Nightlife and Halloween in Kyoto

Kyoto, one of Japan’s ancient capitals, is perhaps in the whole country my favorite city out of those I’ve visited. Anyone I’ve asked who’s been there, Japanese or otherwise, has always agreed it has a generally more relaxed, friendly, and culturally rich atmosphere than anywhere else. Tokyo’s the bustling, cosmopolitan blow-your-mind city-in-the-stratosphere, New York of the East. Osaka’s the charmingly southern, second-largest Japanese city with great, friendly people.

Kyoto is… well, it’s an adjective in itself. It’s where, on beautiful out-of-the-way streetcorners, you find things like this:

(They’re fishing, if you can’t tell… and they look pretty stuffed from eating so much. HA! Man I’m good.)

I’ve spent a bit of time in Kyoto quite a few times this and last year and last and thought it’d be a great spot to spend Halloween with a couple friends. The night life there is, though they have a few famous clubs, much more relaxed than anywhere else I’ve experienced. Several nightlife districts lie along beautiful little rivers, and at night fill up with people of all ages who fill up the tiny park benches and river edges, seeming to always have a great time. There’s more to be said about why in Japan, public life seems much more friendly, but that’s a different and more academic discussion.

We five booked a hostel for Friday and headed toward a spot like that where a Japanese friend said we could find some nice hangouts. We were quickly met by friendly characters like that guy from scream and good ole’ M.J., back from the dead;

We continued on through some back alleys which in Kyoto, like most places I’ve been around Kansai, are generally well lit and not creepy at all.

In their urban messiness, they’re sometimes like works of art while still being delightfully Japanese;

Around any given bend you can find anyone out late having some delicious takoyaki at one of the ubiquitous stands where it’s sold…

…takoyaki being a tasty fried dumpling with chunks of octopus inside. It’s like Japanese festival/fair food, and it’s really good.

Like most bars I’ve known, those here are privately owned, but the vast majority have a seating capacity of roughly 8-20.  Space in Japanese cities is so limited that neighborhood, business, and entertainment districts have no distinct boundaries. Go for a night out drinking or generally hanging out here and you’re just as likely to end up next to someone’s house, a post office, a park, a river, as next to a Shinto shrine;

Here, in Korea Town (the Momodani neighborhood of the Tsuruhashi district of Osaka [also, from several weeks ago - not on Halloween]), this guy’s chilling out, probably after a hard day at work (as is the ritual here just as in the US), with some buddies at a neighborhood bar.

A few steps away from that takoyaki stand I took a shot of some bartenders in costumes from an action TV show. But as I peered through the window, they were instantly ready to pose. That happens a lot here. 95% of the time a Japanese person has been aware that I’m taking a picture of them, they’ve immediately thrown up a peace sign, but I’m glad these guys didn’t…

Instead I got a pretty sweet thumbs-up.

Friday and Saturday as much as any day reinforced my belief in the overall friendliness of Japanese people, including those we encountered in Arashiyama the next day. Arashiyama is an amazingly beautiful mountainous area of northwestern Kyoto, and yet another topic in itself.

As always, I’ve still got a few thousand more photos to go through but I hope, of course, to post again soon. There are TONS more photos on my flickr page you can browse, of course. Feel free to also check out my visual anthropology blog at.

Please, comment on this, my other blog, and on my flickr pages and let me know what you think :3

Sayoonara!

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Koyasan

Last Friday, on a whim, I decided to take a train down to the head of a 23km trail (my map here is a terrible estimation of its actual path) that would take myself and two friends to the town of Koya, the heart of a sect of Buddhism called Shingon. The “Choseki Stupa Route”, starting at the Jison-in Shinto shrine on the edge of the town of Kudoyama, was used by ancient pilgrims journeying to Koya.

Near the start of the route we found this awesome scene. Brilliantly blue bamboo trees lined both sides of the path, which we shuffled along, trying to fully appreciate the spectacle. Walking among such beautiful scenery, the whole time we all discussed whether it was better to carry a camera or not; When you’re there, it’s hard to be “in the moment”, distracted from the actual experience while considering the best angle, f-stop, and shutter speed to capture what you want to remember and show to others. But it’s trivial to worry about such a tired issue when, in the end, you’re in the middle of an amazing and culturally rich place that just being there should be enough.

…and if I hadn’t brought my camera, I might not remember, and certainly couldn’t share, interesting little places like the shrine at this bend in the trail:

Here, a tori gate marks the spot of a small shrine. Among other representations of Shinto gods was this fellow:

This one I liked especially because he looked to have been made out of clay by an individual. I nearly missed him, perched on a tiny ledge on a fairly inconspicuous boulder at the side of the path. Apparently others had noticed him as well, considering the stash of coins he’d earned for his diligent praying. One of my travel mates suggested he looks like a particular kami meant to protect the souls of aborted babies. He’s usually represented by an upturned face, praying hands, and a large grin. (Also, here’s a shot of an anthropomorphic root I liked)

At one peak we were met with this view, of another town nestled into the hills bordering Koya. The whole area was accessible by only one train line and one (frighteningly narrow and twisted) 2-lane road.

—

Mosquitoes are a fact of life in this region. They manage to find their ways into any nook of any building, and concentrate at a rate of at least one per cubic meter outdoors, regardless of whether there are any animals or people around. They seem to lie in wait like a covert air-force, shouting sub-sonic chirps to direct one another to wherever some deliciously, meaty human has been spotted. Wearing long sleeves and pants I’ve been bitten three times on the neck in a single visit to the restroom (at the very center of our dorm building), once in the stall and twice while washing my hands. By now, I can deal with the mosquitoes. But these things…

…I just don’t know what to make of. All three of us oblivious travelers nearly smacked our faces into this one’s web. They look pretty menacing but they’re honestly less frightening than the dancing spiders, who find a dark recess in which to jump and wiggle incessantly. It’s very creepy to find one of those things.

By the end of the night hiking, the other two had dropped off from exhaustion but I decided to trek it the rest of the way to stay a night in a Buddhist temple.

Exhausted from roughly 25km of hiking through mountains, and up and down steep towns on their faces, and having started the day still tired from only 4 hours of sleep, I wasn’t going to stop at the bottom of Koyasan and miss seeing at least a bit of the town. So I caught the cable car up to the information center at the top, took a bus to a phone booth and booked a night at Muryukoin temple. As soon as I arrived, two happy monks greeted me. One brought candied peanuts and tea to my room, and another brought this…

(You might want to click-through to Flickr to read the text better. Also, I should have opened everything up for the picture, but I was flat exhausted and didn’t think about it.)

There’s a special name for this cuisine but I haven’t the time to look it up right now. It’s all vegetarian, and one of the best meals I’ve ever eaten. It was absolutely extravagant, and as the monks do,  I ate alone it in the beautiful traditional bedroom, just amazed at the work put into it. Then I had a nice bath in the communal bathroom, where I met four soon-to-be monks studying at Koyasan University. They were very friendly as were all the monks, and as Japanese people tend to be in general. I woke at 5 the next morning to ready for the morning meditation ritual, which took place in the Dondo. The temple room is an impressively ornate chamber filled with the wonderful scents of woods burned ritualistically in a fire pit manned by a monk, chanting and occasionally ringing a bell that resonates for at least half a minute after each knock of the wood mallet.

Later, more monks joined in a chorus of the most deeply intricate harmonies I’ve ever heard. Though I’d feared I wouldn’t know how to appreciate the ritual, all I had to do was sit and listen to understand how this is supposed to clear one’s mind for the rest of the day. It was absolutely incredible.

Afterwords, a monk (the “head” monk, I think, because he led all the chants), invited me to tea with some others. Though I couldn’t understand most of their Japanese conversation, the experience was great. We sat cross-legged at a short table sipping mild green tea, eating rice sweets and Hershey’s Kisses (yeah). Behind us was a beautiful garden surrounding a Koi pond, full of giant evergreens, stone lanterns, and a smaller rock garden. A large wooden deck, from which to simply stand and admire the garden’s elegance, sat between the open door of the tea room and the garden.

At the temple, I considered pulling out my camera to document its incredible artistry, thus to better appreciate it and the discipline required to maintain it for hundreds of years, but this was a time I thought best to avoid tainting with a tourist’s tactlessness.

…but I just had to get the camera out for a few quick shots at least in the privacy of my room:

Closeup on the painted partition (left photo):

After breakfast – again a delicious meal of extraordinary extravagance – I set off for Oku-no-in graveyard. The largest graveyard in Japan, it holds over 250,000 grave stones and the ashes of the richest, who wish to be interred near great figures like the Tokugawa shogunate. What follows are just a few shots from around Oku-no-in, mostly lacking captions because I really don’t know much more than you do about the place. It’s just a great place to be a shameless tourist:

People heading to the main temple at the end of the trail through the graveyard stopped here to toss water on the feet of these statues. Does anyone have an idea what they represent? Koyasan is the heart of Shingon Buddhism, if that helps. I don’t have the time to research this now, though.

And one last shot I liked:

After this trek I was completely knackered (Can I borrow this term from the British students in the dorm? It’s pretty fun to use.) and decided to head back. Think train from Harry Potter when you imagine the train I took back, winding through the mountains. I mean… awesome!

Since then I’ve been doing a lot of studying and need to do that right now. I’ll have another post up soon when I get the chance.

Sayoonara!

This one I liked especially because he looked to have been made by a

Welcome to Japan!

EDIT: I messed around with the permissions of the photos used in this post, which made this unavailable for now, so I recommend viewing the post proper at http://www.riseoverrunmag.com/franchises/816/welcome-to-japan .

I’m in the land of the rising sun for the semester, studying Japanese language and culture at Kansai Gaidai University. It’s great and all, but while I get to dig through the academic mucky-muck and burn piles of money for such adventure, you the reader can taste the fishy goodness without vomiting at the sight of the daily USD/JPY conversion rate: a sad 90.1599 (and falling) at the moment… and my Gundam insurance isn’t getting any cheaper!

So whatever makes me say “Gollee, that’s queer!” or “What a So Tasty!“, I’ll make an effort to post here so we can jointly decide with the divine righteousness of Western cultural absolutism just what to make of these strange Japanese phenomena. Frankly, I wish it were a little stranger considering the place is just about as far as you can get from Bowling Green while not leaving Earth.

First up… well… alright I don’t actually have any good material so just help me do some of my homework I’ve scanned, if you please. Maybe you can learn some Kana along the way.

Okay so this one’s kind of cute. It looks a bit like a cow and it’s pronounced “Moo”. There are even little spaces to practice drawing the symbol.

What a clever little mnemonic!

So this one looks a little like a car attempting an excessively complicated U-turn. That mnemonic works, right?

Well alright I see this working. A little strange, but charming enough to work.

What!? These mnemonics have been getting progressively weirder but this is just plain bizarre. The image hardly looks anything like the symbol. Come on. There are plenty of ways to remember “re” other than worrying oneself mid-study, imagining a helpless woman tied to a pole.

That’s better.  Something a bit strange so it sticks, and that actually looks like the symbol. And it’s sort of cute too, right? Yeah I can dig that. Soon enough we’ll be reading Hiragana and we can get started on all those imported back issues of Sailor Moon manga!

Oh now come on. Can we maybe get some consistency here? Not to mention, it can’t be good for anyone’s sanity to think of a man popping out a chimney yelling, presumably to his disillusioned and distraught family, that he never goes to church. …And imagine writing the combination れうね “reune”: Desperate woman tied to pole. Man being thrown backwards after being hit by a baseball at high velocity. Angry man shouting at his family about church. Let’s just hope it doesn’t get any worse.

Seriously!? OK – it gets worse. I hope whichever class materials company hired this illustrator was in really hard times. By hard I mean that their long-time, loyal, and politically-correct illustrator got pancreatic cancer and had to leave, that all the other respectable illustrators had been hired by other companies, and that the only person anyone knew who could draw in the least was the recently-released ex-con murderer second-cousin of Tanaka-san from custodial. And the mental-case’s only experience drawing was using a shiv to etch onto the cell wall depictions of the abominable criminal feats leading up to incarceration. That might explain the portrayals of obvious emotional distress. Well I can’t even think about studying Kana any more now, but I don’t want to interfere with your studying so we’ll still check out the next few.

Honestly I’m not even surprised, BUT REALLY!? Mr. Illustrator, you had to KILL the poor baseball player? I know I’m learning this stuff in college but these mnemonics are intended for children! For their sake I hope you’ll be replaced soon so someone can starting drawing more wholesome things like cows and other animals. You know, maybe like “wo” for “wolf”, where the symbol is its mouth. That’s at least better than teaching kids to think of a decapitated baseball player.

Oh so now you’re teaching kids (and impressionable college students) to judge people’s faces? That’s very appropriate for an educational environment. For the sake of argument, I actually think Mr. Nasty Face is a pretty good looking guy, and that you’re just taking inappropriate advantage of the first decent job you’ve probably ever had… one with too much influence for a person like you, obviously. And it’s a bad mnemonic, too. Nobody’s mouth looks like that.

Yeah – while we’re on the topic of alcohol, why don’t you just go get drunk and sleep through tomorrow’s shift at the teaching material company so they realize how bad a person you are and fire you? At least I’m sure you can do a good job of that.

(Yes, these are the real scans of material from my class.)

So did you learn some Kana? I hope it was a good lesson. The mnemonics were, well, maybe a little strange, but you’ll remember them, right?

In any case, there’s one piece of Japanese wisdom dependable for remedying any moody blues, and in this case to blunt the impact of some fairly disturbing school material. And that is anything we might call Kawaii (this one with a hearty dose of Engrish!) :

Again, I’m sorry about the nature of today’s post. It won’t happen again and it won’t always be so monotonously educational in nature.

More pictures of humanoid servant-robots next time I promise!