Booya!

Hi!

My new blog is up at http://tokyofncity.blogspot.com.

See you there.

APPENDIX A: Kyoto

Let's try this again, shall we?

----

In the following two appendices, I will attempt to cover as much of the Kyoto-Osaka trip as my old and tired brain is capable of remembering a week (and roughly fifty five hundred miles) after the fact.

A few words about why we went on this particular trip: the Hodemonster, glorious geek that he is, wanted to participate in the Magic: The Gathering Grand Prix tournament being held in Kyoto that weekend. Seeing this as a great opportunity to take us along and show us two of Japan's coolest cities (outside of Tokyo, of course, which rocks harder than a grand master ninja with Chuck Norris up his butt, and thus cannot be challenged), he decided to do just that. We would leave for Kyoto on Thursday evening, arrive there Friday morning, stay for the Friday and Saturday, then (depending on how well Hodezor would do in the tourney) go to Osaka on either the Saturday or the Sunday. Okay? With that out of the way, let's get all nitty and gritty.

1. Kyoto

Thursday evening, we boarded the night bus to Kyoto. Night buses are a very cool thing; you pay a paltry sum of money to be driven, in the dead of night, to a city way over on the other side of the country. The bus is equipped to provide you with as much sleeping comfort as you can get in a moving vehicle, thusly enabling you to combine the sleeping and traveling hours into one nice package, and arrive fresh at your destination at the crack of dawn.

Not surprisingly, it was the best-equipped bus I've ever been on. Slippers in front of every seat, blankets sitting in every seat (they were Mickey Mouse blankets, to boot). Dark felt covers in front of every window, dim lights. Obviously a bus intended for the kind of ride we were about to embark on.

The ride itself was unremarkable. A few bumps, a few wake-up calls as the bus took a sharp turn or hit the brakes, but eight hours of what was basically a sleeping state later we arrived in Kyoto.

Kyoto and Tokyo are like night and day. Kyoto is kind of like if you took Tokyo, sliced two thirds off the top of all the tall buildings, then dialed the time knob back about 30 years. It's terribly terribly charming and Japanese, and there's a down-home earthiness to the vibe that is as different from Tokyo as a geisha is to a sumo wrestler.

This was our first view upon exiting the bus station:

It was 6:15 in the morning and the only place open in the vicinity was McDonald's. Swallowing a piece each of our respective souls, we hungry travellers opted to choke down a misbegotten advertisement for a meal instead of waiting three hours for the places that serve real food to open. (You may have surmised this already, but I was voted down 3-1 here). As we were waiting in line for our plastic, an old man, suddenly and shockingly, screamed: "This is a national problem!"

There were mixed opinions within the group as to what this meant. Chris, a friend of the Hodemonster's who was competing in the tournament also and had decided to accompany us on the whole trip, felt the old man's comment had been directed at us, while I was more of the opinion that he'd been talking about how slowly the line was moving. The Hodezor thought he was just plain nuts, and to support this point he directed our attention towards where the old man was sitting, engaged in earnest dialogue with his McDemonspawned synthetic egg.

After our entertaining but malnourishing bout with sugar-laced additives and senile dementia, we decided to go see what Kyoto is most famous for: the temples.

Two factors combine to give Kyoto its uniqueness among Japanese cities. For one, it was the seat of Imperial authority until 1868, when the Emperor moved house over to Tokyo (then called Edo), which means that many of the nation's most enduring and beloved temples and shrines were built there. For another, Kyoto was one of few major Japanese cities that were taken off the list of Allied targets in World War II, the beauty of the city being cited as the reason for sparing it. This makes it Japan's largest repository of historical sites, and lends it much of its rustic charm.

We visited three temples. First off, Kinkaku-ji, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Kyoto's most popular tourist attraction:

Breathtakingly gorgeous. Originally built to serve as a geriatric chill-out pad for the Shogun way back in the good ole 1300s, this place has since been burned down and rebuilt several times. The current incarnation dates from 1955, and was built after a disgruntled monk went apeshit and burned the then-latest iteration down, supposedly over a matter involving a missing stapler. Today, Kinkaku-ji is reportedly bigger, better and more golden than ever before. Groovy. Next up was Ginkaku-ji, the Silver Pavillion. Built by the grandson of the dude who brought you Kinkaku-ji, it was originally intended to have been covered in silver (hence the name). Due to an ongoing civil war raging in Kyoto at the time, however, the silver finish was never given to the building. It therefore looks like this:

Very much not silver at all, to our disappointment. The gardens around it were lovely, though. We even got to see some VIP moss. This was a first (for me, at least).

Next up was Kiyomizu-dera, a huge temple complex built on a hillside which affords a spectacular view over the entire city. According to a plaque proudly displayed on the path leading up to the temple, it is currently "under consideration" for being made one of The New Seven Wonders of the World. It's not hard to see why.


















After a short walk through the temple grounds and the surrounding hillside, we heard the sound of a conch shell being blown. Heading back up to the main path, we were faced with this procession:

















I'm not sure whether the ceremony belongs to a Shinto tradition or a Buddhist one, but it was exactly the kind of thing one imagines when one thinks "Eastern religious ceremony." Evil-looking dragon, check. Guys in colorful robes banging things together rhythmically, check. Esoterically-dressed ceremonial warriors, check.

After this we went and found our hostel, aptly named The Kyoto Cheapest Inn, a communal bunk space that smelled of sweaty feet and dirty hair and, as it turned out, was full of Magic players who were in town for the tournament. The Kyoto Cheapest Inn had a few showers, towels for rent, maps of the city for 20 yen, and possibly the most complicated evacuation route I have ever seen.



(The fire exit is the main entrance, by the way.)

After settling in and dropping off our stuff, we headed out to see the Kyoto nightlife. Supposedly there was this district called Gion, where all the geishas hung out, and where we could supposedly get one of them to play an instrument for us and bring us food - ya know, sort of get into the chauvinistic spirit of traditional Japan.

Gion is about as far from Shibuya or Shinjuku as you can possibly get. The cobbled streets were lined with identical-looking low-slung establishments, all of which we learned were private clubs, members only. The only ones that were open to everyone were restaurants which were very reasonably priced, if you happened to be a sheikh or an airline owner.



After giving up all hope of getting into one of these ferociously exclusive establishments, and taking more rejection from white-faced women with cinder blocks on their feet than I personally was able to handle, we headed out to an adjacent area to try and find a decent place to eat.

We bounded around for the best part of an hour, not liking the menus and then liking the menus but hating the price and then liking the menus and the price but hating the decor, etc. We finally ended up in a tiny, awesomely cozy mom-and-pop establishment just off the main thoroughfare, where we were served delicious deep-fried meats and rice, as much as we could eat, with love. We gobbled it up so fast, I couldn't even get my camera out in time.



Delightful in every way.

After this, deciding that Kyoto women were beautiful but offstandish and that Kyoto clubs were either horribly exclusive, non-existent or priced up the wazoo, we decided to stock up on biru and head back to the Cheapest Inn, where we then spent the evening consorting with our nerd brethren, the Magic players, and going on a quite literal kojufyllerí (bunk-bender).

The next day, Krust and I awoke just before noon and jointly decided that, map in hand, we would traverse the breadth of Kyoto on foot and find the Hodemonster in his lair of nerdity (where he had gone at 8 o'clock in the morning, to participate in the eldritch tournament). Our walk afforded us a wonderful glimpse into the feel and style of Kyoto, something I will now attempt to convey through only five photographs.



































We arrived at the Miyako Messe, the Kyoto International Exhibition Hall, where the tournament was being held, just in time to see a traditionally-garbed beauty take to the koto and play an amazing melody with almost impossible grace.



You can strum my koto anytime, baby.

After watching the Magic players work their Magic for a wee while, we decided to head on back to the hotel and rest our weary feet, since we'd been walking/standing for the best part of the day and by this time I had a blister on my left foot that bore an uncanny resemblance to a young Freddie Krueger.

The Hodemonster joined up with us later in the afternoon, whereupon we learned that he had three wins and three losses in the tournament and was thus not really motivated to continue (he'd rather come with us to Osaka so we could get our groove on there). We decided to spend our last night in Kyoto engaging in that noblest and most time-honored tradition of the Japanese.


































Man. If there's anything better than Karaoke in Japan, it's Karaoke in Japan with a bunch of absolutely insane Japanese people. I'm not kidding; those guys were crazy. Three of them were people we brought with us from the hostel; two of them were young salarymen who had wandered in from the next room; and two of them were a couple that appeared to have suddenly sprouted out of the couch. Kyoto is magical, I tell you.

Hodezor and I made a small visit to the next room (where the salarymen had come from), where a Japanese middle school reunion was in its death throes. You may be familiar with the vibe; everybody was really drunk, those who hadn't gone home were sitting around in that uncomfortable way people have about them when they know they should just go to bed but still want to hold out to see if they can get laid, and there was just general awkwardness draped over everything like a thin sheet of dust in an attic.

So, naturally, the Hodemonster and I, in an effort to lighten the atmosphere, blasted out a heartfelt, quivering rendition of Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt." That really really cheered them up, I'd like to think.

The day after, before the train ride to Osaka, we decided to visit two places, the ramen joint down the street from the Kyoto Cheapest Inn and the Sanjusangendo, the temple of the thousand statues. Both were amazing in their own right.

We'd actually been to the ramen joint the previous night, just before we'd headed out to the karaoke spot. It took us about ten minutes to learn that this was no ordinary ramen joint.

A guy walks in off the street. He sits down at the counter and orders something from the gruff, loud-mouthed cook (who, by the way, is the only Japanese person I have met on this whole trip who can reasonably be called rude - like, Western-style rude). The cook goes and gets a torso-sized paper bib, places it around the guy's neck, then starts loudly ordering him around. "DON'T MOVE," he says. "JUST SIT THERE, SIT ON YOUR HANDS, WAIT PATIENTLY, DON'T MOVE FORWARD, DON'T LEAN BACK, DON'T WALK ANYWHERE."

Hodezor looks at us.

"What's he saying?" we ask.

"Damn. That guy's crazy," he says, then translates for us.

"Damn," we say. "That guy's crazy."

A minute or so passes. The customer sits on his hands in front of the counter, waiting patiently. Finally, the cook puts a bowl of ramen on the counter in front of the guy, starts loudly proclaiming stuff in Japanese again, and while he's doing it he grabs a pot, pours some translucent stuff into it, moves it over to the stove, makes this little shimmying motion with his hand, then turns around and pours it over the guy's noodles and a HUGE FREAKING COLUMN OF FLAME erupts right in front of the dude.

Apparently the place is famous for this, because it happened about three more times while we were in there. Naturally, we had to come back and get a picture, which is why we returned the next day. Enjoy, faithful reader:




Damn. That guy was crazy.

After this, we paid a visit to the temple of the thousand statues, the Sanjusangendo. This is one of the more impressive places I've ever visited. Since there was no photography allowed in there, I will refer you to these external links [1, 2] for pictures.

Simply put, there are one thousand and one golden-hued statues of Kannon, the Buddhist goddess of mercy, aligned in perfect formation, facing forward, in a corridor about 150 meters long. In front of them, evenly spaced apart from each other, are 28 statues of various other deities, and in the very center of the corridor, there is an altar with an eleven-foot-tall statue of Kannon.

This place filled me with reverence, reverence at the sheer depth of devotion required to undertake a construction like this. It was one of the more unique places I've been in my life, and I'm happy for the experience.

Our heads still spinning from the awesomeness, we boarded a train and sped to Osaka.

To be continued in APPENDIX B: Osaka, coming to a Tokyo travelogue blog near you.

Peace.

A Short Announcement

My blog seems to be a bit messed up at the moment. Since I got back to Iceland, I've had a mutiny of pictures on my hands. They upload just fine, but as soon as I'm not looking they bail, presumably to Bamako or the Caymans or somewhere more interesting than old Thule.

Since the pictures are half the blog, pretty much, I'll be taking a short break from posting the appendices, at least until I get an answer from Blogger on what may be causing the problem.

When and if this gets fixed, I shall of course trumpet it loudly from the rooftops. To make sure none of you escape from my carefully woven web of bloggage in the interim, I will now reveal, for the first time ever, the names of the appendices yet to come.

1. Kyoto (already published, but you haven't seen the pics yet, so it's only half the joy)
2. Osaka
3. The Little Weird Things: Of Japanese Tech & Society
4. Hideo Asano, Lonely Traveller
5. Engrish

Keep 'em peeled, boys and girls. And pray with me. Pray for the pictures.

Smoochies.

All Good Things

Since I'm mostly done with all of the Tokyo stuff, and since there were pretty much no opportunities for me to sit down and write a blog during the Kyoto-Osaka trip, I'm going to tie up the blog at large now, do the Kyoto-Osaka trip when I get home, and then make a few appendix entries for some subjects that have aroused my interest during this trip.

Basically, then, this is goodbye. I'm sitting alone in the Hodecrib at the moment, watching the laundry on the balcony billow in the breeze. Behind it, towers like broken teeth rise from the cityscape, blinking their red and blue, the town humming along under their watchful gaze. During my time here, I've seen things you people wouldn't believe; attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, C-beams glittering in the dusk near Tannhauser Gate... err, sorry, wrong movie.

Can't say I blame me, though. Cases in point:








































This is an absolute marvel of a city. The technological convenience, the endless array of novelties, the number of people, the combination of linear efficiency and balls-out chaos, the sheer lunacy of this place. Just now as I write this, an ambulance is speeding through the Shinagawa dusk, sirens blaring, shouting a terse and continuous stream of warnings out of a loudspeaker on its roof. At the same time, somewhere else, a policeman is riding his bicycle, ringing his bell at pedestrians who don't see him coming. Vending machines whirr away, selling neck ties and AA batteries. Somewhere down there, in the fading twilight, the Shibuya potato man serenades a lonely street corner.

I am coming back one day. And when I do, I'm staying back.

A small montage for memory: the good, the great and the funny.













































To all the beautiful people I've been lucky enough to meet on this strange and fantastic journey - Mark, Wayne, Rei, Kenny, Sina, Lorne, Shu, Neil, Chris, Reffik, Brian - I give much love and respect. I'll see you again some day.


Good night, Tokyo.

Ninja

Wow, I seem to have built up quite a backlog of posts to work through. We just got back from our trip to Kyoto and Osaka, and so many things have happened that I'm still kind of reeling. I'll just start with Wednesday night and then finish up the Tokyo days, entry by entry. I'm thinking of saving Kyoto and Osaka for last, in an appendix.

Anyway, Wednesday was spent at home taking 'er easy, doing laundry, watching strange television and shooting the shiznit. This was a good thing, because it would take all our energy and wits to survive our encounter with THE NINJA.

Telling us nothing beyond that they were taking us to a really cool restaurant, Hanako and the Hodemonster loaded us into a train and shuttled us off to the Akasaka district, which borders Roppongi and is one of the fancy parts of town. After a short walk from the station, we turned sideways and nearly collided with a door so nondescript it would have been basically hidden from view, had it not been for the strangely illuminated logo next to it.

Stepping inside, we found ourselves in a tiny darkened chamber with no obvious exits, with a tall gentleman standing behind a maitre d' podium. Hanako had a brief conversation with him in Japanese. He nodded courteously, wrote something down, waited a few seconds for dramatic effect, then yelped something really loud and clapped his hands together twice. A shutter opened in the wall next to him and a small dark figure shot out, zoomed up next to us and said: "Hello! I am Yukiko. I will be your ninja. This way, prease."

She clapped her hands once and said "Nin!" loud enough to make my glasses fall off. This caused another shutter to open up. Yukiko led us through the twisting maze of darkened stone passageways that lay behind, past booby traps and over drawbridges, and soon enough we were at our table.

Being in the place was like being in a cross between the movie Kill Bill and the game Thief.


































(I can't find an English version of the menu online, so I will use a Babelfish translation for the food names in this entry.)

Every dish we were given was in some way unique, served with a twist or a trick. Take, for example, the Crab and Grapefruit Horizontal Draw Sword Fog Hidden Technique:


One minute I'm sitting there innocently talking with Neil (a friend of the Hodemonster's who was with us at the restaurant), and the next thing I know there's a ninja inside the room right next to me totally flipping out and killing a grapefruit with a wakizashi. He turns the hilt towards me and tells me, in an urgent whisper, to pull it out; as I oblige, the grapefruit begins smoking from its wound. He opens it up and inside is what you see pictured above.

Next up was the Turban Shell Bomb Burning Escargot. A platter of turban shells was placed in front of us, with some sort of oil-and-salt fuse. The ninja in question then flipped out all over it, causing it to explode. Neil, despite being unequivocally the most Cyberpunk individual out of all of us (he lives in Neo Tokyo, is a freelancing codebreaker and security specialist who takes on assignments for global megacorporations, often involving things like social engineering, and he plays EVE), was nevertheless caught slightly unawares when it went off:


After this came some utterly marvelous sushi,


followed by probably my personal favorite of the evening, the Ahead Stomatitis Upper Hand Feather And Cashew Nuts Frying:


WARNING, said the ninja, DO NOT EAT THE RED PEPPERS UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.

"Okay," I said.

WE ARE SERIOUS, said the ninja. VERY, VERY SERIOUS.

"Okay," I said.

Ten minutes later, after I'd regained enough of my eyesight to clean up the cough-blood (and enjoyed a bit of delicious cashew nut chicken), we were given this:


A very mysterious box indeed. The Hodemonster pulled the string, and we were greeted with this:


The Lost Testicle of Tupac Shakur.

Just kidding. It was the Egg Diagnosing of Secret Treasure Treasured Casket Fish Greens Jelly.
















I have no idea how they did it. They somehow filled up an eggshell with a gelatinous glob of oddly spiced vegetable matter, which we were instructed to mix with the rice and other stuff on the plate next to it. The result was an incredibly strange flavor, like green onion-flavored jell-o with raspberry jam.

After this, a deceptively young ninja (who introduced himself as the grand ninja master) paid us a small visit and did some card tricks for us, including a horrifically scary one where he made an entire pack of cards turn into a solid translucent block of polished glass in my hand. It was bizarre.

Next up, another ninja arrived with an ingredient-filled tray. One of the ingredients was a large rock, which she of course totally flipped out on and threw into a pot. Thus was born, before our very eyes, the Specialty Ignition Throwing A Stone Pot Leaf Hidden Technique Salad.


It was delicious, not at all unlike Tom Ka Kai soup. That is to say, Tom Ka Kai soup that has been cooked in front of you. With a scathing rock. By an awesome ninja.

After this, those of us who were still feeling peckish ordered a little more raw fish. The Day Substituting Sashimi Aerial Floating Leaf Quantity (served on a pillar of ice) and the Union Change Sushi of Salmon and White Body arrived presently.
















They tasted as delicious as everything else in the place.

Next up were the desserts. We ordered the "Frog looking cheese cake" and the "Bonsai looking cake with three kinds of ice cream."


The Hodemonster got something called The Blackness, which was maple mousse and sweetened black soybeans in cheese sauce, sprinkled with rock salt.


We spent the next twenty minutes in complete silence, each of us savoring our respective slices of heaven as completely as possible. What a meal. What a god damn meal.

As we'd said goodbye at the door and were turning around to hail a taxi, one of the ninjas jumped out behind us with a blood-curdling kiai and unrolled a Ninja scroll containing a mystical and arcane message, which I will now relay to you, even though I will be facing sure death at the hands of the ninja cabal if I am ever found out. I leave you with this gift. Guard it well.