Language Lessons

The title of this blog was chosen for a very specific reason...because you cannot be prepared for a trip to Japan. Of course, you cover your bases, do your homework and take an open mind with you, which are the basic tools for getting by in any new place, but it is such an inherently different culture that you will very quickly find yourself awash in new, unique ways of going about your day. If you have the right mindset, you go with the flow, learn the basics and how to float on the tide of "different-ness" around you, as well as trying to pick out areas that are problematic and how to work around those issues. When I am actually at a place, this tends to work pretty well, but the lead up to going somewhere usually leaves me stressed and frazzled. I worry that I haven't done enough reading; that I won't remember where that vital piece of information I'll surely need is located; that I won't be able to communicate my desire for the basic things I need to survive in a foreign land...like food and beer. This last issue had me particularly in a twist before this trip (the communication part, not the food and beer bit). Most of the places I've been recently have been Spanish speaking, which I'm by no means fluent in, but have a workmanlike, useable grasp of. Japan, as you may be aware, is NOT a Spanish speaking nation. I therefore dove into the language with a lustful appetite to learn something new, though fueled by a terror that I would end up eating at a McDonald's for lack of ability to ask where a conveyor belt sushi joint was located. I purchased many books, and in the end at departure day had a mighty command of about 300 words and a basic knowledge of grammar to put them all together.

Holly was given the task of learning a bit of the written language. She shares none of my interest of stressing about this sort of thing. She memorized nary a character. In the end our language abilities were about as useful. I'm not sure who wrote the books I used. Perhaps I should have splurged and seen if Rosetta Stone was worth the $476,788 for a masterful grasp of the language. Who knows. I DO know that on top of having learned I was right in not thinking it would be important to know how to say "this computer is new" I have also learned that the authors of the books in my possession have never bothered to check if anyone will understand you if you use the Japanese they are teaching you. They won't. Instead, you'll fish about in your newly acquired vocabulary forgetting the actual word you need, select the nicest, simplest words you can muster, combine them with your most arrow straight pointing finger, mix this in with any English the person you are talking to may know, use sumimasen and hai a lot, and get by just fine. At one point we were talking to the owner of the place we were staying in Kyoto and I noted that it seemed you could get by in Japan with just the words hai and sumimasen, he replied if I add in gomen nasai I was probably right. I learned pretty quickly my attempt at acquiring the bare minimum of Japanese was rubbish, on the first day, in fact. I also quickly realized that we would be just fine (although I did continue to have my moments of wild eyed "Hunh?"). This was mostly proven by the fact that, almost by accident, but mainly because the Japanese are helpful to a fault and their trains are un-friggen believably good, we had flown in, taken a monorail to the Yamanote, gotten to Tokyo Station, gotten our JR passes, gotten on a Shinkansen, arrived at Odawara, gotten our Hakone Freepasses, taken a train from Odawara to Hakone-yumoto, changed trains to a switchback narrow guage train and arrived at the town we'd be staying at that night by 10am. We had been in the country for 4 hours. We couldn't check in til 3. We stared at each other for a bit. Luckily, we had those previusly mentioned Freepasses. A rail employee had spotted this big, goofy American and his smaller spouse the minute we walked up to the ticket machines in Odawara and asked if we wanted one. We had read about them, but honestly I wasn't sure we'd really have the time to get the value out of them. I had looked at Holly and she said to just go ahead and get them. Now, sitting in Miyanoshita station, with the better part of the day to kill, I'm glad I did. They are, to put it simply, excellent value.

Even if you're just in Tokyo and looking to get out for a day or overnight trip, they're almost like admission to the huge park that is the area to the south of Mt. Fuji.

There's rides, scenery, lakeside towns that look like Alpine Italian villages(?), boats done up to look like pirate ships(??), excellent open air modern sculpture museums (including a piece by my personal favorite, Arnoldo Pomodoro), and with the Freepass you can roam about the area at your whim on any of the myriad forms of transportation (short of camels...but we may just have not seen the camels) bearing the fantastic Hakone Freepass logo (I now have the image of a camel with the Freepass logo on its butt, hee).

So with all the time in the world, we dumped our bags in a coin locker, jumped back on the train and headed up the line to get a view of Mt. Fuji.
The narrow guage switchback train ended at an incline railway, where we confused a poor cook by trying to order lunch when he wasn't quite open, it being only 10:30 and us not realizing it. So we jumped on the incline which took you to a cable-car

Which supposedly took you to a spot with good views of the volcano. As it happens, we got good views of diddly-jack. August is apparently not prime Fuji viewing season, so we got a fantastic view of clouds and a nice humid, tropical haze...no prize for guessing wether I've got a pic of that to post. I do, I'm not posting it. Instead, at the terminus we observed the odd collection of sights on and around Lake Ashi,

And then decided to head back down

Back in Miyanoshita, it actually was lunch time, so we popped into a place by the station for our first real meal in country, which set the pace for the rest of the trip by being friggen delicious, not that you'd get that idea from this pic where I'm showing Holly how to be a classy guest in a foreign land...but it really was

All this to and fro and eating had managed to get us to nearly 2, so we grabbed the bags and headed to the hotel, where our room wasn't ready, but we got to sit in the nice conditioned air waiting to take the private incline train down to where we were to stay that night, ryokan Taiseikan.
Which moves nicely to my next rave, ryokan. They are fantastic. Taken care of by your own maid, served ridiculous quantities of food, and topped off with a bath in a pool filled with natural hot spring water while fireworks go off from the mountain above. It was so relaxing I told them so, I actually remembered the words for "it was relaxing", I was so proud of myself.

The above pic is just one course of our dinner. It was, in fact, so many different little dishes we began to wonder if it ever actually had an end, or if they just kept bringing courses until you specifically told them to stop...or they ran out of food. Breakfast was equally as overblown an affair. Delicious.
I also had to take the obligatory pic of the high tech toilet of which the Japanese are so fond. Mild noises of panic and laughter later informed that Holly had gotten adventurous with the buttons.

Arrival

Japan is a fascinating place. I had thought so for years, but in an abstract sort of way. To be honest, I never really thought I would get to Japan. It always seemed too far away and too expensive to seriously plan visiting. However, life is a funny thing. You get older, get a job, get married and suddenly you find yourself actually buying tickets and planning to go somewhere that had for so long seemed so distant. Now, I'm a pretty nerdy dude, so I had been reading about Japan since grade school. Mostly this stemmed from a typical young boy's interest in World War 2, abetted by memories of strange cartoons like Star Blazers and Battle of Planets, which I later learned were different from American cartoons for a good reason. From a very early age the country was part of my conscious, but again, in a fairly distant and abstract way.
   Of course, growing up in the eighties, Japan as an economic force was an omnipresent theme. The fear of an ascendant Asian Tiger buying up all of an America that was in solid stagnation was as common as the present fears aimed at China, and stemmed from the same insecurities, hand wringing and suspicion that we see expressed today. Anti-Asian xenophobia and racism  has a long and storied history in this country, particularly against the Chinese. However, that was mainly because they were the first to come in great numbers. As the internment camps of WW2 proved, as soon as the Japanese made it into our domestic awareness, thanks to Pearl Harbor, we were quite capable of making up for lost time and able to come up with something equally as insidious as the Chinese experience at Angel Island. Post war, insofar as Japan entered anyone's thinking at all, being so far away from the average American in every sense, they seem to have been put in a different category than, say, a resurgent Germany after the Second World War. At best, Japan was no more than just a backdrop, a pop culture shorthand for exotic or alien. From "Walk, don't run" with Cary Grant; a Peter Sellers line in "Dr. Strangelove" (strange thing is they make such bloody good cameras); eighties cheese like "Black Rain", (which in tasteful fashion was the phrase used by the Japanese to describe nuclear fallout from the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, draw your own comparisons to a rockin' Micheal Douglas movie); positive horrors like "Rising Sun"; even in the present with "Lost in Translation" where the country was essentially used as a metaphor for alienation. It was basically a fantastical place where people wore funny clothes and from which radios magically appeared. They didn't look like we did, they didn't work like we did, didn't eat what we did. Personally, I found those differences exciting, and I found the history of Japan and the road to its unique place in the world fascinating. I loved reading stories about "those wacky Japanese" (most of them as true as your average urban legend over here). Loved their cartoons. Loved their gadgets (as any self respecting Walkman owning child of the eighties should). And eventually came to love their food, though I'll admit that did come a bit later.
  Over the years, I had developed a sort of informal list of places that at some point just had to be seen. Luckily, Holly, the wife and travel companion also shares a solid interest in travel. To a large degree her thinking and mine on places on "the List" are pretty much in line, which is good because she tends to prod me to get off my ass so we can actually go see some of these places rather than just talk about one day going. Japan, of course, was one of the shining jewels on that list, but was actually fairly low down because of the perceived expense and complexity of getting there. Lets face it, if you're prioritizing, being able to do an entire trip to Peru for not much more than the cost of the tickets to Japan tends to skew your thinking. Regardless, we knew that as we got older and started thinking about kids it was only going to get harder to go, so we finally moved it to the top of the list.
  We were somewhat hamstrung by Holly's work schedule, she works at a college and that tends to create a specific window on the calender. Sadly, this meant we would be going in August. Which brings me to the first bit of advice, should you ever go to Japan: do not go in August. Aside from the fact that its un-holy-hell-friggen hot and humid, it also adds a pretty hefty chunk to the cost of flying. A month later and we coulda saved a pretty good bit right up front. But, you play the cards you're dealt, etc., so come the crack of August, we were off. The flight was unlike any I'd been on, given the length and direction, it lead to an entire day of endless night. This was perhaps good, as the jet lag was almost non-existant, arriving at a vaguely morning-ish hour meant internal clocks seemed to not notice there was something completely screwy with the calender. We ended up flying into Haneda, the closer of the two airports serving Tokyo (the other being Narita, which is a bit more common to fly into, apparently), this meant it was a quick jaunt on the monorail to the Yamanote Line (the big Japan Rail ring line, very convenient) to get to Tokyo Station to activate our Japan Rail passes. As a first introduction to trains in Japan, it was impressive. I had been a bit worried about this, because though my reading had spoken of the trains and how they were wonderfully easy to deal with, it didn't make clear just how mindlessly easy they were. Aside from the signage being in Japanese and English, all the ticket machines had English instructions too. Not that you would have really needed the extra language, as the whole system seems to have been designed so someone who can't read at all can figure it out. Wonderful stuff.

Sadly, we were actually a bit screwed by the efficiency of it all. We had arrived around 5:30am, and had picked up our bags, gotten through customs, changed money, and were at Tokyo Station at 6:30am. Try that over here, I dare you. This, of course meant the JR office wasn't open, the Starbucks wasn't open, nothing was open. So with nothing to do but enjoy being in the disgusting humidity of Tokyo, we put the packs in a locker and went for a stroll.

Which was actually pretty cool for a "hey...we're in JAPAN" kinda feeling, but also kinda weird because their time of day was completely outta whack with what the sun was saying. It was before 7 but felt like 10. We were trying to decide if we should go do something to kill the time, but I wasn't sure how tricky it was going to be to get to our first night stop, so decided to head back to the station so we could get moving as soon as possible. We should have been picking up on the fact that it doesn't take long to get anywhere in Japan, but heck we didn't know that yet. By the the time we got back and got coffee, it was time to hit the JR office and 15 minutes later we were on our first Shinkansen. It was just that easy.

Two things I need to rave about at this point. First: the Japan Rail Pass.

Everything we'd read said these were the way to go if you were going to be moving around a bit. At first I thought they were a bit steep, mostly because they are good for consecutive days of travel, and I wanted us covered the entire time. But in the end, they were worth every penny and cheap as chips compared to what the cost of all our traveling woulda been without em'. On top of that, being able to walk up to any station and be waved through for a leisurely stroll to whatever train you needed or wanted to take...just too easy. Excellent value all around.
Second: the Shinkansen, ye olde bullet trains.

I don't care how much you've read or seen about these things, but the first time you see one go by, only the most train hating freak wouldn't feel their heart rate go up. They are just too damned cool. They are everything trains should be: punctual, clean, efficient, smooth, and....well....I gotta repeat myself, just too damned cool.

Its like a jet has landed two feet in front of you at the exact minute (nay...second) its supposed to, a door opens and it departs, again, precisely on time. The only thing better is being on the platform at a station waiting for yours and experiencing a through train passing by, because they don't slow for stations they don't stop at. Cool, cool, cool.
So like a rocket, we were on our way. The next stop was Odawara for our first nights stop, but Im gonna leave it here and get to that in the next post.