Japan in Pictures

Okay, here's the deal with blogging.  I'm back in business, but only sporadically.  We can connect a computer (not mine) to the internet, involving some witch doctoring, and I can get pics off my memory card.  Techies, you can feel my pain; the situation is that the setup here is a separate modem and router - modem issued by the isp and wireless router bought separately.  The router is experiencing tremendous problems, but there is no support for it in existence in English.  I would love to help my friend upgrade the firmware, but it turns out I only know how to support these things in one language.

So here goes, a bunch of pictures!

 Here's the giant squid at the prefectural museum!  Soooo huge!

This part of the museum was like a love song to taxidermy and preservation.  It was really interesting, but the mothball smell got to be a bit much.  There were a lot of pinned bugs, too, and many of you will be totally unsurprised to find out that I took pictures of pretty much every insect display.  I will not inflict them upon you here, gentle readers.

This is in the history section of the prefectural museum.  It's a kirin outfit - they're a big deal around here, since they presumably live in the hills.  I guess they chill with dragons and such.  There's also kirin on a bunch of things throughout town - carved benches up and down the main street.  I was disappointed that Cale has not named all the benches and given them personalities.  I would.

This is the Hiroshima Peace Park memorial arch.  Through it, you can see the Genbaku Dome, preserved as it appeared after the bomb exploded almost directly above it.  I have now traveled - although indirectly - from the place the atomic bomb was born to the first place it was used as a weapon.  And if that's not freaky, I don't know what is.

 Here's the big torii gate at Miyajima.  People used to have to boat through this in order to be pure enough to set foot on the island.  We came by ferry, unpurified, and I hope the various kami and spirits understood.  We went under some other gates getting there, so maybe we weren't too terribly unclean.

Miyajima is serious business though - one of those big holy spots with a very long history of being holy.  It's also frigging gorgeous.

 Here's Cale stalking one of the Miyajima "wild" deer.  They are supposedly notorious for eating lunches and ferry tickets, but mostly they seemed sleepy when we were there.

The brochure warns that they were wild animals.  I've met wild deer, and these ain't them.  These were spoiled, entitled, FAT deer.

I totally hiked all the way to the top of this.  Heck yeah.

Here is a snake friend I met on the way up.  Snake friend was like three feet long.  I wanted more photos, but she was camera shy, so I didn't get much.

Here is the other friend I met.  This friend is about two inches (three-inch wingspan) of stinging death.  The story of this encounter goes as follows:

A couple years ago, I watched some nature special that introduced me to the concept of Japanese Giant Hornets.  I had encountered the name before, when I was trying to identify some monstrously large wasps eating our apricots, but hadn't paid attention since we were in Albuquerque, not Japan.  But the show I watched described in horrific detail their propensity for savaging hives of honey bees, which European honey bees have no natural defense for, and how if you stumble into a nest of these hornets, you are pretty much dead.  I have always feared wasps - I have been stung by them on numerous occasions - and so the thought of the uberwasp really scared me.  But I consoled myself with the knowledge that I was terribly unlikely to find myself wandering through rural Japan.  Ha ha.

Cale warned me about the bears, boars, snakes, and poisonous caterpillars in the mountains, but when you get right down to it, nothing is as likely to kill you as these freaking wasps.  But I figured my chance of seeing such a thing was pretty slim.  I wasn't going off path, I wasn't out looking or anything...

So I was almost all the way down the mountain and I noticed raspberries. "Wow, raspberries!" I went, and leaned in to see how extensive the bramble was.  It sounded like there was a small animal moving around in there somewhere.  A sparrow, maybe?  Mouse?  Another snake friend?  Then I heard a sound like a small jet engine, and the creature pictured above hovered out of the bramble.  "Oh shit," says I, articulate and relaxed, as one would expect.  "Oh shit oh shit.  Is that really... oh shit."

Hornet had his own business to be about, though, and once I got over the fact that I was seeing an insect from my nightmares, I thought I'd better document the occasion.  Sorry it isn't the best picture, but I was remaining 8 feet away at all times, because... well, look at it.

Catching Up

I am behind on blogging, partly because of internet/blogger woes, and partly because I've just been busy catching up on touristing.  The travel cold I got is still making itself known, but aside from coughing like I'm about to lose a lung, I'm pretty okay.

So, here goes!  Catching y'all up on my adventure times!  (Apologies for a lack of pictures at the moment - due to internet problems, I am currently unable to use my own computer, and it makes things a bit harder.)  These will be brief, hopefully I will have time for more details later!

First up, the prefectural museum.  This is displaying all the wonderfulness that is Tottori prefecture, presumably.  It was all in Japanese and so a little hard to fully suss out, but that's what I gather from the online tourist blurb.  There's a nature section, with like three million stuffed, mounted, lucite-encased, and otherwise preserved animals that come from this prefecture or show up in the area, or... something.  Including a giant squid.  There was a history section, which was also neat.  Then there was the art section - a special exhibition of an early 1900s impressionist called Moriyama, who did some really neat things.  There were a few other artists in the mix too, and a random section of prints of Renaissance religious paintings, and I don't know what that was about.  I really enjoyed myself, and walked around the grounds too, which are gorgeous and at the foot of a little mountain.  I got an impromptu lesson in butterfly photography by a man who spoke about as much English as I do Japanese, and he was really nice about it.  That's largely been my experience in Tottori.  Very nice people, all a little baffled as to why someone like me would show up to do sightseeing.

Next, Hiroshima.  We went for the weekend, to both be tourists and so I could get firsthand ideas of how the face of nuclear anxiety was shaped at its source.  That meant we went to the Peace Park and museum, and I think it's really good to have been.  Not all easy, especially not when you're staring at things that belonged to people who died from radiation exposure, but good to see and to know, and most importantly in my case, to read how it's presented in English.  Interestingly, where Tokyo was almost devoid of Westerners, there were a lot in Hiroshima, and in the museum especially.  Our pick-me-up after that was visiting Miyajima, which is an island full of pretty.  It has a big famous torii gate out in the middle of the water, and we visited so we could take sunset pictures, and it was just gorgeous.  It was all really nice.  Also, we met a girl who was there because the husband of a friend of hers plays for the Hiroshima Carps baseball team.  Her name was Britney, and... well, she was a Britney.  She had been in Japan two weeks already and only in Hiroshima at that, and she hadn't been much of anywhere, or eaten anything all that new.  Cale and I had no idea how you could maintain that bubble, but Britney did.

Then we had to go back to Tottori - the bus trip is not a short one - and today, while Cale was at work, I hiked the mountain.  I am hoping to show pictures later, but Mount Kyusho is really gorgeous, covered in that sort of ur-forest that I always imagined in fantasy books. It isn't a tall mountain, so making it to the top is really pretty quick, but there's not a lot of lateral looping back and it's pretty much all steep upward movement, which for someone recovering from a cold is an adventure in and of itself.  Cale was pretty sure I might get eaten or attacked by wild animals, a fear not totally unjustified as there are bears, boars, snakes, and other things in the region, but there are bears, mountain lions, and rattlers back home. I did see a snake, but we went our separate ways.  My crowning achievement was in seeing, on my downward trip, something that honest to goodness scares the shit out of me.  I didn't even know they existed until a couple years ago.

I bet you all think you've seen a big wasp.  Maybe even a tarantula hawk.  And they are indeed big.

But Japan has the biggest wasps in the world, and not only are they enormous, they are notoriously aggressive once pissed off.  The Japanese Giant Hornet does not screw around - one or two can decimate an entire hive of honey bees in a matter of minutes, and its size means that a single sting injects enough venom to necessitate hospital treatment.  I don't get on with wasps, and so knowing these existed was bad enough.  Knowing they existed here, in rural Tottori, was also bad.  And then I saw one.  And didn't run screaming like a little girl.  Hoorah.

Sorry this is all so brief and photoless - if I get some internet back soon, I will remedy that!

Feelin' Crabby

Today was crab museum day.  (The post is rather behind because of Blogger's outage.  I'm having to catch up.)

It was my first time going it alone to a new place without Cale as a guide, and he gave me instructions for which bus to get on, but I am always bad at locations, so he also gave me his phone, which I could use to email him at work.  Armed with this, I went to the bus stop, got on the bus, and went far away from the city center.  I was a little worried, because I haven't ever really been too far in another country before without someone there.  Old Rowan would have been eating herself with anxiety, but Adventure Rowan went ahead with it anyway and got off the bus with no idea where she was going and smiled while she did it.  Okay, so I was still a bit concerned, but I figure some concern is healthy.

This is what a crab museum does not look like.

So after a pricey bus ride to a little stop that left me with no point of reference for where I was, I figured that the next part would be easy.   Surely, the Kanikouken, the crab museum, was one of the buildings with a bloody great crab on it.  I went to the first.  Then the next.  These were stores, warehouse sort of places, who knew what, but certainly not crab museums.  I looked at the map that had been near the bus stop.  I saw the kanji that Cale wrote down as the crab museum, and went the way I presumed that was.  No dice.

So when I saw a woman with a baby stroller, I figured maybe she could at least point me in the right direction.  I started to use my limited Japanese to ask her where, and she said "Oh, do you speak English?"

It turned out she's from California, visiting family, and that she would be happy to walk me up to the museum.  She was reluctant to leave me, since nobody else anywhere nearby would speak English, and she had spent our little walk essentially (very politely) asking me if I was out of my mind to come so far out into a place where nobody would speak my language.  I assured her I had my friend's phone and contact with him, and that I would be fine.  I hoped I would, anyway.

I went to see the crabs.  They were wonderful.  It was a tiny little museum/aquarium, but it had things, both crabs and other, that I have never seen before ever, not even on tv or in books.  There were these... things.  The baby ones were roughly tadpole sized, and the adults were sort of like half of an avocado.  They were tadpole-shaped, too, though they seemed do be some kind of fattish fish with a flat belly.  But then... the realization hits that they're sticking to things.  Because from the ones on the glass of the aquarium, you can see that their entire belly is a big suction...thing.  Not like a mouth sucker, because they seemed to have a separate mouth.   Because this place is for Japanese tourists, the signs were not bilingual and as such I couldn't really say what they were.  So I named them Horror Fish in lieu of a real name.  I wasn't disturbed by the small ones, but the big ones made me think of unpleasant alien things from science fiction.

They also had a couple of really big spider crabs in a tank and one of them seemed to be doing kind of a dance.

There were crabs in aquariums, and crabs in glass displays, and one crab that was some sort of big hermit crab, but his shell was pretty well engulfed by an anemone living on it, which made for a really odd-looking arrangement for both of them.

I was a little concerned about the bus, though, since Cale told me I should see signs posted with bus times, and I hadn't recalled any where I was let off.  If the bus only came once an hour, timing was kind of important.  I decided to see if I could find times, but I dawdled through the fish market next to the museum first, just to see.

This put me outside at the perfect time to meet my good Samaritan again.  A  horn honked and a car pulled up next to me.  She rolled down a back window, and said her mother, who was driving, would be happy to give me a lift back to the main station.  Heck yeah!

She and I chatted about Japan and where I was going and it was a really lovely little adventure.

Little Gaijin Goes to School

This is the story of my trip to Japanese high school.

 I went with Cale today to the high school he teaches at in Iwami.  Let me paint a quick picture of the area here - it is not the metropolitan sprawl most commonly associated with Japan.  Tottori prefecture, where Cale lives and teaches, is the least populous prefecture in Japan.  It's rural and hilly and full of tiny communities that are far from ultramodern Japanese supercities.  Tottori is the largest city in its namesake prefecture, and it only has a population of a bit over 200,000.  Iwami is a twenty-minute train ride (provided horrible things don't happen, I'll get to that later) from Tottori, through really gorgeous verdant terrain, where bamboo and spills of wisteria dot the hillsides.  The mountains were all misty today, because it was pouring rain for the second day in a row, and stepping off the train into the little town of Iwami was a little like being in a Studio Ghibli movie.

For those of you who watch anime, forget at least half of what you thought you knew about Japanese high school- for those of you who don't, forget a lot of what you've heard about Japanese students.  As with most fictional portrayals, the scenery is right, and some of the major points are there, but they're missing large chunks.  First of all, this is not a fancy high school, and the kids here are not generally expected to be high achievers.  They're average to below average students, and they don't just sit respectfully in class and act studious.  They chat (a lot) and drag their feet about doing work, and basically fail to live up to stereotype.  Oh, and their uniforms do not in fact fit them like gloves and highlight all the girls' assets.  In point of fact, they're a bit bulky.

The school itself looks very much like what I've seen portrayed, in general, if a little more well-used.  But what I didn't know was that the obsession for different shoes is at almost a peak here.  You have to take off your outdoor shoes and put on indoor shoes.  For me, it was Skechers sandals, for the students, it's these clashy blue plastic sandals that look terribly uncomfortable.  Then, if you go into the gym, the shine on the floor is too sacred for even your indoor shoes (you do after all have to walk over some concrete to get there) and you have to take your shoes off entirely.  For classes, there are separate gym shoes; for assemblies, it's strictly socks.

The English teachers I met were all very nice and clearly hard-working, and gracious about having me there.  For the sake of Japanese propriety and convenience, I was introduced as Cale's cousin, and I became a special guest in the classes he worked with today.

Remember how I said Iwami is a small country town?  These kids are not used to foreigners (gaijin) at all.  Cale may have been the first foreigner many of them actually ever met, so I got a number of goggle-eyed stares just by virtue of looking very very un-Japanese.  A number of them found me cute, which was very gratifying, and they were very shy about speaking to me, and one girl looked like she just seized up and couldn't manage.  But we had a good time - the last class of the day had been asked to prepare questions for me, and so I tried to give very simple and American answers, rather than 100% honest answers which would be weird and confusing.  I couldn't quite manage to keep from a few weirdnesses when I didn't have a better response, because rather than pausing and thinking things through, my brain short-circuits and spouts the closest I can come up with.

So my regular American answers went something like this:

Q: What is your favorite type of cake?  A:  I like chocolate cake very much.
See?  Simple, easy answer for an English learner, even though my favorite cakes tend to have lavender or lemon zest or spice or other things that would require a lot of extra translation.

Or... Q: What kind of food do you like to eat?  A: I love Indian food.

But sometimes, they would ask questions where my options were to answer lamely or to fabricate, leading to some really weird things.

Q: What instrument do you play?

Brain goes:  Of course, they're going to just assume I play an instrument, because they all do.  Just like they're going to assume I play a sport, damn it.  I can't not play both sports and instruments.  Crap, what do I say?  I can play "Merrily We Roll Along" on the penny whistle.  I guess that'll do.

A: I used to play the tin whistle.  It's Irish.  I was not very good.  No, not like a clarinet.  No, not big.  Like a recorder?  You know?

As you can see, that's nothing like "I like chocolate cake."

According to my answers, I like to watch race cars and I watch basketball because so many of my friends play it, and I'm into the Albuquerque Isotopes baseball team, the only team I could remember, and I watch Desperate Housewives.  What can I say, I panic and spout off what I assume is digestible.

They were all very gracious to me, and it was interesting to see how students with very little exposure to foreigners in general, let alone Westerners, react.

As for the train ride home - all the students were sent home early because of the heavy rain, because trains would be running late, and that meant Cale and I were on the platform amongst most of the school.  For reasons unknown, the train that came along was one car.  So we packed like sardines onto one car with half of Cale's school, and that twenty-odd minute train ride slowed down because of weather and weight and became a sweltering, hour-long trip.

Despite that, a good day.

Little Nerd Goes to Tokyo

Our awesome hostel.

Tokyo was a whirlwind - I don't think there's any way for it to be anything else.  I visited some of the major parts of the city that I didn't get to on my first time around, and some parts that I visited before but wanted to see again.

We stayed at a very nice hostel in a traditional building.  Like, really traditional.  Like, parts of it a hundred years old traditional.  So that was cool.  They were very nice to us there, intensely accommodating, and the area we were in was nice, too.  We had to pass through a kind of skeezy area when walking to and from the train station, but skeezy in Tokyo just isn't the same as elsewhere.  Less bite.

We also spent a good half day in Yokohama, which is a bay city next to Tokyo with ultramodern design and giant things.  There's the giant ferris wheel, pictured right, and the giant malls, and a giant tower that contains a hotel and goodness knows what else, and wikipedia tells me it's the tallest building in Japan.  You can see part of it in the left hand of the picture.

We also went to Ginza, Shinjuku, Asakusa, and Shibuya, and we were based out of Ueno.  There was a lot of shopping, where I wished i had a little more spendy money, and a lot of just seeing the city sights - hustle and bustle and walking up fifteen million stairs.

The escalators were frequently out of service, and Tokyo was darker than it should have been.  With the post-crisis power problems, the largest city in the world is having to cut back and conserve.  It's still bright and loud and colorful at night, but it doesn't sparkle the way it should.  It struck me most on the plane when we were flying out last night.  I've always really enjoyed flying out of big cities because they just look like handfuls of jewels scattered over dark land.  Tokyo was dimmed.

Additionally, there were faces missing from the crowd in the city - Western faces.   Tourists were conspicuously absent, even in the ultratouristy traditional shopping street in Asakusa.  Here I was, a foreigner looking even more foreign just by virtue of being one of the few.

As can be expected, I embarrassed myself more than once.  The intensity of my fandom for learning everything about Japanese culture has burned down a bit, so I forget things a lot.  I forget to stand on the left of the escalator and I really dishonored myself when I lost my grip on my suitcase in a train and the extended handle banged into the knee of the businessman sitting across from me.  He was reading a paper so it came as a surprise to him, and my English "I'm so sorry!" (the Japanese takes longer to make it through the brain to mouth process) did not endear me.  If looks could kill, I'd be done.

However, I also feel like I have license for a few slipups, since I'm a tourist and all, and besides I'm spending my money in this country when it can use the business.

I am glad to have a slow day today.  I'm in Tottori, my lovely host Caleb is at work, and it's pouring cats and dogs outside.  Soon I am going to venture out to the store for lunch, but watching the downpour does give me pause.

I will leave you with a picture of me and Hachiko, the faithful dog.  His story, like most of the folk favorites in Japan, is a sad one, but he has a very nice statue.

This sign made me laugh, because if you're standing and waiting to cross the road, it's pretty impossible not to see it as "Big Ho."

I am in Tokyo, and it's the best city ever, pretty much.

Though to satisfy my guide Cale's longing for western food, we dined at an "English Pub" last night, where "bacon" stands in for pretty much every variety of meat that is not fish and chips.  Bacon is all kinds of variations on fatty ham, and not the crispy stuff we're used to.  I had bacon and cabbage rice paper rolls, which were pretty darn good.  Japanese bakery for breakfast this morning, which is great because I love their breads and am starving.  Better pictures soon!

Little Nerd in the Big Sky

I am about to board my first plane for Japan! Fun fact about the full body scanners- you may still get felt up a little if they don't get a totally clear image which is pretty much all the time. They will stop you and some lady with a face like a bulldog's will say "female" and some number and tell you which area she's going to pat down. Apparently I have a suspicious back.