Monthly Archive for December, 2007

I was awoken this morning by the bright blue sky hitting me through the window in my apartment.  I leave the curtains open now at night because it makes it a lot harder to sleep in, the morning after.  Although it’s become pretty chilly in Nagoya now - minimum temperature today is supposed to be -1ºC – there’s no sign of it snowing anytime soon.  In fact, there’s not a single cloud visible today.  I walked down to my local internet cafe in Yagoto, no more than ten minutes from my apartment, but it’s closed for the New Year and not open for a week or so.  The streets and shops are just as clear as the sky is today.  It’s the 31st of December, and almost all of those lucky enough not to be working have returned to their hometowns, to greet the new year with their family.  New Year’s Day is called “shougatsu” in Japanese, written as 正月.

Since I last updated Tomasu with my story about Gifu, Christmas has been and gone, I’ve changed wards for the third time, and just two days ago I returned to Gifu for another one-day trip with Yamashita and Tanahashi.  Just like the time before, the Friday night was a bounenkai (忘年会, end of year party), this time with my new ward, CCU.  This meant a mere four hours kip again, however the fresh air and excitement was enough to keep my eyes open and legs working.  After being a little arrogant about my skiing ability the time before, Yamashita wanted to see me ski, and likewise I didn’t really feel like being as knackered and beaten up as I was when I went snowboarding. 

I only had to rent the skis and boots this time, as I’d bought a hat and gloves the time before.  Yamashita lent me his old snowboard clothes so I didn’t have to rent clothes either.  Yamashita’s a fair bit taller than me, and said he’d lost about 15 kilograms since he wore the set he gave me, which meant they were way too big for me.  However, I already looked rediculous in a panda mask, and a saving of 4000 yen is too much to pass up.  So we took to the slopes straight away.  Compared to the wonderful fresh powder snow we experienced earlier in December, we skied and boarded in the rain this time.  I’ve never skied in the rain before, it wasn’t that much different surprisingly, the snow was just a lot patchier and icier.  I’m glad I wasn’t on a board this time, as my inevitable falls would have had twice the impact.  The dreary weather had the added bonus of the slopes being a lot less busy than they would otherwise have been, as the 29th of December was a national holiday.

We were at the same place in Gifu as we visited last time, Dynaland, as Yamashita had received some discount vouchers.  Although we’d hoped and expected the whole of the snow park would be open this time, probably due to the weather it was the same as before and only half of the lifts were running.  This didn’t turn out to be too much of a big deal though.  There was enough there to keep us interested for the six or seven hours we  spent on the snow.  Well, I did at least.  Yamashita and Tanahashi both took a break in the afternoon, Tanachan because he likes sleeping and Yamashita because he managed to lose his lift pass just before lunch.  He borrowed Tana’s whilst he slept, but after had to sit around inside for a while.  Sleeping in the restaurant is a completely normal thing to do in Japan, as I’ve maybe mentioned before.  I ate Miso Katsu for my lunch, a type of Nagoya cuisine, and could see around me a good handful of people with their weary heads smacked down onto the tables in front of them.

It felt great to be back on skis again, and raced Yamashita and Tana down a few times during the day.  I was able to get the sort of adrenaline rush I just couldn’t achieve last time when I was on a board, since I could only stand up ten seconds at most.  That said, I still want to get better at boarding and I’m probably going to do it again before I go back home.  The main wintersports season here is January to February, so I think an opportunity or two will come up.  Some tipsy nurses from CCU promised me we’d go sometime on Friday night,  but a drunken promise only goes so far.  I’ll wait and see.

 After we’d finished on the slopes, we went back to the onsen at Shirotori to rest our worn-out muscles.  Due to it being the start of the New Year holidays for most people, it was so packed this time we had to queue up to wash before going into the hot spring.  Once we were done we had some food from the restuarant there, got back in the car and drove home.  I slept the whole way.

Looking back on the year 2007, it feels like an awful lot has happened.  It’s definitely the last four cycles of the moon, from the start of September onwards, that will stick in my mind forever and which have shaped and matured me more than anything else.  I’m exactly the same person on the outside as I was when I arrived in Japan.  Same weight, same height, same voice, more or less the same hairstyle.  But inside, I’ve become a different person.  Maybe only so slightly that my friends and family won’t notice a change, but I do.  Other than the skills you acquire without trying when you have to live by yourself such as housework and being sort of organised, I’ve also acquired a much broader view of the world.  I feel like I understand it more sometimes, and sometimes less.  It feels like a very small place from time to time – especially with the ease in which I can contact people back in England, and when I notice things that are so familiar I could be sat back at home; and at other times I realise I’ve only seen such a small, fractional slice of the world that I’m really in no position to talk about it as a whole.

As for myself,  the best way to put it is that I’ve become content.  It’s not like I’ve had some great epiphany or revalation about life or the world, but I’m pretty happy with where I am in the world and have a rough idea of where I’m going to end up in the future.  That said, the destination is all but irrelevant.  It’s the journey that counts, and the journey I began when I boarded that Virgin Airlines aeroplane in Heathrow is the same one I’ll be travelling long after I’ve returned home.

Like I said, most people seem to have returned home to their families for the New Year, which is why I had to come all the way to a 24hr net cafe in Sakae I’ve walked past quite a few times.  It’s a decent place; comfy chairs, free drinks and food, but on the other hand a lot less homely than the place I usually go to in Yagoto.  Either way, New Year’s is obviously a big thing over here.  Yesterday, Rhys and I were invited over to Matsukawa’s house, the same guy who went around Little World with us in Inuyama all those months ago.  There were six of us altogether, along with us there was Matsu, his wife Miwa, Masako (another rehabiri sensei from the hospital) and her husband Keita.  Like the last time I went to Matsu’s house, Miwa cooked us some dinner while we all sat around the television and talked.  It was good fun, and the food varied from delicious to… interesting.  On the television we were watching Japanese game shows, of course.  We could understand some of it and it was entertaining, and certainly not a let down.  I don’t really watch TV in my apartment much, but it’s just as bizarre as you can imagine.

In contrast to New Year’s, Christmas isn’t that big of an event in Japan.  Rhys and I both worked normal days, although after that had a nice meal to go to with our Japanese teacher from the hospital, and her husband, at their house.  That was pleasant and quite fun as we got to help her cook up some Japanese food for the meal.  It was very simple stuff – chicken, egg, miso soup, onion, sake and rice.  And far too much tofu.  It was pretty tasty though, and we were even treated to some of her homemade  amasake.  Amasake is literally “sweet alcohol”.  It’s made with plums, lots of sugar, and then added to that lots of ordinary sake.  It sounds pretty easy, although it takes a year or two before it’s drinkable.  I’ll give it a try back home, for sure. 

After eating, we headed downstairs and I played ‘Go’ with Tanaka Sensei’s husband.  It’s a traditional board game of Chinese origin, although it’s been popular in Japan for over a thousand years.  It’s semi-well known outside for being a problem of artificial intelligence, as whilst the best programmed chess computers are stronger than the best human players, at the moment, the most advanced go computers are about as skillful as a moderately good human player – due to the much larger number of potential moves possible at any time in the game.  There is also an abundance of Eastern proverbs that have popped up over the years around the game.  It goes without saying that I lost, or would have done if we’d kept playing; a game takes well over an hour.  It was fun though, and he invited me back sometime before I go home to play again.

Anyway, as fun as our Christmas Day was with our Japanese teacher, we still worked through the day and it didn’t feel like that much of a special event.  After getting home, I opened some gifts from home including some home made Christmas cake, probably the thing I’d wanted most after an overdose of tofu at Tanaka Sensei’s house.  I called home too, and still had a merry time.  But the party with Matsukawa and friends yesterday felt much like the kind of Christmas I’m used to, sitting around a warm table, talking, eating home-made food, laughing and having fun.  It was heartening that Matsu and Miwa chose to spend some of their New Year’s celebrations with us.

So, one year comes to an end and another begins.  I’m not planning to make a New Year’s resolution as the idea is so futile to me.  If you need an important global event like the New Year in order to make a change in your life, it’s almost always going to fail, unless it’s such an insignificant change it doesn’t mean much in the first place.  If you want to change something, you should be able to do it there and then.  If you can’t, then it’s probably something you don’t really want that much anyway, deep down. 

And on that uplifting note, goodbye to the old year and hello to the new!

また来年！

We had heard a lot of things about Kyoto before we finally went there, a week later than we originally planned to due to being unable to book transport in time.  Kyoto is the old capital city of Japan and is located in the Kansai region of Japan, well known for a strong regional dialect we have already learnt some of from nurses at work – kind of the equivalent of teaching an English language student Geordie slang.  Although Kyoto is less than an hour away by Shinkansen, being thrifty we decided instead to get the bus.  It only cost 20 pounds for a return ticket, but then it did take three hours.

Having been invited out at the last minute to a doctor’s leaving party the night before, which ended at 3am after too much sake and karaoke, I pretty much slept the whole way.  Upon arriving in Kyoto, Rhys and I headed towards the tourist information room hidden away at the top of the Kyoto train station, a long and fairly narrow building with about 11 floors, connected by a long line of escalating steps.   The architechture of it was supposed to reflect the history of Kyoto or something according to a plaque at the top, but I can’t remember exactly what it said.

Anyway, we picked up a couple of maps and headed back down to the ground to walk around and check out the city.  Being the old capital of Japan, Kyoto is a popular tourist spot, due to the many temples, shrines and traditional architecture.  Looking at the map we got, pretty much every street has a temple or some other sight of interest to check out.  Despite that, after walking around for about an hour, Rhys and I both agreed it was a bit lackluster.  Kyoto is tipped to be the most beautiful city in Japan, especially in the season of Autumn when the leaves change colour before falling, as I mentioned in a previous post.  Kyoto is meant to be one of the best places to see this in the country, but upon leaving the train station we found ourselves in a place not too dissimilar from Nagoya, just a lot quieter and a bit dirtier.  For the most part the scenery was made up of the same tall concrete buildings and maze of identical streets, with the occasional temple spire peeping up in the distance.  We made our way to one we could identify on the map called Toji Temple. 

After navigating through the maze and getting lost for the first of many times that weekend, we arrived at Toji.  I was immediately impressed with the size of the tower, at 57m it is the tallest wooden tower in Japan.  Compared to the slew of all-too-similar temples scattered around Kyoto, Toji stood out as something a bit more special.  A large Japanese garden surrounds the tower with several ponds and Buddhist shrines inside it, amongst a multitude of trees which looked stunning in the Autumn colours.  Rather than just going brown and falling to the ground as in England, even leaves on the same tree change to a variety of different colours, from deep oranges to yellow and bright red.

By the time we’d finished investigating Toji Temple, it was getting on a bit.  It wasn’t late as such but by late November in Japan, the sun is already down by around 5pm.  This combined with the public transport being much more limited in the old-fashioned Kyoto than it is in the familiar Nagoya, we had to get moving.  Back at the hospital I had told a few of my friends I was going to Kyoto, and one of the most frequently recommended places was a temple called Kiyomizu Dera (清水寺).  Looking at the map it was pretty far east from where we were around the station, so we skipped lunch and got walking towards it.  The area directly surrounding the station is packed with skyscrapers like any other large Japanese city, but it was refreshing to see that after walking away for about half an hour to Gojo, Kiyomizu was visible in the distance perhaps two and a half kilometeres further.

I mentioned earlier that Kyoto was very quiet compared to Nagoya.  Rhys and I were both very surprised by this, as Tojo san had told us at the hospital that we’d hardly be able to move for the people at the time of kouyou.   As it turned out, they were all at Kiyomizu Dera.   We knew we’d come to the right place when there were two people per crossing to direct the immense traffic of people.  We walked through what looked to be the main entrance, though most of the Japanese tourists took a shortcut straight to the temple, and found ourselves walking through a peaceful garden with an old bridge and various statues of samurai, monks and other traditional Japanese imagery.

Past another temple which looked like it was undergoing some reconstruction work, we walked through a large and dense graveyard before arriving at Kiyomizu just in time for the sunset.  As soon as we emerged into the main temple grounds, we were reunited with the crowd of people we’d seen just earlier, seemingly walking around in a predetermined direction towards the top of the hill the temple is situated on.  As it was getting dark and fast, we played the gaijin card and walked against the traffic to get there a bit quicker.  Nobody seemed to mind much. 

I’ve said before that although intricate and awe-inspiring, Japanese architecture doesn’t show that much variety most of the time – a pagoda is a pagoda, after all.  That said, Kiyomizu being set at the top of a large hill gives it a breathtaking setting, where from the top you can see on a clear day a horizon of mountains surrounding the temples and houses of Kyoto and all around the multicoloured trees of Autumn.  Kiyomizu is also a spectacle after the sun goes down and the temple lights up, with a giant searchlight illuminating the sky beckoning people to come.  This didn’t happen until after two hours from when we arrived at the temple, so we decided instead to head back down and find something to eat – not an easy task though.  We took the main path down instead of backtracking the way we’d came to the temple and joined the flood of people, half of whom were going up and the other down the narrow pathway which made things a bit of a scuffle.  Among the people going up were various school  groups in uniform with leaders in front waving flags with their logo and encouraging the people behind to keep up.

Not long after we had started our descent, the weather changed from clear to heavy rain.  The speed with which more or less all of the shops lining the path stuck up umbrella signs with extortionate price tags outside was an impressive display of Japanese entrepreneurship.  After we got to the bottom of the hill we walked back in the direction of the station with the vague plan of finding a place for tea.  We decided instead to stop in a coffee shop and decide what to do.  Rhys and I were not very organised in sorting out our Kyoto trip, in any way.  Our first step was buying the bus tickets, and from there we looked for accomodation only to find that due to the time of year, there were no vacancies.  We were able to put this problem to the side for a while however, as at the coffee shop we ran into an English guy called Tim, who we talked to for a bit while we had a drink.  He was studying linguistics in Cambridge, but had come to a university in Tokyo for a term to learn Japanese with some friends from back home.  We were happy to find another English guy especially as we had no plans whatsoever, and he invited us to join him and three of his friends later in the evening to get some food and go drinking.  It was as good a plan as any.

We wasted a bit of time in the cafe and in a few shops and wandered back to Gojo station to meet the others.  Along with Tim, there were three more, a Japanese girl called Hitomi, a two other girls, Duuya and Ankita.  All of them were bilingual which was enviable, Duuya being from Russia and Ankita from India, and despite them being Cambridge toffs we got on great in the Izakaya and talked about some of our experiences over the last 3 months, them also having been in Japan since September – well Hitomi had lived in Japan for most of her life, but for the rest of us it was our first venture into the land of the rising sun.

We put away several plates of washoku and a couple of beers each, and then a few of us headed to another place for some more drinking and talking. By the time Hitomi and Tim left us to go back to where they were staying, it was about half twelve.  Rhys and I had a plan sorted out for the next day, to explore the more traditional part of Kyoto, the area of Arashiyama, but there was no point in going there in the dead of night.  Yamashita had recommended we either find a capsule hotel or a manga cafe, which are sometimes open 24 hours and are a frequent place for dirty stop outs to wait for the first train of the morning.  Unfortunately, our map despite having  plenty of temples and shrines, did not have any capsule hotels or manga cafes.   We decided to walk the streets for a while, something that could be dangerous in a UK city but is all but risk free in Japan.

A fter walking in a few squares and coming to the conclusion there probably wasn’t a capsule hotel around the station, we eventually asked a man sweeping up some rubbish outside an Izakaya if he could help us.  Giving another example of the kindness of the Japanese people, he told us to wait and came back five minutes later with a yellow pages and looked up the manga cafes for us, and then called them from the closest one first in order to see if they were still open.  We found one eventually about half an hours walk away, so satisfied we had found somewhere to spend the night we got back on shanks’s pony and walked towards the place.  The Izakaya man was so kind he even marked it on our map for us.  Due to the grid-like layout of any large Japanese city, it was fairly easy to find the way and we got there in about half an hour, like he said.  But it was not good.

Firstly, we’d made a few assumptions prior to looking for a manga cafe, mainly due to the one I know and am sitting in right now as I write this.  We expected it to have internet so we could look on that, we expected it to be quite clean at least, and whilst the idea of going to sleep in a comic book cafe seemed pretty bloody weird to us, talking to Yamashita it sounded like a fairly normal thing for people to do in Japan so we guessed we could adapt to it and get some shut-eye.

We were wrong about everything though, and taking the stairs up to the 7th floor, we had to walk past noisy apartment floors, bags of rubbish and even feces on the stairs we had to navigate around, something that would seem pretty disgusting in England, nevermind in the usually spotless land of Japan.  Having already formed a rather negative first impression of the place, we arrived at the cafe and walked inside.  It was cheap at least, as we had expected, but otherwise about ten times weirder than we had feared.  It was overfull, so if we had opted to stay it would have probably meant the floor, most of the chairs were taken up by Japanese men lying across  two or three and snoring.  We figured at least we could use the internet and sit there, but to our surprise the internet booths were occupied, one with a man sleeping with his head by the computer, another one with a man curled up on the floor under the desk.  I could go on but the expression on Rhys’ face here is a perfect display of how we felt.  Needless to say, we got our money back and made our exit pretty quickly, in the process forgetting the extortionate umbrellas we bought earlier.  We decided not to return for them.

Instead we took back to the streets and found a much better cafe, this one not located on the 7th floor of a shady building but on the main street.  Surprisingly, nobody was sleeping but the place was full of people sitting, talking, laughing, eating.   We sat down in a part of the cafe where we couldn’t see the darkness outside and from there, the setting was indistinguishable from a cafe at midday rather than one in the wee hours.  They closed up at 5am, so we made our way back to Kyoto station to get an early train to Arashiyama.

The cold truly bites at six in the morning, but it was worth it to be in what is without doubt the more beautiful side of Kyoto before the swarm of tourists make their appearance.  Although our map included the area of Arashiyama, we decided since it was a relatively small area and we had a day to kill – our return bus was at five in the evening – we would take our time and just walk, and see where we ended up.  Unlike the concrete mess of central Kyoto, the winding roads of Arashiyama are lined with old houses and quaint buddhist shrines.  Additionally, whilst the kouyou is a great sight  to behold in central Kyoto, the woods of Arashiyama are much denser and a striking contrast of red and green is visible almost anywhere you choose to look.  We walked through a bamboo forest and along several streets, and the only traffic on the roads were carts driven by running men.  The town was quiet and tranquil, very much in contrast to the personality it took on after midday, when the streets were just as Tojo san had promised, so packed we could barely move.

We eventually arrived at a huge lake surrounded by mountains and low lying cloud, with a bridge in the distance and a number of people walking by the side, some taking pictures and others just taking in the view.  Despite barely sleeping the night before, the crispness of the air was so refreshing I felt as awake as I ever had whilst we walked through the wood to the top of the hill.  The reward was a breathtaking sight of the lake below, at which a couple of serious photographers had set up some expensive looking equipment and were trying to get a special picture.  I just took a quick snap.

From there we explored the forest for a while and got a bit lost, and returned to check out the rest of Arashiyama.  The bridge we saw earlier, Togetsukyo bridge, was now packed with people, some going to set up food and souvenir stalls, others just tourists like us, and even an organised school of karate-kids running along the bridge for training.  We walked around the lake for a bit longer after crossing the bridge, and at the other end of the lake we came across a couple of middle aged Japanese women, one of whom called “abunai!” to me as I almost slipped on the rocks by the lake.  We got talking and it turned out that they had been to England for a while some years back so could speak it well, although still talked to us in Japanese for a while first which was a nice gesture – as many Japanese people who can speak English automatically assume we don’t know any Japanese and refrain from using it.  I’m sure they were just as eager to speak English as we were Japanese however, so we did a bit of both.  They seemed happy to see some Western tourists in a less well known part of Kyoto, and we had a nice conversation about how we were finding Kyoto and Japan – neglecting to tell them we’d stayed up all night in a cafe of course!

After that we checked out a few of the temples in Arashiyama, notably Seiryoji and Daikakuji.  The temple grounds had a soothing atmosphere, with the overhanging trees and stone sculptures decorating the paths and shrines.     However, by the time we’d walked up and down Arashiyama in addition to our adventures from the day previous, the two of us were throroughly knackered and headed back to Kyoto station to get a bit of food before we got our bus home.  Just as I had on the way there, I slept all the way back, and a very long weekend came to a close.  This was three weeks ago, but I’ve not really had a day off since to write about it.  Since then I’ve been to a couple of end of year parties, one of which was dire and another which was brilliant, been ill for a day which had some of the people looking after me at the hospital overworrying and asking about my health insurance (though I was perfectly fine the next day), and in between all this been working 8am to 5pm in the peadiatrics ward.  After three more days, I’ll be where the excitement is on the emergency ward.

I’ve also been teaching myself kanji, from an unconvential book by James Heisig which has provoked a lot of debate among Japanese students and teachers due to an unusual method, which does not involve teaching any of the Japanese readings for the characters, instead simplifying them to one english meaning and splitting up the parts of them to make them easier to remember.  It’s designed with the aim of bringing Western Japanese students to the same level as Chinese or Korean students, who are already familiar with the characters from their own language, so they understand the meaning if not the reading.  Additionally, it is ordered in a logical way based on the difficulty of drawing the characters rather than the usual taught order of the most commonly used, which makes them harder to remember individually.  As it does not teach any Japanese readings for the characters however, it is only the first step in the journey of becoming fluent in reading and writing Japanese.  Whether or not it works I’m yet to see.