I’m of questionable consciousness right now — 8 p.m. has felt like 2 a.m. all week, and it’s 11:30 p.m. now — but I feel so guilty about not posting for two straight days that I’ll write anyway. (Plus, I’m on my again-functioning laptop, so I don’t have to do the touchtype-bob-and-weave on a Japanese keyboard. Seriously, who thought it was a good idea to put the @ where the ] should be [unshifted, even!], or the apostrophe at shift-7?)
Thursday morning: A visit to Osaka Castle, a “centuries-old” building that, like many “ancient” Japanese structures, has been rebuilt so many times that it’s tough to call it old. (Earthquakes and American bombing runs have eliminated most of the really old stuff over the years.) The castle’s interior is modern and pretty well done; my favorite part was a series of holograms telling the story of Toyotomi Hideyoshi‘s ascent to power. Really sophisticated holograms, but they were being projected into these little shoebox dioramas that looked like something a third grader might put together. (Plus, I couldn’t look at them without thinking: “Help me, Obi Wan Kenobi. You’re my only hope.“)
Thursday afternoon: Drove to Kyoto, where we met with fellow journalists from the Kyoto Shimbun newspaper. When we met the three reporters we’d be talking with, I realized one reason I, as a rule, like reporters: we’re easy to pick out of a crowd. Put these three guys in a police lineup, and I could peg them not only as reporters, but as specific types of reporters. The guy in the suede jacket with the shaggy hair: theater critic. The rolled-up sleeves, intense look, tiny cell phone: financial reporter. The guy with the conservative suit, the earnest do-gooder look: city hall reporter. All nice folks. Actually, everyone I’ve met in the last week would fall in that “nice folks” category. There’s something to be said for a country where that’s the case.
Then it was off to Kiyomizu Temple, where three mini-waterfalls dispense water that will make you brilliant, handsome, or long-living, depending which one you drink. I drank none, which I suppose makes me dumb, ugly, and ready to keel over at any moment.
Did you know that in Japanese hotel rooms, instead of Gideon bibles, you get a book called The Teaching of Buddha? Did you also know that air conditioning here is more like, um, air suggestion? Climate hinting instead of climate control? I called the front desk at 1 a.m. when it was sweltering hot to ask if there was anything unusual I needed to do to get the AC to work properly. “Open a window,” came the reply.
Friday morning: Kyoto was the only major Japanese city that didn’t get turned to rubble by American bombs in World War II, and as a result it has more real historic sites than anywhere else in the country. (If you ever want your faith in the punitive power of American military might strengthened, just come to Tokyo and search for anything pre-1945. When we feel like unleashing hell, by gum, we do quite a job.) Kyoto was also Japan’s capital for 1,000 years — 72 emperors worth, plus a whole bunch of shoguns — and the result is old building overload. 1,600 Buddhist temples! 400 Shinto shrines!
It’s also the most popular tourist destination in Japan. (Actually, it was until two years ago, when horror of horrors, Tokyo Disneyworld passed it.) This fact, like many others, came from our tour guide, a compact little woman whose name I never got but who brought us from temple to temple to temple today with a Mussolini-like efficiency. Things I learned:
– Some Buddhist temples are in such need of cash for repairs that they’re converting upper floors to condos. Yep, condos. (Wonder if late-night chant sessions downstairs hurt those property values.)
– Shinto has a god of divorce; pray to him/her/it when that bad relationship just won’t end.
– Being called Benton-san is pretty damned cool. (Actually, I learned this on Day 1, at the airport.)
– The Japanese love Thomas Edison, because he once endorsed the use of Kyoto bamboo in building construction. The Japanese also love Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and sing it en masse every winter.
– The geisha industry is dying out because Japanese businessmen don’t have expense accounts like they used to. The average age of a Kyoto geisha: 62.
– Events marked on your itinerary as “kimono fashion show” are invariably less interesting than they seem, involving in this case five young models on the catwalk and eight bored tourists forming their “audience.”
After a while, Buddhist temples do start to blend together, like cathedral fatigue in Europe. But three buildings were quite nice. The Golden Pavilion was lovely (and swamped, like all of these places, by schoolchildren — Japanese schools seem to be on permanent field trips, judging by the presence of the wee ones everywhere you turn). It looks nice and ancient until you learn the whole place was built in 1958, eight years after a crazed apprentice monk took a torch to the original. When I heard that, I thought that’d make for a great opening scene for a book or a movie; as the link above shows, my brilliant idea has already been taken.
Nijo Castle was pretty amazing; it’s where the shoguns held court for centuries. The floors were specially rigged with springs that squeak when walked on, to warn the shogun of any approaching assassins. Unlike most old buildings, it’s actually the same structure that was built four hundred years ago — same wooden floors, same paintings on the walls, same everything. It’s also the place where the Meiji Restoration took place and the shogun transfered power back to the emperor in 1868; being five feet from the spot where the transfer took place was, to use inappropriate language, very cool. (Call me weird, but the fact that we had to take off our shoes in the building also made it seem strangely intimate — only my socks were between me and the floorboards the shogun once walked!)
Okay, I’m clearly getting delirious — I’ll shut up soon.
Finally, we went to Sanjusangendo Temple, which is the longest wooden structure in the world and is filled with more than 1,000 golden Buddhas. Quite overwhelming, really — it’s hard to describe, but that’s a lotta Buddha.
A couple of final highlights from Kyoto (which I highly recommend, by the way — it’s my favorite part of the trip so far): Kyoto Station, the train station downtown, is architecturally amazing. I have a very limited architectural vocabulary even when fully conscious — I usually start off saying something about how a building “creates interesting negative space” or some such nonsense, before descending into “it’s neat” — so I won’t try to tell you why, but poke around some photos of the concourse to see for yourself. (They