Email #8: The End Draws Ever Nearer...

11/5/05

In a fantastic combination of business and laziness, recent days have flown by without me sitting down to write one of these heart-wrenching emails. I can now count my final days in Kyoto on my fingers and toes, am I so inclined. The days after that will be spent in Toyama-ken, a cold mountain village, and Chichijima, a tropical island in the Ogasawara chain that is a 26-hour boat ride from Tokyo (there is no airport). At this point, I can only use the nothing word "interesting" to describe what the rest of the trip probably holds. The last couple weeks have been jam-packed, so let's see what I can remember of them.

My chronology may be lacking this time, but there is one place that we went a couple weeks that was absolutely mind-blowing - and that was the Miho Museum. I am not sure how many of you may have heard of it. In fact, most Japanese people don't recognize the name either. It's a 15-minute train ride out of Kyoto to Ishiyama, and then a 50-minute bus ride up a narrow, curvy, mountain road to the museum. So what makes it special? Let me beginning by announcing the name of the architect: I. M. Pei. Yep, the same I. M. Pei who designed the controversial glass pyramid in front of the Louvre. Why did Pei design this little museum with a small collection that's practically in the middle of nowhere? That's actually a pretty interesting story.

The mountain that the museum is on has been the property of a family of Japanese nobles for centuries. In recent centuries, the family "went into decline", as seems to be the common phrase among traditional Japanese nobility falling to modernity, and decided to put their massive wealth into collecting art. They collected ancient Egyptian art, Greek art, Buddhist art from China and Japan, and a variety of other types of art. With this collection developed an interesting philosophy - that what separates humans from other living beings is the ability to create art. And also that through art, mortals can achieve immortality. Following this philosophy, a cult came into creation. The word cult generally has a negative connotation, but The Hud (as many of us now call Professor Hudson) and I somewhat seriously considered attempting to join this cult, small and secretive though it is. I have forgotten the name of the cult, but the translation was "Divine Light Organization". A little creepy, yes, but the museum they brought into creation was outstanding.

A few years ago, they asked I. M. Pei to consider building a museum for them, along with a temple for their cult. Pei was reluctant at first, but upon seeing the would-be site, changed his mind. There is a famous Chinese folk tale about a fisherman who lost his way and wound up in a grove of blossoming peach trees in front of a cave in the mountainside. When he went through the cave to the other side, he found himself in a heavenly land akin to Shangri-la. When Pei visited the mountain, the beautiful peach trees blossoming and sprawling natural landscape reminded him of this story, and upon hearing that the name of the place was Peach Valley, just like in the story, he realized that he had no choice but to build the museum and temple.

He built the museum to resemble the story - at the entrance to the grounds is a simple building he designed as a restaurant and souvenir shop, with a path engulfed in peach trees leading to a tunnel in the mountainside. Rather than build on top of the mountain, he excavated and replaced everything in the mountainside so as not to destroy the view of the landscape. The tunnel goes through the middle of the mountain, and in an eerie way makes you think you are inside when you clearly are not. Upon coming through the tunnel, you see a series of metal bars coming down from above which were a really cool architecturally element, but I cannot clearly explain how. Then you see ahead of you, across a small bridge, the main building of the museum, designed in typical Pei style - with lots of glass paneling and black and silver steel. Architecture buffs apparently go to the museum and sit in awe of Pei's work for hours on end. Entering the museum, there is a large glass panel visible facing out the other side of the museum. Looking through this glass, one can see the huge alien-like temple and bell tower that Pei built for the cult in the distance. It's a huge tease - no one outside of the cult is allowed back there, and very little is known about many cult activities, or so I hear. The temple and bell tower seriously looked like something out of an alien world. I felt like a loser for making the comparison, but the tunnel and these two buildings made me feel as though I was on Halo (video game reference). The visual connection was uncanny.

The museum's collection was small, but impeccable (I think I just stole that sentence straight from The Hud). I've never been much of an art history guy, but the Egyptian and Buddhist art were excellent. There was a large Gandhara Buddha that was especially cool. There was a special section on Chinese art when we went, and more art was on display there. The collection and setup of pieces at Miho was head and shoulders above any other museum I've ever been to. I moved through the collection very slowly, and read all of the plentiful explanations of pieces, the English of which was much better than that of other Japanese sightseeing destinations. Lunch at the cafe was the only negative point - tiny dishes that were horribly expensive, though I suppose I should have expected as much, given the architecture. That aside, pretty much everywhere else we've been has been surrounded by some form of modern technology, but this place, aside from the obligatory power lines in the distance (it IS Japan, after all), was very natural. Pei's buildings blended in an odd way with the mountainside. It was somewhat surreal.

A couple members of our group never made it to the meeting point at the end of the day, so they got left at the museum. We laughed about that for a little while and didn't really worry too much, since the bus only went to one place. It turns out that Scott and Max had been sitting in the cafe reflecting on the museum all afternoon and kept getting served free green tea by the employees, so they didn't get up to leave until late in the afternoon.

The next trip Professor Hudson took us on was a short one. We took a 5-minute bus ride from school to Shinnyodo Temple. Shinnyodo is a Zen temple, but more specific than that I actually can't remember. The first building we walked to had a Buddha enshrined in the typical Zen fashion - with brighter colors than other Japanese Buddhist shrines, and also some offerings at the Buddha's foot, I believe. We walked past some stone Jizos and a beautiful graveyard that was hit hard by an earthquake. Gravestones were broken and had fallen over here and there, but they had been left in this way, which I found interesting. At the back of the graveyard was a large pagoda. We passed some Buddhist statues on our way out of the graveyard area, one of which we joked was my friend Dave as a Buddha due to what appeared to be a giant afro. At the end of this nice little walk was another series of buildings, from where you could hear the monks chanting. In one building was an incredible looking Buddha of which I remember very little (other than that it was incredible). In the larger building there was another Buddha enshrined, and people came in to pray. There were also some famous wall scrolls there, including one of the Buddha passing into nirvana and all forms of living beings echoing the event in their own way.

That Friday was the date of our overnight with Ritsumeikan University, where the students had arranged an entirely too organized series of activities for us to join them in. After having dinner at the cafeteria with them, we went to the visitor's hotel, where we sat down for a drinking party with about 50 members of the English Speaking Society. Each of us was given a group of 5 or so Ritsumeikan students to sit with and chat in a combination of English and Japanese. When I envisioned a college drinking party, this was not exactly what I had in mind. There were roughly two cans of drink to a person, most of which were some strange fruit spritzer concoction and the remainder of which were beer. Not only do Japanese people get drunk very quickly, you know it immediately by the shade of bright red that their faces turn. This only happened to a few people at the party, who became hilarious as the night wore on. One activity they had us take part in was a combination of charades and telephone, where people stand in a line and wordlessly relay an action to each other. At one point, an action started out as volleyball and ended as Hadouken (video game reference). It was pretty comical. At the end of the party, a member of my group ran around cleaning up the garbage and drinking any remaining drinks. My friend Max ran around as well, asking for any unopened cans in a last ditch effort to turn a Japanese drinking party into an American one. The sleeping arrangements that night were........interesting. The guys, all 30-something of us, had one tatami room to sleep in. It was a rather large room and we took up the entire space with our futons. It was pretty ridiculous. The girls, all 15 or so that didn't go home rather than sleeping over, had three rooms, I believe. Before getting the futons out, some of the students were having an arm wrestling contest, which made my belligerent friend Max jump with joy. Of course, his arm and chest muscles are too broad for him to actually be effective in arm wrestling, so it eventually turned into an all-out wrestling match. Even big Max was bested in the end by a smaller Japanese guy who had been studying Judo for seven years. His name was Takeshi and he was an excellent grappler. After some more ridiculous escapades, we hit the collective sack.

The next day, we had a a normal schedule, which included kickball, and a rainy day schedule, which included, of course, a cross-dressing competition. A cross-dressing competition?! Yeah, OK. A cross-dressing competition. They're not actually going to go through with that, are they? Oh, you crazy Japanese...

Before this impending destruction of civilized discourse, we were again organized into groups to chat officially about this and that. I actually enjoyed this part a lot, which I attribute to having a cool group. Satoshi "Itosato" Ito, sat to my left. He seemed to be the most average, organized member of the group. To his left was a guy who I knew only as "Chicken" - he was the crazy one. He had cut his hair himself and it all clumped to one side. He also wore emo glasses and liked Green Day and Sum 41 (...). His goals in life were to live in Edo Castle (equivalent of wanting to live in the White House) and find a wife who's views were exactly the same as his: patriotic. He was interesting character. To his left was our group leader, Kazu "Kaz" Yoshida. Kaz was the cool character of the three. He had heard of a bunch of bands that I enjoy and was generally laid back about everything. I think he said he had gone to America at one point - his English was pretty good. To his left were two girls, a Chinese girl named Liu and another who left early whose name I forget. They both seemed to be pretty average, quiet girls. They did bring up one interesting point though. In short, they asked me why American girls are so, for lack of a better word (but many worse ones), "catty". Apparently Japanese girls don't generally get in fights with each other the same way Americans do. Just an interesting little tidbit I found out.

The group's major official topic of conversation was, true to the rest of our stay at Ritsumeikan, "Love and Gender". I can't really explain how, but the Japanese psyche on topics like this is completely different from the American one. They just think differently. The group and I had lunch at a cool little alternative cafeteria where i had the coopa (?), a Korean dish I had never heard of before that was pretty good. The cross-dressing competition turned out to be far too comical for its own good. I won't go into details, other than that Max donned a skirt and made some hilarious gestures that had our hosts on the floor. There were 4 other cross-dressing couples, one of whom was very good, but not as good as Max and his girl-dressed-as-a-man boyfriend. Max was the only person from our Colgate group who took part in the contest, as one couple in every group was voted in. All of the Rits students spoke in English for this portion, while we spoke in Japanese, which made everything even funnier. At the end of our stay, Makoto Mito, whom I had made friends with at our first meeting, and I exchanged emails so he could invite us to another get-together (but not like this one). Mister Mito, as they called him, was among the coolest of the bunch, along with Chicken, Kaz (who is apparently the club president), and Sei-chan (from the first meeting). It was good times.

Last Sunday, The Hud took those willing to Arashiyama ("Stormy Mountain"), a beautiful area in Western Kyoto renowned for its bamboo groves and shops, among other things. I unintentionally got there about an hour and a half early, since I wasn't sure what time we were meeting, and hung out by myself in front of the station. When everyone finally arrived, we walked to the river, where cormorant fishing is popular. I don't remember exactly how it works, but the fisherman capture some cormorants, and have them catch fish for them. They stick a ring of some kind in the bird's beak so it can't swallow the fish and grab it straight from the bird's mouth. Cormorants are apparently excellent at catching fish. First, we went to a Buddhist temple complex where there were tons of tourists. I don't remember its name, but its renowned for its vegetarian cuisine, which is very expensive. Next, we went to a small shrine/graveyard where graves that had been scattered and broken throughout the area had been arranged around a Buddhist sculpture as though they were listening to the Buddha preach. The identities attached to the graves have long been forgotten and any sign of individuality has faded from their designs. An actual stupa was built on one side of the graveyard, which surprised me greatly as I didn't know they existed in Japan. In the back of the area was a small shrine to the Bodhisattva Jizo. This one was specifically meant to protect unborn fetuses in their path to the afterlife. What made it even more depressing was that baby's toys had been put beside Jizo from families who had had miscarriages in order to protect their unborn children on the path to the afterlife. Beyond this sad sight, we moved to see Rakushisha ("house of fallen persimmons"), the old house of Mukai Kyorai, one of the ten disciples of famed haiku poet Matsuo Basho. The Hud is a big time Basho enthusiast, so there was no way we were going to Arashiyama without going there. It is a small house with a straw roof surrounded by persimmon trees. Small, but pretty. There were stones with famous haiku on them in the garden. Next, we wandered through some really beautiful bamboo groves to a small circular shrine with six Buddhist figures. People walked around it pouring water from the shrine on each of the figures in an area on their own body that they wished to have healed. I tried to pour water on my stomach and missed. Figures. Next, we went into some really cool shops, mostly specializing in bamboo, where I decided I would have to come back when I got a more permanent house or apartment. There were tons of cool little things, but they were mostly things that you would get to decorate a house. And they were kinda expensive. We walked beyond the shops and through a tunnel and found ourselves at the same place at which we had ended our hike up Mount Atago, called Kiyotaki. It was a beautiful area and I plan on going back soon when autumn colors are in full effect.

This past week, the art school at which I take Japanese classes had a small festival. They decorated the front of the school in bright colors and streamers. Casual musical acts performed, small food stands were set up, and students had little shops where they sold clothes and small goods they had made outside the lobby. Exhibitions were up throughout the main building, some of which were pretty interesting. Of course, my camera has not been behaving lately so I haven't been able to take any pictures.

This past Thursday we went around Kyoto to see three famous places: Ninna-ji (Temple), Ryoan-ji (Temple), and Nijo-jo (Castle). The first place we went was Ninna-ji, a residence of a former emperor during the Heian period, I think. It was made for the emperor to get him out of the real Imperial Palace so that a younger, more malleable emperor could take his place. This was the way the Fujiwara clan controlled Japan in the Heian Period - by turning emperors into monks before they have the ability to make their own decisions. Thus, there would be 22-year-old retired emperors who lived the rest of their lives as monks. Ninna-ji is a major temple in the Shingon Buddhist sect, and is also the base of a sect of a Flower Arrangement. Tons of buildings and objects from there have been listed as National Treasures.

That last paragraph was me summarizing the pamphlet I took home from Ninna-ji and throwing in a few historical things that may or may not actually be correct. The truth is that I have seen enough temples at this point in a short enough time that they are starting to mix together in my head a little. Ninna-ji had a pretty nice pagoda, I remember, and also some low-branched cherry trees for which it is apparently famous. Another reason I wasn't incredibly impressed by Ninna-ji was because the next two places we went were far more interesting. The first of the two was Ryoan-ji, home of the world-famous, enigmatic Zen garden known by that name, which is composed of 15 rocks and a lot of raked white gravel. Sitting in front of the garden may very well have led to some good meditation, had there not been so many tourists huddled around it. A lot of people think the garden is overrated, seeing as it is really pretty desolate and there isn't much to it, but I had the feeling that under the right conditions, sitting by the garden may have been a very, very Zen experience. Aside from the actual garden, Ryoan-ji had some very cool buildings and a big, beautiful pond with large clumps of lilies and a small island in the middle (it was prettier than the language I'm using right now makes it sound).

The final place we went to that day was Nijo-jo, the castle of the Tokugawas. It was a really cool place. The planks had a mechanism, known as nightingale floor, that made them squeak when someone walked on them, so as to protect the castle from a ninja invasion. The castle's interior was gorgeous. The paintings on the walls everywhere were excellent - many, done in gold, had been left the same as they were when originally painted. On the other hand, a lot of ceiling painting had been redone a few decades ago and is already fading. There were paintings in some chambers of fierce tigers, though there were none in Japan so the artists worked off of domestic cats to make the paintings. There was no furniture anywhere, which was not much different from when it was actually lived in. When people were to sit down, they were brought cushions. Futons were brought out at night to sleep on. Everything was kept in compartments in the wall. One of the rooms had mannequins situated the way the shogun, his page boy and the ministers would have been sitting during a meeting. In the wall next to the emperor was a hidden room from which soldiers would be armed and ready in case the emperor was attacked. In the innermost chamber of the castle were the emperor's private chambers, where only women attendants were allowed. The women brought him food, kept house, and provided other services to the emperor. Outside the castle were really nice gardens with a pond and stones designed by famous artists.

I know this email seems rushed, and that's because it is. Please take it upon your imaginations to throw in segue sentences and other examples of basic writing skills. These last couple weeks are going to be a bit tougher, as I no longer have time to put off the things that I told myself I would do before leaving. There is far too much to see around Kyoto - I still feel as though I have barely seen any of it at all. Some of the other students went mountain climbing on Hira-san, a difficult climb by Lake Biwa, today, and others still went to roam around Osaka. But I needed a day to get my life in order so here I am - in front of the computer, but not connected to the internet. I will probably send one more email before I leave for Toyama-ken, but I leave no promises that it will be any better put-together than this one. Hope all is well with all.

Love and peace,
Jess