Yes, I know there should be pictures on this page. They're coming soon...
In 1997, I travelled to China and Japan. The impetous of the trip was to see the Yangtze River Three Gorges in China before the Chinese government destroyed it by damming up the river. Seeing China was, um, eye opening -- but that's another story. I travelled with a couple of friends, but spent an extra week in Japan on my own going to areas that are little seen by foreigners. It's nice to travel with others, but it was so much fun being by myself. This travelogue only discusses where I went to when I was on my own in that final week.
Except for one place.
If you ever end up in Matsumoto, Japan, you should make every effort to see The Utsukushi-Ga-Hara Open-Air Museum. This museum has a whole bunch of modern art sculptures scattered on the top of a mountain. With some exceptions, I've never been a big fan of most modern art I've seen. (At MIT outside of our dorm, for example, we had a particularly hideous modern "art" scrap-metal sculpture that we enhanced in the winter by burying it in snow when possible.) However, these sculptures were different: they were actually very interesting and well done. The best of them took advantage of the setting by changing with the perspective of the viewer, interacting with the wind, and/or changing the way they looked depending on the angle of the sun and the shadows. My favorite was a piece that, although it didn't look like it, had various geometric shapes designed to create different sounds -- some musical, some ghostly wind-like sounds straight out of Myst -- depending on the direction and strength of the wind.
The only problems with the museum are that it's hard to get to and it's expensive. It takes about an hour's drive by car to get from downtown Matsumoto to the museum and, so far as I know, there's no public transportation. Plus, if you drive, you have to pay $20 in tolls to get up and down the mountain, and admission is $12. If you don't drive, you should be able to hook up with a Japanese tour bus for a little more money (a language barrier shouldn't matter for viewing an art museum and hotel employees should know how to get a tour). It's well worth the cost, and if you end up in Matsumoto (in the Japan Alps, near Nagano where the 1998 Winter Olympics were held), and it's not the dead of winter when the roads are impassible up there, you should try to see it. It's easily the most interesting place I have been to in Japan.
Anyway, the first place I went to was Kanazawa, on the west coast of Japan. There, I went straight to Kanazawa Castle, which I discovered was a little different than most castles in Japan. To get to the castle, you walk through one of the supposedly 3 best gardens in Japan (whose tranquility, some might say, is marginally lost by the many bullhorn-touting Japanese tour guides describing the beauty of the garden), over a nice bridge, and through a perfectly preserved gate. There you view a beautiful field and some trees -- but no castle.
Most castles in Japan have been destroyed at least once by war, but not this one. The rulers designed the city with a number of precautions to slow down the invaders; the most interesting being the setup for the three entrances into the city. One entrance went through a Buddhist temple complex, and the other two went through entertainment districts that provided, um, amorous escapades. Though these tactics were successful, the castle still ended up being destroyed 7 times by fire! I guess after the 7th time, they decided someone up there really didn't want a castle in Kanazawa. Instead, English and Japanese signs throughout the grounds helpfully tell you the sites where the buildings used to be. It's a little strange.
Nearby, a more interesting place that still exists is officially called Myoryu Temple, but everyone calls it Ninja Temple. This ordinary-looking temple is actually filled with all sorts of hidden staircases, trap doors, hidden floors, secret tunnels, and various other tricks that have resulted in an amazingly intricate layout. So far as I know, it's the only temple that's so popular, you need to make an advance reservation to get in. (But I figured that if I just showed up alone late in the afternoon, they'd let me slip into one of the groups, which they did.) The tour, conducted in Japanese, took us up and down and around the temple, showing us a lot of the hidden items. It was truly bizarre: Mrs. Winchester could have learned some things from the architect of this place. Apparently, the whole temple was designed to slow down attackers until the temple lord could escape. The only thing I couldn't figure out was why anyone would want to attack a temple in the first place, but fortunately my Japanese wasn't good enough to ask such impertinent questions.
In Kobe, I found a really interesting museum quite by accident; it's not even listed in my guidebook, and even the Japanese tourist information barely mentions it. Above Kobe sits Mt. Rokko, which I went to because it was the highest peak, and also there was a mountain garden I wanted to visit (late fall, being, of course, the perfect time to look at gardens, especially in the mountains). At the garden, the entrance person explained that I could get a special discount dual ticket to also see an adjacent nondescript museum called "The Hall of Halls" (maybe the name makes more sense in Japanese?). Always willing to save money on things I know nothing about, I said sure.
It turned out The Hall of Halls was an old music-playing-devices museum. They had all these self-playing American and European music devices from the turn of the century. Most were fairly elaborate and had a number of instruments in them. Some were fairly odd, such as a turn-of-the-century pre-record-playing jukebox. Every hour, a guide would give a different half-hour lecture about some of the devices and play them. (The lectures were in Japanese, which was a little surreal given the subject matter. Even if you don't know Japanese, though, it seemed like you could get mostly the equivalent of what she was saying by looking at the devices and reading the little English description cards next to them.) I got picked to play a device so old, it used thick punched paper cards taped together as the storage medium, similar to the designs for the original mechanical sewing machines of the early 1800's. (I think I was picked to play it because I stood out; being the only gaijin in a group has advantages at times.) It used no electricity; you turned a crank in the back to feed the cards through and play the instruments. The best device was an American combination player piano/3 player violins, which could also be played as a normal piano, built in 1910. (I never knew there even were any player violins.) The music from the combination sounded surprisingly rich and reminded me of old movies.
Their gift shop was fun, too. You could buy all sorts of oddities, like a little Let It Be music box. They also had an It's a Small World After All music box, but I couldn't think of anyone I hated enough to buy it for.
Next I went to Nikko, which is a Japanese resort town. If you want to see the unspoiled Japanese wilderness, this is the place to go. It's not even that expensive: I only paid $40/night for a Japanese-style room in a Ryokanette. They have lots of gondolas, elevators, and buses that will take you all over to the closer natural points of interest (including a building with the original statue of the three monkeys closing their eyes, ears, and mouth). Although I spent some time seeing the easily accessible places, I decided it might be more interesting to hike up to the highest peak I could find near public transportation, Mt. Nantai, which also had a shrine and a temple on top. I was curious about what the shrine and temple would look like way up there.
The hike was very interesting, but not necessarily in the way I was expecting: I learned a lot about Japanese mountain-trail-building attitudes. First, unlike in China, Japanese trail builders seemed to understand the concept of switchbacks. But they also seemed to resent them. To make up for having to deign to put such in for wimps like me, they compensated by adding as many obstacles as possible. At the bottom, the trail had big steps, which would have been just right for any 12-foot-tall hikers. Later, they decided tangled tree roots, or boulders strewn across the path might be a good idea. I believe they were happiest, though, further on when they could combine the different obstacles. In addition, unlike in the US, where trail and caving painted arrows typically point towards safety, in Japan, trail arrows are painted pointing up, helping direct the hikers further to their doom. However, eventually even the combination obstacles began to wane, and instead the trail builders decided to combine the best of the Japanese and Chinese elements of trail building. Much of the 2nd half of the "trail" went straight up very steeply through nearly impassible fields of boulders. Arrows scattered around this part indicated, I presume, where a trail would be built some day. The thin air, cold, snow, and wind further added to the effect I believe the trail builders -- sorry, I mean, "the arrow painters" -- were trying to achieve. Despite these and other obstacles in the gauntlet, I eventually made it to the top, and snapped some great pictures of the closed doors to the shrine and temple (which were, quite sensibly, closed for the winter). But the view was spectacular, and some outdoor toriis and small sculptures were very pretty against the majestic backdrop.
By the way, In Japan, tourists now get to experiment with different types of film, instead of using color all the time as in the US. I found, for example, places that were selling sepia film in disposable cameras, which I thought would be really neat to try out. Of course rather than using the film in, say, Kyoto -- where sepia pictures of all the old historic buildings might actually look cool -- I only found out about the film shortly before going to Nikko and used it there. Thus, I was able to capture all the wonderful fall colors in every shade of brown. I can't wait to see how the pictures turned out.
In Tokyo, I decided to see the movie Mononoke Hime (Ghost Princess), a Hayao Miyazaki film, which he said would be his last one at the time. I figured it could have been my last chance to see one of his films on the big screen. (For those of you who don't know, Hayao Miyazaki is one of the top directors in Japan. All of his films have been mega-hits in Japan. They're typically children's films that can be appreciated by some adults -- like recent Disney animated films -- but, even allowing for cultural differences, this latest one seemed intended for a significantly older minimum-aged audience. Disney has finally been releasing his films in North America, starting with my favorite, Kiki's Delivery Service, and has since released Mononoke Hime.) Anyway, this film wasn't one of his best, but I'm glad I saw it.
And for those of you who complain about what you have to put up with in US movie theatres, it could be a lot worse. In Japan, it costs $15 to see a movie, and you have to suffer through about a dozen ads -- I'm not exaggerating -- before you see the trailers and the movie.
A little south of Tokyo, I also saw a nice cactus park that had over five thousand species! (None of which I can grow in my house, sigh.) Some of the species were ones I had never seen before, such as a very long hairy cactus, that grew snake-like on the ground, and air cactus (well, succulents anyway) from South America that grew in tree; they looked a lot like Christmas cactus. The gift shop was cute, too: they handed out chop sticks so you could pick out your cactus without fear of getting pricked.
My last adventure was on the plane trip home. Shortly after takeoff, we encountered turbulence: plenty of it that went on and on and on. We were shoved in all directions as the plane suddenly veered sharply to the left, right, up -- and down. Especially down. A secured drink cart near me fell over at one point, and stayed over for quite a while until there was a brief lull that allowed the flight attendants to quickly get up and set it right. As I sat contemplating the relative safety I could have had if I had only gone on a Chinese propeller plane, the pilot came over the intercom and assured us that, really, this turbulence wasn't all that dangerous. That's when I knew it was time to panic. However, 2 1/2 hours later, long after I had become a deeply spiritual person, the turbulence let up. I landed safely, and can greet you with my humble presence once again.
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