The following blog entry is a detailed account of my winter vacation trip. If the details start bogging you down, just skip ahead a bit. I know my mother is eager to know everything, so I was thorough for her sake (what a great excuse for being long-winded).
December 27 (day one):
My trip started at Harima-cho station. I saw one of my students from English club there. Since there are only four students in English club (when I came there were seven, but three have since quit), I tend to know these students better than any. There are three eighth-grade boys and one seventh-grade girl. The boys have little interest in English. None of them are even very interested in visiting English-speaking countries. The boys like video games, j-pop and the Internet. They claim to like sports but not enough to want to be a part of any team. Still they feel they have to be a part of a club, and English club has the lowest commitment.
The seventh grade girl is a bookworm. She has told me she wants to be a novelist. It’s very exciting to see a Japanese student as young as her who already has ambitions for life. Most of her peers just look forward to watching TV and going to sleep. Since she only just started English in April, her ability isn’t that high yet, but I think she has a sincere interest in English.
It was her I saw at the station. Her mother looked pleasantly surprised to see me, but my student cringed in shock/fear/embarrassment/self-consciousness: one of these or all of these. I approached her and asked, “Where are you going?” She certainly should have understood that question. Instead of answering she sort of whimpered and took a few steps back. I then repeated the question in Japanese, and she hid behind her mother. Her mother finally interceded for her and explained they were going to Sannomiya (downtown Kobe). She asked me where I was going but in a way I couldn’t understand. She then simplified it, and I told her Nagoya. She asked if I was taking the shinkansen (bullet train), and I explained in brief my seishun juhachi kippu adventure.
The train arrived, and I made sure not to get in the same car as my student. I had already put her through enough. At last my adventure had started and I was on my way.
I got on the train at 10:20 a.m. I traveled to Akashi station via the private Sanyo line. I changed to the JR station, and board the 10:40 traveling east. Thus began day one of my seishun 18 kippu. This is the name of the train ticket I used during most of my trip. It costs 11,500 yen (about $100) and affords the purchaser five days of unlimited travel on JR express trains. Not five consecutive days but five separate 24-hour periods of train travel. It is offered three times a year: during winter vacation, spring vacation, and summer vacation. The only catch is the express trains only. You can’t use it for any journey that requires a reserved seat, and you certainly can’t use it for the shinkansen. If you are lucky you will catch a rapid or special rapid train, but in many cases you are stuck riding local trains that make numerous stops.
What this boils down to is this: the 3.5-hour shinkansen ride from Akashi to Tokyo becomes a 10-hour ride on express trains. The long trip also requires numerous line changes and countless stops. Of course the main advantage is the cost. The shinkansen ticket costs about $150 each way. For far less I could go round trip and have some side trips, just for a little discomfort.
The first line change stop was Kyoto. The platform at the station was freezing- colder than any day I could remember in Japan. I’ve been told Kyoto is always cold in the winter, because it is in a valley. It was also snowing on the platform, but it wasn’t long until I was on a warm train again.
The next line change was Maibara. During the hour-long journey from Kyoto to Maibara the snow started piling up. The combination of deep snow and industrial factories around Maibara made it look more like an old Soviet town than one in Japan. I got out and waited on the platform. There were a few other gaijin (foreigners) there who seemed to also be juuhachi kippu travelers like I. I experienced the classic “do I talk to the other foreigners?” struggle within me, but I refrained.
A few minutes before the train arrived, one of the other passengers on the platform started making a commotion. I couldn’t really tell what was going on, but it seemed she was out of it. A JR conductor arrived and started officiating. I knew it was serious when he forced her to sit down on the bench right behind me. She almost toppled over as he guided her toward me. I jumped up. not sure if I should help her to the bench, but they made it all right. I understood little of what she said, except she was obviously crazy. I could see the demons in her eyes. As the train arrived it was clear the conductor didn’t think it best to let her board. She started yelling she had a juuhatchi kippu and there was no reason to take her to the hospital.
I got up to board the train and the woman clawed at my arm as I passed. The conductor pulled her back, and I rushed onto the train. I would like to think a crazy woman wouldn’t bother me so much, but in the heat of the moment it was quite unnerving. As more conductors came to help investigate, the woman broke free and boarded the train. She gripped the puffy sleeve of a random passenger, and he just looked away from her, completely bewildered. It was much the same reaction that Japanese have to hugging when they are not used to it. After the first conductor explained the woman to the reinforcements, they both came on and yanked her off the train. The larger of the two end up bear-hugging her down to the bench as the other left, apparently to call for an ambulance. That will always be my memory of Maibara.
I arrived at Nagoya at around 2:30 p.m. I had a 3 p.m. check-in at my hotel so I got on the local subway and made for the station nearest my hotel. I chose to stay at
Capsule Inn Nagoya. It was the cheapest thing I could find on the Internet, and the only thing I could find in the hostel price range. It was 2800 yen for the night. I paid 3700 yen, which included use of the bathhouse and breakfast.
It actually took me a little bit of time to find the hotel itself. I had a map that clearly explained it, but when I got to where I thought it should be, I couldn’t find it. After walking around the block for 20 minutes, I finally figured out the problem. It was clear the building I had been circling was a game center with slot machines and pachinko. What wasn’t clear was the first three floors were the game center, and the rest of the building was the capsule hotel. I still got to the door a couple of minutes before they opened up at 3 p.m.
I didn’t have anything planned for Nagoya, so I just left the hotel, went to the main station, and walked around town. In Tokyo, Osaka, or Kobe this strategy would run you right into all sorts of interesting places and stores, but this was not the case in Nagoya. I hardly found any interesting stores and I struggled to find any interesting restaurants. I finally found a place that looked affordable and cool. I went in and promptly found out the restaurant was reserved for 500 people.
I went back toward where my hotel was. I was finally giving up all hope on finding an affordable and nice restaurant, when I noticed
Saint Marc Café. I knew the name from a restaurant review in the Hyogo Times (the Hyogo Times is a local JET publication that I design and write for). I went in and found it had delightful pastries and delicious drinks. A couple of flakey treats, a hot coco coffee, and some
Sigur Rós, and my spirits were raised again.
December 28 (day two):
I didn’t sleep great in my capsule. I woke at 2 a.m. and it was too hot to go back to sleep. There were no visible heat controls, so after mustering the courage, I got up to complain. Someone promptly ran off, and I returned to find cold air in my capsule. After a while, I fell back asleep and woke up again at 6:30 a.m. when all of my neighbor’s alarms went off. When my alarm finally went off at 7:30 a.m. the inevitable happened: I tried to jump out of bed, and I hit my head on the capsule. Breakfast was more than depressing, but at least there was an egg. Next time I’ll pay less and go back to Saint Marc in the morning.
I left Nagoya station at 8:35 a.m. and arrived in Tokyo around 4 p.m. I had a long stop in Hamamatsu about halfway to Tokyo. I walked around for a little while and took a few pictures. Hamamatsu struck me as a “nice, quiet city”. As I got closer to Tokyo the stations kept getting bigger and bigger. It felt like the opening scene from Jim Jarmucsh’s “Dead Man”, except of course I was getting more urban instead of less remote.
About 30 minutes later, I met Yuko Kato at the station. Yuko was my Japanese teaching assistant at Northern Illinois University, and I stay with her and her family while in Tokyo. We had some Italian for dinner, and then proceeded to Tokyo’s lighted walkway “Millenario”. A few weeks before, I experienced Kobe’s lighted walkway “Luminaria”. Yuko explained that the two walkways are sister projects. The lights were pretty, and it was a good time, but the highlight was getting hot wine on the street. They were selling it in front of a fancy wine shop, and it was as good as in Germany.
December 29 (day three):
This was my big shopping day. I walked through the trendiest neighborhoods of Tokyo all day. I bought myself several “Christmas presents”: a few things that can only be purchased in Tokyo, or at least in Japan they can only be purchased in Tokyo. I left Yuko’s relatively early and got home relatively late. I was hoping to buy some new gloves and a scarf at my favorite t-shirt shop
Design Store Graniph, but all the stores I visited were sold out. I ended up going to three different, one of which was way out of the way, but I was already there by the time I figured it out.
The other main disappointment was the closure of a store I desperately wanted to see called
+-0 (plus or minus zero). When I arrived in Tokyo in July, I went out on my birthday to find the store, but after two sweaty hours in my black suit I returned to my hotel having not found it. This time I had printed out all the necessary maps and directions, but when I arrived it was closed for the holidays. The national New Year’s holiday is from Dec. 29 through Jan 3. A few years back, everything was closed during the New Year but now this is only the case on Jan. 1. Not only was +-0 closed for the holiday- they were closed until Jan. 5! I could order a few things from their website, but I think I will just wait until my next trip to Tokyo. +-0 will be an ongoing quest in Japan.
December 30 (day four):
Yuko and I went and met her friend Allison for lunch. Allison is an exchange student from Australia finishing up a postgraduate year after high school. After Lunch, I opted out of seeing Chicken Little and instead went back downtown. I visited another Graniph store in Ikebukuro. They had one pair of ladies gloves and no more. I also walked and gawked through the big department store Parco.
I decided to go back to Shibuya, possibly to do some writing and net surfing if I could have found a wireless café. As soon as I arrived I saw a movie theatre playing Lord of War. Lord of War was a film by
Andrew Niccol who wrote and directed one of my favorite films Gattaca. He also wrote the Truman Show, and wrote and directed the incredible failure S1m0ne. Lord of War starred Nicolas Cage and Ethan Hawke, and was about the life and career of the biggest arms dealer the world has ever seen. It was good, but the ending had some preachy closing narration, which is never great.
I did some more walking and window-shopping and bought a little gift for one of my friends. For dinner I grabbed some fish and chips and a Strongbow Cider. That was good. Then I went to a hip dessert café and ate a piece of cake while I did some screen writing. I think I finally got back into a script that I started in June. Hopefully I’ll keep writing it.
December 31 (day five):
We got up early with plans to go to
Edo Wonderland. It is a theme park that recreates the Edo period, or days of the Samurai and ninja, and who doesn’t want to see some ninjas?
The park was a few hours North, so we got up early and left the house before 8 a.m. Because of the parks remote location, we had to transfer trains at least a half-dozen times to get there. After many such transfers, we finally made a mistake and ended up almost two hours behind schedule. We didn’t get to the park until around 1:30 p.m., and it was only open until 4 p.m. We paid the pricy admission and ran to the first attraction. It was a live-action show about a group of ninjas. Yuko translated just a bit about the ninjas being mad that their leader had become power hungry, and I could figure out the rest without understanding the Japanese. They confronted him; he got mad; they fought; their master was stronger than them; in the end the humble ninjas defeated their evil master. It was much more about the ninja moves than the story line.
It was almost 2 p.m., so we finally got some lunch. I had shrimp rice and miso soup, which both tasted good. The Kato siblings decided that the food had to be good at this park. Where most theme parks could make up for bad food by having massive roller coasters, this park could do no such thing.
After lunch, we went to an area where they film jidai-geki, or Edo period dramas. The filming site looked a little drab and unused, and it was clearly shut down for the winter.
Next, we went to the Mysterious Ninja Residence, where ninjas practice their balance and eyesight. It was a fun house where the floors were all jagged and hard to walk around. After pretending it was fun for a moment it really became quite fun, and we ran around with the little kids who were doing likewise.
After that, we visited the ninja maze. The maze didn’t look very complicated and I scoffed at the challenge. After a few minutes, we realized we were going in circles and were coming now closer to the flag that lay at the end. Since we were low on time we decided to skip finding the end, but after we exited, we couldn’t help but walk around the backside to see where the end really was. The flag was there in plain sight, and the maze had simply beaten us. Of course, we staged a victory photo.
Finally, we went to the Edo museum where there were various Edo period scenes setup with audio tracks explaining them. Yuko gave me the explanations in English as we rushed through the building. I knew a few of the stories from my meager knowledge of Japanese history. I was most struck by the story of the Christian samurai who fought to the death to defend persecuted Christians in Nagasaki. Christianity was outlawed in Japan in 1614 when the rulers thought it undermined the authority of the emperor and allowed the foreigners an inroad to Japan. There was one story Yuko and her brother didn’t know. I told them not to worry, because the three hundred year Edo period was longer that the whole of American history.
We made the long train journey home, and arrived there at around 8 p.m. For dinner we had suki yaki. It is a dish where you cook beef and various veggies in a pot over a flame on the table. We also ate some sashimi. It was all quite delicious.
After dinner, we watched a singing competition for a while on TV. When that got less interesting we switched to kickboxing. The big fight that night was going to be between Akebono, the retired Sumo wrestler originally from Hawaii, and a Nigerian comedian who is popular in Japan. At one time, Akebono was the yokozuna, or top ranked samurai in all of Japan. After he retired, he blew all his money, and was forced to go into kickboxing to make a living. This brought incredible dishonor to him, and he lost all of his sumo titles, but the guy had to eat. To make matters worse he is a terrible kick boxer. I think going into the fight he was 1-7. The main attack in sumo is pushing, and that doesn’t get you very far in kickboxing. We cheered him on, but to our disappointment, he was defeated. I’m sure he gets paid the same whether he wins or loses.
We all reconvened in the dinning room to eat some cold soba, a traditional New Year’s dish. The countdown finally arrived, and before I knew it, it was 2006. After chanting lots of “Omedeto gozaimasu!” everyone peacefully drifted off to bed. No, there were no wild New Year’s parties, but I had a wonderful time nevertheless.
January 1 and 2 (days six and seven):
On New Year’s Day I was roused by my alarm clock at 6:45. I had planned to sleep in late, but forgot to turn off my alarm from the day before. This unfortunate alarm had awoken me from a rather interesting dream. All I can remember is we were trying to kidnap a kid from a hospital, in order to save him, but the confused do-gooder police were trying to foil our plans. I think these do-gooder police were inspired by Ethan Hawke’s character in “Lord of War.”
I went back to sleep and the next thing I knew someone was pounding on my door. It was Yuko, and she informed me it was breakfast and 11 a.m. I quickly got ready to go downstairs, but not before reflecting on my second major dream. I had met and made some sort of partnership with Tom Cruise. We were trying to start a company or something, but there were all kinds of roadblocks. At one point we were working on the project at my house, which was very reminiscent of a Wheaton Academy float-building project. And like a WA float-building project, all of the people helping out were goofing around instead of working. At some point they started throwing bottles at passing cars. One passerby just happened to be another celebrity who was somehow connected to our project, and the whole thing was thrown into chaos. Tom and I were not happy.
Anyway, back to Japan. The morning meal was Osechi Ryori. This literally translates as “New Year cooking.” The basic premise is that nothing is opened on New Year’s Day, and you are not supposed to work, so you make various dishes the days before. Some people eat Osechi Ryori from Jan. 1 to Jan. 3, but Yuko said now that stores are opened on the second and third, it is becoming more common to only eat it for a day.
All of the dishes are puns. The names of the dishes also have the same pronunciations as things relevant to having a good new year. I think Yuko’s father was happy to be able to explain the puns to someone who hadn’t been hearing the explanations his entire life.
The rest of my time in Tokyo was basically spent relaxing and hanging out at Yuko’s house. I almost finished my new Zelda game (that gave me for Christmas), which I was playing on my used Game Boy Advance SP (that Zach gave me for Christmas), and I really caught up on my sleep. I also had a lot of properly cooked food- not something that I always do at home. It was really nice just to be a guest in someone’s house.
January 3 (day eight)
The train ride home was about ten hours long. I left Tokyo station at 10:43 a.m. and arrived home around 9 p.m. When I changed trains in Akashi, I was thrown off for a second when I realized the escalators changed sides again. In my region, people stand on the right side of the escalators and walk up the left side. In the Tokyo area, they do the opposite. This makes more sense in England and France where the escalators reflect the sides of the road that cars drive on. Of course, in America we stand wherever we want on escalators.
As I boarded the private Sanyo line and began my final train home, I had the feeling that I was going “home”. Sometimes life can be frustrating here, and my apartment, with it’s golden sandpaper walls, is not always all I hope it could be. But I am comfortable to say the little industrial town called Harima-cho has definitely become my home, at least for a while.
