So I figured I should finish writing my second post about my Japan trip before leaving on my next trip TONIGHT! (May 14, although this is going up several days later due to some weird Blogspot glitch. Post on Boracay, Philippines to come in about a week, followed by a post about my friend Fan’s visit and our time in Hong Kong the next week!)
My last post was about Tokyo. After three days in Japan we spent 3.5 days in Kyoto and 2 days in Osaka. These two cities are only about 30 minutes away from each other and they, together with a few smaller towns, make up the main population center of the Kansai region. The Kansai region is well-known as the fertile rice-growing region of Japan, kind of like the Midwest is the bread basket. The capital of Japan was here until 1865 when it was moved to Tokyo. I think “Kansai” sounds la lot like “Bonsai” (the mini-trees) which sounds a lot like “Banzai!” (which is the old Japanese war cry which means “hundred years”, as in “may the Emperor live 100 years”).
Kyoto was the old capital, so it’s chock full of old gardens and temples and buildings and just cultural things in general. I fell in love with it. In terms of size, it’s not super huge like Tokyo or Osaka. The downtown is much more manageable and shorter in general. I fell in love with the city. I think I could live there. If I end up in Asia again I think I’d aim for here.
A few things that sucked about Kyoto though—1) it was very cold while we were there and I wasn’t properly prepared for it, and 2) the public transportation was not as robust and was quite expensive. The result of that was that we spent a LOT of time walking around freezing our butts off ;) That didn’t keep it from being lovely.
I’ve already posted a Facebook album of Kyoto pictures which have a lot of description in the captions about lovely places that we visited—several Pure Land Buddhist temples, the Silver Pavilion and the Golden Pavilion, lovely gardens, food, etc. So I’m going to focus here on things that were equally enjoyable but a bit less photogenic.
One was the onsen that we visited. An onsen is a public bath, and they’re very central to Japanese culture. Up until not too recently, many Japanese didn’t have a bathtub in their homes because they couldn’t afford it, but apparently bathing is a very important thing for Japanese and sometimes a shower just didn’t cut it. So most Japanese would go to the local public bath in the evening. You don’t actually clean yourself in the bath—that would be gross, apparently. Instead you sit at these little tiny spigots that are at about waist level and you wash yourself thoroughly, and THEN soak in the baths. The one we went to was great and we stayed for about two hours! In additional to the main hot tub they had one that had electricity in it, one that had some special minerals in it, one that was really cold so you could cool down in between baths, and one outside in the courtyard—that one was the best! There was also a sauna. It was perfect. It was mostly old ladies, because apparently onsens are another one of those cultural things that are fading. But there was a cute family with a little baby and he was sooooo cute and we were smiling at him and his mom came over and started chatting with us! She was super nice and it was just a great time all around.
Another fun thing was getting accosted at one of the temples by a Pure Land Buddhist monk, an American Japanese named Ray Fukumoto who chatted with Kathryn about being from LA before telling us the history of the temple and of Pure Land Buddhism in general. He was super nice and not at all pushy and had a lot of interesting things to say. Then he took this picture for us!
So if you’re interested in Pure Land Buddhism and want to talk to someone about it, let me know and I’ll pass you Ray’s email J
We also had our own tea ceremony. This was really fun because as opposed to the tea ceremony we did earlier, where there was a lot of explanation and stopping and starting, this was us just focusing on the essence behind the ceremony, even though I’m sure we messed up about a billion small details! One thing that our friend Ikuko told us about the ceremony a few days earlier was that the tea ceremony brought together all the different sections of Japanese art—ceramics (the bowl), bamboo work (the whisk), the tea itself, painting and calligraphy in the art hung in the alcove, an ikebana in the entrance, the architecture of the teahouse itself—but no music. This is because sounds are a very important part of the ceremony—the sound of socks on the tatami mat, the whisking of the tea, the pouring of it, etc. I realized what she said was so true when we had our own ceremony. All of a sudden the neighbors next door sounded almost intrusively loud, even though I didn’t notice anything before or after the ceremony. The sounds all had almost a life of their own. And while talking is allowed and not at all discouraged during the tea ceremony, you find yourself communicating on a different level through the ceremony, by preparing tea for your friends and simply enjoying the fact of being able to relax and drink it with them. Plus being in our kimonos just made it exciting and I felt pretty ;) It was one of my favorite experiences of Japan.
Osaka is about as different from Kyoto as you can imagine. It’s relatively modern as far as Japanese cities go, and it’s mostly the capital of commerce and food. People are considered more rustic and straightforward, and I hear they have an interesting accent, although of course I couldn’t tell! We actually didn’t love Osaka as much, mostly because it was really rainy for the one full day that we were there, and because we were getting really tired, and also because it just doesn’t lend itself quite as much to tourism. But we still had a great time.
We were there on Sunday morning before we flew out that afternoon, and it just happened to be Easter! We didn’t want to go without celebrating, so we found a local hymn sing and church service in English! We didn’t have time to stay for the service, but the hymn sing was lovely. It’s really not Easter without singing “Christ the Lord is Risen Today!” We stayed afterwards for doughnuts and coffee and met some really lovely people! One was a lady who had been living in Japan for 30 years teaching English! She was so sweet. Another was this really funny guy from Ghana who had a great voice! He was also there teaching English. We talked with him for quite awhile, and he actually sent us a couple pictures that he took! There we are in the back on the right.
We're in this photo, on the right side in the back. You can see my pink striped shirt.
So, altogether, an INCREDIBLY successful trip. I highly recommend Japan as a destination in East Asia. We didn’t have nearly as much trouble with the language barrier as we thought we would. Japan is everything that everybody says it is, and it’s worth experiencing for yourself.
