I Like Pigeons Because Nobody Else Does

Mr Hanzawa and I had a great weekend, thanks to lousy weather. San Diego was recipent of quite a bit of rainfall on Sunday morning so we spent the morning at the Natural History Museum visiting the Pompeii exhibit and, when it stopped raining, ventured over to the zoo. We almost had the run of both places and it was fantastic. Monday brought clear skies, so we hiked 6 miles in Cuyamaca Rancho State Park before he caught the Amtrak train back to Los Angeles.

This is Leslie’s first time in San Diego so I took her to La Jolla to see the seals. It’s the start of pupping season and there were a lot of animals hauled out on the beach. Unfortunately, the city government recently…

…rejected San Diego’s request to reinstall the rope barrier this winter to protect seals during their pupping season at Children’s Pool beach.

Read the whole story here. That means that the public will have full and legal access to the beach while the seals are giving birth.  They will be open to molestation by the rapacious cads who opposed the barrier. Distubing these animals is a voilation of the Marine Mammal Act which is punishable by law and I don’t understand why the filthy molesters aren’t prosecuted.  I just can’t figure these people out. They’re lucky I’m not king of the USA.

The poor bugger won’t be smiling in a couple of weeks when the females are aborting birthing pups while simultaneously fleeing some idiot swimmer.

The yin and yang of life, or inyo 陰陽 in Japanese, sometimes is not so subtle. I got all these great snowy egret photos today, but I dropped my cell phone in the water while climbing around on the rocks to get these shots. It’s drying right now and I am hopeful that its saltwater bath hasn’t ruined it. But the thing that really pisses me off is that I also dropped my lens cap and wasn’t able to retrieve it.

Some friends of mine are coming to San Diego tomorrow. Lee has a conference to attend and they’re staying at the Hotel del Coronado which is pretty swanky. His wife Leslie is coming along so we’re going to do some sightseeing. I’m really excited to see some old friends from home because the “making friends” endeavor out here is proceeding at a glacial pace.

By Thursday my guests didn’t seem to be wearing down at all…but I was. I was actually starting to wonder if something was wrong with me because I was so tired. But I guess after a week of talking pretty much non-stop, hours and hours spent on a train, and general sensory overload, any normal person would be exhausted. Liz just emailed me and said they returned home on Saturday and she went to bed at 11pm and woke up at 3:35 the next day, so I guess it wasn’t just me.

Coincidentally the 2007 May Grand Sumo Tournament started the same day of their arrival, so I got us tickets for Thursday. I had no idea what to expect and since our tickets were cheap, I assumed we’d be very far away from the action. We had reservations at a hotel that night in Tokyo after a full day of sightseeing and I didn’t feel like dragging around a whole complement of heavy camera equipment, so I left it at home. Which was a total mistake because we had decent seats and the photos would have been fantastic. I took my old camera, a small Canon G5 and got these really poor shots. But, as luck would have it, a friend of mine hooked me up with a ringside seat at today’s match! We’re leaving at 1pm and I’m taking all my good equipment so check back soon to see the results of my first foray into sports photography.

After sumo we went next door to the Edo-Tokyo Museum which was really nice.

The Edo-Tokyo Museum was founded on March 28,1993, as the place, where visitors come to learn more about Tokyo’s history and culture , and which also serves as a projection onto the city and the living of the future. In the Permanent Exhibition area, there can be found original and replicated exhibits, as well as large-scale models, faithful representations of their originals, which have been reproduced after painstaking investigations and research.

If you are interested in the history of Tokyo and the Edo period, this is a great place to get a lot of history packed into a couple of hours. The exhibits are very well done and it’s a tremendous learning opportunity.

After the musuem, and a short stop in Akihabara, we went to our hotel and relaxed for a bit with some dinner before heading back out to Shibuya for some karaoke. I love karaoke, but I do have a complaint about the accompanying visuals. Two of the many songs we sang were Lynyrd Syknyrd’s Sweet Home Alabama and AC-DC’s Touch Too Much. I know, I know, tired old songs by American standards, but when you’ve been away from your native culture this long they take on a a whole new significance, just trust me. Here’s a shot of the screen for each song which is just one illustration of some of the many American cultural items here that are gruesomely botched in translation:

Pastel Downtown Miami + Lynryd Skynryd = Ronnie Van Zandt coming back from the grave to kick some Japanese karaoke producer’s ass. Everyone knows that a guy in a wife-beater and a can of Budweiser should be involved somehow.

I was a little late with the camera for the AC-DC one. Immediately before that tree scene, they showed a very cute close-up of an Eastern Gray Squirrel.  Bucolic park scenes of picnickers and cute squirrels paired with Bon Scott (a man who died in the back of a car, the result of choking on his own vomit after a night of ribald behavior and power drinking) screeching things like She wanted it hard, And wanted it fast, She liked it done medium rare is a bizarre juxtaposition.  Although I really enjoy those types of scenes, and squirrels, they’re not exactly conducive to rockin’ out to a debauched AC-DC song. Oh well, I guess that’s what the shochu is for and I can’t really blame that karaoke people either. Those are the kinds of things you just don’t get unless you really live in the US.
 I almost forgot to mention day 6. We slept in pretty late (our hotel, despite being a government facility, had temperature control which was a welcome relief from our apartment here on base. The system-wide heat was turned off about 2 months ago and the air conditioning will not come on until the authorities deem it appropriate, usually the end of May. You can imagine what it’s like on the 9th floor where we live. I slept great at the hotel!) and then had a leisurely breakfast before setting off for the base. I wasn’t expecting a crowded train since it was 11:30 by the time we were ready to leave Tokyo. Boy, was I wrong! We got on the Yamanote Line at Ebisu with the intent to switch trains at Shinagawa and it was one of the top 3 most-crowded trains I’ve been on yet. I can’t handle that kind of crowding and like the rest of the Japanese commuters, I retreated into my own dark place in my mind and just kind of shut down. That’s the only way to cope. Foreigners get on trains in Japan and just don’t understand why everyone looks like a stonefaced zombie – it’s only a coping mechanism.  They’re just hiding as best they can. My friends were not used to this kind of thing and of course were at a loss as to what to do.  I am actually glad that they got a great good-bye gift from the city of Tokyo; the infamous sardine-packed Yamanote Line! Chalk it up to one more cultural experience!

Owakudani is the area around Mt Hakone, about 2 hours’ train ride from here, and is a hotbed of geothermal activity. The last eruption of Mt Hakone occurred about 2000 years ago, but volcanic activity can still be found at several locations.
The notable thing about Owakudani is the smell – the geothermal vents spew out boiling sulfurous water and gas which makes the area smell quite foul. The sulfurous emissions also kill off nearby vegetation, giving the land a poisoned underworldy look. It would be a great place to film a movie set in Hell. Hakone is nationally reknown as a tourist destination, its main draw being hot springs. If you’re not driving a car, getting there is somewhat of a pain because it involves several trains, a ropeway (a train car that’s hauled up the side of a steep mountain by means of a cable) and finally a cable-car. But you get a nice view of the mountains for the greater part of the trip.
I was a little nervous about the cable car but I had to set a good example for my guests and, despite my trepidation, I really wanted to ride on it. We boarded the cable-car and set out above the trees. We weren’t terribly high – maybe 20 feet above the trees and I was thinking this isn’t too bad! We came to a rise but couldn’t see the other side but I figured that the landing pad at Owakudani was just on the other side since the smell of sulfur was really strong. Wrong. We came up over the rise and found ourselves hanging hundreds of feet in the air…then we got blasted with a gust of wind. I was paralyzed with fear. Hideous scenarios raced through my mind; snapping cables, shrieking women, plunging to the earth trapped in a glass bubble, a bloody,shattered glass and and guts pancake lying on the valley floor. Oh! The humanity! But the gruesome scenarios evaporated when I mustered the courage to look up and was the first one to see this:

Lousy photo, but in the interest of accuracy, that’s how it appeared from the cablecar. That view came none too soon because frankly, I was scared shitless and the excitement of a good view of Mt Fuji saved me from losing it completely.

So, we made it to the landing pad and had a good day hanging out in the stinking reek of boiling sulfur. The novelty of Owakudani is using the boiling water to cook eggs that are then sold to the public. Eating black eggs boiled in naturally hot water on the side of a mountain full of toxic vapors while looking at Mt Fuji is an experience everyone should have.

After the long day in Nikko on Monday, we decided to take it easy on Tuesday and visit Kurihama Flower World and spend some time with Godzilla who lives in a playground at the top of the hill. Since the Iris Garden was a letdown, I wasn’t expecting much for KFW, but we were struck dumb when we approached the entrance and saw a whole mountainside in riotous color:

You can’t see the full grandeur of this place through my crummy wide angle lens, but the field extends much further than shown in this photo.

The path on the right takes visitors to the top of the hill to a playground and Godzilla’s new home.

Back in 1954, Godzilla was aroused by the H-bomb test at Bikini Atoll from his long sleep since ancient time. His gigantic figure emerged out of the sea off Tatarahama at Kannonzaki in Yokosuka City. Four years later, he landed on Tatarahama beach as a concrete slide in his own image. Once in the movie so terrifying as a horrible monster, he, Godzilla, gradually gained popularity among children. Subsequently, he changed his figure into a slide, often surrounded by frolicking children on school trips. Later on, however, he was demolished in 1973, extensively worn out as directly exposed to the sea wind.

But he resurfaced, cutting a dashing portrait for the new millenium; he’s donned a fetching yellow bandana and holds a handful of doughnuts while crapping out kids all day…

In October 1999, Godzilla which had came back into life, landed on Tatarahama and went up on the hilltop in Kurihama Hana-no-kuni (Kurihama Flower Land), where he settled his own overwhelming figure as Godzilla Slide. This time, his magnificent body is no more made of concrete with cracks here and there but of much evolved stuff of tempered plastic. He towers into the sky above Kurihama in the very image of gigantic Godzilla as was filmed in the movie produced by Toho Film Co.

While out and about on a photography excursion one day, I found a hotel called Sagamiya overlooking the lovely rock formations and gnarled, windswept trees in Arasaki Park. A friend of mine sent me their website and it looked pretty swanky so I figured it might be a good place to take visitors one day. I made reservations last week, but the owners were a little concerned that gaijins might not be amenable to raw fish. I assured them that it would not be a problem since I am quite fond of sashimi and my visitors were coming to Japan with the intent to really get a gutload of culture. Bring it on I said. And they did, in a big way:

A beautiful boat of sashimi you might say…except that the lobster was still alive which unnerved us quite a bit. I could go the rest of my life without ever eating meat again and remain quite happy, but I may have to begin excluding fish also. I just don’t like killing anything and I pained me to still the lobster still moving. As much as I like sashimi, this was even a bit much for me. My Carolina-BBQ-eating friends from Raleigh and Greensboro were simply aghast that a restaurant would serve such a meal. Of course I’d experienced this before - multiple times – so I wasn’t quite as freaked out as they were. I think most Americans are so divorced from the reality of where there food comes from that many of them have no idea that they’re even eating creatures that were once alive.  I have to give them a tremendous amount of credit though because they soldiered through that meal like real epicurean pioneers. They tried almost everything and I was thrilled that they threw themselves into uncharted waters. Cultural immersion mission accomplished!

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?!

I already mentioned that my mom is coming in March, but I just made arrangements with a good friend of mine in North Carolina to visit in May. She’s coming accompanied by her sister and her sister’s husband. I can’t believe that I’ve had so many people come to visit me here given the rigors of the travel…but it really is worth the trip and costs a fraction of what it would if going through a tour agency, so I am glad that so many people have taken advantage of the fact that we’re here. The nice thing about having someone who knows the area is that you’re not limited to just the touristy things.

My mom just bought a plane ticket to come and visit us next month. I can’t believe she actually did it. This is going to be interesting because she’s never been beyond the borders of the USA. Well, I think she went to Niagra Falls one time in the beginning of the last century…or maybe the century before that, I forget. Most people do a trip to Mexico or Europe as their first foray abroad, not Japan, so she’s going to be extra shell-shocked.  The problem is picking and choosing activities since there are so many things to see and experience. I just hope the jetlag doesn’t kick her ass too badly. I’m really excited and am having a hard time deciding what activities to plan.

When I woke up today it looked as if it would be good Fuji-photographing weather, but I got over to Hayama and it sucked. But I took some pictures anyway.