Ikebana

Today is the 1000th anniversary of the publication of the Tale of Genji. Actually, it is the 1000th anniversary of the author of the Tale of Genji writing in her diary about someone telling her she was a good writer, but let's not get hung up on nitpicky details. It's time for some traditional Japanese arts!

Everyone got to do ikebana, but we also had realtime instruction. That means that Dan and Nancy had their ikebana picked apart by the instructor for being too American. As you can see, though, everyone really loved doing this.

Loftin's ikebana got rave reviews.

Kelsey's ikebana matched her face.

Lynn's ikebana was simply perfect, and she exclaimed that she had become truly Asian.

This is my ikebana. It has large flowers in it. It is a space center from the Jetsons. The peppers are little spaceships. Phhhheeewww!!

Today I am going to go on the Philosopher's Walk. There are a bunch of people lined up across the street from me waiting to receive their DSi. Would you guys like a DSi? Sorry, they're sold out. I kind of want a Belgian waffle. Should I stick around until 11AM so I can receive one?

Cold rainy Hieizan

Last weekend we went to Hieizan, which was the source of most of the Buddhist sects of modern Japan, including Zen, Shin, Joudou, and so forth. Unlike Kouyasan, though, it was burned down by a shogun and the post-medieval reconstruction has none of Kouyasan's ancient yuugen.

It was very foggy, somewhere between mist and rain actually, at the top of the mountain, and your author forgot his umbrella. Retouched photo:

Unretouched photo:


Here is Kevin hitting a bell.


Here is a picture of Fang yu L. and Alex-Ko Y.R., just to prove to you that I haven't absconded with them. I had lunch with them the other day. It was a nerdfest.


Today we had Yuko Hagiwara come and talk to us about using meditation and mindfulness practice in hospitals. I took a moment to relax and I realized that living in Japan has actually been really stressful for me, even with all the wonderful things I've done. Everyday life is difficult here, and it's been a harsh adjustment from what I'm used to at Carleton. She gave us an object to focus on-- a sweet picked plum from Akita. I think my grandmother would have liked this plum, as it tasted like a baby gherkin.

When I focused on the plum I thought about all the people who helped to create it and bring it to me. The disturbing thought occurred to me that maybe the work stressed them out, in which case they were stressing themselves on my behalf. I tried to forget about that one.

Busy day on the street

Gotta make this quick. I guess I lied about this blog becoming boring. I had quite a fun day to-day due to taking a little initiative. I woke up early, checked my e-mail, and came back to ask around. Some of my friends were going to Higashiyama so I tagged along. First we played the fish scooping game which you can look up on Wikipedia and we all got tiny plastic fish to take with us. The Kyoto National Museum was open so we went in and saw the lifelike old paintings and luxurious classical pottery. We were not allowed to take pictures inside.



Place looks like the Louvre, doesn't it? It's crazy! Anyway, we walked through Higashiyama,



eventually coming upon a mysterious building complex. It was crowded and we thought it had to be a temple, but everyone was dressed in black and there were weird waiting rooms and tea rooms and directions to a bus station... and the building itself was pretty freaky. Turns out it was a mausoleum. It was a very spooky place. Behind it was an immense graveyard. Here is a small portion.



This is what it looked like when we saw the real road to the real temple (Kiyomizu-dera).



To go along with those pictures, here was the scene at the temple itself.



For a Buddhist perspective maybe you should view those pictures in reverse order. Ha ha ha ha.

The temple was partially ancient marvel, partially tourist attraction. The Shinto shrine attached to it appeared to be a sort of gimmick shrine where you could buy lucky charms to help you find a boyfriend/girlfriend, and take a test of courage walking blindfolded between two rocks of love in order to learn whether you would find luck in the future. But you know what? Even in the midst of all that, with dozens of couples running around, the atmosphere was one of being quite humbled by the natural beauty all around. Here is the austere view from the temple.



Even stray cats take care of themselves.



On the way back, we saw a pickle store, a green tea-flavored candy store, a cheap homemade jewelry store, and a novelty store. At the last one Lynn got an obscene T-shirt. In the cup you can see our fish. This photo is a summary of my day.



Here is my night: I went to the Long Island Cafe for their Halloween party dressed up as... well... some sort of thief, or maybe Bodhidharma, I am not really sure. The people there were awesome.



Julian and Daniel came dressed as Lupin and Fujiko. By the way this blog post is going to segue into obscure Japanese cultural references now. They were both very much in character and did a great job. They did an impromptu skit during the costume contest... he kissed "her" and "she" slapped him and they then kissed again.



They were promptly awarded the booby prize, a can of ramen-flavored suckers. Which were gross, by the way.

Afterwards a girl with glasses approached me and asked me if I liked "animated films". I responded in the affirmative.

- Do you know cosplay?
- Oh yeah! I saw it at the Manga Museum
- There is cosplay near Heian Jingu too, it's called the Event Center (?)
- How often?
- Once every two months. Actually, I have a cosplay costume
- Which one?
- Do you know Gin Tama? [thanks Wikipedia]
- Uh, not really...
- Which anime do you like?
- Oh, you know, Haruhi, Lucky Star... [She starts to grin and say "マジ!!", so I add] Hatsune Miku...
- You are really wotaku!
- そっか…
- I could tell... you have an wotaku aura.
- I have an... aura??

I was kind of surprised, but thinking back on it, you know, I did shout "Sieg Zeon!" when Char did his skit.

I told her about my Interweb friends who go to Comiket as well as my need to find friends in Tokyo to show me around Akihabara. She gave me her e-mail and I split in order to end the evening on a high note.*

* Fangirls are dangerous.

I apologize for this brief outburst of nerdiness. I cannot promise it won't happen again. It depends on circumstances.

Noh words

Last night I went to a Noh play. If you have ever watched MST3K you will remember Noh as a form of medieval Japanese play famous for the ability to make really bad puns about its name. Noh was quite expensive but movies in Japan are expensive too and I figured I might gain something from Noh that I could not get out of watching a movie on a screen that could be anywhere in the world.

I kind of grasped what yuugen might mean by watching the skilled performances at this play. Some of you might know about my Peaceful/Scenic Route imageboard and I was wondering if that might be yuugen. Actually yuugen appears to mean something like "ghastly". I understand why it originally had a superficial meaning: it felt kind of like Zeami was creating an early horror movie with his emphasis on possession and ghosts. There might be something a little beyond that. Rather than being transported to someone else's world, I felt like I was seeing a dimly lit and little-understood part of this world. I definitely would recommend seeing Noh.

When I got back I tried to sleep but my roommates wanted to watch Man of the Year. God that movie blew. I have decided to refrain from making comments about the other people on this trip until I am safely in Tokyo on Nov 10th.

Things to write about on this blog:
- the crazy library
- Shounen Ace reviews

Rainy day parade

There's a difference between American democracy used to mean to Ohio blacks and Iraqi farmers, and what it means today:

When the old woman left the voting booth she made it about halfway to the door before collapsing in a nearby chair, where she began weeping uncontrollably. When we rushed over to help we realized that she wasn't in trouble at all but she had not truly believed, until she left the booth, that she would ever live long enough to cast a vote for an African-American for president.

Yesterday I went to a parade. It went from City Hall to the Heian Shrine so I guess it was a pretty big deal. It started raining an hour into it but the costumed paraders kept it up.



Everyone's favorite part of the parade was the little kids. I think they were supposed to be ogres?



I went to Kyoto University and tried to find an undergraduate thesis paper. My Japanese skills were put to good use, but this turned out to be a useless quest because they didn't know anything about it, and when I got home I found out that a revised version of the paper has been published in a small Japanese journal which Ryukoku University has in its Twilight Zone stacks. (More about that later.)

I thoughtlessly took a taxi home and was charged $20. That was supposed to be my meal budget for this week. Oh well!

I should warn you guys that exciting blogging will not resume until November 10 because we are all done with our field trips. I might go to a mountain this weekend.

Time flies at the flea market

Not much to say right now. I probably should be writing my Shingon reflection paper.

Another evil unlicensed milk dealer bites the dust. Good riddance to bad rubbish, is what I say!



This is a hall with 1,000 images of Kannon plus one really large Kannon and a bunch of guardian deities. Working out how difficult it was to make this temple is beyond human comprehension, and I was simply numbed. It was somewhat frightening.

I got a corn dog from the convenience store and worked it out.



Went to the biggest flea market in town today. Most of it is stuff Grandma would like. Very traditional Japanese, lots of kitsch and overpriced trinkets. Coke was $3 a bottle.



This guy was selling excellent self-made pottery. He definitely stood out among all the typical dealers. I spent four hours at the flea market but I only bought his pottery.

With the money I saved through not buying kitsch, I got for myself a subscription to Green Anarchy magazine. It is good to be young and naive.

Arashiyama and Kyodai

I hope I won't bore you by saying that I made a repeat visit to Arashiyama. For one thing, I was looking for an abandoned facade. Also, when I got there, I realized that Arashiyama is really quite beautiful.





I walked down the side of the river. I have to make a conscious effort to avoid all the delicious tourist foods people sell on the side of the road. They aren't particularly overpriced, but I don't want to survive on ice cream and deep-fried croquets.



I wandered all over Arashiyama looking for this facade. It took many hours. Eventually I reached the place that my tour guide, a random Japanese photoblogger who did not really document his trip, had found on his walk.



I still couldn't find the facade, though. I walked around a large residential zone, peering down every street. I bought souvenirs on a side road. Finally I discovered it on the main road that I had avoided, 50 meters from a Buddhist temple.



Ladies and gentlemen... the Siddhartha Gautama Natural Law Society, Japan!

This facade did not reveal any clues, and when I looked behind it, there were only bamboo trees. I walked across the road to an old lady's shop and asked her about it. She said something about 15 years, 10 years, and 5 years ago. I assume she was using words like "closed", "abandoned" and "demolished", none of which I knew. Well... mission accomplished, right? Now I just need to find the station!



Oh no! How did I end up here?

I wound up walking far past the station on a country road going into Kyoto. I had to turn around and walk back. Durr.



A bug I saw on the road.

Today I biked around northern Kyoto near the university.



The placement of this gate seems like a very accurate summary of Japanese religion to me. It's quite a pretty arrangement, too. It looks like the path is going right into the mountain.



This is another gate. This gate belongs to an old shrine in northern Kyoto. There was a wedding being held there. Their literature claims that they were founded in AD 5. I don't know what I think about that. Brian-sensei is always criticizing Shinto for being a bunch of jingoistic emperor worshippers. Certainly this is a very bold thing for a shrine to claim. I liked the miko though.



I ate at a vegan restaurant named Sunny Place. This is a photo of another vegan restaurant entirely. Sunny Place was very much a woman's kitchen, and you sat at a kitchen counter and watched her make your food. I felt awkward not knowing very much Japanese.

I watched two movies this weekend: Modern Times and Princess Mononoke. I had a good time.

Nishi Hongwanji in the rain

We went to Nishi Hongwanji. It was raining.



A group of old people had come from all over Japan to clean the main hall.



We were allowed to visit an ancient shogun hall, which was being renovated. We were the last people to see the faded paintings of tigers on the wall. They will be replaced with pictures that are actually visible without the aid of an infrared camera. We weren't allowed to take pictures of the Ryukoku students renovating the photos, nor the Noh stages, nor the shogun's sleeping quarters where Queen Elizabeth stayed when she came to Hongwanji. We did get a nice view of the outside of the tea house.



This morning we got to see a Shingon goma ceremony at Touji. There were a bunch of cups of rice, oil, and water laid out on a table which seemed to represent a spiritual plane. In the middle was a hearth which represented a Buddha. Sticks with the wishes of parishoners were thrown into the hearth and burned to purify them. I got a good picture of it.



We had our final Shingon class today. We learned about the Panopticon of life in a Kouyasan monastery. I drew some comparisons between the "race to the bottom" in Kouyasan Shingon and the Catholic Church. Both religions have a contest to see who can be the most traditional and faithful to past practices. It made me think of Wikipedia's central policy, which runs as follows: "If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it." I think this policy should apply to everything in life: "If a rule prevents you from making the world a better place, ignore it."

I don't think I could be a Japanese Buddhist monk.

Meanwhile, in America:

"I'm proud of the people who come to our rallies."

Weekend Part 4: Kyoto Student Festival

We went to see a Noh play but it turned out to be a recital of various Noh cantos. It went on for a long time and was very boring. I left and got a crepe. There were a bunch of schoolgirls at the crepe place who invited me to come see them in a parade at the Heian Jingu. It was Kyoto's intercollegiate Student Festival and it was kind of crazy there.



Here is one of the rows of stalls at the festival. When I walked down this row I was the only foreigner there and the Japanese students working the stalls were very excited to see me. Actually, they decided to ambush me. Four or five girls jumped out of a stall holding a huge sign in Japanese, and they charged at me waving it up and down. "Yakitori!" they yelled. The objective of this guerilla action was to impress upon me a stick of fried chicken for $3.00. Fortunately, I pushed through and had curry for $2 instead.



Here is the parade... the torii at this shrine is really quite large and difficult to capture properly in a photo.



In honor of the 1000th anniversary of the writing of the Tale of Genji they dressed up in kimonos and waved fans. It seems a little random, but hey, I don't know what I would have done in order to celebrate a book. Maybe pass out free copies.



Then over five thousand students gathered in front of the shrine and did the same dance. Yeah. I am having trouble comprehending this photo even though I took it. It is actually more mind-boggling than how it looked in real life because it makes it seem that they are all performing it perfectly ad-hoc. In reality they had various levels of practice and it showed.

The Noh recital lasted three and a half hours; getting back home took another hour and a half, and then I went to my part-time job at the Long Island Cafe. I didn't take any good pictures of that. I chatted in English with Japanese folks and I told them about corn subsidies and how Sarah Palin was crazy. Maybe I could have picked easier topics.