1
Clean, quaint and friendly is my first impression of Japan. It is 4:30 Sunday morning in Kyoto but in reality, at least in my mind, it is still 1:30 Saturday afternoon in Chicago. I am wide-awake, having decided to forego all futile efforts at sleep and write this.
And as if we were home, my mother has most assuredly come and gone from our north-side bungalow after performing her usual Saturday morning ritual of washing, drying and ironing our laundry; a task she has determined is her birth-right to perform and cannot be talked out of. If we were home we would have had lunch and since it is not boating season, be out shopping. But that is not the case this morning, a day later than it should be.
For someone who prides himself on knowing exactly where he is at all moments, I am hopelessly lost. This is the farthest I have ever been from home, some 10,000 nautical miles from O'Hare Airport, and a few obvious truisms, even cliché exist: to get here you have to be packed in like a sardine, without the olive-oil of course and jet lag is exquisitely real. But thanks to my wife Charlotte who took a great interest in our itinerary, I am reasonably sure things will work out.
For some reason after all the years wanting to come to Japan I found I could not focus on the tour books we procured. It had something to do with the names−not being able to pronounce them. I could not distinguish one place from another. I would read about a destination and though my comprehension is quite good, not remember a thing about it let alone the name.
That is not to say I wasn't instrumental in us getting here. Being the president, through no fault of my own, of a group of Japanese and American tea ceremony enthusiast is the main reason we are here in the first place.
Every five years Chado Urasenke Tankokai Chicago Association ventures to Kyoto to commemorate the death of the founder, Sen no Rykyu. This year, 2005, being the 414th year of his death and our 45th year as a group, is the first time I manage to get enough time and more to the point, money to tag along.
Kyoto is a visually simulating city, an odd mix of concrete and cedar, skyscrapers and sukiya teahouses, dilapidated and pristine. We have churches on every block Japan has ancient temples. These cedar structures have a rich dark patina undoubtedly the result of the acidic nature of the polluted air. Kyoto sits in a basin surrounded by low-slung mountains that occasionally pop into view between the narrow streets and I am afraid that just like Los Angeles and Denver this traps the noxious gases.
Walking through the neighborhoods I see Frank Lloyd Wright's inspiration, I see Florence's narrow lanes with shrines to the Madonna, I see Paris's artisan shop-culture. I do not feel threatened here, but wonder about the need for grates covering windows and secure front gates.
This is a town where you can be confronted with modernity and antiquity within a single step. Coming from the comforting complacency of Chicago's bungalow belt, this town is down right sculptural. Around every corner I see unintended art: a curvaceous jungle gym, a wood and wire scaffold surrounded by discarded tatami mats, round copper down spouts converging into one, elaborate wooden supports lashed to trees to keep them in their place. Each image burns into my mind and on to a memory chip for future reference.
A few days have gone by, most of which I have spent in feudal Japan where royalty never touch the ground except in the chasitsu (tea house) and sit higher than the rest of the rabble. A Japan where water for tea is still drawn from a well and warmed by charcoal, where the kimono is the mandatory dress and life is spent on your knees in elegant small thatched huts.
Of course Charlotte is not interested in kneeling for hours or sitting listening to unintelligible Japanese and thus has made great strides at shopping and familiarizing herself with Kyoto via excellent public transportation. After several days I finally take off my kimono, don a pair of blue jeans and jump on the #9 bus to head downtown to the train station. I get my first big whiff of diesel and feel right back in the 21st century.
Japan, for all its high tech persona, is remarkable quaint. At the Japan Railway (JR) desk three impeccably groomed, identical young women, who speak much better English than they let on, greet us. We are here to turn in our exchange order, validate the JR rail pass that will give us the privilege to ride in the first class green car and to make reservations for our in−country trek.
In America one grumpy clerk pecking away at a keyboard, while tickets shoot out of printer would do this. Efficient, usually−some thing to write about, never. Here in Kyoto there is one lowly computer that nobody refers to and a big book, with well-worn edges, full of maps and tables that is the focus of attention and is used to confirm every transit of our trip.
Suddenly we hear our clerk murmur, "Seems you cannot go this way due to the typhoon”. We look at each other and wonder if our trip of a lifetime is to be ruined and our lives put in danger. Silly us, we were worried about earthquakes and now a big wind is going to get us killed. People at home warned us, but would we listen.
Sensing our growing anxiety she assures us that due to last summer’s storm the tracks are out and disappears through a small corridor for a protracted length of time, finally returning with several small chits that turn out to be our tickets.
But sorry for getting distracted, I was really talking about our rail pass. The cover of this passport-size permit turns out to be an intricately printed and embossed image of Hokusai’s 1833 print “In the Hollow of a Wave Off the Coast at Kanagawa”. I watch with fascination, as the country with the most technologically advanced rail system requires their clerk to sit down and pull over a plastic basket to complete the transaction.
The basket resembles the ones used in Tuscany to collect fresh laid eggs. But unlike Tuscany, this one is full of stamps and inkpads. Five to be exact, the number needed to validate our pass. Each stamp individually adjusted for the appropriate date or number, painstakingly inked and placed in the proper box or on the proper line.
I calculate that at this rate, with a three person staff working from 8AM to 5PM, they will be able to process about 10 clients on a good day. I do not mean to be negative here. Japan runs wonderfully, at least for what we need done, with polite and efficient workers doing their cheerful best within a top-heavy bureaucracy.
Before we use our rail pass we travel with our Tea group on a couple of bus trips. Today Nara is our destination; Uji was yesterday. We are finally out of Kyoto cruising south surrounded by some thing other than apartments, factories and power plants. There are even a few small farms interspersed between the other buildings.
People are out tending their terraced fields. Women in straw hats are sowing seed; working with hoes to cultivate the land and occasionally a small tractor plies the fields. Plots are tiny and the equipment is of similar size−Tonka toy like. It seem impossible that the encroaching sub-divisions and industry will not swallow these postage stamp farms whole, but then Japan will have to import all their food.
We visit big and bigger Buddha’s until finally coming to the biggest. It looks to be about the size of the moon rocket I saw at Cape Canaveral, only wooden. And just when I start to think not another temple, we drive to a site where Noh is being performed on a stage at the front steps of the magnificently restored temple. I had wanted to see Noh on this trip and stood transfixed as one of our group leans over and whispers in my ear, “very little movement”. And she is right: very little movement, odd beat, all men, nasal mono tone singing, damsels in distress, sculptural kimonos and grand theatre.
Before we saw temples though, we backed into an invisible driveway on a country road and found ourselves in the front yard of the 16th generation chasen (tea whisk) maker’s home. They explain to us that parts of the house are six hundred years old and that the family has always lived here. With the next generation running around, the 15th and 16th generation chasen makers and 16th generation’s wife knelt and created a whisk while explaining all the steps.
They make it look easy, but then every thing everybody does in Japan looks easy. I think this is because their study is earnest and sincere. In twenty years of studying chanoyu I do not even come close to living up to their example.
Friday, the end of our first week in Japan comes quickly and as the bus nears Kyoto after a day of sight seeing, many of our companions begin to leave at various train stations along the way to visit family and friends in other areas of the country. It is sad to say sayonara to my tea friends, they have been wonderful traveling companions. Though most are expatriates, they have a love and a pride in their country that I have seldom seen in other places I have visited.
Chanoyu, the Tea Ceremony, provides a connection to the world they left behind. It provides a connection to the best of Japanese culture. I am surprised that tea culture, at various levels of sophistication, is reflected on almost every street corner, curio shop, train station mall, home, etc., etc. I can see it in the joinery work at the train station platform, in the plastic green ice cream cones in front of the sweet shops, in the conductor bowing as he enters and leaves the train car.
Before I left for Japan my teacher told me that I would come back with a deeper understanding of Japanese culture that would enlighten my study. This seemed obvious at the time, but it is difficult to put into words the profound effect it has had on me.
Simply, it is similar to when I first practiced chanoyu with kimono. Before I had ever worn kimono I just went through the motions that had been prescribed for me and afterward, well it all just made sense and the movements became instinctual, allowing the intellect to concentrate on other aspects of tea.
2
We finally get on our own and head for Koya-san. This we do with mixed emotions. While traveling with the group we felt in a cocoon, protected and looked after by our friends, but now we will have to face Japan and deal first hand with our lack of language skills.
Koya-san has a spectacularly eerie mountaintop cemetery with over 250,000 ancient and modern souls buried within a native forest of towering cedars. Dark, damp, lichen and moss covered with a hint of cedar and pine in the air, until the odor of incense points to the existence of the Buddhist temple at the end of the trail. Unfortunately we could not linger, we needed to hurry back through the forest due to dinner at the Buddhist Monastery, where we are staying, being served at six.
The next day after a night spent on the cold mountaintop our brains are muddled with blurry vision, stiff backs, sore muscles and indigestion running a close second. Koya-san did it and the Buddhist Monastery where we ate, slept and prayed at didn't help either.
The Buddhist temple takes in guests like the convents in Italy that provide shelter for the faithful on pilgrimage. It is a pilgrimage to get here. Four inner city trains, a cable car and two buses are negotiated to get to the top Mt. Koya.
All this train taking makes me realize that in Japan you do not just wait for a train, you find the specific sign for your train and car amongst all the other signs for all the other trains that will ever or have ever stopped at the station. Of course this takes entering into five conversations with various officials and unlucky by-standers before you are in queue at the proper place. And I mean in queue.
There is a protocol for when you can be pushy and barge on to a train and when you just get in line and wait. Any train with seats that sit fore and aft−be polite, any train where you sit facing each other−feel free to push and shove. But I admit, even in central Tokyo at the height of rush hour there is not a lot of bad behavior, crowding yes, but people still maintain a high level of civility.
I could not help notice the many commuters sleeping on trains; heads slumped on to the shoulders of their seatmates. You'd think you were in Italy where no one eats dinner until 11 at night, but then again no one is sleeping on trains in Italy lest hoodlums carry you and your loved ones away, but as far as I can tell no one is being hijacked here. More likely it is due to sleeping on tatami mats that has made this a country of insomniacs, only able to catch up on their sleep in public.
Next we move on to Kanazawa, an industrious looking city on the western border of Japan not far from the coast. The city has a strong history of tea and the making of tea utensils. When Charlotte put this on our schedule we had no idea that one of the Gyotei-sensei (professor) who was my teacher during our stay in Kyoto is the second son of a famous family of ceramist.
His family apprenticed with the 4th Raku generation and moved to Kanazawa in the 1600's to make tea utensils for the Shogun. The tenth generation of the family is still making exquisite ceramics and of course tea ware. Their trademark is a rich amber glaze call ame-gusuri.
During my teaching session in Kyoto, sensei asked where else I would go in Japan. When I replied Kanazawa he invited us to visit Ohi pottery to see the museum of his family’s pottery. I was to call when getting to town. I did, but unfortunately he was leaving to go back to teach in Kyoto Sunday night. He asked us to come to the museum for a visit anyway; his family would be there to greet us.
We arrived after spending a cold morning wandering around town. First we went to the Kenrokuen Tea garden that, well I am not exactly sure how to describe the breath of the garden with every leaf in place, every 400 year old tree’s limb supported by a complicated web of lashed on poles, the first fountain built in Japan and on and on.
Second we went to the market; all kinds of weird expensive seafood and thirty dollar melons. Third, a sweet shop that made sweets before there was sugar in Japan. Fourth and fifth and who can remember, but the Ohi family I will not forget.
After the usual confusion due to, what I like to call the Tower of Babel syndrome, we were shown to the museum and set free to wander on the three floors of mainly tea bowls dating from before our country was founded and a few other art objects. Once finished and not knowing what else to do, we returned to the front desk and were lead into the family’s tearoom for a sweet and a bowl of matcha (thin green tea).
There my teacher’s wife and his mother met us. While his wife made us feel welcomed and described the various treasures, his mother stood and stepped out for a moment. She returned a grand mother carrying our teachers beautiful plump six months old with jet-black hair standing straight up. This baby girl put all the other artwork to shame.
As you probably know by now if you have been reading my previous stories, you always have a sweet before having matcha. We had heard legend of the sweets in Kanazawa and then one suddenly appeared before us.
How do I describe this golf ball size morsel? It almost looks like a hollowed out gourd except maybe it is wrapped in some type of pastry or maybe a little basket or eggshell topped with tri-color ribbons. I would need to attend the Iowa City Writer’s Workshop to do this one little sweet’s description justice.
But let me continue as best I may. When you eat a moist tea sweet you divide it into three pieces with a small pick that is usually provided. I use a little metal pick I keep stashed in my kaishi. Kaishi are checkbook size folded stacks of thick white paper that are used to place sweets on and for general clean up purposes during tea.
Matcha was brought and served to us by sensei's wife. The chawan I drink from was made by the father of the present generation. It was black similar to raku bowls but was made in the style of Korean bowls with a wide mouth that narrows down to a tallish unglazed base.
The second chawan that Charlotte receives her tea in was more traditional, with a wide mouth and straight sides resting on a short stand. It has Ohi pottery’s signature amber glaze with circular curlicues shapes pressed into the bowls side.
The chawan, their hospitality and that baby girl are priceless memories. To be honored as such is truly the meaning of ichigo, ichie−one meeting, one time.
3
Off to the mountains again, Takayama is our destination today. I wait, camera in hand as the train pulls into the station, but this train does not look like the usual bullet train. Our reservation is for car #2 and sure enough the second car's entrance stops right at the allotted spot, so we instinctively board.
Please let me explain some thing here. When you arrive on the platform to board your train the work has just begun. Maybe this seems odd to me because as a nation we are not typically long distance train riders. We are in our cars or on planes or in cars driving to planes.
In Japanese train stations there are multitudes of signs specifying where trains and their cars will stop on the platform i.e., Train A /Car 1, Train A/Car 2. Given that the train stops for one minute and 8 second (believe me I timed it) at each stop, it is imperative that you be in the exact place to board, in queue of course.
The only people exempted from this standard practice are the ninety-pound, unmarried, twenty something females known in Japan as “parasites” for their proclivity at living off their parents. Highly coiffured with six-inch heels they prance to the front of the line, into the train like a gaggle of geese and drone on until finally exiting with a flair.
The signs are mainly in Japanese characters except for a few of the more modern stations that service the shinkansen, otherwise known as bullet trains. We have become adept at recognizing the shapes of the characters, but not their meaning and can usually find the proper place to board.
I find odd my sincere need to acknowledge every Westerner I see. In Chicago I can go months without ever looking up, but here there is an instant bond between travelers. Of course, you can tell the long time Western residents. They will never signal back, having I am sure with much effort, habituated themselves to the environment. Reminds me of waving to other VW Beetle drivers in the 1970’s when the car made its first appearance in the USA.
The other odd thing is this train of ours, the train that is to take us into the mountains, is spewing diesel from the top of each car. Seems down right primitive compared to the sleek electric trains we have been on, but once inside it is redeemably plush.
We settle in, the train starts to roll and it is then we realize we are facing backward. A bit disorienting especially as the train picks up speed. Our initial response is to turn the seats around to face forward. Turn the seats around you say? Earlier in the day when our train pulled into the station one way and left another, the entire car stood up and immediately rotated their seats in the right direction to face forward−lock step.
So now on this train, we stand up and rotate our seat, but notice everyone else is sitting drinking beer and eating lunch out of bento boxes. Maybe they know something we do not, which of course they do. At the next stop the train takes off in the opposite way and we are facing forward. No need for motion sickness bags on this leg.
Morning and breakfast come early in Takayama. Our meal is served on wooden trays with no less than thirteen different dishes used to present the various types of tofu, pickles, fish, roots, seaweed, broths, not to mention the prerequisite runny eggs, rice and yogurt with strawberry. Add these dishes to the plates used during dinner and we are probably up to thirty unique pieces of ceramics. Where do they store all this stuff in these tiny homes?
We walk up to the Old World Wisconsin of Japan to view rustic homes gathered from all over Japan−we should have taken the bus. We walk up to the ruins of a castle−we should have taken the bus. We take the bus down to the historic center of town−we should have walked.
The town lies in a basin between two high hills and it has retained its agrarian roots. Walking from store front to store front we are drawn on by the smell emanating from sake and miso brewers and by the artisans making everything from paper to dolls to fine lacquered pieces.
Takayama, the little mountain village is not really a village, it has grown up. We are in the old section of town, staying in a pricey ryokan (don't pronounce the “r”) otherwise known as a Japanese Inn. Think bed & breakfast with dinner, tatami mats and your own server. As every thing takes place in your room, someone is needed to rearrange the furniture every morning and night.
The fourth night on our own I reach my limit of raw fish. Well not just raw fish, but raw any thing that ever swam in the ocean or scurried on the ocean floor. Charlotte, a real trooper up to now, finally balked at the raw octopus with half its head, brains and all beautifully arranged in a fashion that only a Japanese chef can. We requested no raw fish for our next dinner and a Western breakfast due to our confrontation with the little creature. It packed a visual punch.
After two days, we board the train in Takayama and proceed to wind down the river valley toward the sea. Today it’s Tokyo or bust. Up in the mountains it is cold and rainy with the clouds obscuring our last views of the mountain scenery, but I imagine the weather will be different down on the coast and it turns out to be warm and sunny.
The Japan that I am seeing race by my window is a megalopolis. Just when I think there will be some wide-open spaces, the train comes out of a tunnel and there is another city. Of course I am talking with limited geographical knowledge, but in the onsen (hot tub or hot spring) a trekker from Montreal confided in me his disappointment with the wide gap between his image of an ideal Japanese landscape and its reality.
While we trekked around the outskirts of Takayama we saw great snowy peaks off in the distance and even warnings of bear. I imagine if one showed its face some one would figure out how to serve up the various parts, except maybe the teeth, claws and bone, for dinner and snacks with beer. Nature seems far removed, but the splendor of Japan lies in the small touches.
Traditional homes amongst the concrete, the container gardens sprouting from the stair steps of every home, the manicured pine and cedar trees reaching out from behind small walled-in compounds, the care with which every plate of food is arranged and served and for that matter the care with which every cash transaction takes place, the exotic to sublime flower arrangements in store windows and in all the small street side shrines so tenderly cared for.
These touches and the genuine congeniality of the Japanese people more than make up for the urban sprawl. I have traveled a bit and the Japanese rival the Irish for their gentle, endearing nature except it is present in a formal sense. By this I do not mean stuffy, but like the tea ceremony, it is codified and offered with the heart.
I sit on tatami writing this, looking out through windows placed at eye level in the shoji screens that line our space, viewing our room’s small gardens on either side, listening to water flowing into moss covered stone fountains from bamboo pipes.
The gardens are still secured for winter. The trees are fastened to stakes with handmade straw ropes; pine boughs are intertwined to provide some color and texture. This is presented on a ground of bark and bamboo fences, opaque to the outside world.
This is a world unto itself. It gives me an idea of just how isolated you can get in your little or large, depending on the size of your check book, compound. I feel comfortable here because it feels like I am in a boat.
A boat confines, but also offers the possibility of a wider world, a direct experience with nature. This room does the same, except offers a direct experience to an inner world that is just as expansive, if not more so and without the worry of the anchor dragging.
We have traveled a couple of hundred miles from Japan’s Alps to Tokyo and as we approach the capital of Japan, the coast becomes a perpetual city. Of course this is all I see from the train and each train we have taken, starting with the cable car at Koya-san, gets faster and faster.
Our train into Tokyo is not the fastest and it makes a few stops along the way, but on the last leg of our journey it picks up speed until I am feeling uneasy. As we accelerate, the tailored gentleman seated in front of me leans over his wife to shut the window curtain and I hear Mozart coming from his earphones.
This may help him alleviate the stress of traveling at these speeds while still on terra firma, but I find it hard not to stare out the window. I marvel at how much real estate is passing by and cannot stop looking even if it is unsettling.
Tokyo turns out to be a safe well-run city. We camp in a 5-star hotel overlooking the Imperial Palace and decompress for several days. My nephew Nick, who has been teaching English to the youth of Japan for a year in a half, shepherds us around.
We finally catch up with the elusive cherry blossoms and rub noses with the crowds that they attract. The white blossoms remind me of the last snowfall in spring; big fluffy flakes that disappear quickly into the warming soil.
Now I am sitting in a vehicle moving at three times the speed of the shinkansen, burning kerosene instead of electricity from a fast breeder reactor. We are over Montana dropping down into Chicago’s airspace and having fitfully slept across the Pacific Ocean I have the illusion of feeling refreshed.
Some trips are fun, some stressful, some life altering. This was all three, though in my present state of jet induced fog I doubt I can do justice to the task of recounting why.
Kyoto and tea culture, sumi (charcoal) warming mizu (water), potters and chasen (tea whisk) makers, four hundred year old chawan (tea bowl), industrial tea processing, one hundred foot tall Buddha, eight-course tofu dinner, the delight of friends, wearing kimono for days at a time in rain or shine, delivering a speech and a toast, living on tatami for a week, temple vegetarian cooking, fresh beer poured well, tiny purple raw squid that kept appearing at every meal and bowing, bowing, bowing. It was a real joy to spend two weeks with such gracious people.
