#4: The Good, The Bad and The Japanese

9/24/05

Yep, I'm still here - the place where even the hobos make themselves little houses out of paper and take off their shoes when they enter them. It's finally starting to cool down here. Kyoto is around the same latitude as North Carolina, which makes Takatsuki around...South Carolina. Palm trees can grow here, but the few I see probably didn't naturally sprout up there. I still come home from school sweating and overheated, but no longer drenched and delirious (a slight dramatization for example's sake). There's been a bit of a breeze sometimes as well, which is a welcome addition to the usual heat.

This week there were two Japanese holidays - one for grandparents, I believe, on Monday, and another on Friday, which I believe had something to do with the beginning of fall. Everyone had off from school on those days...except for foreigners like me who don't celebrate the holidays. When I asked Keiko and Daitaro what they did to celebrate, they laughed and said that every day was a holiday for them. They are retired, but my friends and I have been noticing that a lot of people in this country seem to be generally happy with their lives and motivated to do what they do, even if they have a run-of-the-mill office job. Previously I didn't think this was the case, but more and more I've been noticing that laziness is a genuinely American epidemic. A walk through Ankoji-cho will show teenagers walking a group of dogs, an older couple keeping their garden, men working on rooftops, people tinkering with their cars and bikes, kids in the playground, etc. Keiko and Daitaro generally only watch TV during dinner, when they are not running around taking care of business.

There is, of course an ugly side to the Japanese psyche - a very, very ugly side. Recent years have brought a new element to the suicide epidemic here: group suicide websites. People - usually teenagers and 20-somethings - talk to each other about how much they hate living, and plan in advance to commit suicide together. For a lot of them, it seems that they are so extraordinarily lonely, that dying together with someone they have never met before is the only thing that will make them happy. A lot of these people just access the sites through their cell phones, which is pretty scary, because a walk through downtown Kyoto will show huge masses of people messaging each other and going online on their phones. Thinking about the possibility that they could be planning to kill themselves can turn a mood sour. Being here for three months, the chance is still pretty low, but I hope I don't witness any train jumping.

Youth culture here isn't all death and doom, however - people here dress more colorfully on the whole than in the states. It's probably because students are forced to wear uniforms in most schools. Young Japanese love shirts with English phrases on them - think of it as their reverse version of the Chinese/Japanese tattoo fad in the States. I'd need to be constantly alert to take pictures of all of the funny sounding English (or Engrish, as it has been dubbed). Shirts I've seen people wearing a lot include "I LOVE HAPPY" and "EGOTIST". Pop songs here typically include English choruses, or at least the occasional English nonsensibility. A song I've had stuck in my head lately has a chorus of "Crash- into the rolling (or is it roaring?) morning, Flash- I'm in the coolest driver's high..." Smarter business here have their store signs and advertisements with at least some English - with as few words as possible. This is not just for foreigners looking for an accessible bar, it also shows local youths that the business is hip to the modern.


Last Saturday (the 17th, was it?) I went with the study group to Fushimi-Inari Taisha, the shrine to Inari, the fox god of agriculture. It's located in an area of Southern Kyoto that I'd never before wandered - the houses were bigger, with nice gates, garages with BMWs inside and the rest. One house even had it's own personal temple/dojo separate from the main house. Despite all of this, the houses were still close together, as is the Japanese way of conserving space in a small, densely populated country. On an interesting side note, Tokyo was built on some very soft ground, and an earthquake may come through there in the near future that would absolutely devastate the area. It may be to the same catastrophic degree as the Tokyo earthquake early in the 20th century. The shops and restaurants in the area specialize in inari zushi (rice in a bean curd pocket, named after the fox god) and kitsune udon (inari zushi in an udon soup - kitsune is Japanese for fox). At the bottom of the mountain was a beautiful temple where some tourists student field trips had gathered. It wasn't a mob scene, but apparently that spot entertains more people on New Year's Eve than any other spot in all of Japan. As with other temples, this one had a small sink area nearby where you ladle yourself out water to clean your hands and mouths (but not drink) before you pray. Professor Hudson made his son Taro (who's mother is Japanese) do so and we proceeded on our walk.

The entrance to the main trail is marked by two stone foxes, in homage to Inari. All of the poles and Shinto torii (arches) in Fushimi-Inari Taisha, of which there must have been more than a thousand, were orange. I forgot to ask why this was. At one point we walked for a while under a tunnel of orange torii, consecutive arch after arch, for several minutes. I believe that the arches were put up for people who had dedicated money to the shrine, as they all had names on them. There were all sizes of torii on sale in the trail-side shops. I almost bought a pint size one, but didn't remember to do so on my way down. Near the top of the trail were a series of shrines with foxes and stone markers of some sort. I'm having trouble describing these in my head, so I guess the mental image will have to wait until I steal the digital photos from my friend Joe (my camera's battery ran out again midway through).

Sitting at one of the small shrines, I saw a bug on the wall that looked remarkably like a stick. This may not sound interesting, but this bug looked so much like a twig that I did a double take. It was way longer than most stick bugs I imagine, so it must have had incredible camouflage. Unfortunately for the bug, he was doing something that twigs don't do, so I noticed him. My friend Max picked him up and carried him, kicking and screaming, for the next leg of the walk. As was the tradition the two of us had begun at Mount Atago, we decided to name the bug, and due to his looks, I thought he looked like a Twiggy. Twiggy was quite a kicker, however, and after a while Max had to let him go. I thought I'd never see another Twiggy again, but then I was wrong. We came upon Twiggy II some time later, and Max picked him up again. Max and Professor Hudson's son Taro were walking some twenty feet behind me at one point when I heard them giggling like schoolgirls. "There's no way..." I remember thinking, but then I turned my head and saw that my instinct was right. Max had launched Twiggy II twenty feet, sky high with good aim, and the poor bug had ended his frightening flight by firmly clamping himself to my behind. I let Twiggy stay for a little while, but eventually decided that no one rides for free, and set him back in the woods. And by set, I mean, tossed, because for some reason it was hilarious to watch the poor guy fly through the air looking for something to clamp onto. Oh, simple pleasures - it doesn't matter what part of the world you're in, you can still have fun by being immature.

I know I said I would have an easier time sending mail last time, but apparently I was wrong because the library has been closed for renovation for the past two weeks. I can pick up a very weak wireless signal outside the library, but it's pretty unreliable. So for the time being, sending email for me is still a matter to grumble over.

Ai to heiwa,
Jess