JAPAN [two] - KYOTO...

KYOTO: The Ancient Imperial Court's city...

The second city we wanted to visit was the ancient seat of the imperial court… which moved to Tokyo a century ago, leaving Kyoto to maintain respect for deeper history…

'Seems a map might be useful to show the three major destinations on our travel.. As I wrote in the previous post, we landed at Narita [just east of Tokyo] for the first night, then on for 3 days in that city. Now the narrative picks up with a week in historic Kyoto.

Celebrating contrast to the exciting modernity of the newer city we were leaving on the very[!] fast Shinkansen… the "bullet train" from inside which the view was passing too quickly for my camera to catch anything... it was almost too fast for even my eyes!

Trains run PRECISELY on time... here is the crew of cleaners waiting... bowing, actually... for the passengers to exit before they cleaned in only minutes so we could board. At exactly the time printed on our tickets we began moving.

 

  

Glimpses only: rice fields flashing between urban areas; tantalizing views of the coast; quickly visiting a cemetery hanging above a seaside resort; patches of peeking tea, growing in tight rows; numerous tunnels through ridges of mountains giving me irregular periods of shade to more easily see my computer screen [I'm sitting at a south window seat]; tightly clipped gardens whizzing so I could not see what was planted; many greenhouses... mostly smaller home-sized, but some were quite large operations; a huge wind generator; numerous large solar panel arrays; largish factories labeled Toyota or Mitsubishi, surrounded by residential areas, no doubt for the workers; mostly modern homes, but a few looking quite traditional; high net-surrounded driving practice cages [we've seen several bits of evidence that golf seems to be popular]; a European inspired church tower of open-worked stone or concrete; contrasting numerous traditional temple roofs; many. many! power lines... this is an electric culture;

Then... suddenly, unexpectedly… Mount Fuji... peeking into the window on the other side of the train! I am so happy to have noticed her… we'd neglected to note Ryan Shaffer's suggestion to reserve seats on the right [also correct] side of the train… I scrambled to get some fair snapshots.

THAT made my day! We live communing with with one of her distant cousins, so I passed along Tahoma's greetings to what is indeed... even at such speed... one gorgeous lady!

Kyoto is like arriving in another country... it actually is more "country" in the sense that it contrasts the " megalopolis" of Tokyo, having no skyscrapers. The train station is an amazing contemporary construct of spaces where interiors of rail concourses open to a series of seemingly endless escalators going up/down toward each end of a vast architectural "valley"… recalling that the city lies inside its bowl of mountains.  A broad, long stairway lights up into images, including Halloween greetings with spiders as yet another culture celebrates a becoming-universal holiday.  The complex contains a huge department store & a big glitzy hotel... Dozens of small restaurants & shops scattered on every level of this urban extravagance... Presided over by the Kyoto Tower... a colored light mushroom lofting.

Bells began to find me...

The city is the ancient Imperial capitol... like more than a thousand years ancient! It is built on a plain in a bowl surrounded on three sides by mountains… not the Rockies-big... at the junction of two small rivers...laid out on a grid with the Palace near the center.

We stayed first at the Westin Miyako Hotel, famous from the late1800s & built onto enough to now comprise hundreds of rooms, but with all its added-on parts, over a century it has become too big for its britches. It was quite a contrast to the Andaz, but served us well. It offered a birding trail & a garden I never got to see, because we were constantly running to meet the times we'd reserved at the Imperial Household Agency on the first day... four tours.

Each tour began with admittance 20 minutes before the tour time… after we'd stood waiting for the reliable precision outside a gate in the walls surrounding the Imperial acres inside. Our tickets were checked by the guards before we were allowed entrance to where our passports were examined to match the information on file from the IHA. Verified, we joined our group... usually several dozen folk, mostly Japanese.

First, a video of the route we were to take through each of the gardens, with some bits of history, all in Japanese except for a few breezy English subtitles... not terribly useful. The guides spoke only Japanese... the headsets we were given in English were not much more informative…sometimes offering a bit of helpful information.

My eyes did not need many words...

While I love the dazzle, 

my eyes are always also drawn to the 

hardware & plumbing...

This demonstrates the roof construction of cedar fibers. familiar

to us living in the Northwest USA, where the First Nations people use cedar fibers.

 Tile is used as well... frequently looking quite metallic!

I studied methods for propping-up trees as pertinent to supporting our own recumbent native cherry.

Geometry is practiced with interesting care...

Finally, here I'm sharing some of the hoped-for classic images of bridged water surrounded by the carefully positioned stones & the studiously shaped pines...

Each of the two palaces... & the two villas, which were retreats overlooking the city... were situated inside a complex garden, which is what we wanted to see.

We were brought up only to the "porches" of any of the buildings to be able to peek through the open exterior screens into the interiors with noteworthy painted screens. Much became repetitive & thus familiar, but the gardens, while equally true to some forms, were quite different in terrain.

Gardens are part of what we especially anticipated seeing. We visited so many... including those in numerous temples... that I felt almost as exhausted as if I were in my own garden trying to keep up with Tom!

These are immense landscapes … tightly planted, designed with amoeba-like waterways into ponds; bridges of wood or stone, sometimes earthen topped, create walking paths of rocks & various rustic pavements meandering over small islands to arrive at teahouses placed for spectacular viewing... so many artfully placed stones!

Those light & fragile buildings, honoring wood from the forest & paper from the field, are well grounded with stone… communing with its garden… well watered all this evolves into quite a fantastical version of nature.

We are here too late for most blossoming plants yet too early for the full autumnal color… which is just beginning to tinge the maples. One can imagine the coming glories, however the basic sculpture of the trees is a study in & of itself. All have been tended... if not almost "tortured"... carefully from early in their lives so that they are sculpted to dance with their siting & with each other, inviting transitory compositions opening to vistas long & short. Many become steep in places rising toward spots of choice overview. They are places of very long-term fantasy resulting from years of labor in pruning alone! They are the bones of these gardens.

The Imperial taste was seemingly "simple"... refined toward an appreciation of natural beauty… not gaudy or gilded in the European manner. The palaces & villas are thatched or shingled wooden structures with paper shoji screens & shutters to enclose/protect as well as to boldly expose/open to the gardens. They seemed quiet, private places not much made for show in the usual sense. Of course, one knows there were many additional aspects to the Imperial life which would add the color & pattern of robes & kimonos, sounds & rhythms of ceremony, which are not evident to us as later tourists... who were constantly in each other's way as we all were shooting our cameras at every turn...not really enjoying anything "natural" about where we were.

So I must enjoy being the tourist & trust my memories as they mature with the images' help... I've done this before. My new fancy camera is not yet comfortable… I must continue enjoying the full plate of learning… Learning life.

Speaking of plates: I will make a post about the fabulous food fun, but this morsel for now. We walked a lot & once got happily lost in an unexpected... color-coordinated... urban rice field.

I'd begun collecting advertising fliers for their design & color… thinking gift-wrap. One flyer informed me about a NETSUKE museum. I have long been entranced by these miniature sculptures… which originally functioned as counterpoise on a cord holding the inro, a small purse hanging from the belt of a kimono. They were always collectors items. 

I recommend a recent bestselling book, The Hare With The Amber Eyes which tells the story of one such collection.

The museum is housed in a handsome 300-year-old home set back in a garden behind a gate at the street. A collection of some 400 small exquisite pieces displayed in magnificently inappropriately designed cases! One could not get close enough to actually see the pieces... which others had realized, so they placed magnifying glasses on clunky stands to highlight one detail… obscuring the rest of the piece! All was sharply lit from above all that reflective surface! These displays were absolutely stupidly rude to their contents.

Netsuke are intimate personal objects, meant to be held... fondled... which freedom I know to be impossible in a public exhibition. I have seen other museums show such collections at eye level in thin glass cases... so they can simply be viewed from both sides with much more clarity & ease.

It was very frustrating to this jeweler already suffering from loss of too much of my youthful visual acuity. Photographs were not allowed.

I tried to console my disappointment by moving through the opened screened spaces between the actual objects to a series of videos featuring the techniques of some of the contemporary artists being displayed. Those offered some tighter viewing, but would have been much better had they been edited so as not to be so tedious, sometimes even silly. By now I've been around filmmakers enough that I recognized these to be almost amateur.

The saving grace was the building, complete with the kitchen... which functioned as the video theatre. It featured a huge black cooking stove, its pipe soaring into the two-storied space... served by a steep stairway. A water well or cistern was covered with sturdy bamboo laced to roll back…. with a crane to lower or raise the wooden bucket. Clay pots were covered with wooden lids, two parallel bars for handles... All a bit over-sized.

More netsuke were much better displayed up in what must have been the bedrooms of this large home. I'm glad to have seen it all, even as I wish I had been able to actually see what I'd paid to see. Ahhh, life!

The better experience, later that same day, was the International Manga Museum. I knew very little about this particularly Japanese art form... Thinking of it as "comics" because it is usually drawn like that... pages of cells with words, often in "balloons".

I met this lively one on our first night in the gift shop under the Tokyo Tower... He seems to be part of what Manga's about... While I will probably never quite understand the persistent overlay we saw of plastique phantasm in both print & 3-D forms... so much of which I cannot easily appreciate except as [too] "cute" or as kitsch was commonly considered fashionable.

This sculpture made in the technique of paper lanterns crafted on bamboo framework was the only permissible place to make photos.. so I did!

 That will serve as a light dessert to our deep appreciation of the old city's charms... we have many more photos, of course, but... enough for now.

Our last two days in Kyoto, we moved closer to the train station, first in an urban, rather vertical ryokan, a traditional Japanese inn with tatami mats where you sleep on futons. The last night, we moved across the station to another hotel which allowed us to catch our train the next morning to the island of Kyushu, where our friend Terry Welch had arranged for us to stay in a real ryokan!

JAPAN - one...

JAPAN JOURNAL..
Part One: Tokyo

To celebrate our twenty years "in some kind of relationship" … as Stephen likes to explain that ours did not begin with any sort of wedding... nor did "we" begin at the same time [it took longer for Stephen than for me] We know we met sometime in the month of May. So, we celebrate the entire merry month! This year we planned a holiday to Japan -- in October -- because we are so busy in the garden in May.

Using miles [plus some cash from me] we afforded ourselves business class luxe. With libations & laudable dinner service inside our adjacent pods, we could recline flat to sleep nicely,... landing 10+ hours later at Narita, the airport about an hour away by train from Tokyo. On good advice, we settled into the Narita Hilton for that first evening in Japan. Inside an extension of the familiar corporate design as the airports within which we'd been "suspended"... proved to be an important restorative assisting the inevitable adjustments into a 16 hour leap forward in time. A quiet dinner invited a good sleep.

Next morning we got ourselves organized by reserving tickets on our rail passes for the train travels we plan... being able to take the high speed trains whenever/wherever we like beyond those. The first was to travel into Tokyo station, watching as the scenery changed from rice fields to suburbs into the urban core. I had difficulty making photos out those blurring windows.

After several years not having a "proper" camera this obsessive observer of the odd niceties, the hardware, the smaller details, mundane & exalted, of new places began to explore inside the too-tight macro lens of a new Nikon… which immediately presented a steep learning curve!

[10 October] On the second day in Tokyo I woke early... into a spectacularly dawning view from 47 stories above the city shrouded in a delicately misted dawning. The same view last night was sparkling city lights.

 

We had been delivered by a quiet, rather formal, white gloved driver with white crocheted-lace antimacassars adorning the seats. I did not know until later that all cabs in Tokyo present these accouterments.

Not before, however, I'd begun making a small collection of photos recording their slight variations…

At the same moment our luggage met the pavement in the forecourt of a brand new skyscraper named Toranomon Hills, the second tallest building in the city, containing our hotel, the Andaz, a young man, deftly identifying us from our luggage tags,  greeted us with our names. Taking our roller bags in tow he invited us to follow him through a quietly-lit short dark wood passage into an elevator whisking us up to the lobby… on the 51st floor! We were led past what looked like the registration desk, [but was the station for several concierges] into a lofty space with several large tables… heavy slabs of tropical wood. Requesting our passports he disappeared to make copies while a server offered us tea just as we were joined by a woman with fine English who welcomed us with our passports in hand to register us... all this seemed choreographed so smoothly as to match the polished surroundings. We had indeed found a slice of heaven! I rather liked being spoiled for our anniversary!

She explained the hotel occupied 5 or 6 floors at the very top & we would take an elevator down from this "lobby" on this 51st floor to our room on the 47th! I am intrigued by the interior elevators, connecting only the floors of the hotel, where the cars are decorated with delightful relief sculptures of cast paper... Quite lovely!

 

 As I realize I'm sharing a white series, here is a huge sculpture in the garden of the hotel's building. Its calligraphic aspects caught the eye of my doppelganger,  Leo Toye, of course. The graphic & written aspects of the Japanese language fascinated me visually...

Our room had more of the dark wood slab furniture, contrasted with white walls. Stone floors in the bath & dressing area, which is capable of being divided with several heavy sliding wood door/walls into configurations to accommodate openness or privacy.

 

 This, at our bedsides gave control to, well... 'most everything!

The toilet, once one learns, lifts its lid as one approaches it & begins what must be assumed to be encouraging gurgles as one settles on the heated seat. It has one of those rather invisible automatic bidets which we are enjoying to explore. One chooses the temperature & pressure of various squirts, sprays & poofs... after which, walking away, to hear it lower the lid & flush while you wash your hands. Its control panel was understandably complex!

Ahh... Japanese technology!  Our verb at home "to compost" simply does not apply inside this seeming flood of water.

We pulled our attention from those amenities & the view to drop back down to street level & began a walking exploration, following notes from Stephen's cousin, Ryan, who travels here often in his work for the Mike Mansfield Foundation...

Several well planted shrines, tucked amidst the modern towers, began an introduction to the richness of gardens we would experience…gradually becoming archetypal.

We eschewed going up the Tokyo Tower, an aged engineering feat inspired by Eiffel, which once offered views now surpassed by the one of our room.

Japan seemingly becomes dense layers long lacquered into a particularly groomed & polished history.

We began walking toward the Ginza, where Ryan noted a plaza with an old steam locomotive staged outside the station, a meeting place for salary men, shedding their ties from the uniform crowd of the black suits all of them wear to their office jobs. Cell phones (ubiquitous to everyone!) in hand as they connect with friends for drinks in the warren of small "stand-up" bars or eating places of this district. A few women & younger people, but this is, as Ryan states, a local business ritual interesting to watch for awhile.

We initiated our own search for a beer & some Yakitori .... skewers of pork or chicken parts (tail to gizzard) which are the specialty in these places tucked under the arches of the train tracks above. We peered down into numerous open doorways before making an impulsive choice to share half of one of the small tall tables packed into the crowd. We ordered beers & soaked in the atmosphere, watching as the biz guys hung their black jackets on the wooden hangers on the walls already crowded with adverts. We took a rudimentary education as we watched what others were being served to approximate what we read on the English version of the menu we were given as obvious foreigners. We ordered chicken… not the gizzards, although I suspect those would have been delicious too.

    Later. after more walking we shared another table with two young men in an equally crowded place, seeming more Korean, with grills in the tables. The two young men across this fire were giving each other lessons in gripping a golf club, but we took their lessons in how to order a selection of seafood including scallops in their shells big prawns & oysters, all of which we would grill ourselves. But first they brought a tightly covered big tin box with oysters & mussels steamed in sake... delicious!

We finished with raw oysters from 3 different areas... including New Zealand. We tried another of Ryan's suggestions to drink, Shōchū which is a gentle earthy liquor brewed from rice, buckwheat & sweet potatoes often flavored with things like chestnuts. Mixed with water, juice or tea, it was interestingly odd to my palate.

The food has been amazing! We've eaten all sorts, including nifty rice snacks we found at the veritable "deli" found in the numerous quick-stop stores which also offered the best cash machines.

One evening we ate at a restaurant high in a tower giving us views of a very different area... specializing in shabu-shabu, which is Kobe beef, sliced very thin & cooked by a woman in kimono, in a broth. But the first courses were sushi & sashimi [both raw fish]… then a crab tempura, presented whole before she pulled it all apart to serve. It seemed curious to this son of a beef-steak fanatic who would never have sliced such prime fat-veiled slices too thin for a grill & Poppa would never think to lay it into boiling water! But he would have stopped resisting at the first bite of tender succulence. Cabbage, mushrooms & greens were added before more slices of meat… all building a lovely soup for the end.

TOKYO NATIONAL MUSEUM...

We would visit many more gardens than museums, but The Tokyo National Museum served as our first primer into some of the layers of this anciently complex culture, which we could only pretend to peel into such a brief appreciation.

A handsome kimono!

Robust archaic pottery...

Helmet decor...

Rich embroidery...

Hell... as depicted in one section of a scroll...

becomes Heaven in a couple feet...

Thus, Tokyo would garner more attention on a second visit... this "taste" was revealing. Cities are always studies unto themselves, being archetypal cauldrons lively in the flux of the real aeconomie... 

I didn't think I wanted to spend time in another city when my image of Japan wanted to capture something "real"... as in what functioned in the archetype of "JAPAN". Yet this city will collect my attention again.