Temples and Castles and Post-towns

Spring is finally here, much to the dismay of many Japanese people who suffer from an aggravated type of hay fever (kafunsho), and who consider spring to be the most miserable season. I’m quite healthy and am enjoying the plum blossoms.

This weekend we took a trip out to Nagano to do some sightseeing. First stop was Zenko-ji, a rather hugeish temple right in the heart of Nagano city. This temple is not unlike most temples, except that it has a passageway leading underground where you must navigate your way through to the other end in complete darkness. You’re supposed to run your hands along the walls and try to find a protruding key that, once found, will unlock your path to enlightenment. As innocuous as it sounds, the total darkness thing may lead those with disturbed overactive minds to foresee unfriendly encounters with any number of things. Like a Rapeceratops. Or his more terrifying big brother, Rapeasaurus Rex.

Having emerged alive, our next stop was in Matsumoto to visit a national treasure. Matsumoto castle is nicknamed The Crow because of its black exterior and wing-shaped roof. Castles are much more accessible to tourists than temples are because you can poke around inside and check out the keep and storage areas.

Samurai armour rocked several different moustache types. Behold the upside-down Walrus Moustache:

Last stop was Kiso Valley, where we visited some post-towns. Here’s the abbreviated history behind this: The Tokugawa government imposed a kind of back-and-forth system whereby every year all the shogun would have to travel between Edo (Tokyo) and their domain. Along the main travel route to/from Edo, a series of little towns popped up to provide shogun and their samurai with rest and food. Two of these towns are preserved in Kiso Valley, and one is still inhabited. They are very much unchanged from how they looked when they were built (sans slightly unhinged honour-obsessed samurai stabbing each other in the goolies).

Note my new haircut, which is cheekily referred to as He-Man hair by my soon-to-be ex-boyfriend.

On the second night of our trip we had unknowingly stumbled upon Japan’s stinky armpit, a town called Nakatsugawa. I won’t bore you with details, other than that everything we touched was sticky, but the clinching factor was that Adam and I both hated it and were unable to leave because our scheduled train kept on NOT COMING. It was like it was some voodoo ghost town that doesn’t exist except in your most vivid nightmares. We were lucky enough to catch a train out of there after waiting 3 hours, and we didn’t look back.

HATE HATE HATE HATE HATEH AHET HTATE

Overall, it was an intriguing couple of days. Interested parties can click here for more photo goodness.

Bento

No real blog post, just pictures of another bento I made:


I made this for Adam because he had to take a long train ride out for a business trip on a Saturday. Cute, ne? A mawkish lunch such as this should do well to boost my reputation as a caring and generous individual despite the fact that I am small-minded and mean and sometimes involuntarily creepy.

About Valentine's... mostly.

Happy February! As of the 27th, I will have been living in Japan for 7 months. I suppose I completely glossed over the half-a-year milestone, so I’m celebrating by eating some turducken. Well, not really, but I will stuff some food into some other delicious food stuffed into some other delicious food. I’ll probably make ramadamatamagoyakiso…ba.

Valentine’s Day was mostly spent nerding around at some museums this year. We went to the Tokyo National Museum, the oldest and largest museum in Japan, which houses an excellent Asian exhibit and a ton of National Treasures. I’m happy to report that I learned the Japanese word for Archduke (taikou) from an old-timey English-Japanese dictionary. I do hope it comes in handy. We also went to a futuristic science museum on Odaiba, a man-made island near Tokyo Bay. Odaiba is well-known for its newfangled architecture. Check out the Fuji TV building:

Among the exhibits at the science museum were a giant pinball machinesque simulation of the internet, real-time displays of data from a huge array of seismometers across Japan which show the whole country vibrating, Asimo/other cool robotic business, and space stuff. I was looking forward to seeing the Maglev Train model, but couldn’t find it. There was also an exhibit devoted to creating awareness about man’s negative environmental impact, and Adam and I exchanged ironic glances as we stood on the artificially made ground. At any rate, I feel safe knowing that the mountain warrior-priest responsible for Japan’s ninja-grip on technology is using it for good, not evil.

I packed this bento for our lunch, my best attempt to date. By the way, bentos have been way easier to make now that I have access to every kind of Japanese ingredient. The pink heart sushi was made with denbu, which is a kind of fish egg product, only it’s sweet and very pink. And my octodogs aren’t gross anymore, because now I can use sausages specially made for octodogging purposes.

When we sat down and cracked out the bento, in less than two seconds a bird came over and pooed on it, with fevered intent. I swear to god it was just waiting for us. Luckily, only one of the tamago pieces was soiled, which was easily isolated and disposed of. Adam graciously ate from the poo-bento first, while I cursed all birds to hell with angry fist-shaky action. I was disinclined to partake, as I am neurotic about poo-related skin diseases, but Adam said it was fine and I eventually gave in.

While we’re on the subject, and this being the classy blog it is, here’s a textbook example of the tendency for Japanese to anthropomorphize everything, sometimes with terrifying results:

Anyway, as the day wrapped up, Godzilla came over and stomped on the Fuji TV building and we ran for our lives.

Voilà, c’est la fin.

Lots of nakie man bum

I meant to get this up a few weeks ago, but it’s been busy back at work. Recently a second wave of the pigflu has quarantined many of my students in their houses, so I’m finally free to sit down and write this.

Recently there was a huge sumo tournament in Tokyo to which Adam and I bought tickets. The tournament lasts all day, with the lower level matches beginning in the morning and running until the serious wrestlers go at it in the late afternoon. We got there in the morning and played spot-the-sumo in the area around the stadium. This is super fun because all the wrestlers are out doing normal people things like eating lunch and riding bikes and shopping. And they’re easy to spot since they all have a traditional waxed hairstyle. (And easy to spot for other, more obvious reasons.)

Mid-day we left to visit a Parasite Museum. It was cool, but very misleading. I won’t go into details, but Adam and I walked out of the place under the false impression that tiny fish could live inside your liver, and crabs could live inside your heart. We later googled ‘liver fluke’ and ‘heart crab’ to no avail and promptly realized how stupid we really were. I blamed the museum for lying to us and maintained a dignified silence on the train back to the sumo tournament.

Anyway, we went back to see the oozeki and yokozunas, the top ranked players in Japan. There are a surprising number of foreign sumo wrestlers, and in fact, the two highest ranked wrestlers are Mongolian. We sat a few levels up from the action, but people can buy Japanese style seating right next to the ring (really just cushions on the floor) for outrageous prices. These usually go to impetuous old farts who are known to have mantrums and throw their cushions at the wrestlers during lacklustre matches (because old people can get away with whatever they want in Japan.) What’s funny is that Sumo isn’t just a fat man’s sport. We saw lots of Marvin the Martian vs. Mongo matches, and it wasn’t always a win for the bigger guy. It would seem that being a good sumo wrestler has qualifiers other than ‘be gigantic and push people around.’

Though this guy never got the memo:

Oh and we got to see the Emperor of Japan. He and the Empress came to watch some Sumo too, only they had much better seating than us and were accompanied by some shifty eyed suited types.

In other news, you’ll be interested to know that the Tokyo Metro Railway Company puts out a series of ‘do it at home’ posters featuring various impolitenesses, reminding Tokyoites to mind their manners when riding the subway. These are apparently necessary because Japan sans public service posters detailing embarrassing social faux-pas is a Japan with no discernable moral compass…? Some of them are quite funny, and here are a couple of my favourites.

Here's a spoof I thought was pretty funny:

Tewnty-ten!

Happy New Year! Winter holidays are over and it’s back to work. After Christmas I spent most of my time showing a friend around Tokyo and its surrounding areas. We got to see a kabuki performance, which was lucky, considering the famous (and very old) Kabuki-Za theatre is being torn down in a couple months and being completely renovated.

We also played some pachinko. Pachinko is way less fun than it sounds. And it sounds horrible. When walking into a pachinko parlour you’re met with the sound of a million million steel balls ricocheting off the pegs inside the game. It sounds like the engine room of some great ship. Couple that with second-hand smoke and flashing neon lights, the whole experience is a sensory overload. Oh, and the chairs are designed to pull you right into the machine, should you push away or lean back. It was like being inside the heart of some giant out-of-control manic robot clown.

New Years was spent drinking nihonshu (a mix of sake and shochu) in an izakaya in Tokyo this year. We did the countdown with everybody else in the restaurant, except for the table adjacent to ours, who did theirs two minutes later… which struck us as odd. What did they think was going on beforehand?

My New Year’s resolution is to stop carrying around so much shit in my bag. I never wanted to become one of those girls with irritatingly full shoulder bags, but I find myself reaching in for my wallet when it’s time to pay for something and embarrassingly grope away like a 13 year-old boy trying to get to second base. Here, then, is what’s in my bag:

-emergency battery for iPhone
-assorted tea bags (this month is Lady Grey and popcorn tea)
-pamphlets/tickets to things/receipts
-extra pair of underwear (black, if you must know)
-iPod
-broken South Africa keychain
-book (currently reading Kafka on the Shore) (So guhd)
- 2 spoons
-no, wait, 3 spoons
-magnets
-lip shimmer
-insurance application form with scribbles all over it (this is telling, don’t you think?)
-mittens
-packet of soy sauce
-maple candy I brought from Canada (I don’t like maple. I brought these to give to other people, but now they’ve gotten all scummy and manky at the bottom of my bag and would likely give someone a bad case of thrush)
-glue stick
- earrings I thought I lost
-broken pens

…I may have issues.

Tokyo is a walking city, but after a while we were able to duck into a basement cigar bar near Harajuku, where we sat down like rakish highbrow types and ordered port and sat in high-backed leather chairs and exchanged sly witticisms while smoking cigars etc etc. Struck with the realization that I had an opportunity to indulge in some bad-assery, I opted to try the whiskey, mainly to satiate my preoccupation with Captain Haddock. Nope. Still can’t drink the whiskey. But going to places like this may ruin my life in the most magnificent ways.

I was recently made aware of a place in Tokyo’s Ikebukuro district (lit. “pond bag”) called Nekobukuro (lit. “cat bag”) where you can go and play with cats all day. If everything is born of necessity, places like this is what makes Japan so bloody peculiar. Adam’s allergic and I’m in kitty-withdrawal, so I made a special trip with Juan to see this place, which is just a big room with cats comfortably tucked into every nook and cranny, as only cats can do. They’re used to being pet all day so they’re completely indifferent if you go up and poke at them while they’re trying to sleep. I happened to have some string with me, but I was popular only as long as their attention spans held out. Either way, they were soft and cute so I was happy.

Overall, it was a busy and tiring holiday. However, Adam and I weren’t so worn out that we couldn’t appreciate the novelty of this enormous carrot, which provided suitable entertainment for an entire evening.

What small lives we lead.

Ho Ho etc..

Merry Christmas! My internet gift to you lucky readers is this Youtube clip of a monkey bullying a couple of tigers. Please enjoy.


Adam and I went on a day trip to Haruna shrine on Christmas Eve, easily one of the nicest shrines I’ve been to in Japan, and it’s only about an hour from home. Most shrines and pagodas are rebuilt as copies of the originals due to fires or earthquakes or bombings, but this one is the original structure, built in 1869. You can really feel the history in the faded paint and weathered wood. To get to it you have to hike alongside a mountain path lit by lanterns. Really nice. We packed a bento and drank some hot tea before hiking up to the top, and we pretty much had the place to ourselves.

At sunset we headed up to Lake Haruna at the top of the mountain, where there was a Christmas illumination show taking place. This was an involved production which culminated in Christmas lights, hand-holding couples, peevish adolescents in Santa suits, and a bubble machine. (Which was awesome because the bubbles froze in mid-air. Frozen bubbles. Frubbles, if you will.)

We caught a bus back home and bought some fried chicken for dinner. I could go my entire life without going into a KFC and be content, but Japanese eat fried chicken on Christmas, so I thought we’d do it their way this year. Japanese are also big fans of Christmas cake, so I decided to make one of those too. We don’t have an oven, so I made a cake in the rice cooker. This is completely reasonable, since most Japanese homes aren’t equipped with ovens or anything else that would encourage much baking. Rightly so, as baked goods in Japanese homes are doomed to failure. 7 hours after putting my cake in, I gave up waiting for it at 2 am and went to bed. After that time I turn into a surly underslept harpy and nothing good happens after 2 am anyway. The aftermath of it all was something more like a Christmas bagel. We dressed it up and ate it anyways.

Christmas morning was spent hunting down presents and opening packages from home. Thanks to everyone from home. All the gifts exceeded far beyond what I deserved for Christmas; namely pervasive neglect or a swift punch to the nose.

Also, I made Adam a Christmas TARDIS. I am the coolest.
Oh, and check out what Adam made me for Christmas. He was a slave to Microsoft Paint for 2 weeks in order to make this. Steampunk Santa! If you look closely, you can see a man riding a penny-farthing in the background. There's also a TARDIS if you can find it...

Christmas Scavenger Hunt

The next clue is an easy one,
If you can read between the rows,
Tralfamadorians and guns,
Dead one by one, and so it goes!