to be careful that we don’t get possessed along the way in travels through the forest. Shintos believe that you can become possessed by the Kami spirits (go look it up on wikipedia). We were very careful! Although, on our meanderings back to the bus, Joyce talked about how she was going to miss our wanderings throughout the world. When we get back to real-life. So, we have all definitely been possessed by the Spirit of Meandering & Travel & Wanderlust. And the Spirit of Short-Attention-Spans. I’m a little worried that it will be hard to work a complete five-day week after this voyage …
Day 4. Saturday in Hiroshima. Mary & Michael & I took the monorail in Kobe … to the subway … to the bullet train … to the street car … to the Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima. Afterwards we took a ferry to Miyajima. And from Miyajima, we took a ferry … to the Hiroshima subway … to the bullet train … to the Kobe subway … to the monorail … back to our ship. The transportation system couldn’t possibly be easier here. Everything was completely intelligible even if you don’t speak Japanese and each vehicle left perfectly on time and arrived to exactly the place we expected perfectly on time. It was astounding.
Hiroshima was astounding. We stared in the Peace Park, whose central memorial is the A-Bomb dome.
The building was built in 1915 with a central green dome. The name of the building varied, but largely it was the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall. It was used to display and sell prefectural products and do market research and consulting for local businesses. Its galleries served for art exhibitions, fairs, and other events. When the bomb was dropped on August 6, 1945, it was one of many buildings that were heavily damaged but this one was the one chosen to memorialize the event. The dome was still recognizable after the bomb. A number of preservation/reinforcement projects have occurred over the years, but it is largely as it was in 1945 immediately after the bomb was dropped. The park is beautiful. It spans both sides of the river and there are various and separate memorials all around. There is a flame that will burn until the last nuclear bomb is destroyed; there is a monument to memorialize student victims, child victims, Korean victims, and more. There is a centograph that contains the names of all the people who died. People were praying there at the centograph and laying flowers. There is a bell for visitors to ring to bring peace to the world. The children’s memorial park holds a collection of origami cranes. The story goes that a little girl dying after the war from leukemia -- the result of radiation -- believed that if she could fold 1000 cranes, she would not die. But, she did die before she finished and her schoolmates folded the remaining cranes in her memory. As did schoolchildren all over Japan. The kids on the ship here (children of faculty and staff) folded 1000 cranes over the last several weeks and they delivered them to the children’s peace park this week.
The park is beautiful and calm and amazingly peaceful. The museum itself is very intense. There was an introductory movie that I had to walk out of. Michael had commented earlier that he heard the movie was really hard to sit through. I said, at that time, that this is why were here, right? To bear witness in some way. But, I literally felt like I would pass out. I had to leave the auditorium.
Giles and Kate (who had gone the day before) were critical of the museum for its general presentation of what happened during the war and the role (not-so-much-acknowledged) of Japanese aggression. They cited a recent U.S. newspaper article that criticized the use of the passive voice in the museum labels: “the war erupted” … “children died who would not have died had the war not ever happened” (by the A-bomb? by the war in general? -- take that however you like, a lot of thought went into that choice of language …) … but, in fact, the passive voice was used regarding American transgressions as well. Several times it said “the bomb was dropped” without that same sentence attributing agency. Certainly, though, it could be surmised by the context. I wondered if the passive voice was just more the Japanese narrative style, I don’t know. The translations were all good -- there weren’t any of the odd translations that we see on the streets -- so I’m not sure anything was lost in translation. And they do attribute agency in many other places: “In 1941, with a surprise attack on the U.S. army and navy bases at Pearl Harbor, Japan started the Pacific War against the U.S. and its allies.” I thought it was pretty fairly balanced, although all the information definitely comes (as it does always) from a particular perspective. Giles studies how history gets told and who gets to tell it and who gets left out, so they noted the lack of mention of the comfort women and the broader history of the Allied/Axis powers and he is right there. No mention of anything there. There is a lot of auxiliary information that is noticeably missing. But, it’s a memorial museum to the bomb, its after-affects, and the start of the nuclear age. Not the history of World War II. Made me wonder what a 9/11 museum would be like (will be like?) …
We passed this sign alongside some roof tiles that have rough bubbles on them due to the explosion: “Feel free to touch these items. They are safe.” I thought this was fascinating. The restriction on touching museum objects are usually intended to keep the museum objects safe. It’s usually (always?) about the objects, not about the people. They also had on display a metal lunch box that was full of ash from the meal originally contained inside. There were many artifacts on display, that one just really touched me.
Something to note: the Japanese consider Pearl Harbor to be December 8th. Because of the time difference … And while we (Americans) all have memorized the date of Pearl Harbor, I had no idea of the exact date the bomb was dropped. Almost every plaque here started with: “At 8:15 a.m., August 6, 1945 …” It’s all about perspective ... “We see things not as they are but as we are.” ...
I came back for the end of the movie to catch back up with Michael and Mary. At the end there was a beautiful song and I’ve spent the morning trying to google the lyrics, to no avail. I wish I could share it with you. It was a likely a poem set to music, I’ll keep searching …
We walked through the park again to other parts we didn’t catch in the first pass-through. De-compressed, let back a little air into our lungs. Breathed in the beautiful sunny 65-degree day. Recovered.
Afterward, we took a ferry to Miyajima to visit the “floating shrine”. The Shinto shrine and the accompanying tori-i gate are constructed of wood and built to look as if they are floating in the water. We were warned by our guidebook that most often they are sitting in mud. The ferry ride was unexpectedly fabulous. It went up the narrow river through Hiroshima for quite a while and then the river opened up much wider and there were mountains in view and fishing boats and fish farms. And blue blue water (as if we haven’t seen enough blue water by now). Michael and Mary and I spent the 35 minute ride largely talking about where we were on 9/11. Vietnam/Iraq … Hiroshima/September 11. How we go there in our heads …
We arrived on the island and walked along the water up to the shrine and indeed it was surrounded by mud. People were walking along the beach, which was lovely, and the shrine was definitely very beautiful but it was sitting in the middle of mud.
We toured the shrine, did some shopping, and as we came back around we could tell the tide was coming in. We went to go find some dinner and then went back to the shrine just as the sun was setting. By that time, the water had come up all the way to make it appear indeed to be floating. It was very beautiful:
And then we took the ferry … to the Hiroshima subway … to the bullet train … to the Kobe subway … to the monorail … back to the ship … This day ranks as one of the best of the trip. Mary and Michael were great to travel with, the travel logistics were a breeze, there was history and culture and sadness and relief and hope and peace and calm and beauty. I had a perfect day.
Day 5. I want to live in Japan. Today I roamed around Kobe, starting with Robin & Giles & Kate walking into town from the ship, rather than the monorail. And then they went back to the ship after lunch to grade papers and I just roamed aimlessly some more. Lunch wasn’t great, but we had salad and I drank ice-water -- which is the first time in 3 months that I’ve had salad and ice-cubes! The water is safe to drink here and tap-water-washed-salad is safe and street food is safe. In Japan, I had fish-on-a-stick from the street vendors, and chicken-on-a-stick, and corn-on-a-stick, and ice cream. Like water, they suggested we not eat non-cooked dairy products in other countries as well. It felt totally wonderful to not have to worry about everything you put in your mouth! I may not have eaten terribly healthy here, but it was oh-so-fun! Back to today -- I was trying to find some gardens several people mentioned, but my map wasn’t very good and I was not at all successful. And, I got detoured by beautiful little streets and beautiful big streets and became totally absorbed by city life. Walking and walking and taking photos and dropping into the occasional store, but mostly walking and walking and taking photos and watching people go about their lives. I didn’t see any other Semester at Sea people, just Japanese people walking and talking and living.
This is the beginning of a week-long national holiday, Golden Week. And people were out everywhere, living their lives and enjoying their holiday. I walked until I couldn’t walk anymore and then took the monorail back to the ship. I loved Japan. I could totally live in Kobe. It’s amazingly easy to navigate, even without speaking Japanese. They literally couldn’t make it any easier. From the trains to finding a ladies room in a public space, all incredibly easy to manage. The orderliness, the calm, just reverberated back to me. I felt totally peaceful here, even in the middle of the downtown with people rushing living their lives. They’ve got a mission, they’ve got a plan, stress feels low, chaos is non-existent (or maybe just not allowed in). The Peace Park is about hope, not about sadness. The purification rituals are about being present in the moment. It was the coolest thing. I’d have to get used to not-jaywalking, and Robin kept shushing me all morning because I’m much too loud and everything around, even downtown public spaces, is much more quiet than I can manage, and having done a little-shoe shopping I learned that there’s no hope of finding shoes here in size 8 … so that would all be problematic. But other than those few little things, I could totally live here. I need to find a way to bring that kind of peacefulness into my life. Breathe it in. It is unbelievably refreshing.
Speaking of chaos … I have managed to do ok with the Internet access for most of this voyage. It helps that I have dial-up at home and so my expectations were adequately low. On my overnight trips, I hardly had any withdrawal at all. Being off the ship and tooling around, I had other priorities. But, being in Japan on the ship at night with no Internet access was really really really hard. We’ve seen a number of ads throughout Asia for Internet Addiction Recovery Centers and such, which seemed pretty amusing at first glance. But, feeling so much much much better now that I’m back online -- physical relief -- I actually do wonder about my state of Internet health …
Late last night, I stood on the deck and watched the lights of Kobe disappear behind us. Ready or not, here we come.
