Where are you living next year? You're probably not going to see me online anytime soon, so use the link above to let me know.

So that was Golden Week. I went to go see an ENT (ear, nose, throat doctor) twice the next week. In Japanese. And I actually understood most of what he told me. My basic pattern of allergy-induced congestion is easily solvable with a little Sudafed in the US, but in Japan it’s illegal. Why? It’s too strong a stimulant. Not that Japanese coffee isn’t ten times stronger than a tiny pill of ephedrine like that. Japanese over-the-counter medicine is pretty weak. The theory is, you should go see a doctor if you need anything more.

This doctor knows how to make money. The first time I went, before Golden Week, he gave me only 10 days’ antihistamines and wouldn’t give me antibiotics. So I went back a second time with really serious symptoms, only to have him give me four days of antibiotics and ask me to come back again. Only when I returned for a third time did he give me the full week’s dose of antibiotics it actually took to get rid of whatever –itis it had become.

This wasn’t all bad, though, because with my Friday afternoon (since I have no Friday classes!) and clutching my bus map (printed entirely in kanji mind you) I went to go explore two more World Heritage shrines: Shimogawa-jinja and Kamogawa-jinja. Both are beautiful and nestled in large nature preserves; Shimogawa is at one end of a protected forest, and Kamogawa is on the side of a hill. Both are sprawling campuses with multiple buildings for ceremonies, priest business, and the like. And both had a fair number of tourists.

So we traveled to Osaka, arriving there just after midnight, and sent out search parties to find a karaoke place. We managed to find a place just as the station was getting ready to close. And over the next four hours we sang English songs, Japanese songs, even Chinese songs. I had some nasty pharyngitis, so my voice was deteriorating to the point where all I could manage was the really low part of Barbie Girl—and I must say I sounded pretty sketchy.

Later that morning when we stumbled out into the sunlight my voice was really creepy, and I was really tired. I took the first shinkansen back to Kyoto to sleep for a few hours.

With our last day we got to the station (running into even more Stanford people in the food court) and dithered on what to do for long enough we missed all the major trains to nearby sights so we decided to take a free boat ride around the city (apparently paid for by the tourist bureau). It was a nice break with a nice breeze, although the city isn�ft that impressive from the water. We had lunch on the river bank, then wandered around the area. There was a flea market along the river bank, which was interesting, but next to it was a �gstone fair�h where on an impulse you could buy a huge statue of Kannon, or a boy peeing, or a bizarre chair shaped like a naked woman. Of course these were in the hundreds to thousands of dollars, over to Bizan-san, a mountain that we took a cable car up and hiked down. Once again a beautiful view.

We ate at this nice sushi restaurant at the foot of the mountain, then faced ourselves with the eternal question: what to do with our last night of Golden Week? Of course, there�fs only one answer: all-night karaoke. It�fs cheaper than staying in a ryokan, and besides, sleep is overrated.

Today’s kanji lesson: the character shi, meaning “teacher”. It has two parts: the radical in red means “butt”—it even has two boxes to represent, well, you get the idea. The radical in blue is “cloth”. So a teacher is one who wears cloth over butt? Darned if I know, but I at least remembered that kanji on my last test.

By that point my travel group was breaking up faster than a CD in a microwave (two ,explore Kurashiki). So I abandoned ship and joined up with an ubergroup of now nine people in Takamatsu. By the time I got there it was 11 PM. The directions I’d gotten to the hostel were to look for a Daimaru department store, but I didn’t see any, and the guy working at the station had no idea where it was. (How could you work at a train station every day and not know there was a big department store right down the street?) So I called the hostel, and just barely managed to talk to the owner before my phone battery died. Another nice guy, he biked out to the station to meet me. So I spent the night there, and in the morning we headed off for Tokushima in the east.

And to think I missed out on this by only a month:
World's first megapixel phone

So we headed to Kumamoto, where we saw a beautiful park with shrines set up to model stops on one of Japan’s train lines and the impressive Kumamoto Castle. Then we wandered off the beaten path to a mountainside temple, far enough removed that we could forget we were in modern bustling Kumamoto for a while. We climbed quite a few steps, past incense burning and a multitude of gravesites, to a breathtaking view of the city.


We had time to kill at Kumamoto station and we needed someplace to sit down and plan our attack with the Lonely Planet (thank you Stewart!) so we ended up at a KFC. The Japanese seem to have a love affair with this chain because these things are everywhere. Even more of them than there are in the US. And each one has a statue of the Colonel outside—he’s bigger than Ronald McDonald here. This one even had country music playing inside. Weird.

We spent Golden Week Thursday on Mt. Aso (that’s Aso-san to you). We were really hoping to hike up but the visibility was so awful we couldn’t see ten feet in front of us. Thinking those might not be ideal hiking conditions we retreated to a hotel onsen (hot springs) nearby. Essentially it was a spa heated by Aso’s magma. It was a nice break.

Then we left the beaten path (quite literally) and took a train down to Takachiho. This sleepy little town in the mountains is known for very little but claims to have the cave where the Sun Goddess Amaterasu once holed up in to evade the other gods. The cave’s enshrined so you can’t really go up to it but it’s next to a beautiful gorge. That night at a nearby shrine we saw a traditional dance to retell the tale of Amaterasu’s hiding: the problem with her hissy fit was that if the Sun Goddess is inside a cave, there’s no sun in the world. So the gods huddled outside the cave and decided to perform what’s alternately described as an “interesting” and a “lewd” dance outside to attract her attention. She got curious, and peeked out, whereupon they stunned her with a mirror and hauled her out.

The final act in the performance was loosely based on the myth of the creation of Japan: a god and goddess make sake, get drunk, and have sex (in two positions I might add). Somehow I don’t think that’s quite how it happened, even by most Shinto accounts…but it was damn funny.


On Friday we went to Beppu and met up with another SCTI group by chance at the train station. Outside the station, this nice guy offered to take us around in his taxi van for a reasonable price. The taxi driver came with us; his is not a bad job: get paid to go sightseeing with people. He was really nice and actually gave us a few gifts on top of his services. We went to an obligatory jigoku (hell)—a pond of steaming red water, heated by the springs and colored by iron deposits. The hells are much too hot to swim in; back in the 19th century the locals used to boil Christians in them.

Then we headed to a sand bath onsen. A sand bath doesn’t intuitively sound like that great an idea but it was soo nice… After washing yourself off, wearing nothing but a “modesty towel” to cover your most private parts, you lie down on a bed of black sand heated by the onsen. The attendant ladies shovel sand on top of you until only your head’s sticking out. Then you just kind of lie there for ten minutes. Afterward, you get up, wash off all the sand, and go soak in an ordinary water bath. It was surprisingly relaxing. After that I left for Shikoku with a little bit of sand still in my hair but definitely refreshed.

Tuesday was Depressing Thoughts Day in Nagasaki. It was gray and cloudy as if to match the mood. We started off with the Peace Park, which was tranquil and beautiful in its own—statues and artwork from around the world representing peace, donated to Nagasaki, along with a huge statue and a few shrines. We stopped at a cathedral where a mass was taking place when the bomb went off; the singed rosaries are all that’s left of the congregation. Then we went to the nearby A-Bomb Museum, which was pretty melancholy. We prefer to think of an atomic bomb as a weapon of mass destruction in the abstract, rather than the gruesome details. It’s easier to think of it in terms of the instant destruction it renders than the slow radioactive poisoning that lingers as the legacy of an entire generation. The museum seemed a bit politicized as it was passing out fliers criticizing the recent US withdrawal from treaties like ABM. Curiously though, Pearl Harbor was nowhere mentioned in the museum’s WWII timelines, a somewhat glaring omission in my humble opinion (IMHO).

Outside the museum we walked over to the epicenter, the exact point above which the bomb exploded marked with a simple stone column. Apparently a good meter of soil was thrown into the air by the explosion, leaving the epicenter area flat and depressed. We followed this up by visiting a memorial to the 23 Christians who were crucified in Nagasaki back when Christianity was banned in Japan. By this point we were ready for something that didn’t involve death...

Japan just keeps getting weirder and weirder: Men in white sheets postpone end of the world to next Thursday

It’s so weird having class for more than two weeks at a time… everyone back at Stanford is fretting about midterms and I just got off our Golden Week vacation. Golden Week is three national holidays that just happen to lie close enough to each other that many people get the whole week off. So convenient…

Friday I made my first attempt to get money from the US through a so-called “international” ATM. It was a royal pain, so much so that on my fifth ATM when it finally worked I literally jumped for joy. I felt like I had just won at a slot machine. That night was our Welcome to Japan party where students from four Japanese universities converged on the Stanford Center to try and speak English, while we tried our best to speak Japanese to them. Each of these schools has either an international exchange club or an English-speaking society (though members need not really speak English). Still, there was something like a 3 to 1 ratio of Japanese to American students.

So it was no surprise when I got accosted by three Japanese students who had just barely introduced themselves when I got hit with it: “What do you think about the war in Iraq?” The others in the group whacked this guy to scold him for bringing up such a sensitive topic, but he was grinning ear to ear like he was about to meet his first right-wing war hawk. Once I made it clear I wasn’t in the “let’s bomb Iraq today” camp they all relaxed. He was wearing a t-shirt with a caricature of a woman he told me was “the Japanese Rumsfeld”. She’s part of a right-wing nationalist faction that’s arguing for Japan’s remilitarization. Rumsfeld has become somewhat of a pop icon, because his name’s so hard for Japanese to say—on TV game shows the host will spring the challenbge on one of the contestants and laugh maniacally as he stumbles through it.

Japanese game shows are unequivocally weird. Last night I was watching one called “Beauty and the Beast”, which just finds beautiful women who (in real life) have ugly boyfriends. The norm is something with a few contestants in a studio though, with an annoyingly loud host and a token gaijin. Said gaijin usually speaks fluent Japanese but utters maybe one or two lines the whole show. Don’t ask me what the point is, I think just to lend an air of sophistication to an otherwise crude show.

Saturday I went to Kobe (yes, earthquake Kobe) with people from SCTI and from Keio University in Tokyo. From the moment we got off the train and saw signs advertising “the America of Kobe,” “the Italy of Kobe,” and “the France of Kobe”. Sure enough, we climbed a hill steep enough to be Lombard Street to end up in the old gaijin houses quarter. A bunch of homes from early Dutch settlers had been preserved and turned into tourist attractions. These weren’t famous gaijin by any measure, but the novelty of seeing a 100-year-old gaijin house draws throngs of Japanese each day. Where else could you see a toilet that was once used by a real gaijin ages ago? My favorite was the description of the rooster on top of the Weathercock house: allegedly not a weathervane but there “to reinforce Christian doctrine of living in harmony with nature.” Riight…

Monday we left for Golden Week, clutching our guidebooks and our JR railpasses. We got to Nagasaki with no idea how to get to our hostel. Outside the train station, a taxi driver took pity on us and walked us to the hostel (a five minutes’ walk) for free. Then we headed off to Glover Garden—another disappointment if the magic of a Western house is lost on you. It was pretty…but the main attraction is reconstructed gaijin houses, complete with little placards (apparently the bedroom of one house doesn’t really contain a bed). The hostel was kinda nice though, as hostels go.

I'm in Kyoto now, about to go on Golden Week. (This blog won't be updated until I get back on the 10th.) I only have time for 60 more seconds of typing on this annoying Japanese keyboard... but today we're going to Kobe to run around there. Kyoto station is a huge complex--I'm on the 9th floor right now, and to get there I accidentally ended up in the backrooms of Isetan department store--a staff only area. No one really thought it that weird so I didn't realize I had done anything wrong... until I got off the elevator to a room full of boxes.;