This
weekend was our first 3-day weekend here and the timing couldn’t be better. It’s
been about a month since the big move and I like to say that’s about how long
it takes to settle into a place. Up until now, most of our weekends have been
spent running errands to set up our apartment and our life here, including but
not limited to: groceries (which is more difficult than it sounds, since this
means not only searching for our favorite foreign staples [*ahem* peanut
butter], but also looking for the biggest and cheapest places, which we’re
learning is quite a feat in Tokyo), getting appliances, attending work
functions, building furniture, and attempting to get internet and phones. We’ve
been able to explore a little around our area, but this was our first real
“let’s get out of the city and jump into a giant pile of nature” trip.
Originally,
we were told we would have to attend a conference that Saturday, which meant 8 long
hours of sitting in a chair attempting to decipher the plethora of Charlie Brown’s “wahwah
wahwah wahwah” teacher surrounding us, but ultimately zoning out thinking about the many paths
I could have taken in life and wondering how I ended up with a sore tailbone
and a confused brain (or how I ended up with an awesome opportunity in a country
so different from my own; it depends on my mood). To our surprise, our
colleague who first informed us of this event, hinted, or rather outright told
us, that there’s no point in us going and we should enjoy our 3-day weekend
instead. Now, normally we are hard-working individuals who understand the
importance of presence and body language, which you would gather from our
attendance at daily morning meetings. But considering we’ve already sat through
a number of endless conferences (exhausting my supply of questions about my
greater purpose in life), we couldn’t argue with his logic and immediately
looked online for quick Tokyo getaways. One of the great things about Tokyo is
how many must-see destinations are 1-2 hours in the surrounding area. Combine
this with the ease of high-speed (albeit expensive) transportation and 48 hours
after learning of our newfound freedom, we were on a bus to Fujikawaguchiko
(“Fuji”, like Mt. Fuji, “kawa” like river, “guchi” like mouth, “ko” like lake;
a breakdown that might help you with that mouthful of Japanese syllables).
This area is popular largely
because of its breathtaking view of Mt. Fuji. After hopping off the bus, it was
right there in your face, and it was gorgeous. We only got to see it the first
day we were there because after that it was mostly enshrouded in fog, but that
made it even more ephemeral and majestical and all words magical that one usually
associates with nature and unicorns. Another wonderful thing about living in a
city with actual seasons (looking at you, L.A.) is that as nature changes and
scenery transforms, there are reasons to visit places again and again. This
might be old hat to some of you, but for me, multi-colored leaves will never
stop being foreign. So with Autumn, of course comes an endless array of oranges
and reds and other indescribable colors of fire mixed in with the traditional
greens and browns we know and love. We went to a place called Maple Corridor on
the northeastern part of the lake, which had a small canal flanked with trees
with leaves of every color of the rainbow. It’s apparently a thing in Japan to
surround the trees with spotlights at night, which they call illuminations. It
makes for a fun new dimension to the view, and we visited this part of the lake
more than once during our stay.
One
thing I forgot about mountain towns was how early everything closes down at night and
starts up again in the morning. Once the sun sets, there’s not much reason to
be outside in the freezing weather, so when the warmth was officially gone by 5 pm, there was little for us to do by way of killing time before we could go
back to our hotel. I should mention as a side note, the hotel double-booked and
we found that out while we were literally on the bus halfway to the town. Their fix
was to transport us by van to and from another hotel they owned about 30
minutes away. It was terrible and we were reliant on their transportation to do
anything and add to that the driver was an exceptionally talkative man whose
English was simply not on par with the crazy ideas he wanted to convey to us.
At one point he literally described a pyramid scheme (that he clearly did not
know was a pyramid scheme, which reminded me of this "The Office" clip)
and after 20 minutes of it, asked us if we understood his business plan. When
we politely nodded (considering the fact that we were trapped in the car with
him), he said, “Wow, I’m impressed with my English that you can understand me!”
The hotel was not owned by Japanese
people, which means it lacked the typical Japanese style of high-quality service regardless of price.
But
despite this, we had a lot of fun filling our day with many of the activities
in the area, including a tour of a sake factory, a visit to a museum of a
professional kimono artist,
exploring a cutesy European town, and visiting an onsen in the evening.
Julia
and I have a lot of fun visiting breweries (after all, what else are you
supposed to do in Portland? I'm joking, Portland's awesome), so
when Julia parsed through the internet and saw that you could tour a Sake Factory, we jumped on it like white people to sushi.
It’s recommended that if you don’t speak Japanese, you bring along someone who
can translate the tour for you, so imagine their disappointment when they asked
me if I spoke Japanese (no doubt assuming I was Julia’s tour guide) and I sadly
shook my head (I always think it’s interesting when people ask me in English if
I speak Japanese, versus the times when they ask me in Japanese. It’s like an
accidental litmus test to see what they already assume the answer will be).
The funny part of course is that he is more fluent in English than I could ever
hope to be in Japanese, knowing words like “glucose” and “fermentation”. He
constantly checked in with us to see if we understood what he was saying, and
always breathed a sigh of relief when we said yes. Halfway through the tour he
leaned in to me and said (half joking but mostly serious), “Please. Next time,
learn Japanese.” After touring the factory itself, we went out back to a
traditional Japanese house and garden that had been in the family for 22
generations. 22! They don’t actually use the house as a house anymore, only for
wedding ceremonies and celebrations, which makes sense considering there were
paintings and swords (katanas) that were hundreds of years old just hanging
out like it was nothing. The tour was wrapped up with some sake tasting and
since we are in our mid-twenties now, we felt it was time we be adults and
start actually buying things to support the local business (something I’ve
always wanted to do, but couldn’t make an excuse to do until I was a little
more financially comfortable). So we bought our favorite plum sake and had it
that evening in our cozy ryokan, with heater and 5 layers of marshmallowy puffy
blankets (insert sigh of content; warmth always wins).
The
museum visit was a very unique one and would have made the entire weekend worth it even if we only visited the one room filled with beautifully painted giant kimonos. The artist,
Itchiku Kubota, was an apprentice kimono maker before becoming a Russian POW in Siberia during WWII. When he came back
from the war, he decided he wanted to recreate an ancient
dying technique from the 14th and 15th centuries.
Considering he had no living teachers to learn from about this technique, his
journey was long and arduous and he eventually adapted the technique with
modern-day tools and came up with the kimonos you see today. If you’re curious,
this is actually the exact video that’s played in the museum (My favorite are the old school Washington D.C. blue bloods). Not only did the
technique take years to learn and master, but also a single kimono can take as long as a
year to make. His main collections are entitled Mount Fuji, Universe, and Symphony
of Light. Essentially, the
collection involves paintings that span a series of kimonos (The final count is
intended to be 80 kimonos). You can see what I mean here.
Even better, like a true artist, he wanted people to really interact with his
art, so none of them are in glass cases. You can walk right up and put your
nose super close to them and really look at the details of the painting (which
is incredible especially if you learn about his process first). He passed away
before completing his mission, but of course there are apprentices who are
continuing to carry out his vision. Highly recommend visiting this museum if
you ever find yourself in Japan.
On par with the west’s obsession with Japan (mostly the U.S.) is Japan’s obsession with the west (mostly Europe; which when
you think about it, makes for an unfulfilling love triangle in which the U.S.
loses). I say this because it’s apparently common to create a life size replica
of a quaint European town smack dab in the middle of some of the most Japanese
places in Japan. When we first read about the Music Forest Museum, we weren’t quite
sure what it was. After entering through the garden of music, we realized it
was supposed to be a little getaway of flowers and bridges and whimsical
architecture, complete with a Fairyland and a House of Fragrance. There was a
sand art show about Pinnochio, automatic/self-playing organs and pianos, and
even a Japanese opera singer.
Lastly, another highlight of the trip was our
visit to an onsen (Japanese hot spring/bath house). I’m unsure of my reader audience, so
while some of you may know exactly what this is, I want to describe it for
those who don’t. It’s basically a public bath house (separated into male and
female), where everyone showers in a giant room, after which you get to hang
out in hot springs, steam rooms, etc. Think bath combined with spa. Some onsens
only have a hot spring, but the one we went to was really big and had a lot of
spa-like places you could go, including an aroma room, an outdoor hot spring, a
cave hot spring, a carbonated hot spring, and a sauna. I had been to an onsen before,
during my high school trip to Japan, but it was a different experience going as
an adult. Also, while in general people don’t look at other people (especially
as this is a very old and historic Japanese tradition), Julia and I tended to
get a few furtive glances most likely due to us being foreigners. As Julia
pointed out, you can’t really blame them. It makes sense that a largely homogenous
society would be interested in what the bodies of people of other races look
like; I know I would if I didn’t grow up in such a salad bowl of cultures.
So that concludes our first weekend trip! Phew,
this one took me quite a bit to write. The weekend I was referring to was
November 21st – 23rd. Still, it was a lot of fun to write about. I hope you have as much fun reading it!
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