I visited Tokyo and Kyoto for ten days during the "golden week", a unique week during the year when the Japanese enjoy numerous days off. This page gathers some pictures and thoughts gathered during my trip.
Before going further, I must extend a very special thanks to Mami, who organized this trip for me and endured my countless questions on her language in general and Kanji in particular. Thank you so much, Mami, I owe you memories, the most precious gift.
Monday at 5am, we enter the metro, change at Shinjuku station and board the Shinkansen bound to Kyoto. Three hours total and peak speeds of 400 km/h (not the fastest line, the record is 443 km/h). We reach Kyoto station at 10 o'clock, have our bags sent to our Ryokan and start visiting. The schedule is busy, but in the two days we spent in Kyoto, we managed to visit the following places:
That's a lot of walking, even for a seasoned golfer (although I was also fighting a nasty virus during the whole week, which didn't help keep my energy at its usual level). What's amazing about Kyoto is that all the temples and castles are scattered within the city. No need to take a lengthy trip, all you need is a bus map and some patience (or some knowledge in Hiragana) in order to find your way. Good ears help too, as the destinations are usually announced on the buses.
We spent two nights in a Ryokan, which is a traditional Japanese hotel. This part of the trip in itself was a wonderful and enlightening experience, and I recommend it to anyone interested in discovering more about the Japanese culture (take note of the warnings I put in the link, though).
Tuesday night, we took the Shinkansen back to Tokyo and we stopped in Atami, a little sea resort one hour from Tokyo which has the particularity of having a lot of hot springs ("onsen"). Consequently, most of the hotels and ryokans feature public baths tapping directly in these hot springs.
Tokyo features a lot of very different neighborhoods, all with their unique features. Since we had had our share of temples and castles in Kyoto, we focused more on idle walking during our stay there, in an effort to "take in" the buzzing and never-resting atmosphere of the capital. We took a stroll in
On Friday night, I had the rare privilege to attend Kabuki. It's a very old Japanese play that Japanese connoisseurs love (and that most Japanese are absolutely not interested in, as I found out). For historic reasons, only male actors are allowed on stage, which forces some of them to specialize in female (onnagata) and young kid roles. Kabuki's are extremely long (4-5 hours is pretty common) and often feature several sections. The crowd also participates in the play by shouting the names of the actors (or the house they belong to) to encourage them, or simply to express their satisfaction.
Kabukis are usually very slow in the development of the plot and sometimes (but not necessarily) feature dances and songs. We were given earphones that explained what was going on on stage as the events unrolled. The plays are usually spoken in old Japanese and the plots are often very intricate, which explains why quite a few of the Japanese themselves were also wearing these earphones (although the explanations were most likely more detailed than the ones we had in English).
The play we attended struck me as reasonably modern: a local detective decides to investigate a mysterious case of ghosts appearing in a little village. Despite all our efforts, we still missed out on some of the elements of the plot, even though these were explained in clear terms by the main protagonist at the end of the show.
I can't wrap up this summary without sharing some thoughts that I had as I was visiting this country that I had been wanted to discover for such a long time (not only because I studied Japanese).
I remember that my first contact, as the train approached Tokyo, was that the outskirts look a lot like Paris. Europeans won't be extremely surprised by the difference, although Americans certainly will. However, the resemblance stops there. As soon as you get off the train, you are immediately struck by the density of the crowd and the intense and vibrant atmosphere that permeates everything. We got off the train at Shinjuku, which might also explain this unmistakable feeling (Shinjuku is the most modern neighborhood of Tokyo, where all the new high-tech shops and buildings are located).
If you think that housing in San Francisco is expensive, you need to experiment Tokyo. The prices have flared up there, and vacancy is still very rare. Once you're in the City, getting by is made easy by the very dense Subway network, coupled by JR (Japan Railway) and also the very convenient Yamanote, a special train that circles Tokyo. Pretty much all the names I have come across are written in Kanji, spelled in both Hiragana and English (I should say Westerner), which makes it relatively easy to find your destinations. I found that my knowledge of Hiragana did help me a little to understand where we were going, even though Mami was pretty much making the calls every time.
One word of warning for international travelers: the banking system of Japan is very much behind, in the sense that your international credit cards will be very hard to use. Don't even think of using it in a restaurant. ATM's that accept them can only be found in very touristy places (or near the main train stations) and expect the instructions and transactions to be painful and hard to follow. I did make a purchase of a digital camera in Shinjuku with my American card, and it took twenty minutes of waiting to get confirmation, including a conversation I had to have over the phone with the bank where they asked me my address and even my social security number (you have been warned, you need to have it with you).
The best advice I can give you is to withdraw a lot of cash on your first day (or even better: before leaving). Life is very expensive in Tokyo and it's pretty usual for Japanese to go out with 50,000 yens in their pockets for a night out (about $400. Yes, even Japanese credit cards are not very much used there).
Impossible to talk about Japan without mentioning the wireless madness. As Mami pointed out to me the first day, "our phones are no longer getting smaller, it's the contrary now". And she's very right. They are not getting extremely bulky either, but they do have a reasonable size. The main reason is that they all sport a crispy clear and quite wide color screen which makes them very close second to our PDA's. The Japanese use their wireless phones a lot. In the metro, of course, but also everywhere. They write emails and extensively use CC's to organize their lives and keep in touch with each other, which is a sad reminder about how America lags behind (hardly anyone even knows what SMS is in San Francisco).
The most remarkable thing is that Japanese are quite proficient at writing Japanese on the keypad. The typical method of input is Hiragana coupled with the completion mechanism that we know and hate here. While the speed doesn't come close to an English email (or even a Japanese message spelled in Romaji and then completed in Hiragana and then Kanji, as I do with IME on Windows), they do send "real" emails with these keypads. iMode (the protocol used in Japan) limits those to 5,000 characters, but it's very sufficient for the basic needs.
While I'm on the topic of the language... I arrived in Tokyo with a few months worth of Japanese studying (although I hadn't practiced for a few months) and a very rudimentary knowledge of Hiragana. By the time the week ended, I had become pretty much fluent in reading Hiragana. I'm not saying I was reading fast, mind you (more like a 1st grade), but I knew close to a 100% of the Hiragana alphabet. It's amazing what immersion will do to you. I basically spent every minute studying signs, posters, books, magazines, trying to memorize the symbols. I was carrying with me a chart of the alphabet for a quick look up when a sign wouldn't sink in.
That's the good news. The bad news is that as my Hiragana was progressing, I also received a new insight as to how complex Kanji was. I did start to learn (and successfully recognize) some Kanji characters, but my success was short-lived: I was then hit fully in the face by Kunyomi and Onyomi. I won't go into details, since this will only interest people fascinated by Japanese, but suffice to say that knowing a Kanji character is not enough to know how to pronounce it, as every Kanji character has two possible pronunciations, and only memorizing which one is which will work.
The hard-learned lesson for me was the following: if you are studying Japanese, postpone reading and writing as much as you can. Learn how to speak and how to understand, or reading will be an exercise in frustration and humility. After all, what's the point of being able to put syllables together if you can't identify the words they form? Besides, if you know how to speak, you can ask around and the need to read is lessened by that much. And finally, when you are reaching a decent level at speaking and understanding, being able to read will be an incredible reward. Trust me.
To end this summary on a funny note, I have to mention Engrish. There is an ongoing joke about Japanese having a hard time with English, and you do get to see a lot of broken English in Japan. The name itself, Engrish, is a joke made on the fact that Japanese doesn't have the sounds "l" and "r" (the right sound is something in-between). It seems very fashionable to wear t-shirts and sweaters sporting English (or other languages) sentences. The funny part is that very often, there is a blatant mistake in the slogan, sometimes written in big bold letters. A quick example would be "United we stands". Here are two other occurrences that totally cracked us up:
Cedric Beust, May 10th, 2002
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