Author: himawari

Along side the path were grave markers, no doubt the savage tally of others foolish enough to venture to deep. We wandered through the rows and rows of tombstones, reflecting on the path ahead of us. Though we could not read the strange pictographs on the headstones, we realized that these must be fallen adventurers. Adventurers, like ourselves, led like flies to the… GAH! Spider guardians!

In our haste to depart, we forgot to hurl our child at the danger. It seems we’ll have to carry him around a while longer.

While walking the Philosophers Path, I had a revelation. The path was named for its ability to bring clarity and focus. In particular, clarity and focus on where you put your feet, because those stones are pretty treacherous in places. The path culls the weak and unfocused mind, bodily removing the poor philosophers from the gene pool and leaving only the greats.

It also features crazy old men on bicycles that randomly accost travelers and exhort them to visit Honen-in shrine. It sounded like a trap. We readied Locutus in the baby carrier, prepared to toss him and flee the moment a threat appeared.

You’re absolutely correct. Pass me my bottle of sake and I’ll get this story started…

Our stay in Tokyo was surprisingly excellent. Tokyo is not our favorite city in Japan, but the hotel we stayed at did its best attempt to win us over. The bellhop went out of his way to explain everything in English, and even went back downstairs to the lobby to pick up a children’s bath set for Locutus.

We woke up quite early on our first morning in Tokyo. Locutus declined his socks and shoes and so we put him in the baby carrier for our errands.

We exchanged our vouchers for our rail passes, then sauntered over to the Imperial Gardens for a stroll. The gardens are several city blocks of immaculately groomed grass and Japanese pines, with a wide gravel path to traverse. The Imperial palace itself is off limits, but the outer grounds were turned into a very pleasant park. The notable landmarks were a statue, a bridge, and rows and rows of Japanese pines.

The sky was sunny and clear, the temperature too warm for a jacket. The paths were filled with people on their way to work. We both remarked what a tough commute that would be. The park has several running courses set out. And at the hub where all these courses connected, there was a giant stone monolith with a clock for runners to monitor their times.

We arrived back at the station around the time most stores were opening up.

Since we were all still adjusting to the time change, we decided to forgo visiting the Meiji Jinja shrine and park complex and instead travel to Kyoto while Locutus napped. The ride was uneventful, aside from the half dozen Japanese that had to come over and compliment our beautiful son.

Upon arrival, we wandered Kyoto a while on foot while Locutus napped in the carrier. I was heartened to see throngs of school children carrying their English dialogue books! Tomorrow, we shall ambush the ambushers! We will be in Kyoto for a few days, seeing a mix of old and new sights.

We eventually settled on a hotel, grabbed some dinner, and retired to the hotel room to relax and adjust our internal clocks to local time.

Wow. This vacation is awesome. We’ve finally visited the Silver Pavilion, wandered the tranquil paths of Honen-in shrine, revisited Enkando temple to admire the finished restoration and briefly admired the sights of Nanzen-ji from a distance.

But somehow I get the feeling that we’re forgetting something. Something I can’t quite put my finger on…

In a move that caught absolutely nobody by surprise, we are trekking once more to the land of the rising sun. We have wintered in Japan; we have sprunged in Japan: at long last, it’s time for autumn.

The juxtaposition of city and nature creates a wonderful backdrop to experience the seasonal variations. In many ways, it’s not so dissimilar to Vancouver. As the cool, fall nights creep in, Vancouver’s tree-line ignites with bright oranges and reds against that ever-present backdrop of evergreen. Nature’s fireworks on display.

Yet subtle differences do exist: Japan does autumn with a good deal less rain than Vancouver; the temperatures remain modestly warmer well into December; and the laws on public consumption of alcohol are far more palatable. But most important of all: Japan does autumn while enormously-strong, nearly-naked men attempt to hurl one another bodily from a raised clay platform. It’s non-stop, winner-takes-all, man-on-man action for fifteen days.

It’s the Kyushu Grand Sumo tournament. And we’re going to be there.

The Studio Ghibli museum is incredible and a must-see if you are ever in Tokyo and happened to buy tickets three months in advance. It was completely packed with Japanese tourists. And i mean packed. Which is why you have to buy the tickets so early. And the tickets specify which time you are allowed to enter the museum at.

The building itself is probably my favorite part. It is done in a very Victorian, wood and metal style. Very evocative of the steampunk aesthetic Jenn and I like. An interesting fact is that all of the exhibits are build to child scale. Expect to be bending down to see stuff.

The exhibits themselves are also nice. A good bit of the permanent exhibition is devoted to how movies work, the creative design process, and so on. There was a fantastic strobe-effect setting, which sculptures of all the stages of animated movements. There was a bat flying, a girl skipping rope, someone riding a bicycle. The entire scene was built on a wheel.

The wheel would spin up to speed, the strobe light turn on, and it was timed so you suddenly were watching a brief stop-animation movie. It was quite impressive and definitely the highlight of the movie creation gallery.

The seasonal exhibit was devoted to the new movie, which we have not seen, so we had no particular attachment to the project. Aside from declaring we should see the movie upon our return.

The biggest disappointment was the gift shop. There were studio ghibli gift stores all over Japan, and we refrained from purchasing anything because we were going to the museum. Sensible, yes? But sadly it was so very, very wrong.

The gift shop was tiny and mostly featured movie-creation related paraphenlia. Cells from the films, audio and video collections (at Japanese prices, whoo!), and a whole crapload of cell phone charms. It had none of the cool statues from the various films, robotic-head seed planters from Castle in the Sky, the kodama statues from Princess Mononoke.

But we did get a couple cool pictures of the rooftop garden area and the building itself (the only two places where photography is allowed) and we nabbed the movie-cell admission tickets as our souvenirs instead of watching the 15 minute short film like we were supposed to. The tickets are way cool.

On a previous episode of Sauntering Sunflower, Jenn and Lance were shopping in Kyoto. Walking up and down Kiyomizudera and exchanging yen for fancy trinkets. But our famed protagonists were unable to find a zen cushion in Kyoto.

More importantly, however, we had not found a foo dog. Foo dog is a name I invented for the statues I liked in Nara. I doubt it’s accurate, but a good author doesn’t let integrity and accuracy get in the way of a blog post. We had seen the foo dogs in abundance in Nara. But searching the shops of Kyoto, we discovered a dearth of foo dogs. Kyoto was foo dogless. But because the train system in Japan is so phenomenal, we thought nothing of zipping between cities.

We went to Nara and bought a foo dog. We knew exactly where they were sold, and which one we wanted. So aside from waiting around while the owners manufactured a box large enough to wrap our purchase, that part of our trip was pretty uneventful. This post isn’t about foo dogs, though. That’s just a lead in to the cushion story. This is why this post is entitled ‘The Cushion Story’ and not the ‘Really easy foo dog purchase story’.

So we were in Nara after an entirely uneventful foo dog purchase. We decided we had enough time to hunt for a zen cushion. I didn’t actually know what a zen cushion was, but Jenn wanted one, and that was a good enough for me. Being pragmatic, I suggested we ask the local tourist information bureau where we could buy a zen cushion.

Unfortunately, the girl at the tourist desk wasn’t prepared to field this sort of question. She sought the guidance of a higher authority, who sought the guidance of an even higher authority, and soon we had two co-workers and a manager digging through the Japanese yellow pages hunting for a zen cushion store. I took pictures of the robo-ninja deer. Eventually, it was determined a shop existed that could produce the cushion we were probably looking for. It was also only half a block away.

We set out for our cushion store. We don’t read Japanese. We missed the store the first go by, but found it on the second. We sauntered (as sunflowers do) to the counter and the nice lady inside brought out one of the cushions. I thought it looked very nice, but a glance at Jenn informed me this pillow wasn’t zen.

I don’t know how many of you have tried to describe something you haven’t actually seen into a second language with which you are marginally proficient, but let me assure you the experience is highly entertaining!

We had a quarter-dozen shop keepers scouring the store, trying to appease us mighty foreigners and sate our bizarre pillow related demands.

In the course of twenty minutes we established the following facts:

1) One of the shop keepers had at least a passing familiarity with zazen, and the cushions there of.

2) Japanese zazen doesn’t use cushions anymore. They use little cushioned mini-benches.

3) The shop did not actually have the cushions we sought.

4) Lance actually remembered the japanese word for ’round/circle’ at a key moment. Man, that saved a lot of potential headache.

5) The shop would make us cushions in 30 minutes.

Yes, that is correct. The shop did not have the cushions we wanted, but they had a square cushion filled with pipe bead. The square cushion was far too thick to serve a useful purpose in meditation, but the shop owner assured us they could remove the pipe beads from the cushion. He got the approximate height that Jenn wanted, and told us it would be ready in thirty minutes. We asked for two cushions, and he increased the wait time to….thirty minutes.

That’s awesome math. We went for burgers.

No, wait. We looked at kimonos first. Jenn got a kimono last trip and I was going to buy a men’s kimono this trip. Sadly, this shop didn’t sell used kimonos; they sold custom-made new kimonos, in whatever fabric you desired. And if I had $9000, I would have totally bought one. We chatted with the shop owner about Banff, then went for Mos burgers.

After finishing our lunch, it had started to rain. We returned to the shop damp but unharmed. The owner had two employees furiously hand stitching pillows for us but they were not yet done. The staff seated us at the back of the shop by the heater and made us tea while they finished.

Roughly an hour after we arrived in Kyoto, we had two hand-stiched quasi-zen cushions in our possession, and they charged us a grand total of 60 cents for labour.

Our two nights in Matsumoto were incredible.

The first night we had the run of the ryokan, because we were the only guests there. We were given exclusive use of the hot spring, our room was made up for us and our hosts were very generous and helpful.

The ryokan itself was described as a ‘new’ structure. Whether that meant built within 50 years or 200 years, I’m not certain. The style of building it emulated was from the 1600’s, built with modern materials and traditional methods. There you have it.

There were various decorations around the inn from all periods of history. Marvellous tapestries, delicate ceramic bowls and cups, antique kami masks. The entire in had a wonderful character.

We didn’t arrive to the inn until around sunset. The ryokan lady was going to carry our bags to our room but I took one look at the tiny lady, one look at the bags I’d been hauling, and felt an immediate twinge of guilt at being responsible for her death. It took some doing, but we convinced her to let us schlepp our own gear.

Our second day in Matsumoto was for sightseeing. We had warm, sunny weather to wander the town and we made the most of it. We hitched the bus back into town and spent around seven hours wandering the streets. We saw the castle and park, the art museum, a cool german liquor store, the time-piece museum (totally steampunk!) and a french tour guide that insisted on helping. We also took in lots of interesting buildings and shrines and temples along the way.

That night we had a traditional ryokan dinner served in our room. It was interesting. Some parts were fantastic, others required some suspension of disbelief. I’m particularly pleased I figured out how to eat prawn sashimi. It helped that the prawn was still so fresh and in one complete piece, he was able to offer guidance on how best to consume him.

This morning we hopped a train to Nagano city, only to be told by the tour guides there that the Olympics were being held in a different city this year. Who knew?

The Japanese are way too helpful. We arrived in Matsumoto for a stay in an onsen ryokan. The ryokan itself was part of the Welcome Inn chain in Japan, which helps foreigners book lodgings around the country. We had received a print out from the Welcome Inn crew in Osaka that included directions on how to get to the ryokan. Since the onsen itself was quite some distance from Matsumoto station, we needed to take a bus. Unfortunately, the bus number listed on the directions did not exist at the bus station.

We wandered below ground to the sub-station, in search of better information. There was a help desk. We asked for help. Once we established where we were going, the lady informed us which bus to take. It was arriving within a few minutes. Then she proceeded to get up from behind her desk, walk around and point us in the right direction.

Or so we thought. Instead, she actually guided us to the specific bus stop outside, in sub-zero weather, wearing a skirt and high heel shoes. She insisted on holding all of the doors for us along the way, because we were rather laden from shopping, and then she waited until the correct bus came and made sure we got on. Above and beyond the call of duty.

Random extremely helpful lady at the tourist info desk who didn’t speak English and helped us crazy gaijin anyway, we salute you!

Oh, but it doesn’t stop there. Because the bus driver was crazy nice awesome, too. It turns out that Asama onsen has approximately seven stops, all a variation of Asama Onsen. We were uncertain if a particular stop was ours, so I asked the bus driver in my broken Japanese.
He instead asked me where we were going. I supplied the name of the ryokan, and he said this was not the correct stop. Instead, the correct stop turned out to be directly in front of our ryokan, where he let us off. We did not learn of his kindness until the following day, however, when we had to go to the actual bus stop to head into town, and it certainly wasn’t where we’d left it.

Okay. Fun story. It turns out upon further inspection that the map to the Gekkeikan brewery museum was truncated by about 10 km. Our 1:45 hours of walking only got us halfway before we gave up and found a trainstation back to Kyoto. But it was a good half, wandering minami Kyoto in the sunshine and searching for a vending machine that would sell pineapple soda.

Near misses would be the theme of our day, as we later were within a block of the hotel we wanted to stay at, but were unable to discover the secret alley hidden in the back of the old wardrobe that led to the magical Super Hotel Kyoto.

After tramping all the way back to Kyoto station, we visited the tourist information center and got slightly better directions, which may or may not have involved a secret handshake, a snow monkey with a scottish brogue, and discovering that the true meaning of Christmas was in our hearts all along.

If only we knew.