Hanami

This is going to sound awfully clichéd, but have you ever been somewhere and felt as if you’ve stepped into a fairytale?

Japan’s brush with sakura is fleeting. It has to be. To paraphrase Robert Frost, nothing this impossibly, wonderfully pink can stay.

Through summer and autumn you don’t even notice them. They’re just trees like any other trees. And, like any other trees, they strip themselves bare of their leaves in the winter. Just ordinary trees.

And then . . . a single petal. A single blossom, half-glimpsed, perched on the end of a twig. The tourists queue to capture the memory on film. Within a week, the cherry blossoms have spread, like a rumour, to the four corners of Kansai. Standing ancient, majestic and alone at Kyoto’s Yasaka Shrine. Bending their sad limbs over the waters on the Philosopher’s Walk. Raising their black arms into a canopy of pink and white in the Peony Garden at Himeji Castle.

And beneath the canopy, and beneath the evening blue sky that can be glimpsed between the petals, a carpet of blue tarpaulin, upon which the locals gather to look at the flowers, and sing karaoke (badly), with their eskies full of beer and sake, and steak sizzling on their barbecues. The Japanese have never looked more Australian.

This, my friends, is why God invented the digital camera! Click the images below for slideshows . . .

The beginning: Kikumasamune Sake Brewery, Nada-ku

Tenryuji Temple, Arashiyama

Heian Shrine, Kyoto

The Philosopher's Walk, Higashiyama

Yasaka Shrine, Gion

Evening at Himeji Castle

Osaka Castle

The last of the cherry blossoms: Sumaura

Lightning doesn't strike twice, but it appears earthquakes do

Yesterday morning, at about 1am, a small earthquake struck Osaka Bay. It woke us both up; but Emma couldn't recollect it happening the next morning, so I put it down to a vivid dream until I asked some teachers about it later in the day.

It happened again just after 4am this morning. Only very minor--we're both intact, and more importantly, our bottle of Lambrusco is still sitting happily on top of the buffet. To put things into perspective, around 20 percent of the world's earthquakes happen in Japan. I couldn't find any information online regarding yesterday's local earthquake, but it appears a larger one also struck north of Tokyo. I guess we should be surprised, then, that we hadn't encountered a tremor sooner.

Highlight from Week 1: Kinosaki

On the Bantan line

This day afforded us a rare glimpse of the “backwoods” of Japan (i.e. fewer skyscraping tenements per square kilometre), as we journeyed on a slow and rickety train from Himeji across central and northern Hyogo. Our destination was the resort town of Kinosaki, which is famous for its many onsen, though unfortunately, given the miserable weather, we didn’t get a chance to visit any of them. Instead, we took a ropeway up Mt Onsenji, stopping along the way to look around Onsenji temple.

The view of Kinosaki and the surrounding area from the summit of Onsenji is said to be breathtaking: on a clear day you can see the Sea of Japan.
This was not a clear day. (Click the image above to see a slideshow of Kinosaki and Onsenji.)

But even in bad weather, Kinosaki is a picturesque little village: very European-looking (though I really have no basis for comparison), and Emma and I hope to return soon. We made the most of things by soaking our feet in a small hot-spring by the side of the main street, with the intention of visiting a few onsen after booking into our hotel, but that didn’t eventuate. The hotel in question, a ryokan, turned out to be a fair distance away from Kinosaki, and the constant rain (it never pours, but it rains in Japan) stranded us there. And so began our first experience of traditional Japanese accommodation.

(Click the image above to see a slideshow of the ryokan)

It would be putting things mildly to describe the ryokan as austere. From the outside it looked like the kind of establishment that in a Western country would normally play host to marital infidelity and drug deals. We were greeted in the lobby by a friendly old lady who spoke no English, but with the aid of Emma’s Japanese was able to show us upstairs to our rooms. These consisted of a tatami room for sleeping, a small anteroom for removing your shoes, and another anteroom by the window containing a washbasin, a mirror, and an inoperative fluorescent lamp. The youngest item in the room was Emma. At the end of the hall were the toilets, all of which were squats (but more on that later). The old lady returned with tea and informed us that dinner would be served at 7pm, so we changed into our yukata, had a few photos taken with Mum, and then headed downstairs.

We were expecting to eat in the dining room, but our host showed us instead to a smaller room off an adjacent corridor. There we found, to our delight, a mountain of noodles, rice and vegetables, and a nabe pot bubbling away.

Better still, since this part of Hyogo is crab country, there was crabmeat on the plate in quantities for which you’d have to mortgage your house in Perth. We ordered 3 beers, and our host returned with longnecks, at no extra charge! Though Dad found the concept of cooking for yourself in a hotel confusing, the ryokan all of a sudden did not seem as overpriced as it first appeared.

Copious amounts of beer and a very full stomach forced me to confront an aspect of the Japanese lifestyle I had somehow hitherto managed to avoid, though I knew someday it would catch up with me. Yes, I was obliged to use a squat toilet. I’ll say two things about using the squat toilet, and leave it at that. (1) The squatting position definitely makes for a very fast and efficient method of “purifying oneself,” so to speak, which may explain why the Japanese haven’t yet abandoned it. (2) The Japanese believe that the squat toilet is more hygienic than the Western toilet, since you don’t make any contact with the seat. This sounds like a good theory, but it actually takes a great deal of logistics and forward planning to make it work. Your pants and underwear are bunched around your ankles, and you want to avoid having these touch the rim of the toilet. On the other hand, squatting puts a lot of pressure on the bladder, meaning that number twos are usually accompanied by number ones, and you definitely don’t want your underwear getting in the way of the stream. Your spare third and fourth arms, the ones you keep packed away for just such an occasion—these you use to balance yourself against the walls. Since I was only wearing a yukata at the time, and since the cubicle had high doors, I ended up stripping naked. And that’s probably more information than you need.

The second best feature of our ryokan experience—the crab nabe was definitely the best—was the fact that it contained a hot spring. Nothing too fancy—no sauna or iron bath or anything like that—just a simmering hot bath that stayed hot. Like being boiled alive—the nice way. I had the place to myself, too: there were very few other guests in the ryokan, and Dad wasn’t game enough to try it, though Mum joined Emma in the women’s onsen.

The next morning we were called to breakfast in the dining room at around 7am. I wasn’t expecting crumpets and Weet Bix, but nor was I expecting a whole dried fish to greet me as I sat down to eat.

And you know what? I ate it—well, everything except the head. (It was delicious.) The raw egg, on the other hand, was a bridge too far even for me; Mum found a use for it in the miso soup. We had planned that day to stop in Amanohashidate on our way home, but it was still raining and we decided it wasn’t worth it. Emma, making small talk, said as much to the host, who replied with “Ame no hashidate!” Even the Japanese can make Dad jokes.

We're back!

Usually when we take this long to update our blog it’s because we’re bone lazy, or are busy with more pressing matters, but this time we have a good excuse. We’ve been on holiday for the last 3 weeks, and have spent most of that time traipsing across western Japan with our parents in tow. We won’t blog every last detail—that’s just not our style—but we do want to tell you about the highlights. So stay tuned . . .

The Japanese Cuisine Conspiracy

Dogs are the best people

Emma and I are partial to a daily early morning constitutional, such as the philosopher Kant liked to take through the streets of Konigsberg back in the day. On Wednesday morning, we hadn't even travelled 100 metres from our front door when we're greeted with the following sight. One of the locals was standing in the middle of the road while her dog was, you know, going about its business. "It had to see a man about a dog," as the saying goes. Anyway, there she was with a handful of tissue, about to do her civic duty, we thought, by scooping up the evidence when the dog was finished. Well, she scooped it up, and put it in the bag, and that, we thought, was that.

But no. That wasn't that.

After depositing the droppings in the plastic bag she carried with her (what do they do with that stuff when they get it home, I wonder?), she then took a wad of tissue in one hand, lifted Fido's tail with the other, and proceeded to wipe its bum. I shit you not. I mean, this is a country in which you're not allowed to use your phone on the buses and trains. You can't hold a conversation in public above a barely audible whisper. If you have a touch of the flu or the common cold, they don't want you using a tissue. But taking that same tissue and using it to clean the stinking, fetid detritus from a dog's anus--that's OK.

I mean, what was this woman worried about? Hasn't millions of years of evolution taken care of this anal hygiene problem? Or was she worried that, in the absence of grassy lawns such as we have in Australia, Fido was going to wipe his bum on the tatami mat?

Club Pure Feb 2007

Club Pure . . . yes, well, the less said, the better. There's a Charlie Brown cartoon where he wakes up one day and all his friends are telling him what a great time he had the night before--he even got to dance with the red-haired chick he has a thing for--only he can't for the life of him remember it. That about describes my second visit to Club Pure (sans the red-haired chick, of course). Apparently we went to Club Pure, and somehow made our way from there to karaoke. And while I'm buggered if I recall the events of that evening, we have photographic evidence (most of which we'll eventually get around to Facebooking) that suggests they did indeed transpire. Weird, huh? Anyway, I'll let the slideshow below tell the story.

(Click image for slideshow)

Note to self: while the cocktails at Club Pure are watered down to the potency of weak cordial, the vodka shots aren't.

(P.S. Don't get the wrong idea: we had a fantastic time with our friends as always, and Wendy and Aimee were kind enough to put on a great nabe the following day. Emma was a little worse for wear--though it was nothing to do with the nabe, I hasten to add.)