Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Four Days in Japan (an extremely detailed account)

A few months ago I realized that I had a four day weekend coming for one of Korea’s biggest holidays: Chuseok.  It’s kind of like Korean Thanksgiving, where family gathers together and games are played, special treats are eaten, and thanks are given.  Sitting at my desk, trying to prep for the day, I decided that I didn’t want to stay in Korea for it.  So I pulled up a Chrome window on my computer, neglecting my reports, and looked for a plane ticket to Osaka.  Twenty minutes later I was two minutes late for class but with a plane ticket in my inbox.

I somehow forgot to mention to most people that I was going, except for a few coworkers who I knew had recently travelled there.  I decided not to spend any time in Osaka, but rather to take a train to Kyoto and tour around to a few of the cooler temples in the area, take a day trip to Hiroshima and another to Nara, and just generally do whatever struck my fancy on a particular day.  By the time Chuseok weekend rolled around (two weekends ago), I had discovered that a good friend and former coworker was likewise headed to Kyoto for a few days.  Everything was going well.

And then the security line was insanely long at Incheon on the way to Japan, made infinitely longer by the racist middle-aged Frenchman who’d decided I was his best friend.  I tried to keep the conversation light and humorous, mentioning Supernatural’s ideation of hell as infinitely waiting in lines, politely declining to point out that Jean Paul Sartre’s iteration of hell was other people.  The trip didn’t seem to be going quite so well after all.

However, I made it away from the Frenchman and through security without incident, and a few short hours later I was in Japan, jumping on a train from Osaka to Kyoto.  Straight off the train, I went outside to catch a bus to my hostel, and once I found the proper place to line up, I heaved a sigh of relief and dropped my bag to the floor.  I turned around to look around, only to discover two full-blown geisha lined up behind me.  You know you’re in Japan when…

I really messed up my first day timing-wise, and didn’t get to see anything in Kyoto because the temples were all closed even though it was only four in the afternoon.  Apparently temples close at four thirty, which seems a bit on the early side.  I found myself wishing I had just left my bags at the bus station and taken off to explore, without heading to the hostel first.  You know what they say about hindsight.  On my way back to my hostel I thought I’d go a few stops further to Gion (a.k.a. historical geisha town) and see if there was anything to see.  There were: some random, amazing, bright red temple-style buildings, and scores of Geisha.  Then it started pouring, so I sat there in the rain, on the edge of a vermillion temple, trying to wait out the rain.  By the time I gave up on the idea that it would ever end and just took off, it was past dark and I was soaked.  I stopped in at an Indian restaurant that was on the way back toward my hostel and had the best garlic naan of my life, ignoring the guilt for not eating Japanese food whilst in Japan.

The next day I got up early, intending to hop a train to Hiroshima, not knowing how to get anywhere once I arrived at Hiroshima station.  When I first woke up though, I had some trouble lifting my head, which seemed to be weighted to the pillow.  I finally realized that I was not ill or exceedingly exhausted, but merely physically held down.  You see, my bed was a mat on the floor next to another mat, so close together that with blankets on top you couldn’t distinguish one from the other.  Or, you know, so close that you wake up with a random dude’s hand twisted in your hair.  I untangled myself, made my way to the train station and got on a train to the allegedly still radioactive destination of the first atom bomb.

 After jumping on a random streetcar in Hiroshima and getting off at the stop the driver told me was closest to the museum, I wandered around for a while, looking for signs of where I was going.  I finally started to see markers pointing me in the right direction, and headed off toward the museum.

The museum was moving in a lot of regards.  I’d heard that it was quite biased, but I didn’t think so.  I mean, yes, I only saw one mention of Pearl Harbor, but there wasn’t any vicious attack against the US.  From what I could tell, it was a factual, unflinching, objective as possible representation of the effects of the bomb.  Most moving stories:  A mother who forced her daughter to go to work “so she could help her country” even though her daughter had a headache.  Only part of the girl’s schoolbag was ever found.  Her mother blamed herself until her own death.  A girl who swam across a river to get home, but was so badly burned that she was only recognizable by her voice.  She died a few days later because her family didn’t have enough medicine to help her.  A mother came into the city to look for her 12 or 13 year-old son.  She found an unrecognizably charred corpse curled up around a lunchbox, which proved to be her son’s lunchbox.  The carefully prepared lunch consisting of the first harvest of his own garden, which he had been extremely excited about that morning, was completely charred inside.  The item I found most interesting was a watch, carried by a man who died, its glass face smashed, and its hands stopped at the exact moment the bomb hit. 

The other part I found most intriguing was the children’s monument.  The idea for the monument came from the classmates of one girl,  Sadako Sasaki, who got Leukemia ten years after the blast at the age of twelve.  She’d heard that if you made 1,000 paper cranes, your wish came true.  She folded 1,000 tiny cranes in the hospital.  She died anyway.  Ever wonder where those paper cranes you folded in middle/elementary schools went?  They’re here.  Maybe I folded that blue one.  Or the purple one there.  They even had some of the cranes made by the girl herself in the museum.  The truth was that there were huge numbers of children in the city at the time, particularly kids ages twelve to sixteen.  These students were used after school or during free hours as demolition teams, tearing down old houses to make fire lanes.  When the bomb hit there were thousands of them in the city, working for their country.  Almost all of them died within just a few days of the blast.

The next stop was the dome, one of the only structures to survive the blast.  Inside weeds, grasses, and flowers were taking over what was once the floor of what was once a government building.  Steel support beams for the frame of the dome were twisted but remained in what was recognizably a dome shape.  Rocks crumbled, and the floor of the second story were mere holes.  And yet, the walls, the beams, and most of the basic structure of the building endured.  It stands as a testament to what was once in the park where I walked between museums and monuments, just below where the bomb detonated.  Before, this area, now cleared for tourists, had been the bustling center of the city.  Now its entire identity was shaped by the bomb, ever building, ever stone, either left behind by the blast or put there to honor those whose lives had been forever changed, or whose voices had been forever silenced.

I sat there in the shade at the park, thinking about all the things I’d just seen, read, and heard.  The weather was beautiful; a perfect blue sky filled with the hot sun and fluffy white cotton ball clouds.  My favorite kind of weather.  I kept thinking about my Pop-Pop, my mother’s father who fought in WWII.  I couldn’t stop.  I wished he could be there, that I’d somehow brought him before he died.  He either would’ve been moved or he would’ve hated it.  I was having trouble contextualizing it, though, trying to really understand what it all meant.  Something that massively important, something that shaped the world we live in today, something that will forever be a part of the entire world’s history, is so colossal that it’s hard to really conceptualize in a mind so unaccustomed to violence and large scale mortality.  I wonder if anyone can really imagine it who wasn’t there, who hasn’t experienced something similar.

Afterward, I had a few hours left to kill before my return train, so I walked to Hiroshima palace. I was quite unimpressed.  It was basically just two buildings with a dirty courtyard in the middle, where people dressed in garish attempts at historical costume were singing and dancing to J-Pop tunes while fan girls screamed and foreigners took videos.  Annoyed more than anything else, I moved on to some nearby botanical gardens.  I saw a land crab, carp, and a few turtles, one of whom came and sat with me.  It was beautiful and relaxing.  My camera battery had died at the castle (of course) so I only had my iPhone but the camera on it is surprisingly good.  Then I found out I had missed most of the castle, so I went back.  I was still unimpressed.  The tower was somewhat interesting, but the coolest part was the ruins from the A-bomb.  There were two foundations, both with small sets of stairs leading up to the outline of rooms, a stone blueprint built and filled in with grass.  A few trees nearby had barked scorched white by the bomb, which was still noticeable even this many years later.  I researched what those ruins had been in their former life and discovered that they were the headquarters for the Empire, which had set up camp in Hiroshima during the war.  The place was absolutely decimated, though it was almost a kilometer from the center of the blast.  I hadn’t realized that Hiroshima had been such an important target to the Allies, mostly because I’d never known why.  If the Empire’s high command really operated from here, however, it makes sense as a target.

The next day I decided to go to Nara, a nearby town with some interesting temples and shrines and a large park filled with deer.  The rapid train to Nara was by far the better choice, but I took the local train to a stop called Inari.  Just outside the stop I climbed up the side of a mountain through hundreds of vermillion Torii gates, the most popular tourist destination of Kyoto.  I’d read it took thirty minutes to the mountain’s top, but forty minutes in I wasn’t there.  When the third map in a row, spaced a quarter to half a mile apart, had the self-satisfied red “You are here” sticker in the same halfway spot, I realized that either I wasn’t moving or I was in the Labyrinth, in which case I had to get out of there before David Bowie’s spandex junk mulleted me straight to the Bog of Eternal Farts.  So, after 40 minutes and 2 miles of hiking, I threw up my hands, said “Fuck this shit” and went back down.  It was still cool even if I didn’t reach the top. 

I went to Nara and went to a Buddhist temple that had three massive Buddha sculptures.  I used to live in Thailand, so you know when I say a Buddha is big, it’s pretty damn big.  I bought a few Buddhist charms there, for family and friends.  The temple was gorgeous inside and out, and within walking distance of an amazing Shinto Shrine.  The shrine supposedly was the final resting place of four Shinto gods.  It was interesting, filled with stone lanterns all the way up the walk through the woods, and metal ones all the way through the paths of the shrine itself.  Between the temple and the shrine I stopped to buy deer cookies, thinking I’d feed a few deer.  What really happened was I took the cookies from the woman selling them, took two steps away from her, and was instantly mobbed by deer who tried to bite my fingers when I couldn’t get the wrapper off the cookies fast enough.  I ripped through the package and basically just threw cookies into the wind, hoping to make a getaway.  Aside from getting my stomach bitten (hard enough to bruise), I made it out unscathed.

Having seen what I wanted to see in Nara and with time to space, I sat on a shady bench in Nara Park with a bottle of water and my Kindle.  A few deer came to check me out occasionally (one tried to abscond with my garbage bag) but mostly I was alone.  People walked along the street in front of me (about 50 feet away) or walked through the grass about 30 feet behind me, but I was alone on the benches.  All of a sudden, I heard a sound like thunder and I looked up.  At some unknown cue, all the deer in Nara Park had started sprinting toward the woods just beyond me.  They ran mostly on two paths- one just in front of me (my bench was on its edge) and at the edge of the grass just behind me.  Mothers and babies, bucks and does, all sprinting determinedly toward an invisible something that called out silently to them.  I pulled my feet up on the bench, surrounded, and watched these seemingly docile animals do something altogether organized yet wild, answering some call of nature that my domesticated human ears could no longer hear.  Girlish squeals from farther down the road toward the temple announced the impending arrival of deer too far away to be seen joining in the wild dash.  Every person on the road and in the park froze and watched these animals be just that- animal.  Conversations stopped, conversations in Japanese, Korean, Spanish, English, and French, and everyone silently watched the blatant, naked spectacle of nature.  I didn’t see a single person raise or even reach for their camera.  The sight was so sudden, so shocking from such tame creatures, that everything else was forgotten in favor of just seeing the glorious, thunderous, inexplicable flight of the deer.

That night I met up with Mayte, my friend and former coworker, and we had dinner and a few drinks.  We started with Japanese food, which was delicious but not filling, and then moved on to a pub.  The next day we headed to the Golden Pavilion, which is one of the most recognizable sights in Kyoto.  A man who wanted to show off his wealth covered the top two floors of his home with gold leaf.  It was set in a gorgeous lake with great trees and bushes, and it was beautiful. 


After that we jumped on a train and headed out to an area called Arashimaya, which had an amazing temple, a stunning bridge over a river that snaked between hills, a bamboo forest bisected by a path, and a hill whose top was covered in monkeys.  As we adventured we met a guy from California who tagged along through our sightseeing.  I had to leave early to make the train to the airport and make my flight.  Of course, being me, I mistimed it all, missed the train, missed the next airport bus, and only made it to check-in 32 minutes before my flight, despite the fact that the ticket said 50 minutes prior or no flight.  They still let me on the flight, THANK GOD, and I made it back to Korea in one piece.  All in all it was a fantastic trip.