Hasu Transitoire (The Transient Lotus)

Today we left the hustle and bustle of Tokyo (thank god for Dan, he was ready!). Despite not being able to sit next to each other at first due to a very crowded bullet train, the ride was nice. The shinkansen here not only go extremely fast, they are so smooth. You can barely tell when you are going or stopping. It is quite lovely. Once we reached Nagano city, the home of the 1998 Winter Olympics, we grabbed some ramen from a nearby noodle shop. I enjoy listening to the slurping sounds of people in these sorts of places, but Dan still thinks it is weird. Slurping noodles and apparently eating sushi with just your hands are not considered rude here. Slurping, at least, is encouraged. My technique is not up to par in the least. It takes skill to slurp a big spoonful of noodles up the hashi (chopstick) and into the mouth. About an hour later on the local Nagano Dentetsu line we reached the small mountain town of Yamanouchi. The ride up was pretty cool, since we sat in the very bac...

We awoke early to check out of our room today, and head to Ueno, a very different area of Tokyo on the northeast end. The journey over was rough, with all of our luggage, but the air conditioning of the train saved us, and we made it to Ueno. This time, I was certain that I knew how to get to the hotel. However, we got lost again, and I asked a policeman for help and he said we were very far away. He hailed us a taxi, and I sank into the seat feeling I had failed again. The driver, though, was very confused at the map, and kept insisting that we could walk. After driving in what can’t be described as anything but a circle, we arrived at our hotel. I was not wrong! We were about one block away. The policeman was obviously not from Ueno. After dropping off our luggage, we headed to a nearby café to wait until we could actually check into our room. I ate some surprisingly delicious spaghetti carbonara, and we watched some sort of track event in Osaka, while being stared at by chain-sm...

Today we hung around Shibuya and explore the area more. We intended on shopping, but didn’t make it too far. It was very hot, and neither of us felt 100%. We did hang out in a Starbucks that overlooked the main intersection for a few minutes. It is strange to see so many American companies in Japan. McDonalds pop out of every corner, 7-11 does as well, and I have even seen Denny’s, Tully’s, and Outback Steakhouse! I had been excited to take Dan out to “shabu shabu” since I had eaten there during the conference (for details check out my previous blogs). We headed to Shinjuku, an even busier spot several train stops down from Shibuya. After strolling through the masses for a while, we settled on a restaurant overlooking all the lights on the 8 th floor of a big building. When we arrived the place was empty, and we sat in a corner overlooking everything. Not only was this place all you can eat, they also had an all you can drink package for only 1500 yen (about 12 or 13 bucks). We wa...

Today was my last day in Kyoto. I spent the morning repacking my bags, which seem to grow with every day, and headed to the train station (which is huge and amazing! shown at left) to store them and then to my meeting with the Columbia University sponsored research institute that works on women in Buddhism. The past few days I have been resting and just hanging out with Bethany, anxiously awaiting Dan’s arrival. Despite getting lost (surprise!) in the back alley streets of Kyoto, I am proud to say I made the meeting on time. Of course, I left myself plenty of time and had Bethany as a pretty reliable tour guide (she studied for one year in Kyoto at Doshisha University which was actually quite close). In fact, we had enough extra time to grab some last minute “Coolish” – a delicious frozen treat in either vanilla or green tea flavors. As chance had it, the research institute was right next to a park. We sat on the swings and raced to eat our ice cream before it melted in the intense hea...

Saturday we decided the new Executive Committee for the JASC. If I haven’t mentioned already, the whole conference is student organized and run. There is a lot of support by many people, obviously ($250,000 budget!) but really it is put together by people who participated like me the year before. It really is a great opportunity, but I personally had no interest in running, for time reasons, and because the conference will be in America next year and that wasn’t as appealing as coming to Japan! Anyway, that took up most of the morning, and then we had to go way down south to have a meeting with high school students. Most everyone was ready to be done with the conference after the final forum and all, and we had to walk through dreadful heat for a long way, but it ended up being pretty neat. (and the walk was through beautiful fields of rice - pictured at left) The school we visited was actually a Buddhist University! We were treated to a show of some Shingon priests (a very esoteric...

Most of the day today was spent preparing for our final forums in our roundtable groups. Our group is seen as the “model group” because we have it together so well. I made an awesome pamphlet that we ended up printing in color and distributing at the Forum, which was amazing and everyone loved. The highlight of August 16 was that it marked the end of the Obon Festival, which I think is the largest national festival in Japan. The festival honors the dead, and is really about gathering with your family and remembering those who have passed away. The reason it was really great to be in Kyoto is that to celebrate they burn certain Chinese characters into the surrounding mountainsides. The one I was able to view was the daimonji, which is 大 (shown on the left) and signifies large things. I wasn’t sure exactly how it would turn out, but first I saw people fanning out carrying little individual fires. They fanned out into the character shape, and then placed the fires somehow and made...

Today I went to the most beautiful place I think I have ever seen. Perhaps that statement will be revised by the end of this trip, but Kiyomizudera is simply marvelous. It is a Buddhist temple that sits in the mountainous hills just outside Kyoto. Before the temple, we visited a small shop down a windy alley to learn how to dye fabrics. For my planned "Cultural Experience" today, I chose to visit a small shop where they continue a traditional art of dyeing, called yuzen, which involves stencils and thick paint brushed onto various mediums of fabric. The shop owners and workers were very very nice and helpful! I made a nice little wall hanging. I told the man who was helping me it was “wabi sabi” which in Japanese means something along the lines of “perfect because of imperfections.” Really I just am not good at stenciling, let alone any other more difficult art form. Nonetheless, I like it and I’m proud! Okay, now onto the temple. After bearing the sticky heat in the city, ...

August 12 & 13 I now write from Kyoto. Our last day in Hiroshima was our Forum, like we have in every city we visit. This time, we had group discussions and then presented what we discussed to the entire delegation as well as the public. My group was “Seeing both sides of the atomic issue.” Our discussion was quite fruitful and interesting. We talked about how education about Hiroshima and the a-bomb differs in the U.S. and Japan. In the U.S., I talked about how Pearl Harbor is emphasized and we learn that there was no choice but to drop the bomb to end the war quickly and save lives in the long run. The Japanese actually learn mostly about the actual dropping of the bomb and of the devastation from it. They don’t really learn about Pearl Harbor. I think that both countries emphasize their victimization in war, and this is somewhat natural, owing to notions of patriotism. However, we should seek to broaden the perspective on this and all decisive moments in history so that students...

August 11, 2007 Focusing on the history of Hiroshima as the recipient of the world’s first atomic bomb was intense and rather upsetting. It is one thing to read about the incident in a history class in the US, but quite another to meet with an actual survivor and see artifacts from that fateful day and see terrible images of destruction and death. We began the morning meeting with Hiroshima area high school and college students. In smaller groups a few of each led us around the Peace Memorial Park and explained the monuments. We visited a memorial for the Korean people lost. Japan colonized Korea in 1910, and there were about 100,000 Koreans living (many not of their own will) in Hiroshima in August of 1945. We also saw the memorial for children. It is dedicated to one little girl, Sadako, who survived the blast but later died of leukemia (a common subsequent development from radiation). She believed that folding paper cranes in origami would bring blessings and sought to fold...