Hiya, Dad –
I hope everything is going well there. Heard that Missouri finally locked down – thank goodness. The sooner people stop going outside and isolate for two weeks, the sooner this can be got under control and we can go back to our normal lives. I hope you and everyone in the family is being smart & safe.
Taking a break from lesson planning to write about my trip on Tuesday. I heard back from Wydown and I’m in the second round of interviews – I need to put together a lesson on the origins of the Cold War. They sent me the email last Tuesday, but I somehow missed it, so now I have to have everything together by the end of today! D: At the same time, I’ve got to get my lessons for this week in Korea in by the end of the day today, as well, so it’s busy, but I need a break to refocus my mind.
So, I left off my narrative having arrived in Osaka Monday night. It was cold, wet, and rainy, but Himeji was spectacular – one of the highlights of the trip, for sure. I recommend it to anyone who visits Japan.
Tuesday I had no specific plans, other than “Kyoto,” the ancient imperial capital (Tokyo wasn’t the official capital of Japan until the 1870’s). What exactly was in Kyoto? I didn’t really know, but I figured I’d play things by ear when I got there. So, I made my way through the streets back to the train station.
Osaka is a lot busier than Hiroshima. For one, it was a weekday, and no longer a holiday, so the streets were crowded with people hurrying to work. For another, it’s the second largest city in Japan, I believe, so there were people everywhere! Furthermore, the Kyoto-Osaka line is one of the most important in Japan – the two cities are only 40 miles apart, and plenty of people live in one but work in the other. Thankfully, that means there’s tons of trains, of course.
So, safely ensconced on the train, I flipped through the Internet to figure out what to do in Kyoto. The answer was pretty obvious, though – the old Imperial Palace is open to visitors! So naturally I’d go there first.
The station is in the south of town, and like all other stations, is huge. Just outside of it is a model of the old Rashomon gate, which used to stand there as the southern entrance to the city. It’s famous as the place where the Akira Kurosawa Rashomon takes place – if you’ve never seen it you should definitely give it a watch, it’s one of my favorite movies. The imperial palace is a two-mile walk north, a straight shot. So I paused at a coffee shop to get get a drink and set off.
It’s wonderful walking through a new city. You get to see the people, the buildings, the traffic, and really get to know a place. I walked by old Buddhist temple complexes side by side with modern glass and steel skyscrapers. It took an hour or so, but at last I reached the palace grounds.
When Kyoto was the capital, the area around the palace was filled with living compounds of dozens of court nobles, living near the Emperor and jostling with each other for power and position. There were all sorts of intrigues and power struggles, assassinations, raids, sometimes even open warfare in the streets of the city. When the Emperor moved to Tokyo, though, the nobility went with him, and today the old noble quarter has been turned into a wonderfully large park in the heart of the city. I came in through a side gate, not really grasping where the main entrance was, and explored some old preserved noble houses set aside as museums. Japanese houses are generally a series of rooms set around an open courtyard, with covered patios and sliding walls everywhere. Not bad places to live, honestly. The park is filled with ponds and trees and wildlife, including lots of cranes, which was cool to see.
Eventually, I wandered up to the palace itself. There are two villas – one was used for retired emperors, the other was the actual palace the sitting emperor lived in. It was about 10 am, and sign-ups had just opened up for walking tours of the retired emperor’s villa. You can’t get in without a tour, and tours fill up pretty quick, so I was lucky to get there so early. I put my name down for the 1 pm tour and headed to the other villa, which is just next door.
Only a certain amount of people are allowed into the palace at any one time. They give you a number as you enter, which you have to return when you leave (so they can keep track of how many people are in), but then you get an audio guide and you’re free to wander. The palace is mostly a set of living chambers and audience rooms, depending on if the emperor was feeling public or private that day. The public rooms include waiting areas, a carriage porch, and the famous throne room where audiences with the emperor were held. The private areas are bedrooms, living areas, places for scholars, and of course extensive, beautiful gardens. The Japanese love a good garden. I wandered around with other tourists for a few hours, taking hundreds of pictures, seeing everything. Lots of signs like “This tree is where such-and-such samurai was assassinated by Lord So-and-So during the Boshin War of 1493,” “here is where Emperor Meiji’s scholars drafted the proclamation overthrowing the shogun in 1870,” and so on. Nice place to live, though, if you can avoid being murdered by a political rival.
At noon, I grabbed some lunch right outside the palace compound. There’s an Irish pub right across the street proudly proclaiming “It’s five o’clock somewhere!” (I believe it was 5 pm in New York at the time), so I like to imagine the Emperor and his retinue ate there sometimes when out and about in the city. I rejoined my tour group at 1. Most of them were Japanese, of course, but 3 of the 50 us were foreigners – myself, clutching an English audio tour, and a French couple on their honeymoon. We were led all around the villa’s gardens, which are huge, and beautifully put together. Kyoto might have the most gardens per square mile of any place in the world, and they’re all wonderful.
As the afternoon wore on, I walked back twoards the train station. The temples I passed earlier in the day, this time I explored. They’re UNESCO World Heritage sites, and some of the largest wooden buildings in the world (I heard claimed the largest wooden structures in the world, but can’t verify that). Each temple has a large compound surrounding the enormous main buildings themselves. I was free to walk and explore to my heart’s content (removing my shoes before setting foot on the polished wooden porches or going inside, of course). There are a pair of sites, about a quarter mile of each other, so I got to explore some of Kyoto’s back alleys on my way from one to the other.
By the time I finished, it was only about 5:00, and I didn’t feel like going to Osaka yet. So I headed south from the station, again walking through some obscure and out of the way back alleyways, through small neighborhoods, past school kids hurrying home, just a regular day in Kyoto. I passed a river where the survivors of Sekigahara were executed (more on that tomorrow), but my goal was a large park/mountain just outside town, Fushimi.
Fushimi is a large Shinto complex famous for having hundreds upon hundreds of the famous torii gates. Wealthy Japanese, to get blessings for themselves, have a tradition of donating torii to the shrine, so they’ve been set up in long, winding tunnels and paths all up and down the mountain. I thought the park was a few acres at most, so I’d explore it before dinner, then head back.
It was overrun with thousands of people, vendors, police – the busiest tourist area I’d seen since Itsukushima Shrine back in Hiroshima on Saturday. The long tunnels of torii were filled with people, every last one of them posing for a classic photo to upload on social media to rave reviews later. Finding a deserted patch to do my own social media photo was almost impossible. You had to snatch moments of a few seconds when no one was around, because inevitably another gaggle would be coming down the path in just a moment. I did grab one resigned selfie at one point.
As I wound further and further up the mountain, I started to realize that this park sprawled over miles, not acres. I had gone in maybe a mile, it was dark now, and the rain, absent all day, had returned and was gently falling. I got high enough on the mountain to look over Kyoto, and STILL the torii wound away into the darkness, snaking back and forth up the mountain side. The few maps I could find were in Japanese and totally incomprehensible, and all the other tourists had vanished. In fact, by about 6 pm, I was the only soul around, it seemed. I was high up the mountain, alone, in a graveyard (lots of those in the park), in the rain and the night, and I heard rustling in the bushes. Well, no large predators in Japan, I should be fine, right?
Well, I happened to glance at a sign at that point: Wild boars sighted at night in this area! Please keep your distance!” Nope! I decided I had seen enough of Fushimi park and turned around right there. Never did make it to the top.
It took me about an hour to make my way back through the tunnels of torii and to the entrance to the park. Happily there was a subway station right across the street from the entrance, so I didn’t have to walk back to Kyoto station. I hopped on the train, rode back, and then bid farewell to Kyoto and caught my train back to Osaka.
In Osaka, it was late, but I had had a buddy who lived here for a few years after graduation, and he told me of a great dongatsu place I had to try. Dongatsu is beef and egg and noodle stew, almost like ramen. It’s buttery and garlicky and delicious. I walked into the tiny little alleyways of Osaka and found this place. It was a small hole in the wall – only seats at the counter for like 8 people. Right as I stepped through the door, in front of me were a pair of Americans, a middle aged white guy and a black guy about my age, arguing about what to get. In lots of Japanese restaurants, you order at a sort of vending machine near the door. It gives you a ticket with your selections, which you hand to the man behind the counter and he gives it to the chef.
I sat with the Americans as we waited for our dongatsu and got to talking. They were animatronic engineers, of all thigns, and were in Osaka for work. They build the funny robots that you see at amusement parks, like the characters in It’s a Small World at Disneyland. One guy had on a sweatshirt proclaiming himself a member of the Gringotts crew – he built the goblins at the Harry Potter park in Orlando. The young fella was new to the trade and was apprenticing under the older guy. They told me stories about the industry and characters they met – my favorite was “Volcano Dave,” who as you might guess is a guy who specializes in volcanoes. If you want a volcano at your park, Dave’s the guy you go to. If you remember our pool in Kauai – of course you remember that pool – it’s possible Dave did the volcano in the middle of it. They were a fun pair.
Dinner was finished late, nearly 10 pm after my long day, so I walked back to my hotel, which was just a few miles away. Back through the dining room (curry again wafting through the air) and upstairs to my little bunk bed. The next day I’d have a few more sights in Osaka, then it was off to the big one: Tokyo.
Gwangju Dreaming 