Category: Uncategorized

• Leaving for Kyoto
• Kyoto Part One
• Kyoto Part Two
• Kyoto Part Three
• Kyoto Part Four
• Kyoto Part Five (Nara)
• Kyoto Part Six

There are 15 national holidays in Japan. Last Monday was Taiiku No Hi, or Health and Sports Day, to commemorate the opening day of the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. It was an important day to many Japanese, a sign that their country had recovered from the destruction of World War II. To me, the day was motivation, not reflection. You see, the undergraduate program at my school took Tuesday off as well. This meant a four day weekend and therefore necessitated something particularly exciting to continue my devotion to travel at each week’s end. I have not failed you.

In my first two and half months in Japan, I have had a great deal of difficulty getting out of metropolitan Tokyo. About this I have lamented before. I went to Yokohama, supposedly the country’s second largest city, but the Japanese laughed at this. I went to Kamakura, a former Japanese capital, but they told me no. I have been to Shibuya and Shinjuku, with populations and infrastructures and even histories that made them capable of being large cities on their own, but, they suffered the same fate at Kichijoji, where I watched a fall festival.

Continue reading Kyoto Part 1 of 6: The Plans

• Leaving for Kyoto
• Kyoto Part One
• Kyoto Part Two
• Kyoto Part Three
• Kyoto Part Four
• Kyoto Part Five (Nara)
• Kyoto Part Six

Well, I have been granted a long weekend. Monday is one of Japan’s many and varied national holidays, Taiiku no Hi or Sports Day, and undergraduates at my school were given Tuesday off. What does this mean? It means a four day weekend. It means I gotta run.

So, I am heading to Kyoto, the historical imperial capital of Japan with 1,800 temples and hundreds of shrines. It is widely recognized for maintaining some traditional Japanese urban life, with ancient buildings and legendary sights.

To get there, I have to make it to a bus station near Shinjuku, the WORLD’S busiest train station (remember my Fuji experience?) Saturday morning to take an 8 hour bus trip southwest to the Kansai prefecture, and more specifically, Japan’s seventh largest city, Kyoto.

I am spending three nights there. On this whim I managed to book a cheap hostel for two nights. Let me say that again, I’ll get to Kyoto Saturday night and don’t have a place to stay until Sunday night. THERE IS NO WAY THIS CAN’T WORK OUT!

Get ready for some great photos and plenty of stories. I’ll get back to you next week, wish me luck. A lot of luck.

From a train to a bus to a tram car up a steep mountain incline, into a ramshackle wooden home set back off a dirt path, sat the Tendai Buddhist monastery that I would be staying the weekend.

Combining Shinto and Buddhist tenets, I ate well, relaxed, practiced concentration sessions with another five guests, all of whom were Japanese men, and, on the final morning, put on a very light robe and followed two priests and the five other guests without much understanding of where we were going.

Continue reading Mitakesan Buddhist monastary

I had asked for your suggestions on a name for my bicycle. The suggestions came slowly and uninspiredly. Perhaps that is because I have three and a half readers.

But, as democracy must do, I will plow on, with enough votes cast or not.

The finalists for my bicycle’s name, chosen from reader suggestions, are as follows:
1. Ethel – “bikes should be named after old women”
2. Handle Bars and Stripes “it’s clever and overly patriotic – like you”
3. Uncle Sam – “it can be nicely shortened but loves the USA”
4. The Widowmaker – “the bike sounds dangerous”
5. Bearcat – “if you ride anything, it better be ferocious”
6. Newton – “when I hear the name, I think genius (Isaac) and pride (your hometown)”

Please, cast your votes for the final decision. …And by cast your votes, I mean post a comment, let me know what you’re thinking. All I know is that if I am going to ride this bicycle, I need to have a name so I can stop using article and noun, the format of ‘the bicycle,’ gets old.

Alright, let me know.

Home is one of those countless abstract ideals for which, I tend to think, we over search. In the pursuit of its understanding, we push the explanation further and ignore its reality longer.

I apologize. Travel forces me to think in these irrepressible circles.

Usually it takes a bit longer, but here I am, in Tokyo just under two months, and nihilism has never seemed any less sensible to me than now. Hurl “social construct” or “comforting illusion” or whatever other accusatory psychoanalyzing garbage you know, but there is nothing I like more about travel than that first appreciating, comforting glance of home again. The first glance of the meaningful protection of the abstract.

It doesn’t need to be any stay of extension. Wherever our comfort prospers and our resistance fails, this home is a sight of cleansing alleviation.

Continue reading Home

There is nothing vicarious about this entry. I did not sleep in my apartment last night. There is nothing explicit about this entry. I slept in someone else’s bed. Nothing inappropriate.

Rather, I simply got the chance to check off-completed something else I promised myself I would do while in Japan. A few hours’ bicycle ride from home, I walked through a sliding door, handed over 4,000 yen ($34 USD) and rented my very first capsule hotel room.

Its name may be enough for you to know what I mean. For others, you still may be waiting for me to clue you into what a capsule hotel is. You’ll have to wait. Follow the chronology.

Continue reading Capsule Hotel

As I grapple to find a place of comfort and habit here in the land of rising sun, I am becoming aware enough to observe the megalopolis that is around me. Hit with so much new, my thoughts blur and my ideas jump, thrashing in my head without any uniting thread other than their home in Japan

It appears Tokyo seems to support a class of elderly men who, in a country that doesn’t accept gratuity, must get their supplemental compensation from nods, smiles and the occasional bow from an overanxious foreigner or particularly formal Japanese man. I’m not entirely certain who is giving them their uniforms, assuming they are, indeed, being paid. Still, there they are, directing traffic unnecessarily and guiding navigators of tight Tokyo parking lots and standing guard at buildings that don’t seem to need guarding. They mumble garbled Japanese in sing-song voices, further muffled by their crooked-teeth smiles and craggy, time-worn skin.

Continue reading Tokyo Feeling

It is typhoon season. It rains long and often here in Tokyo. Today it was particularly stormy. This morning I woke up and found that the world outside was wet. It was steady and it was hard, but I wouldn’t take the bus. I couldn’t take the bus. I am stubborn. I didn’t want to spend the 400 yen. I didn’t want to miss the exercise. I didn’t want to feel lazy. More importantly though, I said, as I often say to myself when trying to do something that seems outrageous or pointless, it was an opportunity to do something different. To ride in a typhoon. I looked out the window and saw nothing but water.

I rode the bus for a month. You can never go wrong when you do something new, if you do that something new just once. So, I took my Japanese umbrella and some spare clothes in a plastic bag stuffed in my school backpack. Things seem safer from the window.

Continue reading The Window

I am taking a short rest from Tokyo-telling. I was eating my daily breakfast of rice, egg and a soy sauce splash, and got to thinking that your college guidance counselor and showy and nosy neighbor are right, a point that even I continue to harp upon, the strange importance of travel. Between you and me, I don’t even think you have to do much once you do travel to get anything out of it. You certainly won’t learn as much as you can, but if you were to sit on a couch in a different country or a different time zone for just a week or so, I bet you’d see something differently. Don’t think this type of experiential learning requires great lengths.

Still, the grandness of so-labeled “study abroad” is exceptionally altering. I can tell you. I can tell you because I sit writing this at a university in Tokyo, Japan. I can tell you because I took classes at the University of Ghana in West Africa. I can tell you because I even did more than just sit on a couch at these places.

Continue reading Travel

I made a purchase ten days ago. Ten days is long enough for me to decide that the 9,999 yen ($85 USD) I spent on that hill-clobbering, three-geared, two-wheeled Japanese bicycle was well spent.

(SEE PHOTO ALBUM)

I closed my Tokyo bus school-commuting tenure after a month of slobbering on those wide, tinted bus windows as I stared at the skyline above. After finishing my bus pass, I find myself wheeling through those very skylines.

Now it’s me that is swooping past hand-holding couples and ringing my bell at slow-moving elderly men, always with, “sumi ma sen,” excuse me, floating over my shoulder. The ride to school is a hilly trip, which always hastens a sweat on my forehead, even with the increasingly cooler winds of a late Tokyo September riding along my side.

Continue reading Bicycle