I Like Pigeons Because Nobody Else Does

We left for Nikko yesterday morning at 6am and the weather was superb. It was definitely the best weather I’ve had on my four trips to Toshogu Shrine. We had a fabulous lunch at a restaurant that was in a house originally built for an American dignitary (I forget who). If you ever go to Nikko, the architecture of this place is hard to miss amid all of the old Japanese structures. It looks like a house from somewhere in eastern Pennsylvania and I highly recommend it for lunch because the food was excellent.

Having visited Nikko so many times coupled with a bad night’s sleep,  I could hardly bring myself to climb the 100 or so stairs to ascend Futarasan Shrine, so I waited at the bottom while everyone else went ahead. It was a fateful decision because as I had just finished attaching my macro lens to photograph some maple leaves, I saw this tiger beetle (Cicindela japana, niwahanmyou, ニワハンミョウ), a new species for me:

Definitely the highlight of the trip for me. Now for some photos that the rest of you might be interested in. I took the shot of the rice paddy from the train.

Here are photos frmo Rieko of the game we played. Players are supposed to throw the fan and knock that thing off the box. It was a lot harder than it looks.

 And here’s our dinner, post-onsen. This was great. I loved cooking my own food over the coals. They served venison which I couldn’t even bring myself to eat. It was raw. Incredibly, my mom ate it and loved it.

The Toshogu Shrine area in Nikko is always a great place to take visitors and I have learned to never put off a visit because of rain. I consistently get great shots there when it’s wet because the colors are so saturated and overcast skies create a wonderful and diffuse light. We were lucky enough to happen upon a wedding taking place but shots were tough because they were inside a dark building.

All of my pictures are starting to look the same so I reluctantly dug out the lens that came with my camera when I bought it. It’s perhaps the shittiest lens ever and is totally cheap but it does go down to 18mm which is a great focal length for wide angle shots. The problem is that the photo quality is abject crap. I really need to get a wide angle lens before I leave here. It sucks having an expensive hobby.

Nikko’s rough if you have a problem climbing – there are stairs everywhere. My mom couldn’t handle it anymore so she took a break:

After Nikko, Heike Village. This place was an aggregation of original Heike buildings for public viewing. Inside were all kinds of tools and implements used in everyday life in that time period. None of it was fake…at least it didn’t look like it to a tourist like myself.

By this time I was beat down tired and was ready for an onsen. We found our hotel, checked in and went to the onsen…but on the way there we were waylaid by a group of people playing Japanese darts. We joined in the fun for while but needed to get moving since we had dinner reservations for 6pm. Photos from that experience will come later since Rieko was the only person with a camera and hasn’t yet sent me the photos. 

The Bankyu Hotel spanned a creek and to get from the guest house to the dining area visitors had to cross a rope bridge that wasn’t all that stable. We tottered across the bridge in our yukatas (which amounts to nothing more than a cotton bath robe), haoris (old-style Japanese jackets), and geta (traditional shoes) surrounded by snow and ice with the wind crawling up our yukatas and freezing our bare asses.  But it was worth getting scared shitless and frozen when we reached the other side – a seat on a pillow next to a pit of hot coals that was warming skewers of fresh fish and hot sake, a personal table loaded with enough food to feed even an American, and an enka performance by Ms. Heike herself was waiting for us. Dinner was a vast menu of more things than I can even mention but it consisted mainly of mountain food which I really enjoy. It was a ridiculous amount of grub but I was able to eat almost all of it. 

The next day we went to a waterfall and then to Edo Wonderland. The Edo period in Japanese history was an important period for a number of reasons.  In 1603, Tokugawa Ieyasu was appointed Shogun by the emporer and established his government in Edo, now called Tokyo. The Tokugawa shoguns continued to rule Japan for 250 years. During the Edo period most of what people consider traditional Japanese culture was born and flourished; kabuki theater, tea ceremony, literature, painting, martial arts and other popular culture endeavors. The reason Japanese culture is so unlike anything in the rest of the world was because in 1633 shogun Iemitsu forbade travelling abroad and almost completely isolated the country from foreign influence. Contacts to the outside world were reduced to very limited trade relations with China and the Netherlands in the port of Nagasaki only and, in addition, all foreign books were banned. In this isolated and stable microcosm, Japanese culture was able to become highly specialized and refined producing a unique style that is recognizable by almost anyone. And then in in June 1853, the U.S. East India Fleet, commanded by Commodore Matthew C. Perry, entered Uraga Harbor (which is just down the road from us) and brought with him McDonald’s and KFC which is what actually killed off the samurai – they all got coronary artery disease. Anyway, it was the end of the Edo Period and the beginning of the Gaijin Invasion.

So, Edo Wonderland was modeled on this period and all the employees walked around in appropriate costumery and staged a number of plays. We watched a play about poor farmers and ninjas that was excellent, but unfortunately there were no subtitles for the two Americans in the crowd. We enjoyed it anyway.

So my mom got a gutload of culture packed into a very short time and we took it easy the rest of the week. Here are some photos from Kamakura:

My mom arrived last Friday and I just returned from seeing her off at the airport. I must admit that I was really impressed with her stamina and adventurous spirit on this trip. She’s from Lancaster PA which is a bastion of tasteless food – the strongest spices used in the local cuisine are salt and pepper so I didn’t have high hopes for her venturing too deeply into Japanese cuisine. I couldn’t have been more wrong. On her second night here she ate the infamous natto…even after she smelled it. And then she moved on into eating sashimi which was also fairly impressive. This was her first trip out of the US. I think that people who’ve never left the US think for some reason that they can’t travel or that it’s really difficult. All this strange and forbidding territory is just out of their realm of reality…so they think until they actually take the plunge and go somewhere. Now that she’s overcome that mental hurdle, I am relatively certain she’ll go somewhere else. Any travel after a journey to Japan will seem like only a hop, skip and a jump away.

We had a great time but were totally burned out by the end of the week. We started the trip off at full-steam with a day of sightseeing in Nikko, a stop at Heike Village (really cool) and then overnight at Bankyou Ryokan in Yunishigawa Onsen about 90 minutes north of Nikko. Yunishikawa Onsen was discovered in 1573 when the Heike Clan used the area as a hideaway when they fled the Genji clan after a battle in which they had been defeated. They settled in the area and you can still experience their influence in local cuisine and customs.  Bankyou Ryokan was really cool and unique even by Japanese standards. It’s a 400 year-old hotel owned and operated by a 25th-generation direct-descendant of the Heike family. We had a spectacular dinner around an irori (a square fire pit in the floor used for warmth and cooking) in our yukatas after a dip in the in-house onsen. The next day we visited a waterfall and a historic park that was comparable to Williamsburg in Virgina, except that it was geared a little more towards kids rather than adults.

We spent the rest of the week touring locally with trips around the Miura penisula and Tokyo. We went to Ueno Park to see the cherry blossoms, then on to Kappabashi, Tokyo’s kitchenware district, and finally to Harajuku to Aki’s for haircuts and a massage.

Mr Hanzawa, a student a friend, came over for dinner Friday night to experience some Lancaster County home cooking and meet my mom. She made pot pie which he thought was fantastic. I figured that would be a dish that would suit the Japanese palate; bland dough with some salt and vinegar. I thought I was terminally burned-out on pot pie, but after not having eaten it for probably 20 years, it tasted pretty darn good.

I’ve got a lot more photos, but we’re getting ready to watch this week’s Lost episode, so I’ll post more later.

Oh, and now I can leave Japan – I saw wild monkeys for the first time. We were driving over a mountain outside of Nikko and there was a group of them in the trees alongside the road.  I told somebody a long time ago that I won’t leave her until I see monkeys. Snow monkeys and platypus all within 9 days -what more could a person ask for?!