Eel at Inari

This is a photo of the place where two of us ate lunch near the Inari (Thousand Torii) Shrine; we had eel, grilled in the open air right in front of the restaurant, combining the Japanese love for eating freshly cooked seafood and the necessity of squeezing a big task into a small space. The grill took up just a small space and it was easy to chat with the person cooking. It's at a shop near the shrine where I purchased the fox (inari) mask that hangs in my office.

Second to Last Post

Since the order of blogging is most recent first, this will make sense only if you read it from top to bottom. (I really wrote the post below first, but it will look last.) I should be sleeping since I have to get up at about 4:45 a.m., but I have a really great Internet connection for the first time in a really long time and I can't resist just a little more blogging. Above are Mr. and Mrs. Fukuda, owners of the house where I had a home stay. Mr. Fukuda works at Kyoto Gakuen, and the professors who preceded me also lived here. And below their photo is one of the fruit market directly across the street from the house where I lived; it was great to have it so close - and I mean just a few steps from my driveway. It opened every day about 9 a.m., and stayed open until 7:30 at night, closed only on Tuesdays. So if I felt like having a fresh pear for breakfast, I would just walk over and buy one pear. More than once I went out while we were getting together one of our Monday night dinners and bought apples, brought them across the street, and make an apple crisp.

Last Post from Japan

I assume I'll keep posting about China and Japan for a while, but this is the last post I'll actually write from Asia. I'm staying tonight in a hotel close to Kyoto Station, because Kameoka, where I was living, is so far away. I'll miss the pretty house I lived in, which had several rooms floored with tatami mats, and a low table designed so that you could put your feet in a well beneath it that was heated beneath its floor of wooden slats. There was also a kind of blanket surrounding the table that kept the heat in, so that you could stay toasty warm while eating or otherwise using the table. That's the photo you see. This is a very Japanese room, with rice paper window shades (they slide back and forth), tatami mats on the floor, large closets for storing futon, and lovely wood. The only other objects in the room were a small cabinet for dishes and a TV. The group ate many meals around this table (protected with some plastic foamy sheets I found in the foodstore) although the boys will complain they were often banished to a large room with a carpeted floor. Yes, I was afraid spaghetti sauce and cranberry sauce would end up on the tatami, especially if they decided to wrestle a bit. Despite all the dinners eaten sitting on the floor, not one dish was broken and only crumbs ended up on the floor, even when 25 or so people came for Thanksgiving.

Nara Tour

I just like this photo: you see half of Jeff, and most of Ashley, Forrest, Jackie, and Tim. Everyone is looking in a different direction. The day we went, which seems really long ago, was sunny and very hot - hot enough so that we could have worn shorts and sleeveless shirts. Nara has tame deer that live in several herds scattered around the city; during the day they wander through the temple areas, cadging food from the tourists. You can buy a kind of biscuit designed to feed them; they are cute but persistent. No deer in this photo, but I'll post some with deer.

Campus Festival

People in the group will recognize these as old photos, but I never got a chance to blog about the Campus Festival, which was the first weekend we arrived. It was excellent: every club (including sports teams) had a booth selling food, including sweet potatoes cooked over a wood fire, various kinds of fish and seafood stews (squid and octopus being the seafood), cotton candy, chocolate-covered bananas, and pancakes, which you see here being held by Ashley, Vickie, and Valeria. Valeria has been here for several months and has been glad to see so many NCC buddies. In the top photo you will see our KGU friend Nori, who is performing karaoke-style at the festival with lots of stage presence. He is enamored of American culture, especially films like Rambo and television shows like Friends.

View from Nishitatsu

The area of Kameoka where I live is called Nishitatsu, and here is the view from one of the upstairs windows. It was taken on a day when the sun shone, at least throught the clouds. Notice the gray slate roofs, ubiquitous in Japan, and the mountains in the background.

Teremachi

I need to post more pix of the girls in the group, and I don't have much time before we leave Japan: it's Thursday night and we leave Monday morning from Kyoto Station at 5:45 a.m. Here is a photo of Valeria (NCC exchange student at KGU), Natalia and I in Teremachi, a shopping district in downtown Kyoto. We also went to the Nishiki Market, full of all sort of food on sale in kiosks, including fresh fish, smoked fish, dried fish, big fish, and teeny-tiny fish used as a garnish.

Mini Choco Sundae

Tim, Erik, Jackie and I decided to try the Choco Sundaes at the Dining Hall at Kyoto Gakuen University - here you see Tim and Erik. Tim went for the full size and the rest of us chose the Mini. They were delicious, and even better, looked great. The apple in Tim's sundae is cut in perfect V-shapes that have been pulled into a kind of vertical fan. The cherries were kind of weird, though - they were pinkish but had pits and tasted like Queen Anne cherries, not the shiny red bad-for-you maraschino cherries that belong on sundaes.

Laundry in Japan

Top: Coin Laundry in Kameoka

Above: Coffee Shop/Karaoke Bar "Coffee and Sunak"

Long ago and far away in China I wrote a post about doing laundry, which at first seemed as though it would be hard, but turned out to be easy, like so many things in Beijing. The hardest thing to figure out was how to get the machine going: it turned out a kind of magnet shaped like a flat ice cream cone could be purchased at the front desk for a small deposit and charge per load - it cost about 36 cents to do one load of laundry. And it was really easy for me, because the machine was in a tiny room across the hall from my room - closer than the washing machine at home. I had it much easier than the students, because I had a cool arrangement in front of a large window with a bar (and hangers) that could be lowered and raised. In addition, it was warm, and often hot, in Beijing in September and October. It rained perhaps two days in eight weeks, and the clothes would dry in a day or less if they weren't very heavy. I even found Tide in the convenience store, and found I really wanted that perfume that smells like clean laundry they put into it. The heck with those fragrance-free brands: give me the chemicals that signal fresh linen. But I forgot the first time I did laundry to take the Kleenex out of my pocket, so I had a blue shirt polka-dotted with white and no dryer to remove it. After that I was more careful.

In Japan, I live in a beautiful house, but one that is not equipped with a washing machine. My host family, who live in the house adjacent to mine and who own both, pointed out the Coin Laundry a few blocks away. Most of the time it feels like my own personal laundry, with just two washers and two dryers. It costs 300 yen to wash and 100 yen per 10 minutes to dry, of course much more expensive than China, but at least I had dryers to use on rainy days in November and December - and in Kameoka it seems to rain several days a week, and always on Saturday and Sunday. I have no idea what laundromats cost in the U.S. these days, anyway. Most Japanese apartments and homes have washers, although dryers are much more rare: laundry hangs from most balconies even on rainy days, and most married women work only part time and do all the cooking and cleaning. Tonight was my last visit, I hope, to the Coin Laundry. And since I did it in the evening, I was able to take advantage of the "Coffee and Sunak" shop across the street from the laundry. I've passed it ten or eleven times, but it seemed not to be open during the day. It looked surprisingly European or American, sporting wrought iron chairs and tables outside, white lights, potted plants, and wreaths and vines decorating the painted white exterior. There is a reason why it's "Coffee and Sunak" - in Japanese there are never two consonant sounds together, so the "sn" of "snack" becomes "sunak," even if the "su" is elided so it really sounds like "snack." Similarly, "Spain," if written out sound by sound, would be "supein," but it's pronounced pretty similarly to the English "Spain."

So inside I went, dressed as always in my Beiwai sweatshirt and black pants. As soon as I entered I realized I was underdressed for this tiny but sophisticated bar/coffee shop. In fact, it turned out to really be a tiny karaoke bar. But I was the only patron, and the hostess, dressed beautifully in muted colors, like most women in Japan, brought me coffee in a pretty china cup with a little Venezualan chocolate on the side. I inquired about the "sunak" - perhaps I could eat something while my clothes spun in the washer and dryer - but no menu appeared and it didn't seem as though there was really any food to accompany the drinks. I pulled out the papers I was grading and settled in, wondering if a karaoke crowd would show up. But I was there pretty early, from 6:30 to about 7:15, and the only customer, so the hostess brought me two magazines, one the Members' Directory of the (British) Royal Horticultural Society and the other something very Martha Stewartish about English Kitchen Gardens, with pretty photos of thatch-roofed cottages and photos of recipes I'll never make, like crackers embedded with edible leaves and flowers. Apparently there were 1000 members of the Royal Horticultural Society in Japan, not surprising considering how many people in Japan are serious gardeners. We talked about our children and China, and I showed her that I had some of the same jazz tunes on my iPod that were playing, including one by Ella Fitzgerald and some Cole Porter.

After two serious cups of coffee I had that I-can-paint-the-house-and-write-a-book-before-l-go-to-bed feeling so I figured I'd better leave and watch the clothes rotate in the dryer before I got more caffeinated. Even so I was unable to complete the laundry without singing out loud along with the BeeGees on the iPod, safely enclosed and soundproofed in the capsule of the Coin Laundry.

Floating Tori

One of the most famous scenes of Japan, found on every tourist brochure, is the Floating Tori of Miyajima, an island close to Hiroshima in the Inland Sea. The tori and the shrine that accompanies it are the subject of the final chapter of Donald Richie's book and comprise some of the last images in the documentary made about 1990 from the book, first published in 1971. Shinto shrines are bright orange and very cheery; they also surprise with their huge size, when the gates are immense, or with repetition, as in the 1000 Torii shrine in Kyoto, which takes an hour or more to walk through. I liked this particular shrine because it was on the water and you didn't have to climb up a mountain to see it. We took the ferry at dusk and by the time we arrived in Miyajima it was dark. The shrine was closed, but the tori was dramatically lit. It was low tide and you could walk out to its base, if you didn't mind getting muddy. We took a pass on that.

Postwar Shack in Hiroshima

(I wrote this post hastily to take advantage of fleeting Internet availability so I have rewritten it a bit.)

There is a Japanese short story called "Fireflies" about the years following the bombing of Hiroshima, long before the economic miracle of the 50s and 60s. After you have been to the museums in Hiroshima, you can understand the devastation that occurred and what it must have been like to survive the blast and go on. The Peace Museum is designed to let you understand the experience on a very personal level, and many of the stories are about mothers and children. (Almost all the emphasis in Hiroshima is on how terrible war is, rather than ideological argument about one side or the other being right or wrong, a great contrast to museums about the Allies and Axis in the European theater.) In "Fireflies" one woman's only wish is that she will live long enough to live in a house with running water; she lives in a hut where worms crawl in and out of the walls. It's often a difficult story to use in a literature class, because American students have a hard time imagining a Japan where people lived in huts; if they have any impression of a Japanese city at all, they think of it as Tokyo, the city in Lost in Translation, all glitz and Ginza, or a place so modern that, as Parker suggested once in class, that robots walk the streets. The changes in Japan that occurred between 1890 and 1940 were huge in terms of engaging in foreign wars, but the changes in its physical appearance were greater between 1940 and the present. Hiroshima suffered a devastation no other city on earth had experienced, and it was rebuilt as a 20th-century city.

Hiroshima on December 7

Top: The Atomic Bomb Dome, from Ground Zero in Hiroshima; the ruined building has been maintained as a reminder of the devastation of war.

Above: Paper cranes formed into doves, created by schoolchildren and displayed in Peace Park in Hiroshima.

The hundred years between the opening of Japan (if that’s the right word) and the end of World War II were almost a blur of trade, rapid economic development, military buildup, and turn of the century wars with Russia, China, Korea, and forty years later the Allied powers. Not too many American even know about the Japanese war with Russia, invasions of Manchuria and the establishment of Japanese occupation in parts of China, including Shanghai, in the 1920s and 1930s. Oddly enough, even though World War II killed hundreds of thousands of Americans and millions of Japanese, and ended with the devastation of the atomic bombs in Nagasaki and Hiroshima (the museum at Hiroshima notes that 140,000 people died within a few months of the bombing, and thousands more months and years later of their injuries and radiation-related diseases), the history of conflict between Japan and the United States, though horrible and deadly in an almost unimaginable way, is a relatively short one in comparison to Japan’s conflicts with China and Korea; those countries are important sources of Japanese culture but were also enemies for centuries.

As some historians have written, when you look at what happened in and to Japan between the arrival of Commodore Perry and World War II, you wonder if perhaps if had been better to stay isolated than to jump into the world arena. I went to Hiroshima with some of our students last Thursday night (some of us had no classes on Friday). That happened to be December 7, an irony that was not lost on the students and me. I know people who visited Hiroshima twenty years ago who imagined themselves met with angry glances and comments from people who remembered the bombing. There are fewer and fewer people who were adults during the war alive now, sixty years later. There are plenty still, though, who were children then and are now in their sixties and seventies. There are an estimated 350,000 people still alive in Japan, according to the Peace Museum, who survived Hiroshima’s or Nagasaki’s bombing. But we did not encounter any unkind words or resentment from any of the people we encountered; surely Hiroshima residents are accustomed to tourists who are coming to see and consider the famous site of the bomb blast. And Hiroshima offers plenty to see. It’s a modern city – it feels much more modern than historic Kyoto, which was not bombed. Kyoto still includes many ancient temples and old wooden houses, and forbids building skyscrapers over five stories tall.

Hospitality

Top: a delicious Japanese soup, with custard, gingko beans, pink and blue seafood disks as decoration, fu, and chicken

Above: My new friend Reiko-san of Kameoka, at a Shinto shrine.

Yesterday I had a large dose of the kind of Japanese hospitality that Donald Richie (in The Inland Sea) and especially Pico Iyer (The Lady and the Monk) talk about, and that long-time foreign residents of Japan try to explain to recent arrivals. Steve, the energetic and kind Australian professor at KGU, also mentioned this type of almost overwhelming attention. The Japanese seem to us (and I mean our small group) quite shy and somewhat introverted, especially in comparison to the effervescent and bold Chinese, who are not afraid to go up to strangers and start talking in a way that would make even the most extroverted Americans seem reserved in comparison. (It’s hard to imagine even an outgoing and confident New Yorker interrupting someone on the street to practice a language they learned in school and rarely speak – like French or German – to ask how they like the United States, but that happens to Americans in China frequently.) Here you can take a train from Kameoka to Kyoto in the morning and hear a pin drop; the Japanese use train travel for sleeping or text messaging, somehow waking up just in time to get off at their stops. Americans feel somewhat uncomfortable and restricted in travel silence, and we were cheered in China realizing that no matter what we could not be too loud. (I usually use the explanation that unless you jump on a table and start yelling, you will not be louder than the Chinese in public. There loud conversation, even argument, is sport; in Japan loud or even obvious but restrained argument is severely frowned on and buses and subways echo with energetic conversation).

The Japanese seem to us extremely polite but harder to get to know, especially in casual encounters. But last week when I stopped to take a photo of the Girl and Boy Scouts in front of the Saty grocery and department store, and left a small donation in their boxes (covered earlier in my blog), I offered my name card (business card) to some of the adults with the scouts.

(I highly recommend carrying cards all the time in China and Japan; it’s easy to let someone know your email address that way. In China you can even get name cards made with Chinese on one side and English on the other for just a few dollars. I’m sure you can do it in Japan also, but for a higher fee. Or get a friend who knows enough English and is a native Japanese speaker to do a Japanese translation for you.)

One of the women in the group emailed me, and did something which is pretty unusual in Japan: she invited me to her house. And since so much of what you do in other countries is a leap of faith, and I was anxious to visit a Japanese home, of course I said yes, I would love to visit her house. She said in her email that she had been with the scouts as part of her volunteer position on the Welfare Commission in Kameoka.

In the Japanese way, as I knew it would be, it was a visit where every step was planned for the comfort and entertainment of the guest. (Sometimes when you are in Japan every minute brings another realization that you will never be able to repay the kindness you are being treated to.) She made a trip on Saturday (when I was sleeping most of the day, recovering from spending two nights in a row on the overnight bus from Hiroshima) to find out where I was staying. Fortunately I am across the street from a small but excellent fruit market which everyone in the area seems to know. She rang the bell at the gate at precisely 10 a.m. on Sunday, which I knew she would. Her adult son, who I found out actually lives in Kobe, had been pressed into service to drive for the day. (I hope he didn’t drive all the way from Kobe just to chauffeur me around, but it is possible.) Reiko-san and her husband don’t drive; they take buses, ride bicycles or walk for all of their errands, in the heat of summer as well as in snowy January. No wonder these people are so healthy.

At Reiko-san’s house we began with tea and sweets. She brought out family albums, a wonderful idea for foreign visitors, and showed me photographs of her grandparents dating back one hundred years, everyone in traditional dress for a formal portrait. There was also a portrait of her parents on the day they were married, also in traditional dress. I saw a photo of a hunter in what looked like buckskin, carrying a rifle on his back; when I asked what he hunted – was it deer? (We have seen lots of tame deer) and she and her son said yes – but also wild boar and bears. She said bears still live in the mountains around Kameoka. She then she asked what kind of food I liked: did I like chicken, Japanese food, and so on. I said I liked all kinds of food, which is true. I really was only expecting tea and some cookies, but suddenly the doorbell rang, and huge quantities of food appeared, including a round box the size of a large cookie tin that when opened revealed smoked salmon, tuna sashimi, rice molded into a star, a fried shrimp, gingery pickles, sesame tofu custard, a tiny sweet shaped and colored like an autumn maple leaf, small pieces of fresh orange and fresh strawberry, and perhaps a dozen other small treats. In addition, we had two kinds of soup, one I was familiar with (miso with tofu and seaweed), and another I had not seen, which included a broth that tasted a little bit of bacon, but looked on top like a cup of egg custard. It included gingko beans, fu (described in her electronic dictionary as “a bread-like food made of wheat”), small pieces of chicken, and vegetables. It was hot and delicious. She had also prepared and placed in front of me dishes of vegetables that she had not only cooked, but grown in a garden plot. One reminded me of dandelion greens and was topped with crushed black sesame seeds, a dish that is supposed to be very healthy and tasted wonderful. Another dish was made of glutinous rice and sweet red azuki beans that she mentioned was cooked and served for celebrations. She served cold beer and room-temperature sake, the sake in a beautiful small blue cut-glass tumbler. I was only sorry that I had to eat it all myself – usually the boys in my group eye what I’ve ordered and estimate how much of it I will finish and how much of the leftovers they’ll get to consume. Sorry, guys. I couldn’t finish all of it, but then neither could Reiko-san.

Then Reiko-san and her son determined which Kameoka sites I had not visited, and we went to two shrines, one not far from the same river where we took the boat trip I have written about; in fact, her son drove over a low span that looked no bigger than a footbridge just as one of the tour boats was passing beneath. When we got to the first shrine the sun was shining, the wind was blowing through the evergreens, and two five-year-old children in beautiful traditional kimono were receiving a blessing in a service being performed by a Shinto priest. We used the spring water at the entrance to wash our hands and rinse out our mouths (you don’t drink from the cup, just pour from it into your mouth) and then rinsed out the ladle in the Shinto way. She presented me with an amulet for safe travel. We also went to a shrine that is very close to where I live, but has a long entrance driveway that had been too intimidating to take on for someone who only knows hiragana and therefore will only be able to read a few signs. (The nouns are in non-phonetic kanji, and words borrowed from other languages are in katakana, which is also phonetic; after six weeks I can read hiragana, which means I can figure out the particles and grammatical connecting words, which is like looking at a sentence like “The book is on the table over there,” being able to read “the,” “on,” and “over there,” and wondering what’s on what.)


Then we returned to Reiko-san’s house for coffee and lemon cheesecake. We sat for a long time, Reiko-san using her English, which is fairly good, aided by two electronic dictionaries (I highly recommend them for anyone spending more than a month in China or Japan) and five or six English-Japanese dictionaries. I drew maps of the United States pointing out the various cities where my parents, sisters, and children live and indicating the distance between them. We discussed her work on the Welfare Commission for Kameoka (she is going to a lecture on child abuse in Sendai soon) and I explained a little bit about my work on the Naperville Plan Commission, both of us having put in many years of volunteer service to our cities. We discussed how working mothers need people to watch their children, and their many responsibilities in both Japan and the United States in balancing housework, childcare, and work outside the home. Glimpses into her kitchen showed that in preparing this meal she had used almost every pot and pan in the house.

My offer to help clear the table and wash dishes was politely refused, as I knew it would be (Japanese who visit my house, however, always offer to do the dishes, usually in a group or at least a pair, and I say yes.) She said she had decided to email me because although others were walking past without noticing the scouts or offering donations, that I had stopped and talked to them, taken photos, and made a small donation, and she thought I must have a kind heart. Then she gave me a loaf of freshly baked raisin bread she had made. We parted with offers of overnight hospitality and home stays to one another and an exchange of home addresses and phone numbers; her son drove me home, and he and Reiko-san both got out of the car to bow, shake hands, and say goodbye. I was almost in tears thinking of all the effort that had gone into her making the visit so memorable. Only after they left did I realize I didn’t get a photo of the two of us, although we each have photos of the other.

Zazen Temple

I'll let Ashley speak about our group's experience at the Zazen Temple; she wrote this week's Culture essay in the form of a letter to her parents. I have compressed it.

Dear Mom and Dad,

Although our time in Japan is growing rapidly shorter, we still have a lot of excitement going on. In fact, you would not believe what I did this weekend: :[we] took a trip to stay overnight at a Zen Buddhist temple! Because of hearsay prior to this trip, there had been some fear about what we would be required to do while at the temple. Fortunately, I can assure you that what we did was not as bad as what we heard about, but even so, we had a singular experience learning about the intriguing lifestyle of the Zen Buddhist monk.The name of the temple we visited was Kyoto International Zendo (“zendo” is the Japanese term for Zen temple). “International” because students from around the world are welcome to study there. The temple is admirably tolerant of race, nationality, and even religion. It’s true – you don’t have to be a Buddhist to practice Zen Buddhism. In fact, while we were at the temple, two monks [were] training, one of whom was Siberian, the other German. Both speak English, and the Siberian monk even spoke Japanese fluently.After arriving at the temple at about four in the afternoon, we were greeted by the monk from Siberia, who we later found out has a Japanese name – Genma.

Genma showed us the temple, which was a fairly small, quintessentially Japanese style house. It smelled of incense and wood, though I’m not sure it was made entirely of wood, and it even had the Japanese-style paper doors. It was not like my expectations of a Buddhist temple at all, though I had not been sure what to expect in the first place, to be honest. There was a small kitchen, several rooms where we would be sleeping, and a western style bathroom – joy of joys! The most spectacular room in the temple was not specifically explained to us, but it was an open room that contained the statues, instruments, and other paraphernalia used for chanting and praying. In the back of the temple was a beautifully kept Zen garden, complete with massive carp swimming in a pond.Our first activity of the day was to chant in the Zen Buddhist style. Genma showed us the proper way to enter the part the room where the chanting is done, which is to step in with your left foot, bow, and then walk to your place with your hands together as if praying. When we were sitting at our places, the head of the temple, or the Roshi, entered to start the session. He was a rather large, bald, Japanese man who looked and was dressed exactly the way you would expect a Zen Buddhist master to look – rather like Buddha, to be quite honest. For some time, the Roshi lectured us on the chanting, with Genma translating. Finally, Genma started the chanting in a ridiculous voice. He sounded like a digeridoo [the Australian aboriginal instrument] and I am not even making that up. All of us were required to say the chants together, in time, with relative the same tone of voice, though we didn’t have to imitate the digeridoo. The purpose was to try to sound as unified as possible. It was rather monotonous in more ways than one.The chants we were required to say looked much like this: TO KU RA SHIKI ZODO SHI BUTSU WO NA.

After the chanting we had dinner. Dinner was the most difficult part of our stay at the temple. First of all, dinner was a very formal process. Everything had to be done in a particular way, from the saying of dinner chants, to setting our places, serving the [food], and even cleaning the dishes. The food itself was not particularly unappetizing, but it was different from the type of food we were all used to. [It was a vegetarian meal of steamed rice, a thin soup with greens, fried tofu, and small vegetable pickles. ] I took small portions in case I did not like anything, luckily, because nothing was quite to my taste, though I forced myself to eat it all to be polite.What really made dinner difficult was the cleaning of our dishes. Everyone was required to clean their own dishes at the table using steaming hot water. First, we had some [boiling] water poured into our largest bowl. Then, we had to pick up a small piece of pickled radish with our chopsticks, stick it in the bowl of water, and use it to clean the bowl. After that, we had to pour the same water into our four other bowls and clean those bowls with the radish. Finally, we had to drink the dirty water containing all our old bits of food and then eat the piece of pickled radish. The radish itself was bad enough to begin with but even worse was drinking the water. I wanted to gag, but the dinner table was silent, and the monks were watching us to make sure we followed the proper procedure.Once the ordeal of dinner was over, it was dark and cold, and we were led outside and down the street to another building to perform Zazen, or sitting meditation. I’m sure you can imagine this – it is where you sit with your legs crossed in such a way that each foot rests on the opposite thigh [lotus position]. I had thought Zazen would be particularly awful, but after dinner, I felt like nothing could faze me.

Zazen was difficult in that we had to sit in a particularly uncomfortable position for an hour and do nothing but think. I counted my exhalations to pass the time and clear my head, as the Roshi suggested, but I mostly ended up meditating on how badly my legs hurt. Our group was fidgeting so much that we had to be told to “keep still.” After two hours of Zazen meditation (including one break), we finally went back to the first building for tea.Tea was the only informal affair we had on our entire overnight stay. The dispositions of the monks changed almost entirely, and we chatted with them on a number of topics, including their home countries and their decisions to study Zen Buddhism. Tea was a much-needed break, as most of the time in the temple you are required to be silent.We were required to go to bed at nine, at which time the boys were led away to a guest building, while we girls went to another room in the temple. We set up our futons with extra blankets, as the temple has neither air-conditioning in the summer nor heat in the winter. Since none of us were that tired, we spent a lot of time chatting and trying to avoid frigid sleep. The monks would be coming to wake us up at ten to five for the morning service. I had an extremely cold and restless sleep.

Our morning activities were much the same as our evening activities. First, we chanted. Then, we had two more hours of Zazen meditation, although the Zazen was not as difficult the second time around. I think we only ended up doing one hour of meditation, because we went back for breakfast at about seven. At breakfast, we had rice gruel instead of rice and more pickled vegetables. I hardly ate anything because I knew what we would have to do to clean our bowls. I drank my dirty water as I was supposed to, but when the monks were drinking their water and not paying attention, I slipped my nasty pickle into my pocket. I felt very clever indeed when, on the way home, I found that only Judy and I had thought to hide our pickles to avoid eating them. My Zen temple experience was [one] I am not keen to have again, but at the same time, I am glad that I did it. It was a challenge, but it was not impossible. I survived, and now I have an interesting story to tell all the relatives when I am home for Christmas. Please tell everyone at home that I miss them very much! I love you, and I look forward to being home again.

Love,

Ashley

I Won't Be Drinking This

Look at the can on the top row, second from the right. Yes, it's Deepresso. You can have lots of fun looking at the names of products that sound funny in English in both China and Japan (Ashley and Vickie created a hilarious account of signs in China that I will steal from soon) but at least there are words even those of us who know just a tiny bit of Japanese can read. And those of us who speak English are pretty spoiled, because almost every educated person in China or Japan has to study English and often speaks fairly well, even if they are shy about it. Japanese vending machines are great: they always, always work, providing both what you asked for and the correct change. And they had better, because often you are putting in a coin worth almost five dollars or a bill worth close to ten. (Would anyone in the U.S. trust a Coke machine with a ten dollar bill?) You can get hot coffee in a can or bottle from machines in many varieties: this one I'll avoid. (Shouldn't the caffeine have the opposite effect?) But I do like the Cafe au Lait. If your coffee needs lightening you can use the creamer called Creap. While you eat a Crunky chocolate bar. Or, the world's best chocolate bar (I think they should be imported) with the oddly political name, Rummy. It's rum raisin and dark chocolate and it is delicious. Vending machines, as every visitor to Japan learns, are ubiquitous and offer cigarettes, beer, milk, batteries, and sometimes hot fried food.

Japanese Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts

Last Saturday, laptop in tow, I spied these Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts collecting money in front of Saty, a combination grocery store/department store that is close to the Kameoka Train Station and across the street from World Center, where I use the Internet on weekends when the college is closed. It's a combination pachinko parlor/pool hall/Internet cafe. I spoke extremely bad Japanese to them (I believe I said I had taught "kindergarten" instead of "in China" at one point) but they took a photo with me anyway. Having stood with many Girl Scout groups selling cookies I was sympathetic and contributed a small amount to their cause, whatever it was. I declined the offer of a balloon since my hands were full. I used to love the illustrations of all the different Girl Scout and Girl Guide uniforms in our Girl Scout handbooks. But boy, I am tired of this coat, these jeans, and these tennis shoes. I may never wear them again when I get home.

Getting Chilly

Although it is REALLY cold in Chicago, where my daughter lives, and even colder in Madison, where my younger son will be heading when he returns from Canterbury, we are feeling the chill in Kameoka and Kyoto. This is how cold it was in my house this morning - not in the room where I sleep, which I can heat, but in the hallway outside my bedroom. The only path to the unheated bathroom, I should add. Which may be one reason why Japanese toilet seats are heated. Forty-eight point nine degrees Fahrenheit. Inside. What you mostly see here is the reflection of my camera in the LED screen of my alarm clock, which also has a thermometer. And me in flannel. The clock is small and lightweight and something I am glad I ordered from L.L. Bean at the last minute before the trip.

Roses

These are a few of the roses that Rui's mom brought as a gift on Thanksgiving. Many are still beautiful, and some are still opening.

Blogging in Japan

Here in Japan blogging is much more difficult for me, since I only have access to Internet at school and at the World Center, a multistory arcade across the street from Saty, a grocery/department store. I'll have to describe it in another post - I think my mother was horrified at my description of the combination pachinko parlor/pool hall/Internet cafe. Fortunately the students have Internet access in their apartments, which they did not have in China. (I had it only because the building's lower floor had been renovated; the upper floors, where the students lived, had not.) As far as I know Japanese universities are all commuter schools and do not provide dormitory space, so students either commute from home to a local school or find an apartment and commute from there. Our students are commuting from different areas of Kyoto, although I am in a house about a fifteen minute walk and a fifteen minute bus ride from Kameoka Station, the same bus that everyone picks up when their trains arrive from Kyoto. The first level Japanese textbook, which includes some cultural information, notes that college students in Japan commute between one and two hours each way to their schools. Also according to the text, only two percent of Japanese high school students drop out. There are some other interesting stats that I'll have to look up about what percentage of students go to college, including the very different percentages of men and women who go to four-year colleges and the fact that college loans don't exist. We have heard very different information depending on the source about what percentage of family income is spent on education.

Boys Cooking

Everyone has to cook for him or herself in Japan; here are some of the boys cooking at my house on Thanksgiving. I've also been cooking on Monday nights, which is much appreciated. Here are Erik, Jeff, and Forrest. I don't know what Erik is holding, but I'm sure he'll tell me.

Thanksgiving in Kameoka

Thanksgiving in Kameoka

No, I didn’t find a turkey in Japan, although I did see some tantalizing ads on CNN for frozen turkeys. But I didn’t get a chance to write down the name of the store that carried the turkeys, and the one whole chicken Sean found in a store was one hundred dollars, so we passed it up. That’s right, one hundred bucks. I’m not sure why things that are whole are more expensive here than things that are cut up, but they are, and Japanese grocery stores don’t carry whole anything except whole fish, which are plentiful. (You’ll note the contrast between Japan and China: look at the later posts on China in this blog to see photos of chickens still sporting their feet, hanging in a very modern grocery store in Beijing.) It has not been too many years since food was a lot more local, both in Japan and in the US, and since Kyoto is not on the water the only fish people used to eat was dried, smoked, or otherwise preserved fish. Persimmons still hang from the trees here in Kameoka in November, looking like big, slightly flattened orange tomatoes, although the birds are now feasting on what has not been harvested. Oddly enough the fruit remains even when the leaves fall. (I need to learn how to use persimmons, which show up in both American and English Victorian literature and cookbooks.)

But – chicken in pieces is easy to find, and so Rose (Natalia’s visiting mom) and I went food shopping Wednesday night before Thanksgiving to get chicken, celery, onions, butter, and whatever else we could find to create a Thanksgiving dinner. All of the margarine is tub style, but there is excellent Hokkaido butter (Hokkaido being the northern region of Japan and home to its beef, lamb, and dairy production). Rose has a deft hand with piecrust and had also hauled with her to Japan canned pumpkin, evaporated milk, pumpkin pie spice, poultry seasoning, and cranberry sauce. I had bought flour, sugar, eggs, cinnamon, vanilla, milk, bread, more celery and onion, and apples. I even made chicken broth with chicken necks for the stuffing, but it disappeared in the dishwashing process and never made it into the dressing. That night we (Rose, mostly) made three pies, adding to the one I had already improvised with the ingredients I had, two pumpkin and an apple pie with a latticed crust (Rose is a fiber artist and wove the crust!). We went to bed at almost 2 a.m. Rui, our liaison, had to visit the house a few days earlier to help figure out how to use the combination microwave/range/oven, which is so advanced in its choices that its Japanese directions were way beyond me.

All the students kicked in a contribution of yen and food, including creamed corn, Kentucky fried chicken, a huge dishpan of salad (including precious red and yellow peppers), a giant bowl of fresh fruit (including delicious pineapple), very smart-looking appetizer sandwiches, onigiri (triangular rice cakes), twice-baked potatoes, and macaroni and cheese, Rui, our liaison, and her mother brought a big silver platter of edamame (soybeans) and chicken drumsticks, as well as a beautiful bouquet of roses in four colors – yellow, white, pink, and deep red. People also brought things to drink, like pineapple soda and Calpis, which tastes something like Fresca or that old grapefruit soda Wink (the Sassy One, from Canada Dry). All in all about 25 people attended, including former China/Japan student Sara Jane (her roommate Leen is at Canterbury Christ Church with my son Garrett), Valeria and Rob, current NCC exchange students at Kyoto Gakuen, three former NCC exchange students visiting Valeria from various schools, and some Japanese students who would like to attend an exchange at NCC in the future.