Central Japan, November 20-29, 2004

Images of Japan abound in the media: super-efficient bullet trains and exquisitely polite people, neon-saturated Tokyo streets and centuries-old Buddhist temples. Visiting Japan even for a short time gives you a sense of how these contrasting sides of the same country co-exist. The polite and friendly old couple, both 70 years-plus, who spontaneously started a conversation with us on an inter-city train journey turned out to both have advanced models of digital cameras that they proceeded to take our pictures with. The beautiful old Buddhist temple in Kyoto, its entrance covered in delicate gold filigree work, shared a wall with a massive industrial warehouse that was the very epitome of modern ugliness. The shops of Akihabara in Tokyo are stocked with the very latest electronic gadgets, many of them unavailable anywhere else in the world, yet the electrical system that delivers power to those same shops is an ancient mess of crisscrossing overhead wires that snake through every street. Japan can often feel as if it hasn't decided which century it really wants to be in.

Many of these contrasts came to us slowly, of course, staggered over the course of a few days. Our first impressions of Japan were overwhelmingly modern, from the efficient arrival terminal at Narita to the to-the-minute accurate express train that took us directly from Narita airport to Tokyo Eki (Tokyo station). One of the first things we noticed at the airport was that the heating was set to a much higher temperature than it would have been in the US. At first we thought that the airconditioning might not be working, but that was clearly not the case since it was much colder outdoors, and none of the Japanese there seemed to notice anything amiss. Later we would notice the same thing on trains and buses. The Japanese are clearly just used to higher temperature indoors than people in most other countries.

Our first train rides in Japan involved a 60-km ride from the airport into the center of Tokyo, and then a 500-km journey to the city of Kyoto on the "Shinkansen" (bullet train, literally "new trunk line" in Japanese). Although it was dark by this time, this was an interesting way to gather our first impressions of a foreign country. For a non-English-speaking country, Japan has a surprising number of advertising billboards with signage in English, sometimes in addition to and sometimes in place of Japanese lettering. A friend who had visited Japan before had told Sejal that knowing English is a status symbol to the Japanese, so English wording on an ad is considered "cool", even if most Japanese have no idea what it means. As we passed from Tokyo Eki through the suburbs of Tokyo, we could see a dense network of houses with tiny one-lane roads running through them, unexpectedly punctuated by vast shopping districts brightly lit by the famous vertical neon signs. It would seem as if we were passing through the backroads of a small country town one moment and Times Square in New York City the next.

The train station at Kyoto is vast, with multiple storeys of shops, restaurants, a post office, a 12-floor hotel, and yes, train tracks all in the same building. Finding the way to our hotel was quite difficult - getting off at the wrong bus stop, we had to take a taxi to our final destination, with the cell phone equipped cab driver having to take copious directions in Japanese from our hotel owner before we got there. We were staying in a "ryokan" (a traditional Japanese inn) in Kyoto, so in accordance with custom, we took off our shoes at the entrance to the hotel and put on a pair of slippers: shoes were not allowed anywhere inside the hotel. Ryokan typically have only one or two bathrooms shared between all guests, but we had decided not to experience that particular part of Japanese culture, so our room had an attached bath. Our bed was a futon, or flat mattress, on the floor, and the floor itself was covered with traditional Japanese "tatami" mats made of bamboo. Adding to the foreign experience, the door to our balcony was made of translucent paper, which diffused the outdoor sunlight in a very pleasant way in the morning.

Kyoto was the capital of Japan for over 1000 years, from about 800 to 1850 AD, and so has a large number of old temples and historical sites in and around the modern city. Because of a variety of reasons, however - significantly earthquakes, but also fire and civil war - most of these structures have been destroyed and rebuilt a number of times over the centuries, some more than ten times. The Japanese don't seem to be unduly concerned about keeping the look of the original structure intact when they rebuild it. For example, the temple of Kinkaku-ji, called the Temple of the Golden Pavilion, is entirely gold-plated (all three storeys of it). Looking at it, however, you wouldn't know that it became that way only in 1955, when it was last rebuilt. The emperor who had built it originally in the 14th century could only afford to gold-plate the third storey, but his intention was to eventually cover all three floors - only 600 years later, his dream was fulfilled. Because of rebuilding such as this, it's often not clear how old a building really is - even if it was originally built centuries ago, the actual building you're looking at might be only a few decades old.

The major religions in Japan are Buddhism and Shintoism, but for some reason most of the religious sites we saw in Kyoto and other places in Japan were Buddhist. Japanese Buddhism seems to borrow icons and imagery heavily from Indian Hinduism. In the temple of Sanjusangen-do in Kyoto, the inner hall contains a number of statues of Japanese gods. All of the ones we saw were derivations of Hindu deities, each with their own Japanese name derived from the Sanskrit. For example, there were statues of Vishnu, Shiva, Indra, and Hanuman, although the facial features on these statues were unmistakably Japanese. (The explanatory signs in front of each statue mentioned the original Sanskrit name and the Japanese name for each statue.) Each temple typically has a landscaped Zen Buddhist garden somewhere on the grounds, but these have decidedly Japanese aesthetics. Our guidebook listed a number of distinct styles of Zen gardens, most of which we're sure we saw on our trip - however, to our untrained eyes, they all pretty much looked alike.

On the afternoon of our first day in Kyoto, at the temple of Kiyomizu-dera, a Japanese woman, about 35 years old, approached us and asked if we wanted to get a tour of the temple free of charge. She said she was learning English and was interested in showing tourists around. Although we were slightly wary at first that this might be some sort of scam, we agreed to the tour, and spent a very enjoyable hour speaking with our self-appointed guide about the history of the temple and about life in Japan. The pattern of Japanese people initiating conversations with us on their own would be repeated throughout our trip, and always without any ulterior motive. People just seemed to be genuinely curious about people from foreign countries. During our tour of Kiyomizu-dera we were stopped by a couple of schoolgirls, performing a survey for their class on foreigners visiting Kyoto. This survey was hardly concerned with mundane things like our impressions of Japan, however - the questions were strangely metaphysical, ranging from the thought-provoking ("Do you feel you are happiest when you are with your family?") to the unanswerable ("What would be the ideal amount of time to spend with your family per week?").

Kiyomizu-dera was one of the highlights of our first day, a beautiful complex of temples on a high hillside overlooking Kyoto. It is said that when Kyoto was the capital of Japan, people from the Japanese court would come here to plot in secret against their enemies. The weekend we visited was a holiday weekend, so hundreds of Japanese were visiting the temple, not to discuss political intrigue but to ask for blessings and good luck.

On our second day, we were fortunate to catch a morning prayer ceremony at another magnificent temple, Nishi-Hongwan-ji in central Kyoto. Typical of urban Japan, a large ugly warehouse has been built right next to the temple, marring its beauty from certain angles. When we entered the temple it was almost empty except for a few priests. Within a few minutes, however, the place began filling with Japanese, till we were the only non-Japanese among over a hundred people. The prayer was sung in a very high pitch by a young Japanese girl at the front of the hall who didn't look like she would have the lungs for it. It was a strange but enchanting experience, like being thrust suddenly very close to a different culture. Outside, the gray warehouse was still there, and seemed to clash even more strongly with the temple's grace.

The fall colors we saw at Nijo-jo (Nijo Castle) and Kinkaku-ji (the aforementioned "Temple of the Golden Pavilion"), both on our second day in Japan, were probably comparable to the best of the New England season. Possibly because of its island geography, fall seems to occur later in Japan than in North America, so that when we visited in late November, the leaves were just turning golden, and the daytime temperatures in Kyoto were around 20 degrees C. This was a pleasant surprise, although it did mean that the heavy jackets and gloves we had taken along were never used on our trip.

After a couple of days exploring Kyoto, we went on a day trip to a city called Nara, about 30 km south of Kyoto. Our train trip there involved another conversation with native Japanese, this time an old couple who sat opposite us and almost immediately asked us whether they could talk to us "for some time in English". They both seemed to know a surprising amount about India, asking us "Isn't Singh your prime minister?" and also mentioning Indira Gandhi as another politician they had heard of. We were glad they didn't decide to quiz us on who was Japan's prime minister since neither of us knew. (We looked it up soon after.) Even though they must have both been over 70, they were on the train to hike along a popular mountain trail, and got off one stop before Nara.

Nara was the capital of Japan for about a hundred years, before the capital moved to Kyoto, and has a number of monuments designated as World Heritage Sites by the United Nations. Since we weren't staying in Nara that night, we had got all our luggage with us, but storing our bigger bags in the small lockers at the station turned out to be impossible. Once again we experienced firsthand the by-now normal Japanese friendliness - an attendant at the station, noticing that we were getting ready to take our bags with us on our sightseeing tour (not a pleasant prospect), took us to the tourist information center at the station, where they pointed us to another luggage storage area near the station where we could keep our bags. The information center also had the facility of assigning a local guide to tourists, which we decided to accept as another way to spend some more time talking to a native Japanese. All guides are students, generally studying English at local universities, and other than paying for their lunch the tour is free. Our guide was a teenager studying at the University of Osaka, about 30 km from Nara, but she was a Nara native and still lived with her parents in the city. Although communication was sometimes difficult (and both of us had to remember to speak a little slower than usual), the four hours of our walking tour around Nara passed quickly and enjoyably. Our guide seemed almost as curious about California and India as we were about her life in Japan, and had an electronic Japanese-English dictionary that she used expertly and frequently to ask us as many questions as we asked her.

One of the highlights of our tour of Nara was the visit to the Todai-ji Buddhist temple, said to be the largest wooden building in the world (although hard evidence of this is difficult to come by). Whether it is the biggest or not, however, it is certainly very impressive. The 50-foot "Daibutsu", or Buddha statue, inside the temple is so big that only its base can be seen from outside the temple. Occasionally, however, a large window near the top of the temple is opened, which allows the statue's face to be visible to people outside. Needless to say, this only happens on special occasions. The walkway to the temple is made of stones in four different colors, with stones of a single color arranged in vertical strips radiating outward from the center of the path. Our guide told us that each color represented one country into which Buddhism had spread: accordingly, the innermost strip of stones represented India (where Buddhism originated), the one beyond that China (to which Buddhism had spread from India), then Korea, and finally Japan.

Being around people who smoke in public is one of the less-than-attractive realities of being in Japan. Smoking in public areas, and especially indoors, is not only allowed but not especially frowned upon: knowledge about the dangers of second-hand smoke doesn't seem to have made its way to Japan yet. This hadn't really been a problem for either of us till this point on our trip. However, on our next train journey, to the mountain town of Matsumoto in the "Japan Alps", the non-smoking seats were all sold out so were forced to travel in the smoking section. Being in the stale, smoke-laden air in the smoking compartment was probably the least enjoyable part of our entire trip. The smoke was so heavy it was literally irritating to the eyes, but none of the 30 or so other people in the compartment, all smoking from start to finish, seemed to notice. Both of us had to frequently leave the compartment to get some fresh air, but the two hour train journey (which had seemed a lot longer) finally ended, and we were on the high alpine plateau of Matsumoto, with the temperature a good 10 degrees lower than it had been in Nara.

The main attraction in Matsumoto is the town castle, the original structure still standing from the 16th century, of which we had a great view from our 6th floor hotel room. The local culinary specialty is "sashimi" (thin sliced meat) made of raw horsemeat, which we were not particularly eager to experience. Although it didn't snow when we were there, the temperature during the day was a not particularly toasty 5 degrees C, and the Japan Alps that rise all around the town were capped with white. The area that the modern town occupies was pretty much all part of the castle when it was originally built, behind an elaborate system of moats, bridges, and defensive structures. The castle is 6 storeys tall and fairly impressive, a more warlike building than the religious sites we had seen in Kyoto and Nara. The temperature got progressively lower as we climbed upward through the castle, till it seemed possible to get frostbite on the topmost floor. This was not helped by the fact that, to preserve the wooden castle floor, visitors are required to take their shoes off outside the castle, and climb up barefoot or in their socks. The view from the topmost floor of the castle was good enough, however, that we stayed up there for over 10 minutes. The Japan Alps are a constant, magnificent backdrop to the somewhat less pretty town that sprawls in the foreground, as always with the crisscrossing mesh of overhead power cables. The stairs up and down the castle are steep, and no two stairwells line up, both defensive mechanisms used to slow down invading armies if they ever got into the castle.

We had lunch in this small mountain town at a French restaurant, run by two expatriate Frenchmen who spoke fluent Japanese and had been living in Matsumoto for the last 7 years. They seemed happy to have customers who spoke English and curious about where we had come from and were going.

Where we were going next was Tokyo, 200 km away and our last place of residence on this trip. Our 2-hour train ride there from Matsumoto was short and smoke-free, and that evening we got off at Shinjuku Eki, in the administrative center of one of the largest urban areas in the world.

12 million people live in Tokyo city itself, and over 30 million in the greater metropolitan area. While there are other countries that have larger cities, the Japanese are probably the most affluent people on the planet to tolerate living in such close proximity to so many of their fellow citizens. There were no slums, and very few homeless people on the street, visible in Tokyo, and the vast majority of people live in apartment complexes that are often no more than a few storeys tall because of the danger of earthquakes. A massive underground railway network transports people efficiently across Tokyo; more than 3 million commuters a day travel through Shinjuku Eki, making it one of the busiest train stations in the world. Space is obviously tight: more and more young Japanese are staying on with their parents beyond the age when they would traditionally have moved out of the house, just because the cost of housing is so high. Ironically, this is something of a boon for businesses, which find ready consumers in these stay-at-home Japanese with almost no living expenses and consequently high disposable incomes.

The Imperial Palace in Tokyo, which we visited on our first day in the city, occupies a few acres of prime real estate in central Tokyo, and it's actually where the Emperor of Japan lives. (Like England, Japan has a royal family whose role is largely ceremonial.) The palace itself is not open to visitors except on a few days of the year, so we weren't able to see it from the inside. (We were also by this time fairly gorged on historical sites and castles, so we didn't particularly mind.) After a short walk through the palace grounds - probably some of the largest open area anywhere in Tokyo - we took a short metro ride to Ginza, a high-end shopping district in the center of the city. This is where the oldest shops in Tokyo are, still standing from the 19th century. Among these is the pearl store of Mikimoto, famous for being the originators of Japanese cultured pearls, from where Sejal bought a pearl pendant. Walking here is not much different from being on 5th Avenue in Manhattan, with the same long blocks, continuous traffic, and always the masses of smartly-dressed people walking to and from work. Many of the large department stores in this area have underground food courts where a large variety of Japanese and non-Japanese food is available. However, there is no seating area where you can eat this food after you've bought it, probably because most of the people who come here are working in nearby offices. We had to walk a few blocks till we came across a Tokyo rarity, a public park, where we could sit down and eat our lunch.

That evening we visited Akihabara, a high-tech electronics district in Tokyo (though the signboards to the area call it the "Electric Town" - a throwback to the days when it actually sold electrical items like irons and washing machines rather than digital cameras and cellphones). This occupies an area of over 10 city blocks, jammed with multistoreyed shops selling practically any device that contains a microprocessor. Interspersed with these are the "pachinko" parlours (pachinko seems to be some kind of a Japanese version of slot machines) that we saw all over Tokyo. One of the shops we entered was a seven-storey megastore that had each floor dedicated to one type of electronics item: for example, one floor for digital cameras, one floor dedicated to printers, one floor for computer monitors, etc. By this time we had run through two 256 MB memory cards in our digital camera (more than 300 photos), so we bought a new memory card from this store. It was about $10 cheaper than it would have been in the US. We also bought a Japanese version of the Sims 2 from this area, and that was almost 7000 yen (about $67), more than the $50 price in the US. Sejal adds: We saw so such a variety of electronic goods in these shops that we have never seen anywhere else. Surprisingly everybody in Tokyo seems to have some or most of these gadgets. You will find a lady dressed in a traditional Kimono, playing games on her cell phone in the metro.

Mt.Fuji is one of the most common images of Japan, and a sight that we wanted to see in person. The next day we travelled to the town of Hakone, about 40 minutes away from Tokyo by Shinkansen, from where a route well-travelled by Japanese every day of the year is supposed to provide excellent views of the mountain. This is a popular spot for day trips from Tokyo, so we were surrounded by Japanese all going to exactly the same place we were. The route to see Mt.Fuji involves a train ride from Hakone, then a cable car ride up a steep hillside, and finally a two-stage gondola ride to the shores of a lake close to the mountain. Unfortunately, the weather was foggy on this day, and although the gondola ride is supposed to provide you a clear view of Mt.Fuji we were unable to see anything. In fact, the wind caused the second stage of our gondola ride, from a mountain top at a place called Owaku-dani down to the lake shore, to be cancelled, forcing us to turn back midway through our journey. We later took a bus ride from Hakone to the lakeshore just to see the view, which was spectacular, but the mountain was still covered in fog.

Something we discovered during our stay in Tokyo is that a South Korean film actor named Bae Yong-Joon is very popular in Japan. His visit to the country, one day after we arrived in Tokyo, was a major news event. One of the channels on our Tokyo hotel TV seemed to be dedicated solely to covering every move made by Bae Yong-Joon and his fans. All the shows were in Japanese, but since the language of stardom seems universal they were quite easy to follow. One of the more entertaining programs showed in great detail (no doubt for educational purposes) how four women plotted the actor's course from his arrival at Narita airport to his hotel, planning exactly where to position themselves to catch the best glimpse of him. Repeatedly shown were scenes of mass hysteria at the airport on his arrival there, with the appropriately dapper star emerging carefully suited and sunshaded behind a wall of highly-needed bodyguards. Once our attention had been drawn it was almost impossible to miss Bae Yong-Joon on hordes of advertising billboards throughout the city, selling pretty much every consumer good available in the Japanese market. We had seen a picture of the same actor at Seoul airport earlier, but it was somewhat surprising that a foreign actor was so popular in Japan as well. Sejal adds: On our return flight home we asked a fellow Japanese passenger about this actor. According to him the actor is more popular in Japan than in Korea. I have vowed to see his 'A Winter Love Story' a Korean movie that has caused every single Japanese girl to fall in love with this guy!

The Sumida river runs through the eastern suburbs of Tokyo, and a river cruise provides a good way to get a rarely-seen view of the city. We started the cruise from where the river empties into Tokyo Bay, with the cruise ship then going upstream to the north-eastern suburb of Asakusa. Along the way it passes under twelve bridges across the Sumida river, each painted a different color and with widely varying architectures. While the riverbank might seem like a prime residential location, most of the housing complexes along the river that we saw on the cruise seemed run-down and somewhat downmarket. The cruise itself was pleasant enough, with a flock of seagulls following the boat for much of the way. At Asakusa we briefly visited the Senso-ji temple, an old Japanese temple that looked like it had been imported from Kyoto and dropped as is into the busy Tokyo suburb. The Buddhist fortune sticks that we picked at the temple (each 100 yen, or about 95 cents) predicted moderately bad luck for Sejal and extremely bad luck for Abhi. Sejal adds: Bad luck for Abhi was proved true almost immediately as I found my way to Naki-mise-dori, one of the best destinations for sovenier shopping. There were tons of shops selling oriental craft, Japanese clothes, candies and I felt like a child lost in Candy Paradise!

That afternoon we visited the Tokyo National Museum in Ueno, the suburb of Tokyo adjacent to Asakusa. This contains artifacts - pottery, sculpture and paintings - from all major periods of Japanese civilization, with smaller sections for ancient Chinese, Indian and Korean art. Some of the sculpture here is as old as the 4th century BC, a large part of it is religious in character, and almost all of it is exquisite and well-preserved. Highlights for us included a 13th century "Raaga Raja", or angry Buddha, statue, and traditional Japanese "ukiyo-e", or color wood block prints, dating from the 16th century onward. The museum is fairly small, and we were able to see almost all of it in a couple of very well-spent hours. Sejal adds: This was the day when I had my most famous Tokyo hair cut! Before embarking on this journey, I had made up my mind about getting my hair done in Tokyo. I was really excited to find a nice salon that fit my budget. The guy who cut my hair was not a hair stylist, he was a hair artist! He spent almost 60 minutes on my hair, giving me my most enduring look! :) Needless to say when I offered a fat tip to him, he graciously refused it. Wonderful people!

Our last day in Tokyo was spent exploring the ultra-modern districts of Shinjuku and Harajuku in the western part of Tokyo. Shinjuku, as mentioned earlier, is the administrative center of Tokyo, and houses a grotesquely expensive (at 157 billion yen, or about $1.5 billion) but impressive 45-storey, two-tower municipal administrative building. Both towers have observation decks on the 45th floor, which is where we spent the morning. Shinjuku is the one part of Tokyo that is blessed with a relatively low probability of earthquakes, and most of the skyscrapers in the city cluster here. The view from the obervation decks is therefore somewhat bizarre, with a few tall buildings close by and then a vast sea of low-rise apartment complexes extending almost as far as the eye as can see.

Harajuku is another of the most popular shopping areas in Tokyo, largely for ultra-chic Japanese teens who don't quite have the money yet to shop at Ginza. Since we went there on a Sunday, parts of the area were closed to traffic, and there were masses of people everywhere, crowding the sidewalks and spilling out onto the street. This is a popular area for Japanese companies to test their newest products, offering them to teens and observing what they like and don't like before the product is released into the national market. We tested the Nintendo DS, a new video game system, in a stall in Harajuku, one week before its official launch in Japan and the US. It was a good way to end a trip to one of the most technology-obsessed countries in the world.

The next day, we took a bus ride to the airport and boarded a plane, somewhat regretfully, to California. In retrospect, the highlight of our trip wasn't the spectacular old temples or the dazzling high-tech districts we saw. What stands out instead is the friendliness we encountered everywhere, from people just as openly curious about us as we were about them. This was a large factor in making the trip as memorable as it was.