Glimpses of Familiar Japan - Day 5 (Nikko)

(My Parents and I at Keagon Falls, Nikko)

In every trip I looked at, through every guided journey and every tour of Japan, I found one glaring omission; Nikko, Japan.   Even I had never heard of it until a random search of youtube turned up a video called “Take two minutes to relax” with the city’s name on it.  The images were of serene temples, fog drenched forests, and water flowing freely down long gorges.  The moment I saw it, I knew I wanted to go, and then I started doing research and I was floored.   Nikko is one of the most beautiful, friendly, primeval places I saw in my glimpse of Japan.  If there is a spiritual heart of my journey, it lies here.  

Nikko has been a Zen Buddhist destination for hundreds of years, spanning back before the Tokugawa Shogunate.  Yet it was here, of all places, that the first Tokugawa shoguns chose to be buried, and after visiting it I see why.  The place is nothing but mountains, lakes, gorges and forests as far as the eye can see.   The mausoleums of the shoguns are the main tourist destination to see here, but there is so much more in the town and the surrounding countryside.  

Yamibiko 207 bullet train

Our transport there was the Yamibiko 207 bullet train, and when I say train I mean a sleek dolphin headed vehicle that traveled about 200 miles an hour.   I’ve always wanted to ride a bullet train, and after doing so I have to say I understand the desire for high speed rail travel in the United States.

Trains are on the dot with their schedules in Japan, and they don’t suffer you being late.  You miss your train, you miss your train and they don’t wait.   The bullet train is also incredibly comfortable.  Even going 200 mph, you can stand, walk about the cabin as if it were an airplane.  In fact, airplanes and bullet trains are similar in design. 

Epic train penguin!

The bullet train was a wonderful trip because we sat down in these very comfortable seats and watched the world pass us by.  The train really didn’t get going until we left Tokyo, but we passed through the city in under a half an hour and then out into a completely different world.  Tall buildings became green fields, farms and forested mountains.   Just traveling past Tokyo’s outlying areas, you get a sense of how big this city really is. 

The bullet train stopped at Yutsonomiya, and then we had to take a special commuter train to Nikko proper.   It had a rustic and very old feeling to it.  The journey did not take long and passed through more pastoral country, small towns and little areas I wished I could get out and explore.

The town of Nikko near the station.

The town of Nikko itself is not exactly a tourist trap, but not exactly out of the way.  It caters to the people who travel to the temples and hot springs in the mountains around it, and as such it has stores and shops that have a distinctively tourist feel without being terribly tacky.   We arrived after a light rain and boarded the first bus we could to our lodging at Lake Chuzenji above Nikko.  There's only one road up there, and one road down and the bus was packed with people.  We had to sit with our luggage on our knees wedged between the other people and going up wasn’t the most pleasant experience. 

The roadway up into the town surrounded by the green of the hills.

The way up was winding, and I got a little car-sick, but we arrived at the top and the Nikko Lakeside Hotel.  From the outside, the structure isn’t too spectacular and the inside is much the same.  It has a certain dated feel, but there is a quiet serenity about it.  The hotel looks out on a small lawn, with trees and the lake beyond that.  There’s always a quiet murmur down there, and while the lobby could use an update, it was just fine for our purposes.   The rooms were an even larger throwback to the past.  Not fancy in the least, and certainly not by the comparison of the Okura in Tokyo.   Even so, my room had a view over the lake even if it did smell of cigarettes.  With the window open, though, I didn’t notice and didn’t really mind. 

Nikko Lakeside Hotel.

Inside of my room, very small and simple.  But the view outside (below) was worth it.

I walked around a bit at the hotel first, found out it had a natural hot spring or sento that was free to hotel guests and attached by a covered walkway.   Shortly thereafter, while my parents were still resting, I took a walk around the town.   This area is called Lake Chuzenji, and while there are many hot spring resorts around it, this southern half of the lake was a very quiet sort of tourist town.  I walked about the neighborhoods a bit, alone for the first time in Japan.  It gave me a feeling of serenity and desire to want to explore more on my own. 

The rain that fell created a sheen of beauty over everything.

Gateway into Chuzenji.

The town surrounding Lake Cuzenji is ideally picturesque.

Storefront in Nikko.  Note the Tanuke statue.

Canal leading to Kegon Falls

I walked past shops and restaurants, up the hills and past trees in their vibrant colors.  There are lots of woodworking shops and professions around this area which is a given because forests and the nature of the shrines in Nikko itself.   I discovered a little school up there, likely a junior high, and since the school was out I checked out the campus.  It has a very different feel from schools in the States or at least where I live.  Very self-contained and surrounded by this beauty of nature.  I walked back down along the road with a new goal in mind, the Kegon Falls. 

Kegon Gorge

I’d read about the Kegon Falls in anticipation of coming to Nikko, and they are the premier attraction of Chuzenji next to the lake itself.  Approaching the falls, I was immediately captivated.  The water plunges down a good 500 or so feet along sheer granite cliffs surrounded by the rich colors of trees.  The gorge is shrouded in a heavy mist.  Then, as if by magic, the mist disappears and you are greeted by the sight of the waterfall.

My first view of the falls

The air is filled with a palpable energy created by the falls, and everywhere there is rushing water to be seen.   I knew there was a way to the bottom by elevator to see them up close, and I found the location.  My parents, feeling a bit better, joined me.  We bought tickets and went down the elevator through solid rock and emerged at a platform in the gorge beneath the waterfall.  It was an extraordinary sight, and not something to be missed or skipped.   We stood and watched the falls for what seemed like forever, but at least until it started to get dark.

I could not get enough of the colors.

At this point we went back, and the gentle light of the street lamps illuminated the still wet streets and the torii gate straddling the road.  With this rainy, cloudly atmosphere, it was just perfect.  We took a nice little meal at the hotel and retired to bed knowing that tomorrow we had an early morning and a busy day.  

View from the platform in the gorge itself.

Fairies at my Window sill

This morning I was greeted
By fairies at my window sill.
Fleeting fluttering they flew,
Wings beating like tiny drumbeats.
Forms feathered,
Pink and Purple like cotton candy.
Song sweet sugar, greeting
Warning waning.

Hovering they danced,
Round the feeder hanging.
Pausing, perching, purposed
Tiny tongues flicking
Candy-apple red.

Eyes intelligent peered upon me,
Intruder through the glass.
Beyond, being, befuddled
Watching their graceful beauty
As they drank their fill.

High octane,
Corn sugar,
Sunflower gold it glistened
Like Bradbury's Dandelion Wine.
Whimsical, wondrous, worried
That I would encroach.

Moments, minutes, meticulous
Tiny talon claws lifting
Wings gossamer flitting
Them to fly away,
So my fairies dance away.

The Networked Age

I grew up in a simpler time, before the advent of the internet in the heaviest quantities.  Looking back it makes me feel old to recall the block of a computer we had, the brick of a cell phone we used and how when I went to the library I used the dinosaur of a box that was known as a card catalog.  These days I get weird looks when talk about such things to young kids who are at the age I was back then.  They stare, tilt their head to one side and seem to mentally say, "God this guy must be 60 years old.  He likely rode dinosaurs to school at the rate he's talking."

I won't say things were better when I was a kid, oh no.  Kids today have a wonderful world of information I could only dream of when I was their age.  Of course, by the same token they are more wired and plugged in to technology than I ever was or could be.  They grew up with twitter, facebook, and phones the size of a wristwatch.  I suppose by the time they're my age, they will look back and recall to their kids who communicate to people through cybernetic implants or some such thing. Those kids will stare, tilt their head, and remark mentally to all their friends through their own implants how it must have been when the dinosaurs roamed 2014.

This is a phenomena I call, "The Networked Age."   Mark Twain coined the term "The Gilded Age" to describe the industrial revolution following the Civil War into the beginnings of the first World War.   He, like me, grew up in a time of tremendous change, when America was transforming from a purely agrarian society to one governed by iron and steel.  To Twain, the world was getting in a big damn hurry.  Wealth and opulence were in abundance on the surface while being supported on the backs of the working class.  Thus "gilded" gold over plainer iron.

Its a fitting metaphor, and thus I come back to my own, "The Networked Age."   The term comes from our dependency on all things internet, on networking through ones and zeros taken form in words or pictures and information that we then process.  We are all about networking, exchanging ideas and thoughts to one another from across the country and the world in ways Mark Twain could scarcely dream of.  Indeed, this blog is about networking, about growing myself as a writer.  That, however, is only a surface image.

What lies beneath is the truth, beyond the plastic coating and fiber-optics are a human heart and spirit yearning.  We all yearn for that human interaction, something physical and emotional.   The internet is a social platform yes, but not the same as the one we could physically create in closer proximity.  It is both a blessing and a curse.  I find the internet as new and expansive as the imagination.  It is able to recall or summon anything at a moment's notice but at the same time bound to it's power.  By the same token, when it's gone, we are disconnected and perhaps discontent.

What the future holds for the Networked Age is uncertain, for it is a shifting and tidal phenomena that grows with the humans who yearn for more.  Dreams such as the cybernetics or even virtual reality are swiftly seeming more a reality.  We find ourselves inspired by it, yet we yearn for more.

Glimpses of Familiar Japan - Day 4

Day 4-   We took the metro to what became one of the highlights of our tour and perhaps the best museum we visited, the Edo Tokyo Museum.   This structure stands off the ground like a Japanese granary, but looking at it I was reminded of one of those walker things from Star Wars.  It stands on four pillars with the main structure high off the ground, and to get into it we had to go up a long escalator.    

(This is a head-on look at the museum.  At the bottom is a dry fountain.  Supposedly there's a sumo hall behind the museum which gets use).

You feel like you’re being devoured, ingested by the escalator into the stomach of this beast. Inside were models of early Tokyo life, artifacts and other things when the city was known as Edo.  The exhibits here were marvelous ranging from the castle of Edo to firefighters, to kabuki and a live flute performance.  The models are perhaps the most intricately detailed things I have ever seen in my life.  I saw a replica of the famous Nihonbashi Bridge, once the main entrance at one time to Tokyo.  Looking at the model you can see the tiniest details of the faces and clothes of people.  There’s a remarkable attention to these things, to the point that one can almost forget it is a model.   

 (An exact scale model of a part of the Nihonbashi Bridge which was once the main entryway to Tokyo when it was known as Edo)

Best of all, the displays were distinctly detailed.  Things moved, music played.  You could TOUCH things, interact with things.  There was even an English audio tour that we sadly didn’t get, but I would gladly get next time.  THIS is a museum. This is what museums should be, and it was well worth every penny.  On another note, while we were waiting to enter, we watched the bullet trains whiz by on the nearby rail line.  

 

(I had to dangle my camera down to get this, amazing detail for figurines that are barely over an inch or two tall)

After this went Senkakuji Temple.  On the way, we stopped at the Tokyo Station and dropped by a particular department store I never got the name of.  The first floor was entirely dedicated to pastries of every sort.   There were people crowded all around getting cakes and cookies and such remarkable sweets that I have never seen before.  We had delicious teppanyaki on the thirtieth floor then went down to the pastries.   We walked past the famous kitchen street of Tokyo Station which is lined on both sides with places devoted to food on the go.  Bento boxes, travel food, great and small are for sale in these wonderful stalls.  

 (Senkakuji approach)

Arriving at Senkakuji, we found it a tiny temple in a small quiet neighborhood removed from everything else.  This place is famous for holding the bodies of the 47 Ronin who avenged their master’s death and then took their own lives since murdering their lord’s murderer was illegal.  In this act of loyalty and sacrifice, they are one of the most famous tales of Japan.  The temple itself was quiet with little shops and proud owners selling their wares.    

(Some of the 47 tombs)

The ronins' tombs are tended with love, and it was amazing to see all of them there with people honoring each shrine in turn.   It felt surreal to be there, to see such honors, peaceful and respectful.  It was a place of green in the heart of Tokyo.    While my parents sat and tried to relax, I stood in awe of where I was.  This was a place that I had dreamed of seeing since I was a child.   I knew the story of the 47 Ronin.  It was one of the earliest stories I ever knew about Japan.  Now I was at the place where they rested, where their spirits dwell and where much of the story took place. 

 

(A statue, I believe, of  Asano Naganori the Lord of the 47 Ronin)

Many temples in Japan have an austere aura to them, and this one was no exception.  It felt ancient, surrounded by the new.  There was a strange, sad quality though.  I don’t know how to explain it, but there’s a forlorn feeling in the empty windows and quiet neighborhood surrounding it.  There were people there, but it felt like the place had been forgotten by a greater number.

 

(Senkakuji Courtyard)

We retired to the hotel to prepare for the next leg of our journey after this.   Tomorrow would bring our first trip on a bullet train to the distant town of Nikko, Japan.  

Tokyo Conclusions

Tokyo is a place of energy.   In the skyscrapers and subways, in the people and the places, there is a constant hum of electricity.   Even in quiet secluded places, it exists, only different and more serene.  I can see why the people of Tokyo love living there, yet also pine for the simpler lifestyle away from throngs.  I don’t think I could ever get used to the crowds in subways or the quickness of daily life.  

Looking at the Tokyo map on our last night there, we made a disquieting discovery that we’d only scratched a tiny area of a smaller surface of the greater Tokyo Metropolitan area.   Tokyo is massive.  Most people can live there an entire lifetime and never see most of what it has to offer.  

On the whole, I found Tokyo to be a beautiful city and liked it far better than I ever thought I would.  It is remarkably clean, the people extremely friendly and conscientious of foreigners.   It is a place of contrasts, of old and new and would serve as the foundation to everything else we would see. 

Lament for the Small Town Book Store

I have a lot of fun little conversations with the kids where I work sometimes.  Coming from a completely different generation, their insights into the information age are always funny to me.  Kids today (God, I sound old saying that) have no perspective on what it was like to live before the common use of computers, cell phones or the internet.

I get to talk to kids sometimes about my books, and they are always interested to discover they have a writer in their midst.  Yet in speaking to them, I find an unsettling fact.  Not a single one has a good bookstore to go to.

With the dawning of the information age has come the growth of e-books, of finding everything instantly.  This instant gratification is a good thing in some respects.  I can in a moment's glance, find out what people have read, what they thought about a book, look through the book from the comfort of my home and then purchase it.  The book will then come to my computer, or my door.  It's quite extraordinary.

Yet despite this, I pine for a simpler time, a time when my hometown had more than a single bookstore in the big box known as Barnes and Noble.  Small bookstores were plentiful here back in the day.  We had four in San Luis Obispo.  You could walk into the Earthling, the Novel Experience and you would always find quirky characters in the store as much as you would in the reading the material.   I suppose for writers, bookstores are like a bar.  You go in and it's the local watering hole, the solace, the oasis for creative ideas.

I can remember vividly walking in and seeing the owner of the Novel Experience on a regular basis.  She was a woman larger than life, with dark purple tinted hair and flowing gowns and beads and bracelets on her arms.  Her laugh was hearty and infectious, and she knew books as if they were lovers.  She could, at a whim, recall any story, recommend things for any aged reader and have a discussion of plot and characters.  It was a remarkable.

I grew up on a diet of Novel Experience.  It is what helped to forge my strengths as a writer, my passion for books.  The owner of the Novel Experience was my window to the world, along with the local library.   

Unfortunately, the Big Boxes came and took that away.  Small stores couldn't keep up with what their larger cousins could do and one by one each shuttered their doors.   The Novel Experience put up a fantastic fight, but it was a losing one.  Eventually, it shuttered its doors.  Then, the Big Box stores met a similar fate, the mighty brought down by the internet in a matter if 5 years from the shuttering of the small stores.     All that remains is a single Barnes and Noble.  Big, and rather imposing, it doesn't have the personal charm that I would like.

Yet in some places, the bookstore remains.   What was my surprise to travel to Iowa City, Iowa, for the famous Iowa Writers conference to find the town has no less than 5 - 7 small bookstores.  The most famous, Prairie Lights, is a legend in the writing world.   Walking in, I found the shelves of books, the coffee shop, the quirky characters.   After so long, it was like coming home again.

The age of the bookstore may be alive and well in Iowa City, and perhaps smaller bookstores will flower from the corpses of big ones again.  Perhaps then children will go to them once more, and seek the beauty of books anew.

Glimpses of Familiar Japan - Day 3

We had a long 12 hours of sleep this day, and we got up later than before at 6:30 in the morning.  We had breakfast in the closer restaurant to our room at the hotel that overlooked a lovely Japanese garden though the food spread was substantially smaller than the previous breakfast.  It was a convenient place, however, since we usually had to go downstairs and around and then upstairs to reach the other wing of the hotel where the first café was.  

After breakfast, we set out for our next destination:   Shibuya and the Meiji Shrine.  We took the Chiyoda line to Meiji-Jingumae Station and emerged out into a busy city street.  Not a block away, we could see trees as far as the eye could see in a vast and forested park.  Indeed, the Meji Shrine is not just a shrine but covers the entirety of this park surrounded entirely by trees planted there.  The shrine deifies the Meiji Emperor and Empress who modernized Japan and sits in the center of this beautiful spot.  The Jinguemae Bridge is normally famous for its cosplayers (people who dress in costume).  Sadly, no cosplayers there that day.

The approach to the shrine is entirely forest.  Walking through it, we immediately left any semblance of the city behind.  All sounds of traffic, all buildings gave way to the forest, so much so that one would easily forget he is in the middle of a city!   There were barrels of sake (supposedly empty) donated on either side of us.  

 Here and there were massive, massive spiderwebs.  And where there were webs, there were spiders.  I don’t like spiders.  I don’t like them at all.  These were big black things big as my hand, with bright orange coloring on the joints and abdomen.  We saw a lot of these spiders throughout our trip with massive webs everywhere, but this was our first introduction to them.   

 

(Meiji Courtyard)

(The Prayer Trees)

The shrine itself is an austere wooden structure surrounding a central courtyard.

There is a prayer tree on one side, and my family and I took time to write out well wishes for our trip and tie them around a wire at the base of the tree.   There was a serene, peaceful feeling to the place.  Hardly a soul there, save a family for their daughter’s blessing (Shichi-go-san) or some older folks in traditional kimono.  This was an entirely different world from the busy streets outside.   

 

(Shichi-Go-San)

We walked around the rest of the park.  Here and there were buildings at the distance.  It’s strange to think one is in the middle of the city and not at the edge of it.

 

(View of Tokyo from the phark)

 (Beautiful formal gate at the entrance to the shrine)

After leaving the shrine, we walked down through Shibuya ward.  This was a trendy area with lots of high fashion shops.  It reminded my mom of Beverly Hills, near where I grew up, and frankly I recognized the resemblance.  We stopped by one store, the Oriental Bazaar that had neat Japanese souvenirs and beautiful modern woodblock prints by Kogitsu Tsuchiya.   Next was the Oda Museum of Art.  This museum houses some of the most famous ukiyoe (wood block) prints in its collection.  Most of what we saw was a gory display of disemboweling of samurai, but there were some prints of famous spirits of Japan that were kind of neat.    

 (Shibuya Crossing)

Finally, we went round-a-bout to Shibuya crossing, perhaps one of the busiest intersections in the world.  Here, I must remind my readers of the following:  Not a few blocks away is a forest…and in this space there was no sign of the city.  In Shibuya, it’s all huge skyscrapers, big department stores, shops, lights and noise.  There are a ton of people, all moving with a frenetic pace.   The whole of this spot is tense with an electricity moving in the billboards, the streets, the sidewalks and shops.  I hesitate to call it Vegas-esque because that would make it tacky.  It’s like Times Square in New York in some ways, though I have never been there.  

 

(Shibuya Street)

We had hoped to try to find food in a department store, but we had a hard time.  Our first stop was the famous Shibuya 109, a trendy department store, but it was too gaudy.    My next suggestion was to find soba, but we got lost.  Thankfully, we were helped by a wonderful lady from Taiwan who guided us to Tokyu Department Store just down one way.   There are so many strange signs, shops and restaurants.  Everything is jam-packed one on top of another without a rhyme and reason to a person of western abilities.  There are signs, but all in Japanese.

In any case, we ate on the eighth floor of the Tokyu Department Store in a little bento-box place.  It was a fun experience, being served wonderful dishes of rice in this little back area of the restaurant.  There were so many others restaurants there, but we decided on this one because of its uniqueness.  After lunch my mom decided to explore the building. 

The art of the true bookstore is not lost in Japan as it is in the United States.  Borders, Barnes and Noble?  Pssh.  Try a book store about the size of a target.   Rows upon rows of subjects on everything imaginable.  Huge displays of writing implements, things that we just don’t see anymore in the United States.  One of the fun things for me was to go into the children’s section and see favorite titles from my childhood in Japanese.   There were also manga which I perused, despite not being much of a fan of manga.   Leaving the department store, we went back to the crossing and took a picture in front of the statue of Hachiko.  This symbol of a dog’s loyalty to its owner has been at this station for a few decades now, and it was neat to see in person.

 

(Hachiko)

Shibuya Station is massive, and thankfully, we didn’t go down into the bowels of it, but instead decided to try out our JR rail pass on an official JR rapid line to Roppongi (which we skipped on our first full day).  Roppongi is a massive section of city.  In fact, the Roppongi Hills area was built to be a self-encompassing city within a city.  I first learned about this place in college when my professor talked about the desire in Tokyo to deal with overcrowding.  Roppongi was one of the first developments to try to tackle the task.

 (Roppongi Mori Tower)

 We walked up to a gleaming, beautiful and modern structure called the Mori Tower.  Our goal was to see the top level and take in the sights, and I was prepared to pay when another wonderful miracle happened.  A Japanese man came right up to us with what I thought were coupons.  I mentioned we were going to the skyview level, and he gave me the coupons in his hand and said, “I would like to be your guest” or “I would like you to be my guest” I can’t be sure.  Then he left.  

I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it, but I didn’t put any thought into it.  When I went to the counter, it turned out that the fellow had given us his own tickets …and we would be able to go up for free! I was astounded, because the man disappeared, saying something about being his guests, but it was another example of our extraordinary luck.   Otherwise we'd be paying thirty-five dollars a piece for the pleasure of a nice view.

 

(View of Tokyo Tower from Roppongi Hills)

Skyview is 52 floors up and has remarkable views of the city.  One can look out over the entirety of Tokyo, and we saw places we’d been and would be going soon.   There were pockets of trees.  The elevator up to the top is remarkably quiet and fast, but once you’re up there, have fun trying to find a place to sit.   The views were incredible, perhaps surpassed only by what people say of Tokyo Skytree.  We had a lot of fun pointing out places we’d been, though unfortunately, we didn’t see the reclusive Mount Fuji. Back down in the Roppongi complex is a hotel and shopping mall.  Going through it we remarked how we wanted to stay here the next time we came. 

 (Inside the Roppongi Complex, it is like a city within the city.)

This whole day was an exercise in contrasts in places and people.  From the quiet calm of Meiji with older women in beautiful kimonos, to the sharp frenetic pace of younger people in strange fashions surrounded by the sensory overload of Shibuya.    We went from disappointment at the Oda Museum, to elation at Roppongi.  

( Supposedly this is facing towards Mount Fuji, but it was hiding today)