Email #2

I'm now in Nagasaki, Southern city of extremely kind people. Or at least compared to Kyoto, where people, especially the women (not to be sexist) are known for being stubborn and a little bit tired of catering to tourists. I don't blame them. I'm just sitting around, drinking some vending machine beer and being a general loser on the internet in the hotel room...with friends. Here's the second email I sent out...



9/6/05

The Kyoto-Takatsuki Shuffle

Hey everyone -

This is digest #2 of my adventures in Japan. If you know someone else who wants to read these, or if you don't actually want to yourself, send me an email telling me and i'll do something about within the next year (the next time I get on the internet). It seems as though Colgate is not going to let us send anything from Japan using school email. I can still read mail from that address, but I will probably be using my hotmail address to send things, which is a pain since I have all of you in a nice, tidy mailing list in my address book.......but I digress.

JA-PAN. The land of neon signs and raw fish. Things are still going well; I start to nod off in the early evening, but stay up until 10 pm to do my work. I wake up at 6:30 am to have breakfast and get to the station in time for class at 9 am. I know, it doesn't sound like me. Jet lag has me up that early most of the time anyway, seeing as I fall asleep before 11 pm. My host father, Daitaro, gives me a ride to the train station most mornings. Public transportation here is much more business-oriented than in New York, especially during peak hours. Part of this attitude is probably due to the fact that I live on the way between the Kyoto-Osaka commute, and Osaka is a city in which instead of saying hello a lot of people just ask "how's your business going?" I haven't been to Osaka yet, save for the one time when I spaced out and missed my stop on the way home and wound up going all the way to Juso station in Osaka due to the fact that I was on a super express train. It was only an extra half hour each way. The buses and trains can be pretty crowded, and I sometimes wind up standing for the entire trip. Good for the ankles. I really don't mind the commute - it's time for me to space out before class, which I most definitely need.

As I said before, my host family is really, really nice. I try to help out around the house as much as I can, but Keiko usually beats me to the punch or waves me off. She and Daitaro are both retired school teachers - she taught elementary school and he taught gym and science in middle school. Retired though they may say they are, they're very busy people. Daitaro is an avid kiku (kee-ku) enthusiast. Kiku is a kind of flower arranging art that deals with growing and arranging chrysanthemums. He and Keiko go to their greenhouse down the street every day to tend their plants. Apparently, they are very good - the trophies take up nearly an entire room downstairs. I know he placed at least within the top 20 in all of Japan at one time. So he is busy doing things regarding that all day. Keiko helps out with the plants, and also keeps house. There is no washing machine in the house, so she hand-washes everything. She washes my clothes every day or two, though I tell her she doesn't have to. She's a great cook - I've had a lot of interesting cuisine. Today for dinner we had chicken and chicken liver yakitori (skewers) with onion and something, pumpkin, tempura pumpkin flowers, and rice with seaweed. She always gives me too much food and I feel horrible leaving any left over. The Japanese don't generally have snacks, so even these two small, older people have pretty good-sized meals. Other interesting things I've eaten include yaki-soba, pears, daikon (Japanese white radish), mame (mashed bean type thing), kampyo sushi, okra and okra flowers, and a bunch of other things I either can't remember or forgot to ask what it was. The vast majority of the food she makes is very healthy, and the vast majority of that is delicious. The produce is really fresh, and the sushi - god. I didn't know fish could be that fresh or taste that good. The two of them, with their daughter, Tokiko, and her daughters Chiho, 19, and Kana, 17, set up sushi party Saturday night which greeted me in their special occasion tatami room when I returned from my journey (I'll get to that in a bit). Tokiko is also a teacher - she teaches English to elementary school students. The other night she came over so I could edit something she wrote for class. In return, she helped me with a speech I had to give. I don't know her daughters too well, but Chiho, who is just starting at some kind of special occupation college, comes over occasionally to practice piano (she seems to be just starting...or so I assume). Kana is a gymnast. They both constantly type away on their cell phones at an exhausting pace, as most teenage girls here tend to do. I met Chiho in a hilarious manner. I came home on an incredibly hot day, drenched in sweat, and took off my shirt and splashed my face with water. Upon realizing I still had Keiko's umbrella, I went back to the front door to put it back when in came Chiho with Keiko. I can't tell if she was frightened or holding in uproarious laughter, but there was this silly, awkward foreigner, looking totally wiped and sweating like a pig. We exchanged greetings and I speed-walked to take a shower. She doesn't talk to me much. Heh.

This Saturday was by far one of the most rewarding days on the trip so far. Professor Hudson, the Colgate teacher leading our study group, took a bunch of us to Mount Atago, a mountain outside of Northwest Kyoto with a Shinto shrine at its peak. We met at Kyoto station at 8 pm and took a train to the mountain. Our jaws began dropping immediately as we exited the train - it was beautiful. We were on a bridge overlooking some rapids and miles and miles of tree-covered mountains and hills. Despite the occasional power line, which are always, always in sight in Japan, the scenery was stunning. My friend Max and I set off to find a sturday bamboo walking staff. He wound up carrying an entire dead bamboo tree for part of the way before realizing how ridiculous he looked. Plus, how could he defend against the onslaught of ninjas we would obviously encounter with such a cumbersome object? From the station, we walked to a mountain village (I forgot the name), which was 3.5 kilometers away. The village had a few houses and mile after mile of rice fields - beautiful. We were a little tired at this point and a few people got our their lunches to start eating. I can't remember who it was who said "So this is the mountain?" but the response was not what we had expected. Professor Hudson laughed and said that we had just reached our starting point. We were at the foot of Mount Atago, looking up at it. "From here, it gets a little steep," said Professor Hudson. If I remember correctly, the walk up the mountain from here was about 4 kilometers, which doesn't take into account the incline.

My friends Max, Alex, Chris and I decided to get a work out and set off up the mountain at a rather hefty pace. The first part of the hike was through a clearing, but after that we were mostly in the shade. A first open space let us overlook the town from which we had just walked. Later, another one let us overlook all of Kyoto. Another still let us see even beyond that, a little foggy though it may have been. We saw a bunch of interesting insects along the way, including some of metallic beatles, which Max and I named an assortment of American and Japanese names. This hike was some of the best exercise I've gotten in a long time - I was sweating profusely and sore all over by the time we reached the Shinto shrine, but my god did it feel good. It wasn't over yet though. I ate my tiny Japanese sandwich in a few bites, and drank five bottles of water over the course of the hike. Japanese people, however, drink green tea (cold) instead of water, even when hydrating themselves while exercising. The shrine was interesting - the ritual is to bow twice, ring the bell there twice, clap twice and bow twice more. Of course, I didn't know this at the time, so I just kind of rang the bell, clapped a couple times, bowed and left. I've probably got some mountain demons following me around now.

After waiting 30 minutes or so for the rest of the group (we walked up in less than an hour, which impressed Professor Hudson), we headed down the Kiyotaki waterfall trail down another part of the mountain. We stopped at a small shrine with lots of tanuki (fox-raccoon animals) sculptures. We then headed down towards the waterfall. After a little while, the same four of us decided it would be more fun to run down the mountain like little kids and use shortcuts and side trails. This was kind of bad for my knees, but I got another workout. The bottom of this route led us to a small stream and a tiny waterfall, where we again awaited the rest of the group. Professor Hudson said that the tiny waterfall we just saw was not Kiyotaki, and we headed off to see it. This path was absolutely gorgeous. It was now early afternoon and thick beams of light shot through the thick foliage. We followed the water upstream over a rock path through a tiny village, where we realized it was near impossible to bring anything you might want to add to your house. Just past this village was one of the most spectacular sights I've ever seen. The Kiyotaki waterfall was through a Shinto arch, and had several small shrines (like one in a house): one to an ancient shaman and his demon assistants, one to Jizo, a bodhisattva who takes care of children, and another to someone else equipped with Chinese style lions. There were candles and devices for offerings everywhere. The sun was at just the right angle above the waterfall and we all took a number of pictures. I washed my face in the waterfall - and it felt great. Getting to the waterfall reminded me of the part in Rocky where he reaches the top of the steps, only unbelievably beautiful and more spiritual. We came back from the waterfall and walked through a planted cedar forest past a river and caught a bus back to Kyoto. It was a truly fulfilling trip. I definitely want to do it again.

Well, it's about my bed time now (9:45), so I'm going to leave this email here for now and leave the rest for next time.

Love and peace,

Jess

PS - I apologize for the weird paragraph separations, but it's late and I'm tired.