November 05, 2005
My last Japonism
I'll try to finish the Japan stories with this one - its been a while since I came back and I'm tired of all the "ah.. oh.." how beautiful.. :) Besides there's new things happening already.. For example, on Thursday we went to the beach in Desaru and today we went cycling (and I'm so damn tired!)... Bear with my Japonisms just one more time.. :)
Ok lah.. Back to Japan.. I had hard time finding accommodation in Kyoto before the trip. Apparently it was because there were 2 matsuri (festivals) on the same day while I'm in Kyoto. Of course, I was delighted to find out that I'll get a chance to see them both.
First there was Jidai matsuri - a long parade of people dressed in clothes from different Japan epochs. The costumes were quite entertaining, especially the stupid looking ones. Some of the armors seemed to be completely useless in a battle, but in general I was happy to see lots of colours and floral designs in men clothes. Some of the ancient looking men were sporting Luis Vuitton handbags and umbrellas (see the picture? :)
Once again I was struck about the apparent lack of importance in the women's role in Japanese society throughout ages (all represented by this festival). Women were nowhere to be seen and if they'd pass by, their faces would be painted in white and they'd move in small steps like dolls (the geisha type). Why there were no female in samurai dresses? or in any other superior looking dress?
The fire festival was not in Kyoto, but in Kurama, a suburb/village some 45min train ride away. The main attraction obviously was the generously revealed men's buttocks .
The men from the village were carrying immense torches, supposedly showing dead people the way to the underground. It was relatively interesting and romantic to warm my hands at a fire and the whole idea of freezing during an autumn night was very fresh for me (it must have been below 10C degrees).
The problem was that all of Kyoto felt equally romantic about this idea. I had to que for 2 hours just to get on the train (if I wouldn't have met one girl from Israeli, I wouldn't have gone there at all - which would have been a good thing afterall.. :), almost fainted in the train, almost froze to death and had to que another 2 hours to get back to Kyoto.. Wahh.. If you ask me, the men's butts are not really worth that much trouble!
While travelling in Japan I stayed in ryokans (traditional Japanese inns). That is a very excellent way to experience more of Japanese culture. The rooms have tatami floor and you sleep on a futon (and they give you a hard buckwheat pillow! Yes, just like home!!) carefully layed out for you by a maid or the owner of the place (its rolled up in a wardrobe during the day). You get slippers, a thermoss of hot water, green tea set (with a sweet!) a yukata (a comfortable cotton kimono-like dress).. Often you can slide open all the walls of your room or the windows that are made out of paper and you'd usually have a small garden in the inner yard. You'd notice that most of the time you kneel while in the room, because everything is so low, you have to kneel at your table, kneel to put the table lamp on, etc.. Some common courtesy things reminded me a lot of the Lithuanian courtesy during the soviet times (as time goes I notice more and more Korean and Japanese influences in Russian culture!). Take off your shoes before entering the room, if you're a guest you're given slippers (how unhygenic!), the tea is always brewing, you change into a cozy home-robe as soon as you come home, even some of the traditional designs reminded my kindergarden furniture - rounded door handles, etc.. The Japanese go one step further and introduce common baths (where everybody is naked (female, men separately) and even bath water is shared - everyone dips!). This is not very far from Finnish sauna though..
The last destination in Japan was Koyasan - the heart of the Shingon Buddhism sect high up on the Koya mountain.
There are over 100 Buddhist temples in that small area and over 50 of them offer accommodation.
There's the Shojoshin-in temple where I stayed overnight in the picture up there ^ and down there v. I had very high expectations about Koyasan (must be a very spiritual place with so many temples, I thought), so maybe that's why I was disturbed by the noise (fixing the roof right above my room! ow no! Really made me feel like home.. :) blowing dry leaves with loud machinery, construction here and there...
Besides the noise, I read up in the room regulations that members of Japanese gangs as well as radical nationalists are not allowed to stay in the temples since the new regulations were introduced in 1991. I assumed that until then Koyasan had been infested with macho/fashist/yakuza members that would come to this place to look for the roots of their national pride or smth like that (besides all that, surprise surprise again, women were not allowed in Koyasan town until the end of 19th century!). All this got even worse when at 16:30 (thats when the sun sets in there) they started playing some music (sounding quite nationalistic) through the loudspeakers outdoors and some 20 eagles started flying over the valley (apparently scared by noise).. Hmm.. Men in leather clothes riding bisycles, men in souvenir shop looking like Chinese gang members in their bourdox jackets, jade necklaces.. I realized that I didn't like the place at all!!!
Luckily it was time for dinner and besides having this woderful meal (all that food just for me! :) I met Randy, an American man who saved the Koyasan experience for me! (I guess he's reading the blog too..:)
We went for a walk in the nearby cemetary (that is attraction on its own - its huge and as you can see - very very mossy and beautiful). Randy was a super curious person, who would tirelesly wonder about everything around, so I found myself coming up with hundreds of theories of why things work/look in a certain way, as well, as starting to wonder about things myself. This sharing of the travel experiences really lightened up my heart and after all, I quite liked Koyasan!!
The guests that stay in the temple are invited to join the morning meditation session at 6am. I really waited for the 6am to come the whole night and I'll explain why, later.. :) It was very cold in the morning - only 4C degrees and the walls of Japanese buildings are very flimsy (don't even want to know how it is in winter!). We sat in this freezing cold for about an hour, but it was a very special and beautiful experience.. When the monks started with "oooooommmmmmm.." and a gong, I could really feel the whole world vibrating.. Funny that in Lithuanian "nubudo, bunda, budeti" that means "woke up, is waking up, is awake" sounds very similar to Buddha (it actually means "Awakened One" or "Enlightened On" in sanskrit). Well, here's a proof that the Lithuanian language is the pro-language for all the other languages! Or maybe just that it didn't stray too much from sanskrit.. :)
I couldn't sleep the whole night in the temple (thats why i was waiting for the 6am!). I went to sleep early just to wake up around 22:30 in terror. Somehow I got very frightened (there's a huge cemetary some 20m away!!) and couldn't get rid of the feeling that there's a lot of suffering around this place.. The Thai horror movies that involve buddhist monks didn't help either. I couldn't close my eyes, because I'd see (imagine) ghosts walking on the ceiling upside down and showing their tongues...
During the prayer session in the morning in couldn't help thinking that Buddhism is a very dark and mysterious religion. The chanting, the darkness in the temple, the idea that a much better alternative to life is nothingness.. If you'd like to imagine the exact opposite religion, it would be some cheerful protestant branch with their brightly lit (simple!) churches, lambs and everything so squeeky clean.. I think that Buddhism comes close to some ancient form of Catholicism - the same kind of sense of mystery, very close relation with another world, no-problem attitude to cruel deaths (nailing to the cross, dead bodies hanging on the walls), worshiping body parts of dead holy men, etc..
It wasn't until last Wednesday that I got to know more about the Koyasan in a Discovery channel documentary. Apparently Kukai, the initiator of the Shingon Buddhism sect, has not only been a prominent thinker and an architect (building water reservoirs, etc). He also come up with a 10 year program for the buddhist monks to starve themselves to death. By the choice of diet - 3 years eating nuts only, 3 years of pine tree bark and branches, 3 years of nothing (?) + drinking highly arsenic water from a holy spring, - they actually enbalm themselves alive. In one of the mausoleums in the cemetary there are several monks that died in this way. Their bodies do not decompose, because during 10 years of starvation they got rid of most of the flesh and water in their bodies. They are so dry & poisoned that when they go to their undeground grave (yes, alive, they just go there), their bodies pose no interest to worms and germs at all. A superb way to reach immortality, don't you think? No wonder I couldn't sleep in that place... Luckily I was completely unaware about all this then.. :)