Shisen-do

Today is a national holiday in Japan: Showa no hi, the celebration of the Showa Emperor's birthday (Hirohito). We celebrated a day off for S by taking advantage of a nice afternoon (Hirohito's day is not, of course, a national holiday in the U.S., so I worked all morning) to visit Shisen-do, which is a long walk northeast of our apartment, right at the edge of the Eastern Mountains (Higashiyama).

Shisen-do was built in 1641 by Jozan Ishikawa as a retirement hermitage. Jozan was a samurai attendant of Tokugawa Ieyasu and accompanied him to battle the Toyotomis in Osaka. Apparently thinking of better pursuits, Jozan shortly thereafter retired from samurai service and devoted himself to the arts of poetry and calligraphy. He was especially influenced by Chinese poet-hermits, and displayed (the still present) portraits of thirty-six Chinese poets in the main room of Shisen-do.

Shisen-do is now a Zen temple and is open to the public. It's famous for its azaleas, which are apparently beautiful. S had been to Shisen-do a few weeks ago and learned that we should visit in late May to see the blooms. Since the azaleas in our courtyard are in full bloom, we hurried to Shisen-do to be sure we didn't miss them. Apparently the azaleas at Shisen-do are different than our azaleas, since they are barely getting started. So, we'll go back to see them in late May, as we were told in the first place. Live and learn. We must say this eight or nine times a day around here.

In any case, we had a nice walk to a part of Kyoto we've never been before, and thoroughly enjoyed this little hermitage. It's a lovely and quiet little place with a fairly extensive garden with borrowed scenery of the mountains. It also has a deer-scare (which worked on J) and a moon-viewing pavilion (which I think would look nice in Vermont).

As we explore more of Kyoto with little J, we learn more things (live and learn, live and learn). First, it takes a long time to go anywhere because lots of people want to converse with the baby and they often take his picture. Second, there are a lot of babies who visit temples, ride the bus and train, eat in restaurants, etc. We were told that babies stayed at home. This is not at all true. Also, peaceful places (such as temples) often make for peaceful babies. J seems to enjoy some of the quiet places we visit, which is nice because at home he's been practicing his squealing. Cute, but loud. And, S has learned to balance well enough to take his shoes off with the baby strapped on when we visit places like temples and tea houses. Of course, the slippers still don't fit his large American feet.

So much to say, so little time

Because I'm still working (really!) and I've spent most of my time responding to student papers and replying to e-mails these last few days, I haven't had spare time to do much blogging. But, I do have time to post some miscellaneous pictures. We are still alive, and are having a great time (even when reading papers and e-mail). More real blog entries coming soon...

In the beautiful mountain town of Kurama (at the end of the line of our neighborhood train, Little J rings the bell at a Shinto shrine in order to get the attention of the Kami (spirits).



This fellow watches over the train station at Kurama.

This is the pagoda at Daigoji temple in southeastern Kyoto. (Ah sakura blossoms...those were the days!)

Little J does miss some things on our adventures...

At Daigoji temple.

In our kitchen .

On the balcony outside of our apartment.

At Daitokuji temple (Koutou-in subtemple).

Daitokuji

Last Sunday, we visited Daitokuji, one of the head temples of the Rinzai school of Zen Buddhism. It's also an important temple to the Japanese Tea Ceremony and masters such as Rikyu practiced here.

Today, visiting Daitokuji is like strolling around the set of a samurai movie. The complex is huge (several square blocks in northern Kyoto) and comprises over twenty subtemples on its extensive grounds. It's an enclosed compound, however, so there's very little traffic (and a surprising scarcity of visitors on a beautiful Sunday afternoon.

It's an amazing place--cobblestone streets lined with gates, temples, and a bamboo forest. It was quite peaceful (when the baby wasn't fussing before he gave up and took a nap!).

Some of the temples are open to the public. We visited Koutou-in which has a tea garden and large tea house on the edge of the bamboo forest. Little J slept through part of it, and the other visitors got to enjoy a crying baby in the tea garden when he woke up. However, as we rested on the wide veranda and contemplated the moss garden, he seemed to zone out. It's a baby Zen thing.

Hieizan

The weekend weather was beautiful, so we took advantage of a couple of days off to do some sightseeing. Saturday, we visited the top of Mt. Hiei, the mountain that dominates the view from our apartment to the northeast.

Getting there was an adventure in mass transit. We walked to our local train (5 minutes), which we took to the bottom of the mountain (10 minutes). We then took an incline (cable) train to about halfway up the mountain (10 white-knuckled minutes). Note that the train compartment is angled so that the seats are always level. The mountainside was most certainly not level.

We then took a "ropeway" (gondala holding about 30 standing people--7 more white-knuckled minutes) the rest of the way up the mountain.

After kissing the ground when we disembarked, we walked around the top of the mountain where there's a museum garden (closed that day) and the requisite ice cream and tea snack bar.

Our intention in visiting the mountain was twofold. Since we're living in such a heavily populated urban area (a far cry from our little Vermont village), we're committed to ensuring that Little J also has many experiences in more natural settings. Also, Enryakuji, a major founding temple of Japanese Buddhism, sprawls across the top of Mt. Hiei, and we were excited to tour some of the subtemples of this historic place. We struck out on the second of our goals. Following a path clearly (we thought) marked for the temple, we hiked a mile or two down from the top. Though this was a beautiful hike, we ended up not at a major temple, but at a telecommuncations array and the top of the incline train. The bad news was that we'll have to go another day to the temple. The good news is that we avoided having to come down the ropeway, and we did get to have a great hike on an ancient road that connects Kyoto's eastern temples, and we got fantastic views not only of the mountains, but of Kyoto and our apartment.

Pictures of ohanami

As the last blossoms fade and fly (and are replaced by dogwoods and azaleas!), here are some pictures from the last week.

We are children

This week has been an adventure in laundry. We suspected that our front-loading washing machine is also a dryer, so S took the owner's manual (all in Japanese, most in kanji) to the university for some translating help from his teaching assistants. The good news is that it is a dryer (the bad news is that it takes about as long as hanging the diapers on the balcony, which we'll continue to do).

In attempting to operate the dryer, I somehow activated the child safety lock on the door. One of the few things on the washer/dryer that I can read is the katakana for "door-locked." This blinking red light mocked me for two days as I pushed various buttons which caused my clothes to be washed three times and dried once, but did not cause the door to unlock.

My clothes were finally liberated today. We have to pay the rent in person (in cash!) at the real estate office, and today happened to be the day. S took the manual and was able to find a nice person (who is still no doubt laughing at us) to explain to him how to deactivate the child safety lock so that he could explain it to me via cell phone.

In this instance, I rather wish I was totally illiterate. I didn't know enough kanji to read the instructions in the manual, but I did know enough katakana to read that dumb "door-locked" light everytime I walked by.

Ja mata, Ojiisan. Arigatou gozaimasu, Obaasan.

We said goodbye to J's Grandpa and Grandma on Monday. We didn't like to see them go, but we're happy they made it back to California, and we were so glad they were able to be here. It was especially nice since they'd lived in Japan for a semester a couple of times, so they were able to orient us to some things. Though we've traveled a lot in Japan, we haven't had to do things like figure out which of the vast array of curry packages at the supermarket are vegetarian and what convenience stores are most likely to have the Japan Times.

J seemed a little out of sorts for a couple of days, which makes sense since Grandma stayed with us for over a month while S was already in Japan. When she suggested before J was born that she might do this, I thought it sounded like a nice idea. When she was here, it quickly became clear that J and I couldn't have functioned without her. S and I have spent a lot of time playing with the baby the last couple of days, though, and he seems to be adjusting. Hooray for extended family and airplanes!

So, we're back to talking to Ojiisan and Obaasan on the computer, which isn't the same as having them here, but J thinks is pretty cool nonetheless.

The picture, by the way, was taken at our neighborhood Shinto shrine.

Literacy

I know what it’s like to be illiterate. Here, I am illiterate. I look at billboards and have no clue what they’re advertising (which, come to think of it, isn’t so bad). Japan has three written languages: kanji (thousands and thousands of Chinese characters), hiragana (a simpler phonetic alphabet for Japanese words), and katakana (a phonetic alphabet for foreign words). I’ll never be much good at kanji, though I appreciate learning new characters and their roots as much as possible. My hiragana is a bit rusty, and I’ve never bothered much with remembering katakana (which is dumb, since I would normally actually know those words if I could read them clearly). I had big plans to brush up on my reading skills in the past few months, but the baby had other plans for me!

It turns out that grocery shopping takes a long time if you can’t read (especially with a fussy baby in the stroller), and being fluent in both kana languages would be quite helpful. So, to prevent the friendly staff at my local suupaa from thinking of me as that crazy gaijin who keeps asking where the jamu (jam) and co-hi (coffee) are, I’m putting myself through kana bootcamp. Already I can identify where the “baby salon” (baby changing room) is and which is the correct tofu for making kitsune udon.

Daigoji

As the last of the cherry blossoms started to fall, we watched a reenactment of a famous hanami party at Daigoji, a temple in southeastern Kyoto. Our friend K who is studying at Nagoya U. came along for the festivities and we enjoyed bento lunches under the blossoms and then watched traditional dancing and a procession of people potraying Toyotomi Hideyoshi and his court enjoying a 1598 party.

The centerpiece of Daigoji is a five storied pagoda dating from 951 (Kyoto's oldest building). The staff for the festival were wearing bright pink windbreakers which said "Daigoji. Since 874." I like this--it's like reading a sign on a diner in Vermont: "since 1978."

The down side of all this beautiful springtime is the pollen from the sugi trees (cryptomeria). Lots of smart folks are wearing face masks to prevent allergic reactions. I'm not, and so I'm suffering a little. Little J seems to have inherited my respiratory system--he's been sneezing and his poor little eyes are watering.

We're saying a final farewell to the cherry blossom season today. After an entire week of fabulous weather, it's now windy and rainy. Sayanara sakura.

Tetsugaku no michi

As part of our ongoing "hanami" experience, we rode the bus to the northern part of Higashiyama, the Eastern temple district of Kyoto. Here, after lunch in the Japanese equivalent of a diner, we strolled along the tetsugaku no michi, the "Philosopher's Path." This path along a canal is named for Nishida Kitaro, a famous member of the "Kyoto School" of philosophy. Nishida apparently took his daily constitutionals along this scenic path which separates the hills and temples from the bustle of the city. The canal is, of course, lined with cherries. Thus, it was also lined with hundreds of other sakura-watchers.

We ended our day with a hanami picnic on our own neighborhood river path (Takano-gawa). The local supermarket (in the basement of the local department store) has a nice selection of take out sushi, root vegetable salads, Japanese pickles, vegetable croquettes, and other picnic foods (such as chocolate croissants from the adjacent French bakery). I see many picnics in our future. We're on the lookout for bento boxes--individual lunchboxes in which we can pack all our picnic goods. We'll never be short on drinks for our picnics--on just about every block, one can find machines dispensing everything from Georgia canned coffee (hot and cold--my favorite is Emerald Mountain Blend) to one-cup sake and Suntory "Straight" beer, which "cheers the mind."

Hanami

The last couple of days, we’ve been reliving scenes from Tanazaki Junichiro’s The Makioka Sisters, a novel about an old Osaka family in the twilight of its wealth and prestige (in a Japan experiencing the twilight of its traditional ways just prior to WWII). In the novel, the sisters, as do most Japanese, take part in “hanami,” or cherry blossom viewing. They visit certain famous sites in Kyoto each spring, including the Heian Shrine and Maruyama Park, where they appreciate a famous old weeping sakura in its own twilight years.

We also visited the Heian Shrine and Maruyama Park this week. The Heian Shrine boasts a dazzling array of weeping cherries in an arbor area. There, the air itself almost seems pink. We enjoyed green tea ice cream in a resting spot near a pond, perhaps where Tanizaki’s fictional Makioka sisters would have rested to enjoy the blossoms floating by on the breeze.

We waited until evening to visit Maruyama Park with its famous weeping cherry. Tanizaki notes, pre-WWII, that this stately tree is already declining, though it’s still today the centerpiece of the park. The experience of evening hanami was quite an adventure. We were there with thousands of other blossom enthusiasts, many who had gone earlier in the day and tarped off pieces of ground for picnics under the illuminated branches. Surrounding the picnic area were 50-60 food vendors selling everything from barbequed mochi (I’m sure there’s a real name for this delicious treat) to takoyaki (fried octopus) to fish on a stick (note that this isn’t fishsticks—it’s actually small fish ON a stick, like a corn dog with eyes). I’m guessing there were many, many blearly-eyed and hungover Kyoto business people the next day. Cherry blossom viewing in Kyoto can be quite a circus!

As the blossoms start to fade and fall like snow, I’m reminded of Tanizaki’s passage about the Makioka sisters’ own hanami experience: "The cherries in the Heian Shrine were left to the last because they, of all the cherries in Kyoto, were the most beautiful. Now that the great cherry in Gion was dying and its blossoms were growing paler each year, what was left to stand for the Kyoto spring if not the cherries in the Heian Shrine? And so, coming back from the Western suburbs on the afternoon of the second day, and picking that moment of regret when the spring sun was about to set, they would pause, a little tired, under the trailing branches, and look fondly at each tree--on the lake, by the approach to a bridge, by a bend in the path, under the eaves of the gallery. And, until the cherries came the following year, they would close their eyes and see again the color and line of a trailing branch."

Jetlag

After two days, four bad movies, and countless sleepless nights, Little J and I have finally joined S in Kyoto. Bless his little heart, J is a good traveler. He lounged and slept in his carseat for much of the two-day journey and made lots of friends along the way (stranger anxiety hasn’t hit yet). The transition to the 13-hour time difference is coming along, and we’re just about back to normal (which includes waking up a few times at night, but at least resembles a full night’s sleep since the sleeping and waking does happen at night rather than during the daytime!).

We’re now official—J and I visited the ward office to register as aliens and to be added to Japan’s national healthcare system.

J is enjoying a windfall of adults these days—his Grandma came on the plane with us, and his Grandpa arrived from California last night. Four adults per baby is just about right in our household!