Jizo

Local god or boddhisattva with someone's gifted prayer beads.

Noh

My favourite from an exhibit of Noh masks that I saw in Kyoto. The way that I found out about the exhibit - I was browsing in a paper shop and an elderly woman approached me. In excellent English, she asked me if I was interested in Japanese culture, and when I said yes, offered to conduct me to an exhibit.

So she walked me there, apologising for not walking fast enough (while moving at a good clip assisted by a cane, no less!), delivered me into the care of her friend who was working at the exhibit, and melted away almost before I could say thank you!

The masks were lovely as was the chance to wander peacefully through the small rooms, attended by various elderly people who hovered affectionately but nervously, too shy to try to talk to me even in Japanese but clearly wanting me to be taken care of!

It turned out that the docents had made some of the masks themselves, and that the sensei himself was present! So, not entirely sure what etiquette required of me, I bowed to him, and he waved me off tolerantly and disinterestedly. I left again to go on with my planned day, though not before I was offered tea, and sent on my way with a packet of postcards of the masks and an embroidered handkerchief, courtesy of the temple that offered the exhibition. More Japanese generosity, and a sense of the wealth of the ages being handed down, on and on and on.

Authenticity

One of the little things that amused me while in Japan was watching the look of intense irritation that would sometimes waft across the face of another white person when they caught sight of me. Here I was, having a perfect Japanese moment, the look seemed to say; and then along came this lone other foreigner and RUINED it. Since so often you are clearly the only outsider around, it is noticeable when you pass another of your kind, the dreaded foreign tourist.

This is especially funny in Japan because no matter how many gaikokujin pass through the country, it is hard to imagine there ever being enough to even slightly dilute its essential Japaneseness. Plus, what did you think, other traveller, all these signs in English everywhere were erected for your personal benefit?

I mock, but alas I too am one of those travellers who dislikes thinking of herself as a tourist (though that is what she is). This search for authenticity (and getting to be an invisible observer) is the kind of concept Stuff White People Like was invented to make fun of, but in a way it's an almost necessary part of the desire to travel. We make the effort because we're captivated by some idea of the exotic Other Place, even if the ideal is just a white sandy beach. Then when you get there you have to deal with the fact that the beach is crowded with other holidaymakers, you get sunburnt, there are no bathrooms, and all the other little details that weren't covered in the brochure.

This fond delusion that I admit to cherishing, that as a traveller you can slip quietly into the background of a scene and be part of it without transforming it is of course an illusion for the most part. But one of the many delights of travelling in Japan is that no matter how touristy and built-up the site is, the number of domestic tourists by far outweighs the number of foreign ones. So even if you are having a dreadfully tacky tourist time, it's AUTHENTICALLY tacky. (Plus it's Japan so it's still aesthetically pleasing.)

If Japan let me nourish my delusions in peace, my first few days in South-East Asia were a shock to the system. The presence everywhere in Ubud of posters advertising "the "real" Bali!" were a bit of a hint that this authenticity was no more. If it's made it into scarequotes and onto tour descriptions, it might not be quite what it used to be.

Of course there is still "real" Bali, but it has to hide a little harder from the tourists to maintain itself. Plus, when you're aware that the presence of so many other tourists has already pushed it underground, how hard do you want to try to find it, and make it more vulnerable still?

So then what does the determined non-tourist do? Slip from travel mode into vacation mode and just enjoy the surface pleasures (in Bali there are many, many pleasures to be enjoyed, "real" or not)? Or try to find some non-toxic way to travel? I prefer the following, but short of living somewhere and properly learning about it, I'm not sure what it is. But I have a few months left to try and find out.

Photo: the author, inauthentically pretending to be Japanese at a ryokan in Fukuoka, Kyuushu.

Slurping, sniffing, and smoking

Japan has a deserved reputation for being a very polite country, with lots of rules to follow. But then Canada is supposed to be a nation of fairly polite people too, and a lot of the same rules apply. We tend to take off our shoes when visiting people's houses, even if the location isn't demarcated by a handy step (and we don't provide separate slippers for the bathroom). But anyhow basic polite behaviour is fairly similar.

There are customs that are more idiosyncratic though. People who have eaten a lot of meals with me know that one of my more annoying qualities is severe sensitivity to sound (well, just severe sensitivity really!). Slurping noises can ruin a whole meal for me if I'm in the wrong mood.

Asia is an excellent place to come to break myself of this overreaction. In Japan, not only is it perfectly ok to slurp, but actually when you're eating udon it's rude NOT to slurp. When a friend took us to a traditional udon shop on my trip to Japan in 2008, the owner was perfectly welcoming to the two gaikokujin, but made sure to impress on us that we had to slurp when we were served the noodles! Such is Japanese politeness though, that a friend once told me when he eats ramen in NYC, he looks around at the people around him. If they are mostly Japanese, he slurps, and if they are mostly not, he doesn't!

In fact my month in Japan was enough to win me over to slurping - when you're eating noodles in hot soup in a hurry it's completely functional, cooling each bite as you eat (and also keeping your shirt clear of broth splashes). Sniffing I wasn't really won over to. Apparently you are not supposed to blow your nose in public in Japan, as it draws too much attention to yourself, so instead you are stuck sniffing and sniffing until you are safely in a private place...

And smoking mores are different too. Tokyo has reminder signs everywhere about polite smoking behaviour - don't waft the smoke in people's faces, don't smoke right beside a non-smoking area etc. In most public places in the city it's forbidden to smoke outside. But it's still ok to smoke in restaurants and bars, and the chain cafes that offer both smoking and nonsmoking areas usually have a purely psychological barrier between the two - not too effective as a smoke barrier it turns out.

These are just some random examples but it makes me wonder what behaviours I accept as perfectly normal seem terrifically rude to others. The classic Foreigner-in-Japan example is probably wearing the bathroom slippers out of the bathroom - a solecism I thankfully avoided! I have enough Japanese friends that I felt pretty safe there. Now in South-East Asia, I'm on less certain ground, and I keep wondering what thing I unthinkingly do is someone else's sniffing noise...

Yes, transport?

I've spent not quite 24 hours in South-East Asia now, and my head is full of a blur of images moving about unpredictably like the motorbikes, and the heat.

I'm in Kuta, Bali, which is just as grotesquely geared to western tourists as my little sister warned me it was. Since I was forewarned, I have luckily been able to take it in stride and just enjoy the pageant of it all, as I am heading to Ubud tomorrow, about which I have much higher expectations.

One thing that surprises me so far is the ubiquity of the Hindu temples, which are tucked away everywhere in unexpected places (much as shrines and temples are in Japan, except that nowhere I went in Japan was so full of shops clearly marketed at outsiders only, so that the contrast here is more jarring). And especially I am touched by the small offerings that are set out and left on the ground, everywhere, little folded leaf baskets holding flowers, incense, little cookies for the gods.

I'm staying in what feels palatial after the cramped quarters in Tokyo - the ensuite bathroom is literally bigger than the room I was sleeping in there, and the large room also has a balcony which overlooks a shrine in the hotel courtyard, and coconut palms, all for less than $20 a night. The luxury feels especially strange when contrasted with the crowded streets full of hawkers.

You can't walk down the street without being constantly questioned, offered massages, hair and nail treatments, daytrips, and especially rides on the back of motorbikes. "Yes? Transport?" is ringing in my ears. It's quite something to casually peek into a foodcourt area and galvanise about 40 restaurant workers to leap to their feet and thrust menus at you - miss? are you hungry? (Of course I was just in Japan, where peeking into a business also causes all the workers to yell "Irrasshaimase!" at you, but it feels different somehow).

I'm finding the hawkers hard to deal with, not because they are terribly persistent. Just smiling, saying no thanks, and moving on works fine. It's more that I find it hard to deal with the reality that we live in a global system that requires some people to spend all day smiling ingratiatingly (or much worse) at often-rude foreigners in hopes of getting by, while other people like me can wander from luxury to luxury. I would really hate having to hawk my wares like that and so being on the receiving end makes me vicariously cringe.

Of course, global inequality is there whether or not I am walking down a street in Bali. But I don't have to like it.

As for the vicarious cringing, I will probably get used to the sales techniques pretty quickly (I did notice that Indonesians wandering into the food court get the same treatment). There will be a lot more of it as I travel around. But hopefully not inured to the real issues...

Tomorrow, north to Ubud and a completely different Bali experience.

Mata ne!

And so, after a fabulous month-and-a-bit in Japan, it was time to depart. Most reluctantly. I was fighting a bitter inner war with myself about whether I should live in Kyoto or Tokyo when I come back to Japan (or go apprentice myself as a farmer in Fukushima, of course) and it seemed inappropriate to decamp without fighting the decisive battle! However, I will be back in about five months, so it's "mata ne" instead of "sayonara"!

I had a few last days in Tokyo to spend time on important issues like catching up on neglected soba-eating, as well as day trips to Nikko and Kamakura. I also found time to return to the excellent cafe operated out of this tiny van parked just off Omotesando, one of Tokyo's ritziest shopping streets. (Photo taken on my visit in early October. Please note the plants set out around the van. For anyone in Tokyo, to find the cafe head down Omotesando away from Meiji-jingu for a few blocks, and it will be in an alley on your left, just past that really fancy odd-shaped department store, tucked away behind Morgan de moi, and its hours are 10 to 6 I think).

Those who know how I love to be a regular will understand how much the following meant to me. When I went to get my latte, the owner (or at least the same woman who I've always seen working there) handed me a stamp card. Then she took it back and added a stamp saying, "for last time". Last time was a whole month ago, but she remembered me! I felt sad to not be able to fill out the stamp card until March - but it was a nice send-off from my all-too-brief stay in Japan. The littlest things can make me happy...

And on to South-East Asia - first stop, Bali!

Fushimi Inari

An endless flow of red torii gates at Fushimi Inari shrine.

This is the head shrine for about 40,000 others across Japan. If you see little fox statues just past the entrance torii, you know it's an inari shrine.

At Fushimi, just south of Kyoto, you can follow the gate-path all the way to the top of the mountain, with views out over the city and toward Osaka. I contemplated them with a kinako (toasted-soybean flour) ice cream in my hand.

Ine

On the farm in Fukushima.

A-bomb dome, Hiroshima

Autumn leaves

Dogo Onsen

Japan's most famous onsen. The waters are naturally 43C, and sitting around after your bathe eating local mandarin oranges or delicious udon is the perfect thing to do.

In Matsuyama, Ehime Prefecture, Shikoku Island.

Fuji-san

Glimpsed from the Tokaido Shinkansen.

Shitamachi

I've been staying in it, both times I was in Tokyo, but today I finally went to the museum about the Shitamachi in Ueno Park.

Shitamachi means "lower city" and refers to the original working-class quarters of the city, into which the people were squeezed in what was then the world's greatest population density, during the Edo period. It's opposed to the Yamanote, the mountain area, the high-class part of Tokyo where the shogun and the other upper classes lived.

Amid the glitzy high-tech building of Tokyo, something of the Shitamachi feeling survives in the areas around Ueno and Asakusa as well as in other less-developed areas of the city. Not much of the actual Shitamachi is really around anymore. As with most Japanese cities, what wasn't ravaged by the terrible fires that razed neighbourhoods over and over, was destroyed in the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. And what survived that was flattened during the three days of incendiary bombing in 1945 that are estimated to have killed 100,000 people in Tokyo alone.

So the Shitamachi museum was created to show what old Edo and Tokyo were like for the common people, since so little is left from that time. It's a small museum, and the upper floor exhibit has little information in English, though it's still fun to see the pictures of the popular actors and singers, and to play with the wooden toys from the period which you are allowed to touch. Everything in the museum was donated by local residents.

But what makes the museum really worth visiting is the first floor, which holds wooden buildings that were moved to the museum and carefully restored, fitted out in the style of the 1920s before the great earthquake, when most homes in the area resembled them. You can enter the buildings (taking off your shoes of course!), walk on the tatami floors, and touch anything in the rooms. There are English speaking guides willing (and eager) to walk you through and explain the details of what you find.

The first house is that of a merchant, a relatively wealthy resident. In this case he was a maker of hanao, the cloth straps that transform a piece of wood into a geta, or traditional Japanese slipper. The wooden part would be made somewhere else, with this kind of specialisation very typical for Japanese craftspeople. We could see the area where he sat working, the workshop beside it, and the front area where customers were received. No space was wasted even in the richer house - the steep stairs hid sliding door cupboards to use all possible storage space. The house also had a wooden basket suspended from poles. In case of fire, the few valuables would be tossed into it and it could then be easily carried by the fleeing residents...such was the regular occurrence of this threat.

Beside this was a tenement house area - well and clothes washing area shared for the tenement, and then the individual wooden homes. One small place had a tiny candy shop built into it, which would be a gathering place for neighbourhood children home from school. Another was a workshop where an artisan made copper kettles. Many of the people in tenement houses worked in the nearby merchant's workshops, but getting by was hard and so there were also lots of side businesses like the candy shop, often run by grannies to make ends meet. This is the best kind of museum since it is so easy to imagine real life for real people when inside it - and being able to touch their actual possessions made it all the more immediate.

But while most of the wooden homes are gone, you can still tell the Shitamachi from the Yamanote. One small wooden house squeezed between large concrete buildings still holds a workshop where day in and day out, a man sits painting chochin, the red or white lanterns that hang outside restaurants to advertise their specialisation. And the area is also home to most of Tokyo's estimated 30,000 homeless, mostly middle-aged men who usually disappear during the day and then emerge at night to rebuild their cardboard box homes in the covered shopping arcades. My first night in Tokyo I wandered just south of my hostel into one such, where everyone was just finding their spot for the night. I felt like I should leave right away - not for my safety, but because it felt like walking uninvited right into someone's living room.

Today in the rain there were many more of them sheltering in the areas around the station, and though they were ignored by passersby, at least they weren't being hassled. Ueno Park contains an actual tent city, with ropes and tarps separating homes, and lots of washing hanging up to dry. I saw one man last night in the downtown area near the government buildings, lying on a concrete slab and doing Sudoku, looking quite as if he were in his bedroom.

Another Shitamachi touch is the conversation the hotel manager is having right now with another guest, about how you have to be careful in these budget hostels (many older Japanese men seem to live here; at least one has been staying here for 5 years!). This one is ok, but at many of the others you have people starting fights, passing out from drink in the hallways...he also touched on his past as a gangster in LA. Shitamachi with a vengeance!

However I feel perfectly safe here, and indeed my major interaction with the long-term Japanese residents has been saying good morning and good night. Yesterday as I sat here typing, one of the older permanents guests walked by and randomly handed me a fruit cup! It may not live up to the cliches about Tokyo, but Taito-ku is a good place to be.

Photo: decaying lotuses in Ueno Park lake.

Mikuji Number 29: Good Fortune

This is my Shinto fortune, which I drew today:

You have been living in obscurity like bog-wood, and have been suffering from many difficulties, by this time. Hereafter you will be in improvement of your fortune, and will be getting better in your life, in accordance with your time and place. Believe in God and Buddha.

Your illness can be cured. In case you are poor, it will be cured soon. When you are superior, it will take long time to.

It's hard to get arrangement of marriage. Try it at slow pace.

Every happy affair, such as building or moving house, will go well.

Good chance for having business, both in selling and buying.

Lost article can be found.

You will win in dispute, but you should treat your opponent kindly.

The person you wait for will come.

"The sky's been covered with cloud of grief for long time. But I feel very happy this morning, that it's turned into clear and we are now in joyful shine of the rising sun."

I got this fortune, the number written on a stick which I shook from an old wooden box, at the Shitamachi Museum in Ueno Park, Tokyo.

In Memoriam

Hoy pienso en ti, querida tia.

Apo logie s

For the weird spacing. I get it to look all pretty in Preview and then the width changes and the text and photos display weirdly. Hopefully I'll figure it out by the end of the trip.

Crossing the street at Shibuya Station

A crazy flow of posts these days, in achronological spirit. Catching up on a few weeks' worth of photos.

To go with the crazy flow, the required photo of the famous crossing at Shibuya Station in Tokyo.

First, a red light, an empty street. Trains come and go, cars zoom past, and the masses build.

And then, the lights change.

And all of a sudden, people are everywhere, crossing right through the middle of the street. People and people in a neverending flow, then suddenly yellow, the last few stragglers dashing across, and then emptiness again. Over and over again against a dark sky and towers of neon light.

Also seen in Harajuku

Koi in a tucked-away park near the craziness of Takeshita-dori.

Teatime on the farm

Pieces of Fukushima apple, and local black sticky rice cake with little gems of sweet potato hidden in it, covered in flakes of coconut. Served with roasted green tea (bancha) and best enjoyed on a tatami mat.

108

Is the number of sins in Buddhism. It's also the number of active volcanoes in Japan.

The most active is Sakurajima, on its eponymous island across the bay from Kagoshima City. It's so active (with over 450 eruptions so far this year) that people's cars and balconies are covered in an ever-renewed layer of ash.

Sakurajima obligingly erupted in this huge cloud of ash just as we were poised here to take a picture. No lava - just ash. The last lava flow was decades ago. And the major eruption before that (in the Taisho Era, 1915) was so huge that it sent ash all the way to the Kamchatka Peninsula in Siberia!

Either way it's an impressive volcano. After taking this photo, we scurried away to the shelter of a soba restaurant to let the ash settle a little before taking the ferry back to the city. The volcanic soils nourish some especially excellent fruits and vegetables, apparently. Sakurajima is famous for tiny tiny mikans that only grow on the island, as well as enormous round daikon radishes that can be purchased in many, varied, kawaii forms.

Our lunch was delicious - cold hand-cut soba with a dipping sauce, tsukemono of the famous island daikon, and including a faintly green jelly for dessert that they told us was almond - but we are pretty sure was actually daikon!