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Japan Day 8 - Kyoto
Today basically I dragged Nykkel around Kyoto, showing him temples, shrines, castles, and tons of Hello Kitty garbage.
Right, so anyway, this morning we got up super-mega-hyper early, leaving the ryokan by 7:15 to get to Tokyo station by 8... we had tickets for the 8:10 Hikari shinkansen to Kyoto. Fortunately we hit Tokyo station around 7:45 so it was all good, we even had time to stop at a bakery and grab some food to bring on the train and all, and we were in our seats 5 mins before the train left, etc. Good stuff. The train ride there wasn't too exciting. I looked outside the windows a lot and eventually fell asleep for like an hour; it was a 2 and a half hour train ride between the two cities. Ponder that a second though - Kyoto and Tokyo are around 270 miles apart if I recall correctly, and we got there in 150 minutes. Meaning the train was definitely going over 100 miles per hour at some points. Cool stuff. And still smooth enough for me to sleep through significant parts of the ride.
So, we got to Kyoto. I have this great idea now which involves me hiring myself out as a tour guide, since I apparently have a really good knack for figuring out these sorts of touristy things. First thing we did outside the trains was I went and got Kyoto bus and walking maps from the Kyoto Tourism Center in the station; then I said to Nykkel, "Okay, we're going to Kinkakuji first, then maybe Ryoanji, then Nijo Castle, then Ginkakuji and the philosopher's path, then Nanzenji... how's that sound? No objection? Good. Get an all-day bus pass like I'm doing and we're gonna hop on the 205 bus in a second."
So we did just that. Our first stop was Kinkakuji for two reasons: 1) I figured it was the furthest out thing we were interested in seeing and 2) I didn't get to see it on my trip to Japan in 2001 because I'd forgotten my passport at the youth hostel. So. We went there. We saw this big golden temple thingy. It was big and it was golden. There were nice gardens around it too. I made a point of burning incense at the shrine (and since it was 3 mai for 20 yen I made Nykkel burn one too), and Nykkel got one of those fortune thingies, which seemed to be of moderately good luck, but we couldn't actually read it, heh.
After that we were going to go to Ryoanji, which was either a mile walk or waiting for a bus, but we got sick of waiting so we decided to bag it and just go to Nijo. (I was vaguely interested in Ryoanji because it is near Ritsumeikan Daigaku, where Shigetoshi Hasegawa went to college, and I thought that'd be neat to see, but umm, yeah, I can be a fangirl on my own time) Got the 204 bus, rode across town, got off, went to Nijo.
I had actually been to Nijo-jou three years ago, but it was still neat to go back. It's one of the Tokugawa castles, and it has these floors with special clamps in them so the boards squeak and sound like nightingales. It's really fun when a huge tourgroup is walking through since they squeak and chirp like crazy. So we went through there and saw all the rooms and things and some shogun figures they had setup and whatnot. Then we went through the Nijo gardens, which were also REALLY nice this time of year; full of Sakura trees and some other sort of white flower, I think a kind of dogwood. From the top of one of the guard gate thingies, you could see a ton of the city, including Daimonjiyama, which I had only seen from the top, previously. So that was cool.
After that we continued on the 204 bus to Ginkakuji because Nykkel had expressed interest in the "Philosopher's Path", which is the walk along the canals with cherry blossom trees, between Ginkakuji and Nanzenji. He wasn't that interested in Ginkakuji and in retrospect I feel bad for dragging him in there since it wasn't as interesting as I remembered it being. Maybe it was the light preventing me from getting good pictures, or something, but... besides, HEY, this LJ pic I use with this entry is ALREADY a picture of me at Ginkakuji :) So hmm. Oh, and to Brad, Carl, and Oren: apparently April isn't the right time of year to be continually accosted by schoolchildren, since none of them even remotely tried to talk to us.
I found a ton of crazy Hello Kitty Kyoto stuff all day, which I have not been mentioning because I don't think anyone wants to know about it. I bought a few small things, and in one store took a picture of all of the crazy HK stuff.
The Philosopher's walk was actually really nice, it was like a mile down a big cherry blossom path. It was really pretty and I enjoyed walking it a lot. It does not, however, actually go to Nanzenji; it ends about 1/3 of a mile from it. So we were vaguely lost and had to figure out how to get to Nanzenji because I knew how to get to the city buses from there... so we got to Nanzenji and then I realized that if the wall thingy was closed and we couldn't go up it, there wasn't THAT much to do there without walking for a while and finding the aqueducts and all. So we left. Eventually we found Sanjodoori and the stop for the 5 bus. We were literally 100 feet or so from the Higashiyama Youth Hostel when we waited for the bus... I got severe deja vu. (HY YH was the first place the four of us stayed in Japan on my trip in 2001.)
I had thought originally of taking the 5 bus to Teramachi or Kawaramachi or whatever covered mall area and getting dinner, but then I realized I didn't know how far it actually was from the station and it'd be bad if we got stranded somewhere and didn't make it back for the train at 8pm, and it was 6pm when we got on the 5 bus, so I decided to just ride the bus all the way to the eki. (I admired the 3-story Book-Off on the way, of course.) We went to look for food in the eki and mostly failed; there was a "Restaurant Road" on the 11th floor of the department store but it was hugely overpriced; we ended up in the B2F floor looking around at food and bento stalls and eventually I got a box of gyoza and some nigiri, and Nykkel got an inari/futomaki bento and some nigiri, and we got some sweets, and OH I found the COOLEST toy in a random souvenir store, it's a REMOTE-CONTROLLED MARIO KART! DUDE! Talk about impulse buys, it was like 10 bucks though and I mean, it's a reallife MARIO KART! Whee! Okay, I'm a dork. Anyway, I got a toy, and some junk food (this weird chocolate fondue sticks candy thing which is like Toppo but not crackers), and then we got to the trains majorly early. Which is not necessarily a bad thing in my opinion.
Spent the trip back writing a few postcards (I have less addresses than I thought, oops; one of my Kyoto postcard sets was of a Buddha and I realized I didn't know Heidi's address, for example), and reading a little, and sleeping for an hour or so; I literally remember nothing between passing through Shizuoka and getting to the Tokyo station. Sleepily I followed Nykkel through the Tokyo station onto the Marunouchi line and I think we even had a conversation on the subway train, but the next thing I really remember is playing PNM in the arcade near the station, and getting a Hello Kitty out of the UFO catcher on my first try, and then I came up here to do a brain dump of today.
So yeah. To sum up: today == 6 hours or so on trains, 9 hours in Kyoto. I know they say you can't do a day trip of Kyoto but I think we had a pretty good time and saw a lot of cool stuff, and I finally saw Kinkakuji, and... yeah. And tomorrow we go to the Giants-Swallows baseball game! Wheeeeeee!
While I'm at it I have two philosophical points I want to brain-dump:
1) I actually have started to enjoy playing UFO catchers for the heck of it, not just for the desire of getting the prize. This frightens me.
2) In the last week I have seen many mixed racial couples here. They have been, 99% of the time, a Japanese woman and a caucasian man, in any stage from just a teenage couple to a guy with his wife and kids. I think I have seen TWO couples that were the opposite way and both times it was a Japanese sarariman and a blonde busty woman. I have to wonder why this is the case. Is it because of the stereotype that American guys go after Japanese girls because they're cuter, or supposedly "easier", or what? Or is it that American girls don't go after Japanese guys, or perhaps that Japanese guys wouldn't consider American girls anywhere near cute enough in general compared to Japanese women? This is what I was thinking about while walking down the Philosopher's Path thingy. I think I said something out loud about it to Nykkel but he wasn't really in a chatty mood at the time.
I guess it was only reinforced by later when on the bus there was a caucasian guy with a Japanese girl and he was literally all over her. I don't think I've really seen much excessive PDA in Japan *except* involving caucasian guys, actually. (There was another couple the other day on the subway.) Maybe it's just the sort of thing I notice again, but eh. It just seems odd. Or maybe for some reason I'm just not seeing the caucasian-woman-with-Japanese-guy couples... they just aren't around anywhere I am?
You know, I just reread the last paragraph or two and debated whether someone might take it the wrong way, but eh, it's what's on my mind and I'm honestly wondering about it, so. Feel free to discuss it instead of kit-kats.
Right, so anyway, this morning we got up super-mega-hyper early, leaving the ryokan by 7:15 to get to Tokyo station by 8... we had tickets for the 8:10 Hikari shinkansen to Kyoto. Fortunately we hit Tokyo station around 7:45 so it was all good, we even had time to stop at a bakery and grab some food to bring on the train and all, and we were in our seats 5 mins before the train left, etc. Good stuff. The train ride there wasn't too exciting. I looked outside the windows a lot and eventually fell asleep for like an hour; it was a 2 and a half hour train ride between the two cities. Ponder that a second though - Kyoto and Tokyo are around 270 miles apart if I recall correctly, and we got there in 150 minutes. Meaning the train was definitely going over 100 miles per hour at some points. Cool stuff. And still smooth enough for me to sleep through significant parts of the ride.
So, we got to Kyoto. I have this great idea now which involves me hiring myself out as a tour guide, since I apparently have a really good knack for figuring out these sorts of touristy things. First thing we did outside the trains was I went and got Kyoto bus and walking maps from the Kyoto Tourism Center in the station; then I said to Nykkel, "Okay, we're going to Kinkakuji first, then maybe Ryoanji, then Nijo Castle, then Ginkakuji and the philosopher's path, then Nanzenji... how's that sound? No objection? Good. Get an all-day bus pass like I'm doing and we're gonna hop on the 205 bus in a second."
So we did just that. Our first stop was Kinkakuji for two reasons: 1) I figured it was the furthest out thing we were interested in seeing and 2) I didn't get to see it on my trip to Japan in 2001 because I'd forgotten my passport at the youth hostel. So. We went there. We saw this big golden temple thingy. It was big and it was golden. There were nice gardens around it too. I made a point of burning incense at the shrine (and since it was 3 mai for 20 yen I made Nykkel burn one too), and Nykkel got one of those fortune thingies, which seemed to be of moderately good luck, but we couldn't actually read it, heh.
After that we were going to go to Ryoanji, which was either a mile walk or waiting for a bus, but we got sick of waiting so we decided to bag it and just go to Nijo. (I was vaguely interested in Ryoanji because it is near Ritsumeikan Daigaku, where Shigetoshi Hasegawa went to college, and I thought that'd be neat to see, but umm, yeah, I can be a fangirl on my own time) Got the 204 bus, rode across town, got off, went to Nijo.
I had actually been to Nijo-jou three years ago, but it was still neat to go back. It's one of the Tokugawa castles, and it has these floors with special clamps in them so the boards squeak and sound like nightingales. It's really fun when a huge tourgroup is walking through since they squeak and chirp like crazy. So we went through there and saw all the rooms and things and some shogun figures they had setup and whatnot. Then we went through the Nijo gardens, which were also REALLY nice this time of year; full of Sakura trees and some other sort of white flower, I think a kind of dogwood. From the top of one of the guard gate thingies, you could see a ton of the city, including Daimonjiyama, which I had only seen from the top, previously. So that was cool.
After that we continued on the 204 bus to Ginkakuji because Nykkel had expressed interest in the "Philosopher's Path", which is the walk along the canals with cherry blossom trees, between Ginkakuji and Nanzenji. He wasn't that interested in Ginkakuji and in retrospect I feel bad for dragging him in there since it wasn't as interesting as I remembered it being. Maybe it was the light preventing me from getting good pictures, or something, but... besides, HEY, this LJ pic I use with this entry is ALREADY a picture of me at Ginkakuji :) So hmm. Oh, and to Brad, Carl, and Oren: apparently April isn't the right time of year to be continually accosted by schoolchildren, since none of them even remotely tried to talk to us.
I found a ton of crazy Hello Kitty Kyoto stuff all day, which I have not been mentioning because I don't think anyone wants to know about it. I bought a few small things, and in one store took a picture of all of the crazy HK stuff.
The Philosopher's walk was actually really nice, it was like a mile down a big cherry blossom path. It was really pretty and I enjoyed walking it a lot. It does not, however, actually go to Nanzenji; it ends about 1/3 of a mile from it. So we were vaguely lost and had to figure out how to get to Nanzenji because I knew how to get to the city buses from there... so we got to Nanzenji and then I realized that if the wall thingy was closed and we couldn't go up it, there wasn't THAT much to do there without walking for a while and finding the aqueducts and all. So we left. Eventually we found Sanjodoori and the stop for the 5 bus. We were literally 100 feet or so from the Higashiyama Youth Hostel when we waited for the bus... I got severe deja vu. (HY YH was the first place the four of us stayed in Japan on my trip in 2001.)
I had thought originally of taking the 5 bus to Teramachi or Kawaramachi or whatever covered mall area and getting dinner, but then I realized I didn't know how far it actually was from the station and it'd be bad if we got stranded somewhere and didn't make it back for the train at 8pm, and it was 6pm when we got on the 5 bus, so I decided to just ride the bus all the way to the eki. (I admired the 3-story Book-Off on the way, of course.) We went to look for food in the eki and mostly failed; there was a "Restaurant Road" on the 11th floor of the department store but it was hugely overpriced; we ended up in the B2F floor looking around at food and bento stalls and eventually I got a box of gyoza and some nigiri, and Nykkel got an inari/futomaki bento and some nigiri, and we got some sweets, and OH I found the COOLEST toy in a random souvenir store, it's a REMOTE-CONTROLLED MARIO KART! DUDE! Talk about impulse buys, it was like 10 bucks though and I mean, it's a reallife MARIO KART! Whee! Okay, I'm a dork. Anyway, I got a toy, and some junk food (this weird chocolate fondue sticks candy thing which is like Toppo but not crackers), and then we got to the trains majorly early. Which is not necessarily a bad thing in my opinion.
Spent the trip back writing a few postcards (I have less addresses than I thought, oops; one of my Kyoto postcard sets was of a Buddha and I realized I didn't know Heidi's address, for example), and reading a little, and sleeping for an hour or so; I literally remember nothing between passing through Shizuoka and getting to the Tokyo station. Sleepily I followed Nykkel through the Tokyo station onto the Marunouchi line and I think we even had a conversation on the subway train, but the next thing I really remember is playing PNM in the arcade near the station, and getting a Hello Kitty out of the UFO catcher on my first try, and then I came up here to do a brain dump of today.
So yeah. To sum up: today == 6 hours or so on trains, 9 hours in Kyoto. I know they say you can't do a day trip of Kyoto but I think we had a pretty good time and saw a lot of cool stuff, and I finally saw Kinkakuji, and... yeah. And tomorrow we go to the Giants-Swallows baseball game! Wheeeeeee!
While I'm at it I have two philosophical points I want to brain-dump:
1) I actually have started to enjoy playing UFO catchers for the heck of it, not just for the desire of getting the prize. This frightens me.
2) In the last week I have seen many mixed racial couples here. They have been, 99% of the time, a Japanese woman and a caucasian man, in any stage from just a teenage couple to a guy with his wife and kids. I think I have seen TWO couples that were the opposite way and both times it was a Japanese sarariman and a blonde busty woman. I have to wonder why this is the case. Is it because of the stereotype that American guys go after Japanese girls because they're cuter, or supposedly "easier", or what? Or is it that American girls don't go after Japanese guys, or perhaps that Japanese guys wouldn't consider American girls anywhere near cute enough in general compared to Japanese women? This is what I was thinking about while walking down the Philosopher's Path thingy. I think I said something out loud about it to Nykkel but he wasn't really in a chatty mood at the time.
I guess it was only reinforced by later when on the bus there was a caucasian guy with a Japanese girl and he was literally all over her. I don't think I've really seen much excessive PDA in Japan *except* involving caucasian guys, actually. (There was another couple the other day on the subway.) Maybe it's just the sort of thing I notice again, but eh. It just seems odd. Or maybe for some reason I'm just not seeing the caucasian-woman-with-Japanese-guy couples... they just aren't around anywhere I am?
You know, I just reread the last paragraph or two and debated whether someone might take it the wrong way, but eh, it's what's on my mind and I'm honestly wondering about it, so. Feel free to discuss it instead of kit-kats.
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Unfortunately, I've heard stories about racism in Japan, especially in regards to black people. My wife is black, and... well... we're kind of kissy-kissy all the time. :) Would we be looked down upon for showing our mutual affection in Japan? Would our interracial cuteness make it more of an issue?
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The Nintendo Company Store (in Redmond) has the remote control Mario Kart stuff - I need to get some, they're so cool!
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What?!? Hello Kitty is awesome! I want to paint a giant angel kitty on the hood of my pickup truck!
It took me forever, but I finally figured out what these Bookoffs you've been talking about are. I thought it was like a 'come in and read before buying' or 'party!' or somehow like a bake-off, that could happen at any store. But now I am wise. Now I know it is just a store, and I am an idiot. :D
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The last thing either one of us ever thought about was, "Hey, everybody! Look what I SNAGGED!", which seems to me to be the purpose of a lot of this blatant public kissy-kissy. She and I don't even hold hands in public, truth be told, and when we see another "international couple" (the popular euphemism) standing around the train station sucking face, we want to walk up and slap them.
Not that I'm being self-righteous or anything -- I mean, they can do what they like, it's no skin off my tuchis -- but this sort of thing does nothing to convince people that I'm not similarly here for the H0T J4P4n33Z3 Ch1x0rZ.
And it goes both ways. Ask the wife (and you'll have a chance to, since I'm probably going to bring you up to the house): one of my biggest turn-offs in the entire world is when a girl walks up to me and acts all interested in me for about ten or fifteen minutes before she starts bugging me to teach her English, which turns out to nearly always be her original purpose. Since I'm old and ugly and have a wedding ring on my finger, this doesn't happen anymore, but 10 years ago I had to deal with that crap just about every day. What a pain in the ass.
My wife never did this. This is probably why I'm married to her today.
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*bows*scrapes*kowtows*begs*
If you see the single for Koda Kumi's Real Emotion/1000 Words (the FF:X2 OP/ED) for cheap, could you pick it up for me? Please, please, pweeeeaaazzze! *sad puppy dog eyes* heck, I can paypal you $$$ for it if that helps ^_^
Man, I just need to go to Japan and spend some money... ^^;;
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Well.....
Also, marriages between most Japanese couples, traditionally, is marriage of convenience. Imagine how hard it is to be married to a salaryman who habitually works 12-14 hour days, only to come home drunk at 2 in the morning to repeat the process the next day.
This is just a cultural Japanese thing. Think of the climate of America circa 1950. You can see that many western women wouldn't really be into having a relationship with this sort of man. This is my theory behind the lack of Japanese male - western female relationships in Japan.
The flipside is that many Japanese women raised in this environment sort of expect men to assume a position of power and dominance in a relationship. Combine this with the sexual atmosphere of Japan - which is much more open than most Western countries; for example, walk into any Tsutaya and survey the diverse and popular porn section - and you have the stereotype of the Japanese woman who is easy to have sex with, and who will care for "her man" and basically do what he says. And the fact is that a lot of Western men find this situation attractive. Plus, the women are usually willing because Western men are supposed to be more liberated, from a feminist perspective, than Japanese men, and then there's the whole oddity factor of dating a gaijin.
I'm kind of giving a rough summary of how I think things are there, but that's my general take on that whole situation.
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This question has come up sooo many times, I don't think we'll ever have a good reason for it...
One of the hardest parts is it's hard to talk about without making broad sweeping generalizations about race/culture, and gender and at the same time even! But here goes:
So what I heard a lot is actually that Japanese guys are actually scared of American/foreign girls. Well, scared of dating them anyway. Stereotypical american girl is all independent and confident and can and will take care of herself, earn her own way, and demand that her bf do the same and entertain her at the same time. While the stereotypical Japaenese guy can handle the last one fine, they aren't so into the other parts, and would much rather go for the stereotypical Japanese girl who accepts these roles. That said, I went to Kansai Gaidai (population 80% female, 5% heterosexual male, remainder: gay as a maypole!), so I didn't meet too many japanese guys, and those who I did were usually gay, but this is just what I've heard.
Also, yeah, I've got to agree with the2belo. Seriously, speaking english is a major attraction (I dunno how much it is an ulterior motive. I think the lines might be a little blurry actually). I watched so many japanese friends fawn over guys who spoke nothing but english. I think that might be why the friends I hung out with many spanish and french majors ;)
Also, there's supposedly this sort of "foreign boyfriend is a cool status thing." but I don't really get where that comes from. I don't think I ever knew anybody who that happened to (well, maybe one couple...they seemed pretty normal though)...The vast majority of guys there spoke lots of english and were just having fun flirting with lots of girls with committing to anyone (oh the jealousy -- i mean amongst the japanese girls), so I don't think anyone ever really won that status symbol. It turned out my "speaking partner" really wanted to use me to meet more foreign guys, unfortunately for her most of my friends were either female or gay (and I don't think she ever got to meet the gay ones).
Anyway, I think I'm rambling now...And these are totally such crazy generalizations, and I know of so many exceptions...But also the stereotypes are out there (or at least sure look like they are)...
You know what I always thought was kind of funny about the hello-kitty stuff? You could buy like the local Hello-Kitty stuff at tourist places as like cute "I was here!"-omiyage, but lots of places sold Hello-Kitty stuff from like the local town plus surrounding towns, like if you wanted to think you traveled more than you did ;)
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Back in Pittsburgh I *think* I've seen it happen the other way occasionally, but anecdotally, I would bet money on it being foreign looking rather than Asian in particular.
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That's what I get for skimming quickly...
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