Golden Week

Golden Week in Japan is what Memorial Day weekend is to the US. Everyone feels compelled to jump in their car and visit something. Only in Japan, Golden Week strings together 4 national holidays. It's a mad busy time. Here's my story. I wrote it in an email to Can the other day. It's a rushed, stream-of-thought piece (with horrific verb tense consistencies), but I think it fits the way I felt during most of the trip. Foggy from a lack of sleep, but determined to keep moving and to see and experience it all.

Leave Ota by night bus. It's raining. I sleep little. Arrive in Osaka at 8. Osaka is a big city. Aaron said it felt like New York. Main road is 10 lanes wide with an elevated highway above. Stumble around for the hotel. Ask everyone. Eventually find it. Capsule hotel. 25 dollars a night. Leave our bags. Get caffeine and food. Get on train to Nara. Is crowded. Walk. Tame deer everywhere in Nara Park. I feed a deer, pet a deer, pose for pictures with deer. Scruffy things. Force fed by hundreds of tourists who buy $1.50 bundles of "deer cookies." Look at temples and pagodas. Nothing special. Seen em at Kyoto and Tokyo. They look the same to me now. Keep walking. Wandering into a festival! Get okonomiyaki and grilled bamboo on a stick. Eat under a tree. Two young girls a few paces from us stop, turn inward, giggle. Courage gathered, they approach with a bag of chewy sours. They offer a piece to each of us, then sit down next to us. The process reminds me of how I had earlier approached the deer by offering bread. They are excited by our foreignness. We talk and giggle and take pictures before returning them to their mother who doesn't seem to mind that her two kids have been talking with strangers away from her sight. That's Japan for you. We walk on to the big attraction--Buddha. On the way I am stopped by two HS girls on an English assignment. Am interviewed. Name? Country? Have you eaten Japanese food? Do you like Nara? Where in Japan have you been? They give me a self-made pamphlet on Nara's deer, my name done in hiragana, and a promise to send a post card to my home (US) address. Awesome! Keep walking. Biggest Buddha in Japan. Housed inside the biggest wooden building in Japan. Both are jaw dropping. Japan is beautiful. Return to Osaka exhausted. Go out for food and drinks.

Day2 we get up early. Breakfast at the capsule hotel is nice. Two thick pieces of bread, hard boiled egg, and unlimited caffeine. No room there for a second night. We move on. Can't find the hotel we had previously booked. Walk into another and get a room. 15 dollars a night. Pallets on the floor. Neighborhood is Japan's dirtiest. Smells like piss. Get on Shinkansen to Hiroshima. Costs mucho dinero. 90 dollars one way. Only takes 1.5 hours for over 300 km though. We zoom. My ears hum and pop with pressure. Everyone but me sleeps. I write and watch the scenery fly. Trees and ocean glimpses. Small populations. Hiroshima is bigger than I thought it would be. We get confused about how to get to the Peace Park. Take the wrong bus, get off, get a taxi. Peace Park is having a festival. It's Greenery Day. Dance troupes. Concerts. A wedding. We pay our 50 cents to get into the museum. It's crowded. Devastating pictures. A watch stopped at 8:15. Small in its case, unworthy of the symbolism. There's a gift shop mid-way through. Sells t-shirts and history books. Modest, but still seems inappropriate. I tear up at the tricycle and helmet that were once buried with a 3 year old victim. Crusted with dirt and rust. A father's desire for safety, the helmet, did nothing. The child's belief in play, the tricycle, brought to a stop. The innocence of both were on display, buried, exhumed, made into relics. I hurry through the rest. Not listening to the tracks on my audio guide. Outside, a wedding on the main stage. Young girls dance to 80s music on a secondary stage. Large paper statues of cranes rise behind me on a lawn. I wait for my friends to emerge.

We all continue down the Peace Park. We stop at the monument to the girl who made 1000 cranes while dieing from radiation cancer. While looking, a Japanese man approaches us and makes small talk. Introduces himself as "Sun-flower." He directs us to a bench and takes pictures of us. First as a group, then just our faces. It's like a line-up. We aren't sure what he means do to with those photos.

We cross a bridge and see the remains of the A-Bomb Building. The fragile dome. The stripped walls. The rubble they never carted away. It's more moving than the museum. While looking there, a baseball game ends and crowds of people happy with their jerseys and sporty exhilaration flood the sidewalks. It's hard to be solemn in such celebration. Hiroshima was a self-contained lesson in disaster and the ability to recover, reconcile, and move through pain. It's impossible to look at the A-Bomb Building without seeing the modern towers rising up behind it.

On the Shinkansen back we are goofy. Is it the lack of sleep, or the need for relief from the day's emotions? We sleep early that night.

Day3. It's our last. We go to Himeji as early as we can. It's an hour away and 15 dollars. We have breakfast at place that has spent too much money on their tables. Heavy marble. I have spicy rice and miso soup. We walk towards the castle through a shopping corridor. It's manic. Finally we spot the castle in the distance. It's beautiful. Himeji is Japan's most famous castle. It's white and majestic. The crowds are immense. 6 bucks to enter,but it's worth it. Even the crowds couldn't keep me from enjoying the place. I find it hard to describe. Powerful. Elegant. We walked around in circles through 50 foot stone walls. The modern city laid out below seemed weak and inadequate. We stood in lines for hours to wind our way through the 6 floors of the main castle. Passed by displays of armor, swords, paintings, guns. The top floor had a shrine. Back in the town I bought omiyage for the staff, lusted after some rose flavored ice cream at a closed shop, and wandered into a festival set up for whatever holiday it was that day. Lunch was had at one of those festival tents. We all ate from the vendor that sold hot dogs coated in cheese rolled in an omelet, covered in ketchup, drizzled with mayonnaise. It was delicious and deadly.

Post Himeji, we went back to Osaka. Picked up our bags at The Sun Plaza and made our way to the bus station. Ate dinner at the station at an over priced Indian place. My mutton masala was 13 dollars. One more hour to kill meant shopping. I bought 3 complementary bracelets from an Indian import store for 9 dollars. Some gum for the road. A bottled tea. Our bus was nearly half an hour late. We boarded. I began a book. They turned out the light at 930 to the disgruntlement of all our group. Got some decent sleep. Woke at 330 in desperate need to go the bathroom. No toilet on the bus. Muster the courage to ask the bus driver about a bathroom. Am rewarded with an answer, and a good one at that. 10 more miles. Dawn at 5. I'm awake. Arrive in Ota at 7. Our group splits. I board a train to Kizaki. Get off the train. Can't find my bike. I circle the lot three times. It's missing. Someone has stolen my bicycle. Am sad, but too tired to feel deeply. Walk home. Fall asleep shortly afterwards.

Pictures are in the sidebar.

Trains in Real Life

Today is Foundation Day. I don't know what that means except that it is a day off from school and work. I spent most of today is a bleary eyed state recuperating from my extended day yesterday. As much as I love and appreciate the train system in Japan, it has one major flaw. It doesn't run trains past midnight.

I spent the day in Kamakura which is a small, pretty, coastal city south of Tokyo. It is famous for a large statue of Buddha, a shrine for washing money, and sweet potato ice cream. I was able to enjoy all of those highlights in addition to going for an hour long hike in the woods, antique shopping, and a delicious taco lunch.

I traveled with Leslie to Kamakura. Since Buddha was an important must-see on both of our lists we went there straight away. It's an impressive statue. It's in open air, serene, and surrounded by sculpted views. We paid twenty yen and were able to go inside the Buddha. There wasn't much to see, but it felt oddly metaphysical.

After the Buddha, we went to find the money washing shrine. Kamakura is a tourist town and there were bilingual maps and signs every two blocks. Still, we managed to take the long way round and get a little lost in the process. Instead of taking a bus, or going directly along the main road, we ended up hiking up a mountain to get to the shrine. It took an hour and the trail was deeply muddy from the previous day's snowfall, but we managed.

It was worth it. The shrine was accessible through a small tunnel in the mountain. At the end of the dark tunnel were a series of pale wood torii glowing with sunlight. We passed through incense burners and prayer candle holders to a cave with a natural spring. Hanging from the roof of the cave were thousands of paper cranes that school children had made to increase the good luck of the site. Good luck was essential to the shrine. Popular belief says that if you wash your money at the spring then it will return doubly to you. I washed various coins and bills from my wallet. Hopefully, I will soon be twice as rich.

After visiting that shrine (and with our guarantee of future wealth) we headed back into town for some shopping. I went to an antique store and bought an awesome compass. It is small, metal, and has kanji on the face. I like it a lot. We also found a place that sold sweet potato ice cream--a local specialty food. It was purple and surprisingly delicious.

After that, we boarded a train to Yokohama, the second largest city in Japan and a de-facto part of Tokyo to meet with Aaron and Clarissa. It took forever to locate them in the city-like train station. We wandered down hallways for 20 minutes, passed restaurants, jewelry stores, clothing stores, grocery stores, and were given free samples of cakes and wine before we ran into each other. We decided to get dinner at a close place since we knew we needed to be careful with the train times if we wanted to get back in time. We found a barbecue restaurant near the train station that was spectacular. We order plate after plate of raw beef and vegetables that we cooked ourselves on the grill in the middle of our table. Oishii!

Unfortunately, the leisurely meal made us take a later train. And since trains in Japan don't run past midnight we became stranded in Tatebayashi, a good thirty minute train ride from Ota. We considered our options: a hundred dollar taxi ride, an all-nighter, or an expensive hotel room. Lucky for us, JET connections came in useful, and I remembered that Leslie and I knew a fellow ALT who lived in Tatebayashi. Despite calling at midnight asking for a place to sleep for four people, she didn't hesitate and graciously let us crash at her apartment for the night.

Pictures of Kamakura are linked in the sidebar.