Goodie Bag

The scraps of paper in my backpack reveal the various interesting things I've been up to these past days. There's a sheet of paper with the URL http://yusuke7.web.fc2.com/ on it. On Saturday night I went down to the river and listened to the haunting sounds of that guitarist. I stood on the guitar and sipped my beer, until suddenly I felt like I was reenacting a scene from Honey & Clover. That was a little surreal. There were also some people juggling fire.

There's a map in my bag with labels such as "Ititani munakata zinzya" and "please put paper bag here. Some monkey want to get it". On Sunday I went to the Arashiyama Monkey Park in the deep woods of western Tokyo. This is a seriously underadvertised place. You walk up a flight of stairs to a Shinto shrine, where there is a little gate. Pay $5.50 and you gain access to an incredibly dangerous cliffside trail with no railings. At the top of this trail is a hilltop full of monkeys. There is a cage-- but you are in the cage and the monkeys are outside. Of course, you have to enter and leave on the normal path, but you feed the monkeys outside the cage at your own peril.



You could see a spectacular view of Kyoto on the cheap, if you could get past the guardian monkey.



That morning I spent at the central Rinzai temple of Japan, Tenryuji. In my bag is a pamphlet explaining how the landscape garden there is a World Cultural Heritage site roughly 700 years old. There were Sweet Lolitas there when we showed up.



We got to go to one of the private areas, where we got one final lesson from Rinzai Zen monk Tom Kirshner. He explained how using zazen to improve concentration was practically useful. When he went back to Japanese college, he had to listen to long talks in Japanese for hours on end and memorize them, but managed it because of zazen. From his long talk I drew out a good example. I don't play guitar because I can't summon up the concentration to practice. I bet if I did more zazen I'd be able to devote myself to it more.



Today I woke up feeling very sick. I could barely swallow. It seems I have a case of Japanese strep throat. For this, the site coordinator explained, the correct remedy is Japanese/Chinese traditional medicine. I asked for penicillin but apparently in Japan people stick to "vitamin drinks" with homeopathic elements instead. I am instructed to not go anywhere today and avoid eating greasy food. I really wanted katsu-curry, too...

Finally, there is a crumpled list of names of people who helped me out at Hokyoji: the abbot, Shinkai Tanaka (深海田中); the monks, Kanzan Kageyama (寒山景山), Daishin Satou (大心佐藤), and the Polish Zen monk who knew English, Bazan Daidou (バザン大道); and the three ladies who cooked, Renshu Matsuri (蓮舟松璃), Fumon Sawada (普文沢田), and Futami Murano
(ふたみ村野).