Touristing Kyoto in Earnest

Caroline came to Japan / Kyoto this past week. I took the opportunity (excuse) to take three days of vacation. Add the facts that Thursday is a national holiday and I have Friday off because I am working this Sunday, and suddenly I have an 8 day weekend. Also, there is an epic battle going on in Kyoto between the forces of spring and winter over which has control of the weather. Round one goes to spring: Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday were beautiful. Winter battled back to make Wednesday and Thursday miserable. Spring is on a counter-offensive today (Friday), but the war is far from over. Anyway, the point is that I got to do some first-rate touristing in the sun. I went from going to work in a winter coat and scarf to sunburning my neck in two days. Kyoto-ites keep telling me that there are seasons in this city; I don't believe them.

For those thinking of coming to Kyoto, here is a rundown of some major tourist sites and their corresponding RAD (Rating And Description).


Kinkakuji (Golden Pavilion) - RAD factor: 6 (out of 10). Kinkakuji is all the rage among tourists. I can't count the number of tourists who come into the Intl. Center looking for the bus that goes there. In a nutshell, Kinkakuji is a medium sized temple covered in shiny gold that is surrounded by a pond. If you only have one day in Kyoto, I suppose, Kinkakuji is a safe bet. I mean, it's pretty and all, but it's always the same KIND of pretty. A temple of gold is always going to be a temple of gold. You will never go there and think to yourself, man, the Golden Pavilion seems a lot more golden than the last time I saw it. Also, you are never going to discover a little personal corner of beauty that you can appreciate all to yourself. Everyone knows that the gold is pretty and everyone knows where to take a picture of it. On the other hand, you can go there any day of the week and in any weather conditions, and you can be assured that you will get 100% of your money's worth out of the place.

Ginkakuji (Silver Pavilion) - RAD factor: 8.5. Ginkakuji is the older sibling to Kinkakuji. I went there earlier in my contract and was left feeling unimpressed. It was hot, muggy, and crowded. I would have given it a solid 5 out of 10 had I not visited it again this week. Catch this place on the right day and you are in Narnia. The place is carpeted in moss that glows an unearthly green in the sunlight. If there aren't too many people around, you can stand in one place and take it all in. There is no one single aspect that makes this temple great, but there is an supreme attention to detail. For example, when you are approaching the main gate, on your right there is a wall of hedges and a line of trees. Between the thick foliage of the hedge and the trees there is a gap - about 5 feet high and 3 feet high - that lets you glimpse a nearly hidden bamboo forest. There is also a sand garden that abstractly depicts waves as well as a perfectly conical Mt. Fuji. In a crowd you are forced to file past as you dodge the line of sight of amateur photographers, but otherwise you can admire the natural beauty that man can create.

Kitano Tenmangu - RAD factor: 5. Kitano Tenmangu might only have gotten a 4, but since it is only about a 15 minute walk from my house I bumped it up a point. My main complaint is that it is a one-trick pony. It has plum trees that blossom into a colorful and odoriferous orchard in March, but the rest of the year leaves it little better than your standard run-of-the-mill shrine. To its credit, it is spacious enough that you can always find a beautiful corner that you haven't seen before. It also tends to not be frequented by your typical nama gaijin - so that is a plus if you are adverse to khaki shorts and hiking backpacks.

Nijo Castle - RAD factor: 7.5. Nijo gets a 1 point proximity boost, as well. It is always crawling with tourists and the occasional tour group of Tokyo high school students. Technically I suppose the castle was built to defend the Shogun from would-be usurpers, but it looks mostly as if Tokugawa Ieyasu just said, screw it, who's gonna attack me? Build me a garden with a fence and a moat. And I want koi fish in that moat. That said, the guy must also have hated getting sneaked up on. He made the main hall so that the floors creaked when you walk on them. Apparently it's supposed to sound like nightingales singing. I suppose the creaks would be pleasant enough when your retinue is walking around thinking of ways to better serve you, but nowadays the building is frequented by hundreds of overweight tourists whose combined creaking just makes it sound like the building was poorly built. Anyway, the parapets offer a very nice view of the city and there is a map coded so that you can tell what plants are blooming during which parts of the year.

Iwatayama Monkey Park (Monkey Mountain) - RAD factor: 9. Monkey Mountain is a little out of the way, but you are missing out if you don't go. After a short hike up the mountain you reach a small shack at the top next to a clearing with a gorgeous view of Kyoto. This clearing is also where the monkeys chill out all day. Just before the shack employees feed them, the monkeys get all anxious and start making a strange hooting noise. It is pretty disconcerting. That and the occasional monkey scuffle led me to feel less than comfortable. I kept having visions of the monkeys all simultaneously going planet of the apes on me. It doesn't help that the entire way up the mountain there are signs warning you not to show the monkeys food, throw rocks at the monkeys, come between a baby monkey and its mother, look a monkey directly in the eyes, or touch the monkeys. The rules were never written all in once place, rather they were haphazardly written along the path. It's as if they made a rule for every monkey-violence related incident the park has had. The shack workers were very nice, though, and seemed very comfortable with the monkeys. They said that the monkeys recognized the workers, and indeed the monkeys were buddy-buddy with them - except for the time when a monkey jumped up and slapped food out of the hand of a worker who was trying to feed it. I accidentally left my umbrella at the top of monkey mountain, and because I am very attached to this umbrella, I made Caroline go back with me to the base station. All I had to do was say the words, "I think I left my umbrella at the top..." and the station lady was on the phone and the monkey feeder ran down the mountain to hand-deliver my umbrella. Well done Japan, well done.

Monkey mountain deserves a video. This is the scene as the monkeys are starting to gather in anticipation of their afternoon feeding. I felt a little surrounded.



We also went to Kiyomizu Temple, which is a solide 9.5 out of 10, but because I didn't bring my camera that day its description will have to wait for another day. Which could be awhile because my vacation is just about over. I can't wait to see how much work has piled up on my desk in my absence.

Now it's Spring

After reading my entry from last week about how spring is not on Kyoto's to-do list, Kyoto decided to get itself into gear and stop snowing. I have even taken to eating lunch in the great outdoors on the roof of my building at work. I didn't know it until a few days ago, but apparently the roof of the Kyoto Prefectural office building is a park, complete with lawn, benches, and flowers. That was definitely not in my orientation. Wait, I didn't have an orientation.

Anyway, two weeks ago or so I was talking to my fellow CIR friend, Megan. I told her how I thought our lives would make very good overly-dramatic comics. She is quite the artist and decided to go about drawing it. With help from another friend, Rachel, they came up with a piece that pretty adequately conveys my job. (The character is apparently not me, but if you take a look at the eyebrows you will quickly realize that it cannot be anyone else.)

I Don't Care, It's Still Winter

I have a few rules in life. One of them is this: "If it's snowing, it's not Spring yet." Seems simple enough to me, but Kyoto didn't get the memo. We are into March now, and it still continues to periodically snow. I am not used to this. Snow once every two years is good enough for anyone. It is very pretty, though. I tried to convey the this whimsical wintry beauty in the photo above, but I think it just looks like a sloppy and cold snowstorm.

Because of the conditions outlined above, I minimize my time spent outdoors during the work week. Walk to work, walk back, that's it. I even interrupt my return trip with an interlude in my grocery store. Nothing puts a smile on my face like listening to the sounds the store offers. When you first enter there is a tape player blasting out a man's voice simulating what you might hear if you were in an actual market: "Oranges! Oranges! Oranges! They're delicious and cheap! Bring some home tonight!" Are you trying to trick me into thinking I am at a farmer's market and you aren't some disembodied cassette recorded in 1982? Once you proceed through the entrance you start to hear the music pumped through the speakers. I wish I could remember all of the tunes the PA system pumps out. Sometimes its difficult to tell which 80s song you are listening to because rather than playing the actual song, the store chooses to broadcast a cheap midi imitation that sounds like it you should be in an elevator. Here are the songs I can be sure I have heard:

Hey Jude - Beatles
Norwegian Wood - Beatles
All I want for Christmas is You - Mariah Carey
Take My Breath Away - Berlin (from Top Gun)

And yesterday I definitely heard the soothing sounds of the ocean playing as I tried to decide if I should buy chocolate covered potato chips (I did).

I wasn't going to include this section into my blog because I didn't think "sounds I hear in my grocery store" would prove very interesting, but today in the meat section I heard something unbelievable. I honestly stopped looking at the pork and stared at the tape player with a huge grin on my face. It was what sounded like a little boy doing a rap in Japanese about ham. "Yeah, yeah, ham, ham, ham sausage. Ham and eggs, if you don't have ham just eat the eggs. Grandma! Put ham into the lunchbox, dad will like it. Of course I will like it to! I like it!" Now, this sort of thing has to be weird no matter what country you are in. I refuse to believe that this is normal. But all the other shoppers just went about their business without a second look.

Come to think of it, the same thing happened when I was eating at a ramen restaurant last week with some coworkers. We were just eating our ramen and chatting while unremarkable pop music played in the shop. Suddenly, though, the music shifted into hard core metal replete with the deep throated screams you usually hear in horror movies. Nobody batted an eyelash. I was left feeling incorrigibly out of place.


I may have mentioned in a previous post that I am doing a lecture series on sports in Seattle. Somehow I couldn't properly convey my sense of sadness at the prospect of the Sonics leaving for Oklahoma (I was just in Oklahoma! I like Oklahoma! Why do they have to steal half of what made the 90s memorable for me.) In an effort to convey my emotions, I showed them a excerpt from a recent Bill Simmons article:

"On the flip side, Presti has to be slammed a little for how the Ray Allen trade turned out: Basically, the Sonics dealt Ray Allen and "Big Baby" Davis for Jeff Green and Donyell Marshall's corpse and saved $10 million for the 2008-09 season ... money that they won't be spending on players because their soulless owner is busy destroying a 41-year history of professional basketball in Seattle. Does that sound like a good deal to you? Didn't think so. I'd have more to say here, but the poor Sonics fans are like abused dogs in an animal shelter right now. Let's just move on."

I realized I wasn't getting through when I had to explain the word "soulless."

Luckily, to help cheer me up, I spent all of Saturday wandering around Kyoto with my friend looking at the newly blossoming plum petals (you ain't nobody in this town if you don't head out to see the plum blossoms when they bloom.) I don't know what the fascination among Japanese people is with going to beautiful locations laid out perfectly with rows of flowers, and taking nothing but close-up detailed pictures of single blossoms. I mean, I appreciate the fleeting beauty of a single plum blossom as much as the next guy, but should I be neglecting the 1000 year-old temple around me? Well, if you can't beat 'em...


Oh, I forgot to write about the Great G8 Staircase Race. I explained in a previous post that I was participating in this event to promote the G8 Foreign Ministers' Meeting in Kyoto. First of all, the place was CRAWLING with people. I have never seen the staircase so busy. People wearing costumes, cheerleaders, and a ton of old Japanese men in running shorts. I hesitate to even bring up the warm up exercises they had everyone do only because I don't think I can do it justice. You know that movement you see sometimes where a person will put their arms out to the side with palms out and shake their chest from left to right? Yeah. That was part of the warm up. The stairs were miserable. I, in my feeble attempt at climbing them was dominated by the three other people I was running with. It didn't help I was running anchor of this particular relay. Thirty-nine seconds and 172 stairs later, I was at the top with a microphone in my face.
Reporter: Dou deshitaka? - How was it?
Me (panting and unable to operate my hamstrings): Kurushikatta.

Now, kurushikatta can mean a couple of different things. Here are some translations offered by www.alc.co.jp:

1. agonizing
2. bleeding
3. croosh
4. crucial
5. labored
6. laboring
7. painful
8. rough
9. stern
10. strait
11. thorny
12. trying

I don't think that was the scoop she was looking for, but it was all my poor lungs could offer. Thanks to the fact that nobody on our team was particularly slow, America took third place! Not quite the Miracle on Ice, but I was pleased. Turns out, the best runners did the worst in this competition. The German team was made up of a Japanese running club (not a German to be found in this city, apparently), and they did the worst. The winning team was the Russians, who, true to every Cold War stereotype I can muster, were stocky and burly (not to mention a little bit standoffish.) My hypothesis is that strong leg muscles are more important than long graceful strides in a staircase race. The burly Russians had some meaty legs and were thus able to outlast the competition.

Top Four Fastest Countries
1. Russia
2. Italy
3. America
4. Great Britain (Great Britain's team consisted of a Briton, an Irishman, a Lithuanian, and a Japanese.)

What you are looking at here, gentle reader, is a picture of the author's worst nightmares.