October 30, 2005
Big in Japan
Finally I got myself together to sit down and sieve through the pictures from Japan. I'm still amazed and thrilled about it. All I can say is that after traveling around Asia for a while, I thought that nothing could impress me anymore. I've been to Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines.. Every place is different, but somehow very similar too. I was curious about Japan, but didn't expect something so overwhelmingly different. In general, my expectation was that it is very packed with people, very developed and urban. It is, in a way, but I can't describe how wrong about everything else I was.
The urban part of it is not so horrible (actually quite calm and very cool) and besides that you don't have to hang around in the big cities if you don't want. Every day I was in constant awe about everything. Just walking down the street you get this happy feeling of disbelief, how extremely beautiful and great everything is! The cities, the people, the nature, the arts, the design, the food.. Everything! Sadly all my pictures are overexposed, so I had to spend some time trying to recover some of the original colours and contrast.
The reason why I "had to" go to Japan was because I needed to change my passport (it is full of visas already and the nearest Lithuanian embassy is either in Tokyo or Beijing. A good excuse to visit the "too expensive" and "too faraway" Japan!) Before coming to Japan I had the impression that the Japanese don't speak much of English and that the cities are very difficult to navigate through. How wrong I was once again! The subway/train system is enormous, but very easy to navigate. The train stations are full of helpful people in uniforms that are able to point to the right platforms and that know train timetables by heart. The trains work like clockwork - I haven't taken a wrong train throughout the whole trip and didn't get lost in a "grand way" at all. There's lots of signs in English and in fact Japan is very accommodating for a traveller. Although crowded, Tokyo is very quiet. You don't get such a sensory overload as you do in Leijonakaupunki if you dare to venture to the Orchard rd on the weekend.
I stayed in Asakusa area - a very nice and non-pretentious place. It has a strong spirit of the olden times, there's lots of small restaurants, the streets are narrow and people ride bicycles everywhere. Waah.. The food was brilliant! Btw, in Japan when you eat sushi or sashimi, you don't drown everything in wasabi. There's very moderate amounts of it on the sushi itself and no additional wasabi anywhere in sight! The fish is so good and fresh, that you don't need to "kill" the "fishy" taste with wasabi. But my most favorite throughout the whole trip was soba - buckwheat noodles. Yummy!!
The Senso-ji temple in Asakusa stroke me as something amazing (when I think about it now, probably more as the first Japanese temple..:) There were a lot of people in the early evening hanging around, there were lanterns and small shops everywhere.
It felt that a lot of people were just going around their daily business, it didn't seem to be set up exclusively for tourists. The white papers tied to the frame are fortune lots. You pay some coins to draw a piece of paper with your fortune, but if you don't like it, you can leave it tied on a frame in the temple. Its somebody else's business to bother about it then. Not yours anymore.. :)
I got very excited about the way Japanese use caligraphy. It is amazing to see how traditional arts, crafts and designs get a new life in mordern days. Japanese are very good with typography in contemporary design - text has a lot of visual expressiveness to the extent that I've never seen in any other place before. Many times I thought about the P. Greenaways The Pillow Book movie while traveling in Japan. It is an amazingly visually inspiring place. Sometimes it was difficult to sleep at night, because I kept seeing pictures, imagining new kinds of patterns.. ;)
The great rice crackers from Senso-ji fed me well into the trip. In many places while travelling in Asia I wonder how the Christian churches would look like if Jesus wouldn't have taken the stick and kicked out the merchants from the temple. I don't really see anything wrong about selling things at the holy places. It makes the experience more fullfilling (and filling sometimes.. :)
Japan is still very much the Men's World. You see thousands of men dressed in black suits everywhere in Tokyo. If you ever wondered where the makers of the Matrix movie got their inspiration for Mr. Smith, you should come to Japan. The trains are packed of this kind of "salary men". I got the feeling that females are not quite catching up in the job market and everywhere else. As far as I understood, women play mostly supporting roles in businesses and most of the "high-flyers" are men.. The good old mens club-clan-meetings taking place behind closed doors are very common. I am not sure about submissiveness and the value of the group before the individual known as traditionally Japanese. It felt that many people are very cool and it seemed that very many of them have hobbies (train models, comics, toys, handcrafts, etc). Also the streets are full at any hour of the day, so I guess they have a lot of time for shopping, not only working? And they also line up to get on the train, to enter different places and don't cut ques!!! That is a clear sign of high level of civilization - centuries of living in urban spaces teach you some courtesy...
There's a lot of things "most-est" in Japan. For example the imperial palace is the most expensive piece of land on the planet Earth!!!
Shinjuku station is the busyest train station on Earth. Every day 2 million people pass the station (imagine, thats more than half of Lithuanian population!!)
Oh yeah! And the earthquakes! Supposedly there are about 1000 earthquakes a year in Japan (some of them very small). So I was not suprised at all when on the second night in Tokyo there was quite a strong earthquake (I think some 6 grade or whatever you call it). The house shook like a train and the glasses were ringing. But as everything is built out of "carton", I wasn't worried at all. They don't build very sturdy structures and it comes in handy during earthquakes. The walls don't crack, the roofs don't collapse. Everything shakes a little bit and thats about it. I think that the electricity cables are outside because of the same reason. If smth gets pulled and torn underground, there could be a lot of trouble trying to find and fix it..
On the way out of Tokyo I had a tempura soba in this place where salary men come for lunch. You get to sit down just for a short while and there are a lot of people lining up behind you eyeing you seat. Happy slurping!
It is very late already and there's still a lot to tell. I finish here now and will continue sometime soon. There's a lot of days off ahead because of Deepavali and Hari Raya and we're not going anywhere... To be continued...