Japan On My Mind

When we went to Japan 2 years ago I fell in love. With the cities, with the people, with the food, with the culture. You name it, I loved it. I hadn't expected to become so enamored although I was very excited to be going, but it happened.

And now of course I've been watching the news since the earthquake earlier this month, in awe of the swaying buildings in Tokyo and the awesome power that moved them. The tsunami and it's aftermath in Sendai has been horrifying to watch. And now the nuclear plant, radiation and the growing dread of what will happen in Japan and beyond haunt me.

I just read an amazing story about being trapped on Mount Hakone. It reminded me of the much more enjoyable 2 days we spent in Hakone. We even took the same cable car trip. I can't imagine what they all went through, it must have been so scary- and COLD!!!

I'm just giving Japan a little shout out today, hoping for the best for both the country and the people. There's a lot going on in the world and we tend to have a bit of ADD, paying the most attention to whatever is most current. I know some friends of mine have friends and family over there, some in the areas hit the hardest. I'm hoping you all receive good news.

There are many sites/products/agencies you can give to to support Japan. If you feel strongly about one please feel free to put it in the comments.

2011 - A New Decade

Happy New Year everyone! We've just returned from our annual "ring in the new year" trip, this time in Norway. It was 10 years ago that this little tradition unofficially started. Dayne and I were just dating and Forest was getting ready to move to Annecy, France to study. Along the way her and some friends were heading to Italy and we all decided to meet up in Paris for New Years Eve. This would be Dayne's and my first trip together!

We started the evening with dinner at Au Pied de Cochon with Forest, Jeff and Tim (who's birthday it was also). It was very cold in Paris and we were planning on being outside at midnight so we made our dinner last probably longer than the restaurant would have liked. We then bundled up and headed out, bottles of champagne stuffed in our backpacks. Every bridge on the Seine was lit up with the new Euro symbol and the flags of each participating country were raised and waving. We made our way to Place de la Concorde where a huge crowd of people were gathered to watch the fireworks at midnight. Having drunk all of our champagne we bought beers from vendors with little tables set up for the occasion, toasted and kissed at midnight and then paraded down the Champs- Élysées with the rest of Paris.

We would later stop at a cafe, drink the rest of the night away and pay our tab with some of the first Euro's to be dispensed from an ATM in Europe!

A few years pasted with us having parties at home or heading out for dinner with friends for the occasion. But we missed that experience- how do others celebrate the new year? How do the cities look all decorated for the holidays? How many places can we drink Champagne in? And so in 2005, with 8 others we headed off to St. Petersburg, Russia and rang in the new year with vodka and live music on Nevsky Prospekt.

2006 took 4 of us to the Big Apple, possibly the world's best known New Years celebration. We chose not to stand in Times Square but went to one of those big ticketed party's, made our own fun and then headed to Pegu Club right after midnight.

In 2007 we were just 3 and we toured all over South Africa finally landing in Cape Town to see the new year come in with fireworks at the waterfront.

2008 would also mark my big 40th and we were off to Japan! Myself, Dayne, Forest and new year eve tripper first timer Matthieu would spend the evening at the Yasaka shrine in Kyoto with thousands of others. We drank beer and Saki while watching as people practiced the traditional first blessing of the year with prayers to Buddha before lighting a dried twig from one of the many lanterns in order to make the years first soup using flame from the temple.  

And in 2009 we traveled illegally to Cuba, welcoming the new year with aged Havana Club rum and canon shots in Havana's harbor.  Besides the normal 3, team Cuba included Matthieu for the 2nd time, Violaine and a different Tim.

And of course that brings us up to date with myself, Dayne, Forest, Matthieu, Violaine and new comer Caitlin watching some crazy ass fireworks and drinking Aquavit in Oslo Norway which I'll write about in a separate post.

I'm excited to see where the next 10 years will take us, what we'll see and experience and who will come along to share it with. It's been a hell of a decade, here's to the next!

A day trip to Inari and a farewell to Japan

Our last day in Japan, tomorrow we all would leave at different times, 3 separate taxis scheduled to pick us up and take us to various train stations and airports.

We started with breakfast in a nice tea house we had seen on our first day's walk of Kyoto. The garden here is so pretty and the koi are HUGE!

After breakfast Dayne, Matt & I decided to take a day trip to Inari. It was an easy and quick train ride to the small town where the streets were jammed with people making their way to Fushimi Inari Shrine and the the 1000's of torii that wind their way up the small hillside.

The streets were also lined with food vendors, a street carnival feel going on although very different than the street foods we see at home. Here there were whole mackerel grilling on sticks, skewers of chicken, soba noodles being griddled, candied fruits, whole grilled squid on sticks and Sapporo beer everywhere.

We spend some time walking up the hill, through the thousands of orange torii gates. Small "neighborhoods" of shrines would be grouped together here and there, most covered with offerings of sake, sushi, rice, etc. It was a very pretty walk, the higher you got up the hill the less people there were.


After some street food and some beers we headed back to Kyoto to meet up with Forest for our last night. One last cocktail hour in the apartment, one last night out for dinner which would consist of kushi skewers and then okonomiyaki (our favorite food in Japan) and finally a go at karaoke!

We got a private room and immediately ordered up some Japanese whiskey and set about trying to figure out how to work the equipment. There was a good assortment of song choices and even some holiday tunes. We had forgot our animal costumes so just had to sing in normal clothes!


It was a great last night spent with good friends!

Dayne and I had a bit of trouble getting out to the airport the next day. After a quick and uneventful bullet train ride up to Tokyo I accidently got us on a train to the airport which stopped at every town between Tokyo and Narita, making the trip over 1 1/2 hours! We arrived 45 minutes before our flight departure but no one seemed to mind. We rushed to our gate and stood in the long line to board and were then informed that they were moving us from our coach seats at the very back of the plane to row 6 in First Class!! We were so excited as we sat down and were served champagne. This was real international First Class which I had never had a chance to fly on! I spent about half the flight home playing with my seat which fully reclined and had a massage feature. We were also served this lovely dinner

Thanks for following along on our trip and thanks for the nice comments. As always if you'd like to see all the pictures from Kyoto you can click here.

Starting 2009 in Japan

For the first day of 2009 we decided to do our own walking tour of the Gion and Pontocho Street. Forest took the lead and off we went exploring our neighborhood. It's amazing how beautiful the area was! People, many in traditional dress, were still streaming in mass to the shrine so it was good to be walking in the opposite direction.

You know the saying "sometimes the best things in life are free"!

It's always fun to just wander and take it all in. We found a little noodle restaurant and decided to stop for lunch, it is traditional to have noodles on New Years Day to bring you prosperity for the months ahead.

We had to break out the language books (thanks Lauren!) to order as there was no English menu, but we did well and received big bowls of delicious noodles in an amazing broth and a huge tempura prawn on top! We sat crossed legged on the floor slurping noodles and listening to all the others diners slurp too.

Continuing our walk we headed across the Kamogawa River to Pontocho Street. This is an interesting area, originally the red light district and now crammed with restaurants, bars, tea houses, love hotels, etc. The first street is so narrow that you can barely pass people walking side by side, the second a bit wider. It's a very interesting area and I only wish we would have had time to go at night. We did spot a big kareoke parlour...


We had decided that evening to check out the Touzan Bar at the Hyatt Kyoto . Although Dayne makes a mean martini and we had had some delicious Japanese whiskeys we were all jonesing for a nice, well made cocktail and had heard really good things about Touzan. The bartenders were great and after a drink or two we were so happy with everything that we decided to just have some sushi and make ourselves at home for the night. We took a great video of just how much care goes into the making of cocktails! Thanks to the iPhone application of Cocktail DB and our bartenders who were very excited to make different things we had a great night, I highly recommend Touzan!

Happy New Year!

Now that the Spring Equinox has come and gone, I think it's well past time to post about our New Year experiences.

On the day before NYE, the four of us walked out of the Gion District, across the Kamogawa River, and to the nearby Nishiki Market. I was expecting something along the lines of Seattle's Pike Place Market, if maybe a bit bigger. Instead we found miles (yes, miles) of covered streets that were packed wall-to-wall with people, containing stores and stalls that sold all manner of often-unidentifiable food and related items. It's hard to describe how packed it was; we didn't have any basis for comparison, but we assumed that the crowd was due to pre-New Year preparations and the holiday break, rather than being representative of normal traffic.


We knew that we wanted to bring back one of the highly-acclaimed knives from the Aritsugu knife shop. The shop was easier to find than we had anticipated, though no less crowded than anywhere else. Wendy and I picked out a chef's knife that we liked and they polished it, then stamped a phonetic 'Miller' onto the blade in katakana. By far the nicest knife we've ever owned, it was also surprisingly inexpensive; now that we can see how high the online ordering prices are, I wish we'd bought several more at the time!



After the market, we walked back to the apartment, rested for a bit, then went out for a simple dinner at a neighborhood izakaya. We did hit one bar before retiring for the evening; good thing, because it almost broke the bank! We found a nearby bar, not gaijin-oriented but not unfriendly either, that was run by a woman who we surmise was a retired geisha. She was remarkably precise and unwaveringly polite, but our ~1oz/25mL shots of Japanese whiskey ended up being $25 each. Thankfully we realized that after one and quickly left to return to our "home" bar!



On New Year's Eve, we all took the train out to Nara, a nearby city and the location of a UNESCO World Heritage site. (Since Forest works for UNESCO, you'd think she could claim this was all work travel, but no.) We were particularly interested in seeing Tōdai-ji, a huge Buddhist temple and the largest wooden building in the world.

Tōdai-ji and the surrounding areas were in full preparation for the coming NYE festivities, so we saw food stalls and other merchants setting up everywhere. Nara is also apparently a home to a large population of urban deer, so much like on Miyajima, we had to watch where we walked and watch what the deer tried to get into.



The temple itself reminded me of a large aircraft hanger in its immensity, but was at least as ornate as anything else we'd seen. The biggest surpise was that the current structure is 30% smaller than the previous, which was destroyed by fire in the late 1600s.



By the time we returned to Kyoto, all the main streets in Gion were becoming crowded as people streamed towards the Yasaka and other local shrines. After some champagne at the apartment to celebrate in Western style, we joined the throngs and wound our way up the hills. In Japan, on New Year's Eve and for the following several days, it's traditional to visit the shrines with one's entire family, in part to pray for peace and prosperity in the coming year and in part as a huge social occasion. In Kyoto, home to the largest number of surviving pre-WWII shrines, the locals take that particularly seriously. In our quiant Gion district it had been easy to underestimate the population of Kyoto; that night, though, it was obvious what a huge city it was, and everyone was trying to go to the same small parks! We found it curious that there wasn't a big event at midnight, such as bell-ringing or fireworks (I have to believe that fireworks are discouraged around so many old wooden structures).



Eventually we toasted the New Year over beers in a tent that had been set up for the occasion, and then found our way back to our apartment for our first sleep of 2009!

Geisha Glamour Shots!

For my birthday Forest had arranged for us to get geisha makeovers! That is definitely not something you get to do every day at home, or ever!!! We were excited and headed out to find the studio which proved to be much harder than we had anticipated. Even with the exact address written down locals in the area could not figure out where this place was. We asked a waitress at a coffee shop (which would turn out to be just 2 blocks from the studio!), delivery men- who you would think knew the city, and even called the studio for additional directions. In Kyoto we saw a lot of people dial the phone number into their phones which would then give them the address and the area of town that the location was in. This was also true of cab companies which just asked for the land line and then showed up on time.

Once we did find the studio they had us change into plain white dressing robes. I'll just say that Japanese women are much more slight in build than American stock ;) Forest and I were bound and strapped tight into these little robes!

Then the makeup was applied- creamy white base, bright red lips, heavy black eye liner. Was this a geisha makeover or had we stumbled into the mime makeover studio? Of course Forest and I found this all very funny and started giggling uncontrollably which led to me having tears of laughter which smeared my eye makeup which got us a firm lecture from the makeup lady! We are trouble.



After the makeup was applied we picked out a kimono from a rack we were led to. The women wrapped us in layers and layers of garment. There were more lightweight robes to be put on over our dressing gown, then the heavier kimono. Then various sashes, ties, belts, etc. were pulled incredibly tight and tied. Finally a large headpiece of hair and hair ornaments all set in a metal cap of sorts was set and tied upon our heads. Oh lord, if we hadn't already been giggling...

We were lead to the photo studio (and walking in these things is crazy hard!) where each of us were given our own photographer. Mine posed me and had me hold things that were very geisha like I assume. She spoke no English but would hold her hand where I was to gaze. My make up woman had already told me that I was to smile very small for this look. There were umbrellas, Japanese balls, high heeled wooden shoes, etc. Each time she took a photo she would get excited and exclaim "OK! Very Good!" if she liked it or "Oops, Sorry!" if she didn't.

The photo shoot was actually a blast! It was much more fun that getting our make up done as we expected. They even shot a few of Forest and I together, they let us do a "free style" as they called it and we flashed peace signs. They loved that!!

The studio mailed us our professional photos just last month, they are actually pretty good- much better than these here. I'm happy to show them to you next time you are over, I'll entertain you with drinking games and witty banter as well, for that is the way of the geisha! :)

Kyoto walking tour

Our first morning in Kyoto we took a 1/2 day, 4 mile walking tour of part of the city with local guide Shihoko. She layed out a plan to show us just a few of the temple and shrine highlights of this amazing city.

As we had stayed up a bit late and slept in we hadn't had any coffee/tea. When we asked about grabbing something she took us to a Starbucks! She said it was the only shop that did "to-go", oh well.

As we walked out of our Gion neighborhood Shihoko pointed out the Geisha school and tea houses. Also she showed us the apartments where the geisha live and the small wooden plaques hung outside showing who lived inside. There are so few geisha left in Kyoto and they were all living just steps from our apartment!


We started off at the beautiful Yasaka Shrine, a very popular shrine on holidays. There was lots of activity as everyone was getting set up for new years eve. Shihoko was great at explaining what everyone would be doing that evening and also what people did in general when visiting the shrines. She also helped me to shake a lucky number out of a wooden box and then turn it in to receive my fortune. The fortune she read to me was the best she said! Money, love, health, etc were all to be mine! Now that was worth a couple of yen for sure!



Onward to Chion-in Temple and the massive gates that welcome you. There was a service going on inside and Shihoko took us in to watch for a while. The buildings were so old and beautiful. We learned how the smoke from the incense was thought to make you more beautiful and smarter so we stood in it for a while. I'm pretty sure it worked!

From the temple we walked through the beautiful Maruyama park and then through part of the Higashiyama neighborhood. I can't say enough about the beauty of this city. The buildings, parks, streets, etc are charming and so interesting to look at, truly foreign to our eyes. As we walked through the crowded streets we gasped as we saw a geisha standing silently and posing for pictures. Shihoko told us later that Japanese tourists will pay to dress up and walk through parts of the Gion. This girl looked really good but what gave it away I guess was her being by herself as well as being out at this time of day (early afternoon) when most would be in school.


Perhaps the most impressive of the sights that day was the sprawling Kiyomizu-dera Temple. We climbed the steps through massive orange gates up to a height which gave you wonderful (although hazy) views of Kyoto. Here sat the pagoda and other surrounding buildings. We walked with thousands of people towards the temple which is a huge wooden structure built completely without any nails. It sits 13 meters (about 42 feet) above the ground and the site is over 1200 years old! There are many different shrines and statues on the grounds, each with their own story. One of the things I enjoyed the most was watching worshipers line up at Otowa-no-taki to catch the flowing spring water in cups and drink it for health and prosperity.


Our last stop of the day was at Sanjusangen-do, the temple of 1001 Buddahs. Unfortunately you aren't allowed to take pictures inside but I found this website that has some great images. Once you take your shoes off you enter this massive building, surprisingly quiet for the number of people inside, lit very dimmly and smelling of incense. The site of all those statues with their real gold is amazing! The temple is also know for training the best of Kyoto's archerers and you can still see marks in the beams where some of the arrows stuck.
Walking around Kyoto with a local was such a great way to get aquainted with the city as well as learn a little of the customs of the people. I would highly recommend Shihoko should you ever go!

To see all the photos from our walking tour click here!

Hypocenter

"Hiroshima has the advantage of being such a size and with possible focusing from nearby mountains that a large fraction of the city may be destroyed." --Minutes of the second meeting of the Target Committee, Los Alamos, May 10-11, 1945

When the Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, the city essentially came to an end. That one fact represented almost everything I knew about our next Japanese destination. I'd of course seen the pictures of the Atomic Bomb Dome, but very little else, so I was left with the impression of a ruined city with some surviving suburbs, guidebook information to the contrary. When we actually got to Hiroshima on the shinkansen, what we actually encountered was almost completely opposite my preconceptions. We left the station and found a modern, vibrant city in front of us. We'd decided to stay in a hotel rather than an apartment in Hiroshima, and our choice, the Hotel Active! (inexpensive, ultra-modern, and ideal location), was only a short distance away. We wanted to take a streetcar, but due to a slight traffic obstruction on the track had to taxi instead.

We hadn't really done any research on restaurants for the evening, but needed something to eat, so after checking we went across the street to the start of the city's entertainment district. After wandering for less than half a block, we found a fun little seafood place that was obviously a favorite of the local hard-drinking sarariman. A beer or two later and we were ready for bed!

I wandered around a bit the next morning through the entertainment district to get my bearings (and locate martini makings) while the girls slept in. Eventually Wendy and I walked over to the center of the city for lunch and found a highly-recommended stall for okonomiyaki on the 5th floor of a building completely full of similar food stalls. The counter was tiny -- I was growing used to that -- but we loved watching our meal made layer by layer in front of us.


Our friend Matthieu came in by train from Osaka (where he'd just arrived from Paris) to join us for the rest of the trip. When he made his way to the hotel, the four of us headed back out to visit the Peace Memorial Park and Musuem, including the A-Bomb dome.

There are only a few places I've visited that have similar impact. The Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. is one, though that was abstracted from where those atrocities took place, and certainly Dachau, though I was fairly young when I visited there so have only half-remembered impressions. The A-Bomb Dome, Peace Park and associated Museum were every bit as well done, and right next to the hypocenter of the actual event, so were hugely moving.

The most impressive part of our entire stay in Hiroshima was that, as Americans (all but Matt) we never once felt any sort of resentment, and were welcome everywhere. Maybe it's because the city was so completely de-populated by the blast that most current residents never felt any direct effects to themselves or their families. Maybe it's the effect of time. Or maybe the Japanese have a great ability to look forward and not back.

After spending a couple of hours at the memorial, we needed some dinner. Only a half block from the A-Bomb done, the hustle and bustle of the entertainment district took back over. We wandered through the covered street malls until we found a likely-looking hibachi joint, and settled in for Matt's first real meal in Japan and our first where we'd had to prepare our own food. Wow, fantastic meat! Some of the beef was so fatty it looked like tuna.


We did a little bar-hopping in Hiroshima as well. Bars were everywhere, but not all were gaijin-friendly. Still, without too much effort we found an underground (not in the "covert" sense, but literally underground) bar to finish up the evening.

The following day dawned bright and sunny again, which was fortunate since we'd decided to take a boat out to the island of Miyajima where, among other things, was one of the most-photographed scenes in all of Japan, a floating torii (shrine gate). The island also happnes to be the home of largely domesticated deer that will steal food right from your packets, as well as some fantastic shrines, pagodas, parks, and the attendant tourist infrastructure and trinket shops. Still, all of us enjoyed the island and the views.



A quick ferry ride and train transfer later, and we were ready to head off to Kyoto!

Our complete set of Hiroshima photos can be found here.