Shirakawa part 1

So! Back from Shirakawa. Overall pretty fun trip, think I made some new friends so whee. (One goes to Georgetown! One is from CT and I happened to show her a photo of a mural dad did - she stares at it for a minute, then goes, "Did he do a hair salon in Wilton like 13 years ago?" "Uh... As a matter of fact, yes he did." "My dad's girlfriend owned it! I remember thinking how beautiful the art was!" "HOLY SHIT SRSLY??" It's a small world.)

First off, I misunderstood - we weren't going to Shirakawa-go (village) but Shirakawa-shi (city, though it was in the inaka - countryside). Not really in the mountains, pretty sad-looking and dilapidated. Ah well.

Day 1: Making soba noodles (with ridiculously huge knives), high school visit (Can I touch your hair? Are you going to marry your boyfriend?), crazy ryokan/onsen

We meet up at the ungodly hour of 6:45 am, get into Shirakawa around 11 am. First item of the day: learning how to make soba noodles! In an unheated room, which will soon become a theme of the weekend. We make them using just buckwheat flour and water, and get to cut up the noodles with MASSIVE KNIVES OF DOOM. Seriously, move over butcher knives - soba noodle knives could be stars of horror movies.
Very blurry, but you get the idea.

The house we made soba in.

Beautiful view and misty mountains from the soba place.


I'm not a huge fan of soba - especially when they're served cold, as these were. You dip them in sauce, but there's not a whole lot of flavor. And cold fold in an unheated room, when it's pouring outside, isn't all that nice. But it was an interesting experience. Some friends took some more interesting photos of me with knives... I'll be posting more pictures up as they get posted to facebook. :p

Following soba + eating them for lunch, we went to a high school. We were split into small groups and given a topic to discuss - for my group, what we usually eat at Christmas and New Years. That quickly changed into more general talking with our combinations of bad Japanese and bad English. I kept having girls exclaim over how "kawaii" I was... They told me my hair was beautiful, and asked if they could touch it. Haha. They asked if I had a boyfriend, I said sort of, back in the US - they started squealing and asked if I was going to marry him. Uh... :p They were very nice, it was just pretty funny. They also took tons and tons of pictures of us with their cell phone cameras.

After the high school, we headed up into the the start of the mountains to go to a ryokan. It had been pouring all day, so the roads were quite slippery, and when we got to the ryokan (where it was also snowing a bit, since it was higher)... we had a 5 minute walk down the steep, slippery Driveway Of Doom. They expect this to be accessible in the winter??
This picture taken the following morning doesn't really give it justice. Part of it is to the right, too.


At first we thought the ryokan was pretty awesome. It looked very neat inside, traditional, with creaky wooden floors and quite a maze of a place. There would be onsen! Yaay! It had kitties! MORE YAY. I was put in a room with the three girls who I would become pretty good friends with - they were already friends, but I think we clicked pretty well, I had a loot of fun with them.
Right inside:

The room (with kotatsu for keeping our footses warm):

Onsen kitty and uh.... my chest. I do not remember who took this picture for me but I think I may fire them. =p


We went to dinner, where my roommates and I discovered we were probably put together because we were all Special Foods people: one girl was allergic to crustaceans, I still hate fish/seafood, and the other two don't eat red meat.

After dinner, we decided to try and find an onsen to soak in! I love onsen! Unfortunately, it wasn't looking so good. First, one of our Japanese chaperone-guide-type-people thought the only hot springs we could use were ones that were outside. We did mention it was snowing a bit, right? And inside the building was generally unheated. Plus it was dark and unlighted and we couldn't see anything...
Outside hot spring, some brave soul tried it in the morning:


No. We asked someone who worked there, they pointed us to one that was upstairs (he also mentioned a co-ed one, but we weren't exactly comfortable with that when the girls went in to take a look and sad and old man squatting next to the pool, facing them with his legs wide open......). Up we went, but we didn't find anyone else going to it... We soon discovered why. The room was unheated and freezing. The water was ridiculously hot even for an onsen - we tried for about half an hour to get into it, and we just couldn't. We sat on the side, splashing water on ourselves to stay warm and alternately boiling our hands and freezing in the cold air. We eventually managed to get in if we kept our cold hands and feet out of the water, for a couple of minutes. We also wanted to wash our hair, etc - there were no showers, and we were told there were also no showers at the Buddhist temple we would be spending the next night at. We did a rather half-arsed job of that in the onsen, rinsing onto the floor, which you aren't generally supposed to do but we were pretty desperate... Finally we gave up and looked for everyone else. They had more success - there were private pools just beyond the co-ed bath, but you had to go outside briefly to get to them.

Ugh. Frozen and annoyed, we gave up.

None of us slept very well - we went from exhausted all day to lack of sleep silliness and spent a long time chatting. The unheated rooms made us very reluctant to get out of bed early the next morning. Breakfast wasn't a draw either - various pickled vegetables, seaweed, some kind of jelly thing... Fortunately I brought some clementines and food of my own. Not a fan of traditional Japanese breakfasts. :(

We left the ryokan and headed to a Japanese garden and tea ceremony~

Ryokan



To be continued! Need to study for my 3 quizzes tomorrow, I haven't even looked at the material yet... And NEED TO SHOWER. I hate hate hate not being able to shower every day. Freezing cold water from sinks doesn't really do it. :p

As always, Here are all my photos from the trip. :)

Shirakawa

Going to Shirakawa-go this weekend! It's a small mountain village with traditional-style buildings and gets some of the highest levels of snowfall in Japan (possibly the world? Just a quick Wikipedia), apparently - which I only just found out, necessitating an emergency run to buy winter boots and a thicker sweater or two tomorrow.... Because of the heavy snow, the houses have very slanted roofs. The itinerary is in Japanese; all I know that we're doing for sure is learning how to make soba noodles, talking with a high school class, and going to an onsen.

It sounds gorgeous and fun, provided I don't freeze. :)

Mountains mountains mountains!

Unfortunately my blasted camera only takes lithium batteries, which I haven't been able to find in Japan despite a Japanese friend's help, so I can't get it to last long. Hopefully I'll be able to get pictures still.

Vending Machines.. and then rambling about Japanese sex culture

Vending machines are huge in Japan. They're everywhere in Tokyo, usually selling a variety of cold drinks (water, various vitamin lemon waters, teas, soda, etc) and hot drinks in cans (coffee, hot chocolate, even soup). There's also lots of tobacco vending machines (have I mentioned that I hate how much everyone smokes here? Especially in even restaurants?), some alcohol vending machines since although the drinking age is 20, no one really cares here. But there's also lots of odd vending machines...

Here's an interesting page on vending machines in Japan. Lingerie, porn, flowers, I saw one with quick meals, umbrellas... Not mentioned in this article are the used girls' underwear vending machines... Supposedly they were stopped in 1993, but they can still be found occasionally, selling very expensive underwear, as seen here.

Japan certainly is an odd country when it comes to sex. Love hotels, where you can rent a room for a couple of hours, often in some kind of a fantasy setting... Take a look at this gallery and this one. Apartments tend to be so small and crowded, and often have thin walls, that it's hard to get some privacy so they're frequently used. Wikipedia says about 2% of the Japanese population visits them daily.

And no, family members who have reading this, I haven't even seen one... :p Probably passed them in Kabuki-cho (a sketchy area of Shinjuku at night - people, Japan is a lot safer than the US, but you still want to be careful, especially in Kabuki-cho and Roppongi, where the gaijin-aimed bars are located) while out with friends during the day but didn't realize it.

I did get groped last weekend while at an izakaya by a Japanese guy who stumbled out of the bathroom and past me, turned and just... grabbed my chest before stumbling on again. I was too shocked to do anything about it. I was talking to two guys from his group (they were seated next to us, I was waiting for my friends before he left) and they just said, "Sorry, he's pretty drunk..." I also had a businessman reach out and touch my cheek on while walking with friends on Halloween (I was a cat and painted on whiskers) and ask if I would be in Japan long enough to have a drink with him. ..... The professor for one of my classes organized a nomikai, which I didn't go to but a friend did, and apparently he brought hentai (porn) manga and showed it around to everyone.....

But! Most of the Japanese guys I know are incredibly sweet, and just get very stumbley when drunk. And very touchy-feely with other Japanese guys. Haha, it's very common to see guys hugging each other and holding hands when they're wasted. I don't think anyone else I know has had anything too bad happen (even on the subway, which is notorious for being trouble), either.

Just such an odd contrast. People don't kiss in public in Japan, holding hands is very common but kissing definitely not. Japanese don't say I love you much - I like you is used to mean I love you and I think still not that common, and marriages are often not that happy, as the businessmen work long hours and are hardly home except to sleep. And yet love hotels, porn, and the like are far from hidden. I think it's not as obvious in daily life as people make it out to be, but it's still definitely there. Interesting to see how different it is from the US.

More on the Yasukuni

I'm working on the short essay for my postwar Japanese class on the Yasukuni Shrine and Akihabara. This is a little tricky when the professor is obviously quite firm in the belief that there is no reason the Yasukuni Shrine should be controversial - the only article for extra reading that he gave us about it is an article explaining why it is not a glorification of Japan's military past, and that Koizumi's visits to it do not constitute a denial of Japan's past war crimes. It says that there are no bodies (the WWII war criminals are not buried there), that the criminals paid for their crimes in life and it should not go on after death, and that the countries bringing up complaints are silly - it is no one else's business, and no one cares if a President goes to the Arlington Cemetery. Yes, but the Arlington Cemetery doesn't have a museum dedicated to the military history of the country, which includes glossing over Japan's war atrocities, and excusing Japan's involvement with wars as being purely in order to prevent Western expansion into Asia and for self-defense. There's a bronze statue glorifying kamikaze pilots - I think they should certainly be remembered, but glorified rather than mourned as a tragic loss of life of so many young men? I found a photo of a label from the museum - I didn't see it, but I stopped paying much attention to the labels since they were frequently just in Japanese - on Nanjing, with this text: "General Matsui Iwane distributed maps to his men with foreign settlements and safety zones marked in red ink. Matsui told them to observe military rules and anyone that committed unlawful acts would be severely punished.

"He also warned the Chinese troops to surrender but commander-in-chief Tang Shengzhi ignored the warning. Instead, he ordered his men to defend Nanking to the death and then abandoned them. The Chinese were soundly defeated, suffering heavy casualties. Inside the city, residents were once again able to live their lives in peace." Uhm.... http://www.historyplace.com/worldhistory/genocide/nanking.htm

If the shrine was simply a place to honor the war dead, even with the war criminals there, I don't think it would have as much reason to be controversial. It would be for Japan to decide. But the Yushukan, which we went to - we didn't see the shrine itself, just the entrance - is all about the military history. And it portrays it in a very grand way. The essay we have to write - he does a sample essay, and he talks about how the Yasukuni is an example of "great" Japan (he has catchwords for different times in Japan's history and "great" is one) - yet the articles he gives us claims the shrine is there to pray for forgiveness and rest for those who died. Yet the image of Japan at its height, the fighter planes, huge canons, magnificent samurai armor, and the museum itself, seem to stand a little in contrast to that.

I'm certainly not going to bring this up though, to a Japanese professor for a class I'm worried about my grades in to begin with...

Edit - another interesting article here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8714706/page/3/

Oops. Hisashiburi da ne...

So it's been a while since I last wrote... Japan's not a good country to have depression in, and apparently my immune system is pretty terrible and I've had a series of bugs, so I haven't really been out and about much.

Yesterday, for my intellectual and cultural history of postwar Japan class (which sounds so interesting but is so, so terrible... a 3-hour class Friday evening, where the professor has awful English and makes no sense. The Waseda SILS classes don't really live up to expectation for a school with such a good reputation...) we had a class field trip to the Yasukuni Shrine and Akihabara. The Yasukuni Shrine, of course, is the rather controversial Shinto shrine that former prime minister Koizumi visited and caused a great deal of uproar since it honors some class A war criminals from WWII (such as prime minister and general Tojo) as well as war heroes. It's seen a symbol of Japanese militarism and imperialism, and relations with China and Korea especially were quite tense while Koizumi was in office, as they suffered quite a bit under Japanese rule.

At the Yasukuni Shrine, we visited the Yushukan - a museum dedicated to Japan's wars and military history. The shrine wa build to commemorate those who died for their country, and for the foundation of a peaceful Japan (as Yasakuni means peaceful nation/country). So the Yasukuni shrine is dedicated to repect all of Japan's war dead, in the wars since 1853 (it was built in 1869, just after the Meiji Restoration), not just those of World War II. It does portray an image of Japan at the height of its power, and some of the controversy is also due to it glorifying its past and glossing over the atrocities it committed against other countries. Although I couldn't read much, because almost everything is written just in Japanese, some of the controversy with the Yushukan is that it venerates Japan's role in history and glosses over "incidents" such as the Rape of Nanjing, Manchukuo, and the occupation of Korea. It also tends to blame China and the US for dragging it into wars. The Times has an article about it.

Anyway. After that we went to Akihabara (or Akiba), the paradise for techies and otaku. It's where to go if you want to buy a camera, tv, anime and video game figurines, or go to a maid cafe. Quite different from the Yasukuni, it was fast-paced, neon lights, small spaces, crammed with what's popular now - Japan of today is a place obsessed with fads and what's trendy, even more than the US. We have to write an essay comparing the two. Following that there was a class nomikai (drinking party), although I skipped to drag my poor sniffling sick self home instead. Apparently at the drinking party, the professor pulled out hentai (porn) manga that he bought and passed it around to the student. .... uh. Oh, Japan. What would you be without pervy old men...

Today I went to the Studio Ghibli museum with a bunch of friends. Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki, the director, are fairly well-known in the US - animated movies such as Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, My Neighbor Totoro, and others. A lot of them are very cute or well done, although some get too preachy for my tastes... But very creative worlds. The museum was like that: brilliant, creative design with quirky inventions, traditional animated films, and lots to pull out your inner kid. Hard to describe (and they're very strict about no taking pictures), but it was fun. I love looking at concept art.

Off to find some dinner and collapse for the night. Earthquake simulation and earthquake/fire safety instead of my Japanese language class on Monday, um... should be interesting. (As though I'm not afraid enough of earthquakes!)