Sick

Guess who's still clueless.

I am kind of sick so right now finishing my final report must come before blog posts. Look forward to the exciting conclusion of this blog starting next Wednesday, including:

- How I cheated at Chutes and Ladders to make a little girl very happy
- The little Japanese town that doesn't know whether to be historic, modern, or foreign
- "They're all dead now. Long time ago." and more tales from a wizened old Burmese monk
- Meeting my host family from three years back and discovering memorabilia of my stay lovingly placed all over their house

A puzzle for everyone

I got off the train and stuck my rail pass in my pocket. I lugged all my bags to the locker room at Koshoji where a memorial ceremony for Shinran was happening in my former bedroom. Getting to the basement, I pulled my dirty clothes out of my bag in order to put them in my laundry basket. Then I discovered that one of the two chain-smoking potheads on my trip had dropped by yesterday and dumped all their trash, including rotten food, cigarette butts, and dirty chopsticks, in my laundry basket. I slowly and painstakingly cleaned it out, then ran into a bathroom to change into something less smelly. Finally everything was ready. I went to get some laundry detergent and came back to find the abbot of Koshoji had barred the door. I asked the old lady who wanders around Koshoji for help, and she showed me a secret shortcut to the locker room. Finally I grabbed my backpack, my laundry bag, and my detergent and went over to a nearby coin laundry to use a washing machine that was not in the immediate vicinity of chanting monks. Sticking in my last 300 yen at 11am on the dot, I felt pretty satisfied that I was about to get started on my next great adventure.

Dear reader, what is wrong with the above story?

Did you figure it out?

If not, you have made me feel a little better, because 10 minutes later I realized what was wrong and ran back to the laundry in horror, only to find this:



Archaeological evidence suggests that is the remains of a $300 rail pass. It served honorably in my quest to get to Tokyo, Tenri, and back home to Kyoto before it departed prematurely to a watery grave. R.I.P.

I started walking to the station in a futile attempt at getting a new pass (no replacements are allowed). A Japanese man confronted me and started asking me questions in English. He told me he was a professor and generally came to explain his personal opinion on Buddhism, being very confrontational and insisting that one must practice Buddhism with all one's heart and not study it like a historian. He said that true Buddhism was the recognition of life in all objects, including inanimate ones-- so we do souji, he said, in order to make the floor feel happy and clean. He walked with me all the way to the station, stopping me several times and leaning into my face to drive home a point. I don't know if it was a meeting worth $180 but I was quite overwhelmed by how forward he was. Finally he stopped just before the ticket counter and asked me a question in English (he had a scrap of paper from a weird dictionary which incorrectly told him that you could say "I'm going to stationery's" instead of "I'm going to the stationery store", and I clarified that for him).

I wanted his name card because he was a genius of a teacher, but he refused.

I'm sorry I am telling you absolutely nothing about Tenri City, which is an amazing place that rightfully belongs in the guidebooks it is missing from (all of them), but I need to figure out how to get to Hiroshima on a budget sometime very soon. Sorry!!

Ghibli Museum

I have been sort of sick recently and I stayed in for two days. All I did was go to the Ghibli Museum yesterday. Tomorrow begins a long tramp around the country but I may not be able to write about it until I'm done! I hope that's okay with you guys. How many people are reading this anyway?...

I already had a cold, but hey, I had reservations. So, I rode into the morning sunlight of western Tokyo and had a nice walk through the park.



While I waited for my turn to enter I found a birdwatching section in the park. It was really amazing! The birds were going crazy over there. I've never seen anything like it before. Unfortunately my camera was no good, but here are two that were just sitting in front of me chirping their beaks off...



Not allowed to take pictures inside, etc. You should know the drill by now. I wandered through the place in a a feverish stupor, overwhelmed by how many people were making their way through the tiny, beautiful exhibits. Everything was great, but my favorite bit was an exhibit demonstrating how animation is made with a 3D example of lots of little Totoro models spinning around an axis in front of a strobe light. It was entrancing.



I was lucky-- the movie I got to see was also about Totoro. It was a fairly pointless little story about the little girl from Totoro making friends with a baby catbus, or as she called it in Japanese, a kittenbus. I was charmed, and pleased that I understood all the dialogue. It helped that the target audience was 3 to 5 year olds.



Anyway, I climbed around the maze of exhibits for a while, had a croque monsieur with Australian tourists in the super classy Straw Hat Cafe, and finally bought a tin of cookies. I think I will refrain from mentioning the amount of money I have spent in Tokyo but it is truly outrageous. I don't think I would like to come here to live...

Japan Theravada Buddhist Association

The past two days I have gotten back to work on my final report on Theravada Buddhism in Japan. To accomplish this I visited the Japan Theravada Buddhist Assocation's head temple, the Gotami Vihara, and one of its "branch" temples, a place called International Buddhist Center Shouzanji.

Let's talk about the latter place first, because I went there first. I set out for Shouzanji yesterday afternoon. It was quite far from Tokyo and it cost me $8 and an hour for the train ride alone. It was also a considerable walk but the fall colors were more prominent in this town than they ever are in central Tokyo and I was filled with happy memories of childhood-- or certain anime series...



Eventually I came to a point in the midst of the playgrounds and suburban houses where my frankly awful hand-drawn map was no longer useful. It was only then that I realized that my destination might have something to do with the enormous ten-story pagoda down the street from me.



The pagoda turned out to belong to a different but somehow related temple. After getting lost once, a police officer offered to show me the way. As we walked the sun set crisply in front of us. "It's a very pretty sunset, isn't it?" he said in Japanese. "What's the word for it in English?" For the life of me I cannot imagine an American cop being as friendly to a foreigner as this one was to me.



When I arrived at the temple, unfortunately, the monk at the door did not know much English and he told me to come back tomorrow. I walked back down the hill and went home emptyhanded.

Today was a little different. I woke up late with a bad sore throat and unfortunately did not arrive at the JBTA until 3PM, but I knew beforehand that there would be people there because this was the day the monthly newsletter was being sent out. The monks and laity were very friendly and gave me cake and pie while they called their leader, the Ven. Sumanasara, who apparently spent an hour driving to the temple to chat with me-- very embarassing as I had not prepared any questions! As a result I forgot to ask him some vital questions such as the vinaya rules at the JBTA but we had a very lively conversation. Sumanasara is definitely one of the most intelligent people I have met in Japan and I felt very privileged to talk one-on-one with him, and I still feel stupid that I rejected his offer for tea and additional conversation. Kyoto manners dictate that you must reject any offer for tea, but I have a feeling he was adhering to British/Sri Lankan manners, where it is rude to reject such an offer. Afterwards I once again spent an hour and a half heading to Shouzanji.



It was kind of late and I think I was rude to go in without prior arrangements. I encountered a mixture of Sri Lankans and Japanese in the dining room, and once again nobody spoke English, but I got some simple questions answered in Japanese such as when it was founded (35 years ago, but they only started doing meditation 6 years ago-- quite mysterious). The head monk then gave me a blessing of what he called omamori, but was actually a multicolored string that went around my wrist as is traditionally done on Vesak in Theravada countries (I forgot the word, sorry).



I was feeling quite under the weather by the time I got on the first of the three trains necessary to head home. Maybe I shouldn't have walked that half-hour in the cold! One thing you will not find at a conbini in Japan is medicine. Instead there is a display full of dorinku, which is somewhere between an energy drink and a poor attempt at medicine--they seem to have things like Vitamin C or ginkgo in them. In Kyoto I did not see much dorinku to go around, but here in Tokyo I see salarymen popping dorinku as if it were a job requirement. However, I don't really think my fever can be remedied with some gross-tasting caffeinated syrup. So, I purchased the Western equivalent to dorinku-- that is, vegetable juice and a banana. And now, hopefully, some sleep.

Cosplaying miko, dutiful miko

Yesterday was Comitia. All the otakus got lined up at the Tokyo Big Sight. Meanwhile, a jobs fair was being held in the same building! So, lined up next to us were a huge crowd of young urban professionals in black suits and ties. The two groups occasionally passed furtive, Japanese glances at each other. It was clear which group had their priorities straight in life. (Hint: it was us)

Today I went to Nakano Broadway but there was really nothing there. I had dinner at a cutlet fast food place--note for the Japan-bound: Japanese fast food is the cheapest way to eat out if you know a little of the language--and headed home. But I felt like I was returning empty-handed. Never before have I felt like I did not spend enough money in town, but Tokyo will do that to you. So, I stopped in Akihabara and did my normal rounds. What did I find but a $10 doujin I had been unsuccessfully looking for... for $4.20! Yay! I decided to celebrate by going to a miko cafe. Or, rather, a cosplayer was on the street handing out brochures for a miko cafe that I had thought was closed, so I decided to take a looksie.

Unfortunately I did not bring a camera on my trip. Taking pictures was probably forbidden anyway but there were many funny things that I would have liked to show you. The door to the cafe had a torii gate behind it. It was like a Shinto shrine on the 7th floor of an office building, which was funny. The manager gave me an "English menu" which was also very funny. I guess I should have recorded some of the items on this menu because I can't really do it justice. Basically the cafe had this wacky Japanese-Western fusion menu, which made sense in Japanese, but when translated it was incomprehensible and did not sound entirely like food. I asked for a Japanese menu and ordered a short item, which turned out to be pound cake with anko (adzuki beans).

The cafe's theme was a Shinto shrine run by "miko", the shrine maidens or vestal virgins common even today at Japanese shrines. There was a real shrine (a mirror on a perch; it looked like a Tenrikyo shrine) and offering box inside, and a miko gave me a 5 yen coin to throw in the offering box. I threw it in, clapped my hands, and bowed for the housed gods. Was it making a mockery of religion? Well, I guess Japanese people don't take religion too seriously anyway. According to the website the cafe/shrine houses some kami who will help you get better at drawing anime or making money.

After my anko cake arrived, I asked for cheki-kuji. You may recall from my Schatzkiste entry that cheki is a service in Akihabara where you receive pictures of the waitresses for a fee. It is supposed to be the English words "check it", but God knows why. Kuji, found in the common words omikuji (a fortune which you draw from a box) or takarakuji (the lottery found on every street), means drawing lots, but there is some sort of implication that fate is involved. So, although cheki-kuji is an absurd mixture of new and old concepts, when you think about it, it fits the miko cafe very well. Anyway, they gave me a wheel of sealed cheki photos and I took an envelope. It turns out that it was a picture of the miko who did the cheki-kuji for me and she was very embarassed.



I somehow managed on my own in the miko cafe even though nobody knew English. Since Fumi was not there, I screwed up slightly on the crucial moment of blessing my food with moé magic, but the miko were very nice and talked to me in simple Japanese about their favorite anime and America. I ate very slowly and some of them got bored, but they all came out at the end to bid me farewell in super moé fashion. Weirdly, nobody else came into the cafe for the half hour I was there. If you visit Akihabara, please go to the miko-san cafe! Miko outfits are the cutest.



In the evening I went to the Asakusa Tori no Ichi matsuri and saw some real miko doing their duty. These miko were guys, though. Traditionally miko were the daughters of the head priest but understandably this tradition has not carried on in recent times so now male miko are more common. The miko stood over the entrance to the shrine and waved bushels of white paper over our heads. Uh... I didn't really understand the meaning, actually. In any case, the purpose of this festival is to purchase New Year's wreaths to ensure prosperity for a family or business, and you'd better believe that modern Japanese are all over any festival that involves buying things.



Yeah, this festival is popular in a big way. When you purchase a wreath, you clap your hands in synchrony with the stall owner while chanting in Japanese. I told my Japanese friend that the miko cosplayers at the cafe did the same thing for me. "No, not the same," he insisted, laughing.



I ate a taiyaki, a chocolate-covered banana, and a hot dog. The end!!

Comitia

Schatzkiste

The concept of this cafe is “an attic”. It is considered as a secret attic left by a young gentleman who got married in a foreign country. The maids served this master, and are maintaining this attic while dreaming about the day when the young master returns. Thus, unlike other maid cafes, you will not be called “master” or “lady” when you enter. You will be considered as a guest who is visiting the attic.

Some places in Tokyo attempt to take on the comforting small town feel but almost without exception they become parodies of themselves. Hordes of young people swarm the Kyoto-esque shrines and cafes, expansions are constructed, souvenirs are sold, and the decor goes over the top. The size of the city alone makes trying to take the Tokyo out of Tokyo a monumentous task. Today, though, I was magically teleported not just out of the city but to a side street in Germany. This is called the moé magic of Akihabara and it happened at Schatzkiste.

Schatzkiste was recommended to me by a friend. I had never heard of it before the word-of-mouth knowledge drop and it does not appear on any map of Akihabara. Seriously, we pulled all the maps off the shelves and scanned every street. Finally Fumi had to use his cell phone and open their website. Even with their online map in his hand, we walked past it several times until we noticed the low-key sign on a side door:



The entrance was almost purposefully obscured by a loud, bright poster from another cafe; there were no ads out front, and no signs within. We climbed all the way up the stairs past several businesses, finally reaching an unmarked door.



Doors like this go back at least to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Actually, I think putting the door inside a wardrobe is the only possible improvement that could be made on this cafe. Stepping inside, we discovered meticulously fitted cobblestones on the floor, a Victorian cash register, worn-down wooden walls, and a maid greeting us with a gentle smile.



At our seat there were German fairy tales, board games, and cute cartoon biographies of the maids.

We were served tea and cakes and Fumi made some polite conversation with our hostess. Unfortunately my Japanese skills were not up to par especially in such a nervous situation. But the seclusion of the cafe, looking out discreetly over the oblivious Akihabarans below, made my day.



I guess I should have taken a picture of the floor-- my bad. I was only allowed to take two pictures. Of course, I was not allowed to take any pictures with the maids, nor were any for sale. I was a little surprised to find out that there was no "cheki" (photo service for a fee) but I suppose it fits in with the lack of advertisement or public record. Later my friend told me that you need to spend 200 hours in the cafe before you can request the service.* Unfortunately, the cafe is closing in March so that doesn't seem likely for me. Consider this my secret invitation to visit it before it closes. :)

* At the rate we were given of $10 an hour one would hope they give discounts for regular customers.



I was also treated to dinner today at a department store. It brought back happy memories of the Mall of America. Ha ha, just kidding. Malls are terrible.