Tokyo Disney Sea

(Preface: You'll find that if you double-click most of the photos in this post, you'll be taken to a slideshow)

Day one in Tokyo: Matt hearts beer

Tokyo Disney Sea is cool! All my reservations, that a visit to the Disney franchise as an adult would mar precious childhood memories of delightful days spent exploring the original theme park in Los Angeles with my brother and parents, were immediately dissipated upon our entry. Once inside, we met with a shiny blue and gold globe that was dancing on water, and from that point on we were dancing on wonderment and pure childish enjoyment.

Mediterranean Harbour & American Waterfront

The whole attraction is called Tokyo Disney Resort and is made up of two theme parks, Tokyo Disney Sea (for adults) and Tokyo Disney Land (for kids), which are connected by a monorail that sports very cute Mickey silloutte shaped windows. However, separate tickets are needed for entry into each park, and we only had one day to play with, so we opted for TDS as some of the other ALTs we went with had already been to TDL.

Mysterious Island

Mermaid Lagoon

Arabian Coast

While the place just screams rampant commercialism, and everything is shiny and perfectly painted, it was incredibly easy to forget any niggling bleeding-heart/critical-thinking instincts and get caught up in the spectacle and excitement. The best bits were the Indiana Jones ride (in the "Lost River Delta" section of the park--click the image to the left to see the slideshow--where we had to wait 100 minutes in line), Journey to the Centre of the Earth ride (luckily we got a fast pass to this one earlier in the day and it only a 10 min wait), Raging Spirits roller coaster with its 360 degree turn, the Little Mermaid live show (which involved puppetry and a lot of suspended rhythmic gymnastics) and Aladdin’s Magic Lamp Theatre. Thankfully this last show came with a DS Nintendo style translator to allow us to understand the story, as well as allowing us to sport some obviously couture 3D glasses which brought the genie's magic to multi-dimensional life, not to mention the automated seats that gave us a surprising kick up the butt.

As you can tell, we had a fantastic long weekend, and we really appreciate Shibata-sensei's help in organising the trip. Matt's last day could have been better: evidently something he ate at Mister Donuts on Sunday morning--probably the frankfurt-in-pastry thing the clerk neglected to heat up--strenuously disagreed with him. Fortunately he made it home still bearing the contents of his stomach, but he tells me that it was touch-and-go on the flight from Tokyo to Osaka, where he was seated next to an old man who possessed a very vocal digestive system and whose red wine and beer nuts were repeating on him at the most inopportune of times. Still, it wasn't all bad news . . .

Matt hearts the election result

Mt. Shosha, Himeji

About a week or two following our trip to Kyoto, we returned to Himeji. The occasion? An all-you-can-eat Thanksgiving dinner: ostensibly for American ALTs, though we managed to get ourselves invited anyway. Given that we had a day to kill, a few of us--namely Dan K, Goran, Amanda, Emma and myself--decided to meet at the JR station early(ish) in the morning and hike up Mt. Shosha.

(As with the previous post, click the images to see slideshows.)

Though I doubt it's a tidbit of information I'll be proud to relate to my grandkids in years to come, Mt. Shosha is famous for being one of the locations of the Tom Cruise vehicle The Last Samurai (which was mainly filmed in New Zealand). At its summit lies Engyo-ji Temple, which in my view ranks alongside some of the temples of we saw in Kyoto in terms of its beauty, and has the added benefit of being situated at a reliable distance from downtown Himeji. It took us a little while--not to mention the aid of the bilingual Dan and a helpful local--to find the path leading up the mountain, and on the whole I'd have to declare it a little more difficult than Sumaura. (But no less enjoyable.) Fortunately, Emma and I are obliged to scale a mountain to get to our bus stop each day, so we were more than capable of handling this little hillock.


At the top of the mountain, and at the door of the Engyo-ji complex, we took advantage of a lookout. Himeji looks amazing from this vantage point, flanked by rolling green mountains, and with outlying hills rising like islands from the surrounding metropolis. This is the kind of view that makes hiking up a mountain--as opposed to taking the ropeway--all the more worthwhile. You feel as if you've earned it, somehow.



Engyo-ji itself is a massive complex, and the temple proper is a fair distance from the gates, but at this time of year (autumn) the hike is a reward in itself. The path leading from the gates to the temple buildings is lined with buddhas, and close to the gate there is a large temple bell which visitors are welcome to toll. (It is supposed to bring good luck.)The buildings themselves are impressive. Depending on which route you take from the gate, the massive main building appears before you very suddenly, over the crest of a hill. Behind the main temple are the lecture theatres, arranged around a wide courtyard. It was here, evidently, that the scenes from The Last Samurai were shot. (I was inspired thus to regale my fellow travellers with the curious beliefs of the Scientologists, which are summarised here.)
But IMHO the main attraction of Engyo-ji is the flora--chiefly the red momiji (maple), and I'm afraid that our photography can't really do justice to the combination of bright greens and yellows, and brilliant, sharp reds, that we saw there that day. (Even after Emma's great editing work.)
It's one of those things that you have to see for yourself.

Let's see . . . what else did we do that day? Well, after hiking back down the mountain (precariously), we made our way to an onsen (hot spring) in the CBD. Neither Emma and I had been to one before, and I was a little concerned that I would be denied entry because of my tattoo, but nobody seemed to mind. Goran and Dan showed me the ropes: the art of a good onsen, as I understand it, is to subject your body to extremes of heat and cold, and repeat this process until you're ready to be flayed alive and eaten. (That's if the sauna doesn't cook you first.) Then you take a dip in the hot spring briefly before fleeing the hungry locals.

At the Thanksgiving the Australian table (with two Americans along for the ride) was the life of the party, naturally. Although the party was held at a restaurant the food was homestyle--though in a good way (go to Miss Mauds in Perth if you want to try it the bad way): mashed potatoes, chilli con carne, stuffing (mmm . . . stuffing) and turkey (of course). Dan and myself did ample justice to the all-you-can-eat terms of reference, downing six plates between us. Afterwards a group of us finished the evening at a karaoke bar--it is the law here, after all--in a raucous session truncated (to half an hour) by the fact that we all had trains to catch.

Kyoto

I wish I could tell you that from now on we will endeavour to update this blog more frequently, but that's not a promise we feel we can keep. Although we've been to quite a few interesting places over the past month or so--including Himeji (again), Osaka and Tokyo--today's entry concerns our travels to Kyoto.

Kyoto, apart from being famous for the eponymous Protocol to the international Framework Convention on Climate Change that the new Australian PM has promised his government will ratify, is (as most travel guides will tell you) the cultural heart of Japan. Go to Osaka or Tokyo and you will see one side of Japan--the side immortalised in the novels of William Gibson and which inspired the iconography of Blade Runner; go to Kyoto, and you will see the side of Japan immortalised in The Karate Kid movies (I know--none of them are set in Kyoto). For many centuries, Kyoto was actually the capital of Japan until the latter part of the 19th century. (Thanks, Wikipedia.) The city was spared bombing by the United States during World War II because of its great beauty, so unlike many large Japanese cities it has retained many of its prewar buildings. (Thanks again.)

Click on the pictures below for slideshows, and click on the subtitles for further information about each temple/location.

Kinkakuji

Kyoto certainly is a beautiful city, except for its river, which runs along its eastern side. Have you ever seen The Host? That's what the river reminded me of. A choking mess of reeds and weeds from which I kept expecting, as I looked upon it with some disquiet from a bridge, a giant mutant fish monster to spring. I'll never whinge about Perth's foreshore again!

Ginkakuji

The real attractions of Kyoto lie mostly on its periphery. During our two visits to Kyoto--one sometime at the end of August, the other in early November--we visited temples to the north (Kinka-kuji and Ryoanji), south (To-ji) and east (Ginkakuji, Honen-nin, and Nanzen-jin). To get to these locations we were unfortunately obliged to negotiate Kyoto's buses.

Honen-in/Nanzen-jin

All I can say is, if you choose to board one of these vehicles, take a seat if there is one available. Even if it is one of those custom-deisgned-for-the-diminutive-Japanese-physique seats they usually place over the wheels, and you have to wrap your legs around your own head. You will still be more comfortable than standing and lurching to and fro--as if you were on an ocean liner that had crashed into an iceberg--while the bus takes corners at breakneck speed and incessantly pulls in at bus stops that can't be more than ten metres apart. That's if you're lucky. Most of the time you'll find yourself standing in the aisle in conditions resembling those aboard Australian container ships bound for Saudi Arabia. In Perth, there are regulations governing the maximum amount of people a bus is allowed to carry. Once the limit is reached, the bus driver cannot and does not pick up anyone else. In Kyoto, the prevailing wisdom seems to be that you should pack in as many people as is humanly possible. Oh--and I should mention that if you do decide to brave the buses, you can buy an all-day pass from Kyoto's ponderous train ststion--be warned, however, that it won't be accepted on buses going to and from the outer suburbs. (We discovered that the hard way.)

Philosopher's Walk

The temples, in any case, are well worth the trouble getting to them. Many of them look as if they have sprung to life out of fairytales, and they really brought home to us the sense that we weren't in Australia anymore. Kinkakuji's famous golden temple, which we visited on a day trip at the end of summer, has got to be one of the most photographed buildings in Japan. On the eastern side of the city lies the more serene but no less popular Ginkakuji, the "silver temple" which isn't actually silver. (Depending upon who you ask (we asked the rickshaw driver who took us there), it was so called either because it was going to be coated in silver but the job wasn't completed, it was covered in silver but the silver was stolen or removed, or the "silver" is the effect of moonbeams reflecting off the white sands surrounding the building.)

Ryoanji

Toji's pagoda is the tallest in Japan, but even more striking are the giant buddhas housed in the lecture halls (in which visitors are unfortunately forbidden to take photos), and watching the locals stop to bow their heads or genuflect before the statutes gives those halls an almost "Catholic" ambience. The Zen temple Ryoanji is famous for its rock garden, which consists of "15 rocks arranged on the surface of white pebbles in such a manner that visitors can see only 14 of them at once, no matter what angle the garden is viewed from." You achieve enlightenment, apparently, if you see the fifteenth rock. On the day we visited, it was too crowded to see more than three or four! But for us tourists, it would probably be a great place to meditate, if you're into that kind of thing.

Tooji

The highlight of the two journeys to Kyoto for me was the Philosopher's Walk, which I had been looking forward to visiting since I read about it back in Australia. The Philosopher's Walk is a 2 kilometre path beside a canal lined with cherry trees, and is so named because it was the constitutional of the Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitaro. We tackled it very early in the morning in order to avoid the crowds, and despite the cold, it really is the only way to appreciate it, I think. A testament to its popularity is the amount of cafes that line it--there is even a cafe named in honour of the late astronomer Carl Sagan (where we would have stopped for coffee if it wasn't so overpriced). We did run into crowds eventually, but fortunately it was towards the end of the Walk and they were coming the other way.

JR Kyoto train station

I'm not sure when we'll return to Kyoto--but since it's part of the same conurbation as Osaka and Kobe, it's no great hassle to reach by train. (And you should see Kyoto's train station!)

Last weekend's journey to Minas Tirith and Rivendell . . .

. . . a.k.a. Himeji Castle and Kokoen.

Last Saturday Emma and I took a train to Himeji to see its famous castle--the first castle I had ever visited since Kryal Castle in 1988. (Kryal Castle is Australia's most well-known medieval castle--which is interesting, since Australia was only first settled by Europeans in the eighteenth century.) I won't say too much about it--I'll let Photobucket and Wikipedia do most of the talking--other than to remark that one of the first things you notice as you emerge from the train station and gaze down what has to be one of the widest streets in Japan (one of the JTEs at my school informs me that said street was purpose-built for a visit by the Emperor soon after the Second World War), is that--despite the fact that Himeji is a city of half a million people and is abundant in tall buildings--the eponymous castle really dominates the landscape.

The other thing you notice is that Himeji itself is roomy--big in the way an Australian city or large town is roomy--which is most unlike the Japan we had hitherto experienced. (Well, certainly unlike Tarumi; though I suppose Seishin-chuo, the Joondalup-esque area of Kobe where I work, is roomy in its own way.) Japan is one of the world's most populous nations, and all of those people have to squeeze onto a set of very small islands--so often you find yourself on very narrow streets, hemmed in by towers and tenements. Central Himeji just doesn't feel like that.

Anyway, here a couple of Himeji Castle slideshows. (I apologise if they slow down your browser.)

And here is Nishi-Oyashiki-ato Kokoen. It is adjacent to Himeji Castle, and used to be the residence of a samurai lord, apparently. Now it comprises a series of serene and beautiful gardens (let's just say Jamie Durie and Scott Cam couldn't hold a scented candle), along with a teahouse. (They don't do Devonshire, alas, but the lady at the desk is very helpful and speaks excellent English.)

We also visited Himeji's art gallery, having bumped into Daniel Carter at a park along the way. (Where the three of us discovered that not only are some dogs just as skilled at frisbee as humans, they are also permitted to drink from our water fountains. Now, that's just wrong.) The gallery featured an exhibition on Surrealism to which we arts graduates--true to form--couldn't say no. ALTs: if the exhibition reaches an art gallery near you, it's well worth the admission.

Sake and sardines

It turns out we arrived in Japan right in the middle of public holiday season: three out of four weekends have been long weekends. This has given us a lot of time to explore our local region, Kobe.

On one particular long weekend we journeyed to a sake museum. For those readers who don't know, sake is an alcoholic drink made from fermented rice. When done poorly, sake tastes like what methylated spirits smells like; when done well, it tastes really quite nice. After a very informative English video on the ins and outs of making sake (on which I am now "full bottle") and touring the relics of traditional sake making materials, I almost drank a full bottle of sake! To sell their wares, the museum gives samples to their visitors and I think they got a little excited to have foreign guests, as they got us to try just about every available sake drink they had on offer. However, in retrospect, perhaps this was just a clever ploy to get visitors to buy more products, the logic being the more tipsy they are the more likely they are to buy. Indeed, it worked--as Matt and I are now the proud owners of some sweet plum sake! Check out the pictures below as it really was a delightful place; cameras, unfortunately, are yet to capture smell, but take it from me, the subtle smell of aged cedar mixed with the dim shadows that pervaded the place really transported us back to a different world. (Where men were men, and real men got naked in giant vats of steaming rice.)












Then it was off for sardines; however, not the eating kind. Kobe is a port city, and typical of port cities it has a highly concentrated population with the employment that international trade brings. However, this is compounded by the fact that Kobe is wedged between a mountain range and the ocean. This is where the sardines enter the picture. We traveled up Mt Rokko, the highest mountain in the region, and from here we got our first birds-eye-view of Kobe's geography. (And I mean literally--on the floor of the museum at the top of the mountain there is a giant satellite image of Kobe and the Rokko Mountains.) As you can see from the pictures below, possibly the best way to describe how the city appears from such a height is by comparison to sardines squished into a tiny tin. It is a truly foreign way of living to the eyes of Perthites used to flat landscapes and hectares of backyard. It's a magnificent sight and especially great when viewed from the top of a mountain where the air temperature is 6 degrees lower than the sauna we've been enduring at sea-level.