Big In Japan*

1 April 2010
We are, of course referring to Gregg who when travelling on the crowded metro in Tokyo stands head and shoulders above most of the Japanese people but there are other times when it becomes either painful and/or embarrassing. Like the day we were walking out of one metro station and everyone easily walked beneath a beam – except for G; even on the Shinkansen bullet trains he has to duck to get through the doors; in hotels guests are provided with slippers – he can’t even get them on to his feet, guests are also provided with beautiful soft cotton coats to wear in their rooms – the sleeves on the ones G wears end just above his elbows and as for the bottom hem – nothing is left to the imagination and no photographs will be appearing on the blog. The latest ignominy came today when we visited a temple in Kyoto (where we now are – more of this later) and visitors, as usual, are asked to remove their shoes, so as not to damage the beautiful tatami mats and lacquered floors, and are given a plastic bag in which to place their shoes, G needed two bags one for each of his – good thing he was wearing sandals and not his walking boots!
Another thing that is big in Japan is jazz; it is played almost everywhere, restaurants, bars, hotel foyers and lifts – the other day in a department store we went up to the ninth floor accompanied by Django Reinhardt and came down with Keith Jarrett and this evening in the lift we think it was Tomasz Stańko. Of course we only get tantalising snippets which can be quite frustrating, especially when G then hums the same four or five bars over and over again trying (usually without success) to identify the piece.










We travelled to Kyoto today aboard the Shinkansen bullet train, it is still exciting to be travelling so fast and so quietly but because the tracks are frequently in cuttings or tunnels the view is not as good as we had expected. However today we did get some glimpses of dramatic coastline and mountains but these were soon swallowed up my mist and rain so we saw not even a vague outline of Mount Fuji.
Kyoto and Tokyo are like two sisters, similar and yet different. Tokyo is the younger, louder and flashier of the two and she’s the one people tend to notice first but soon become enchanted by her quiet, reserved and graceful older sister, Kyoto. Tokyo is a tall glitzy metropolis while Kyoto is a lowrise deceptively modest looking city just large enough to fill the valley floor. Kyoto is the old capital city and when the Imperial court moved to Japan much of the stately buildings, merchants’ homes, innumerable temples and shrines became frozen in time. The city has tried to fit modern architecture into its orbit – not always successfully – the Kyoto Tower may have looked groovy when it first went up in 1964 but the 131metre structure, much like the word ‘groovy’, has not aged well. On the other hand Kyoto Railway Station is a very successful piece of building. At 15 storeys with somewhere approaching 20 different exits it is the largest railway station in Japan (and believe us they are BIG), it is tall but not tall enough to intrude on Kyoto’s natural cityscape. It is cavernous and yet somehow manages to house a theatre, an enormous 11-storey department store, a huge number of restaurants and cafés and the Hotel Granvia Kyoto which is where we are staying. It was in one of the cafés where we had lunch – feeling we just couldn’t face another piece of tofu, another bowlful of noodles or another grain of rice we went to a sandwich shop and had an avocado salad roll but just in case we lost the taste for Japanese food we had a ‘pudding’ of sweet red bean paste wrapped in mugwort flour dough.
The afternoon was wet and grey but we managed a shortish walk to two Buddhist temples – different sects just a few roads apart from each other and they have been having doctrinal squabbles for the last few hundred years which, evidently, still continue, The surrounding streets have more religious tat shops than even Rome and Padua put together but because it is very alien to our western eyes it seems interesting but it is all the usual superstitious stuff and nonsense of good luck charms and warding off evil – even so the incense smells heavenly (perhaps we could sell some to the Westin in Sydney).










For dinner we were back on the noodle, tofu and vegetable diet (plus sake, of course) but it still goes against our upbringing to eat noodles in the way Japanese people do – slurp, chomp, slurp, slurp chomp; we both hear a distant voice of our mothers telling us to eat our food quietly and not make a mess!