☆ Arrival

Arrival is all bureaucracy, gathering the requisite cards and papers and chips. In a relatively abandoned hallway, while waiting for some Japan Rail (JR) pass things, I saw a vending machine for SIM cards. It asked 1,000¥ less than the desk where a human would sell you a SIM card, so we quickly checked off the "buy something unusual from a vending machine" box on the Japan Bingo card. The ATM for cash: the always-familiar 7-11 logo, which we'll see far more of. The JR pass was another counter, the subway card (Suica) another machine. All very boring, except the crowds and the desire to get out of the airport made the entire thing feel hectic, like a challenge to be surmounted. But none of these things are, especially here in the present day when there's not much concern that your usual bank cards won't work, and for that we'd already done the homework of working out which cards charge us the smallest fees when used overseas. [Bonus tip: your ATM outside the country of your bank might put up a screen stating an exchange rate and asking you if you'd like to continue. You can decline the currency conversion and the transaction will still go through. Your bank will do the currency exchange, not the ATM, and your bank will give you a far better rate than whatever some rando ATM will offer.]

The train ride was soothing. Rice paddies! On the sort of lots you'd see a house on, there they were, verdant. Much of the train's route went through cities, at street level, and we could see down narrow streets like the ones we found ourselves walking on once we got off at our stop.

There is no custom of street parking in Japan. It's a weird custom to begin with: here's public space, but go ahead and leave the largest movable object you own anywhere you want, and if somebody touches it they're the one causing problems. Try that with your couch or BBQ grill and see how quickly it disappears, and if not wait for the police tell you to move it immediately.

This has a massive effect on the streetscape. Street parking creates a barrier between pedestrians and autos, so autos always have their own space, so there are always autos on every street, driving at a rapid clip even in what would otherwise be residential spaces. Here in Japan, the streets are just wide enough for a car, but if you want to drive through you're going to have to deal with pedestrians, who will get out of the way but at their pace, which means you're going to drive through as a last resort. The auto itself has to be narrow, limiting the extent to which the obesity epidemic plaguing autos today can take hold (though we did see some puffy but narrow ones).

The city is far quieter, and despite the main streets that are the familiar urban affair, there isn't a constant white noise and attendant underlying stress. When people say they want to get away from the city, what they mean is that they want to get away from cars. They want respite from unceasing engine noise, the sense of being inside of a giant machine that one gets from being surrounded by a network of corridors dedicated to machines moving at high velocity, the need to be constantly be aware of your surroundings, because in every U.S. city the likelihood of being struck by a driver is an order of magnitude larger than the likelihood of any other crime being committed upon your person. [I only fact-checked this for the city where I live right now.] If you want that kind of respite in a Japanese city, all you have to do is walk a block away from the car-dedicated streets. Yes, I put the lack of street parking as the first impression of Japan outside of the airport, because as fun as all the other quirks relative to Western cities might be, the lack of street parking and its side-effects strikes me as having the biggest effect on day-to-day existence.

The hôtel was unremarkable. The windows don't open, they give you free scrunchies in with the free razors, there is our first electronic bidet, the bath tub is much deeper, that's about it. The view was of at least half a dozen other hôtels.

Fireworks

It was 7PM, and the fireworks were about to start. I was walking faster--who knows how long they'll last--though my cohost was keeping it chill. Our walk retraced the walk to the station, then further South past Takashimaya Times Square (no there is no Takayama Times newspaper), then tracing just outside the fence of a park. The street was dark and quiet, the sort of thing that would be characterized as dangerous if this were a movie. But here in real life, we passed by hipsters waiting in line outside of a restaurant, and boutique shops, then we heard the booms. The map said we were just short of straight line-of-sight to the National Stadium where the fireworks were going off. A couple in front of us started running, and we did quicken our pace. Around the corner, and we found our first viewing site, with a few dozen people standing on the side of the road. Despite our desire to not miss any of it, we continued under a bridge and found ourselves right by the stadium, in a plaza in front of a train station, with an appropriately larger crowd of spectators who didn't want to pay for a seat.

Our sense of urgency came from living in DC, where there are annual Independence Day fireworks, which are huge. Each burst fills a good portion of the sky, and you can all but read to by the lights of the finale. It's fifteen or twenty minutes long.

The fireworks at the National Stadium were much smaller. The web site said that the fireworks would be visible only from the stadium itself, so please do not congregate outside the stadium. Joining the crowd congregated outside, there were intervals between the bursts we saw, which implied lower-lying explosions that we couldn't see. But what we did see had a great variety of effects: clusters in rainbow colors; ones that burst, then at the end of each line of light another burst into dandelions; smiley faces; large red bursts whose embers would keep burning as they drifted to the ground. We and the rest of the crowd stood for about an hour. My cohost tells me that there were 10,000 fireworks set off, and I thought that must be a typo or their definition of "firework" differs from what what we civilians understand. But with smaller munitions, such a long display is possible. My cohost even got a little bored and said we should move on to dinner before it was over.

We started retracing our steps, though at the previous viewing spot where people were congregating, we paused and saw what turned out to be the finale. After the park, we passed through an even more pedestrian-heavy space. Shinjuku station is evidently a hot spot in Tokyo (thus the cluster of hôtels, I guess), and there were crowds all about.

Shinjuku

We passed by a curved electronic billboard showing a cat perched on a shelf. My eye was absolutely fooled. Everything the cat did, even floating in zero-G, yawning wide enough that we could see the inside of his or her mouth, was completely realistic. The cat's purpose in life was to get our attention so we'd watch the advertisements interspersed between cat clips, including one that seemed to be for Shinjuku itself, with pictures of the very corner we were standing on, cat floating in the background.

The ad for the street corner we were on featured a cartoon woman holding a to-go cup of coffee, indicating her modernity, taste, and having cash to burn. Nobody on the street actually does this. The United States had a collective trauma in November of 2001 from which it hasn't recovered, and security at airports (and increasingly train stations) is unreasonable, governments use that trauma to justify efforts (sometimes in coöperation with online advertising firms) to track every person in the country all the time, and if you're not a citizen your life is more miserable than ever. Japan has its own trauma from 1995, and the main result is that there aren't public trash cans where people could leave bombs. Got trash? Pack it out. This is an Only in Japan thing, because in most countries there'd be litter everywhere, but everybody seems to have adapted, part of which means just not buying so much disposable everything. The conbinis have trash, for all the plastic wrap you just bought.

Back to our street corner, there were pachinko parlors (roughly a mix between pinball and slot machines, see below) and a very large number of "girls bar"s, which sometimes had women holding up signs with a price, who were sometimes dressed in French maid costumes. Tomorrow, we'll see somebody who explains to us that these run a sliding scale, from having a bartendress you can talk to, to a woman who will come to your table, to anything you want above the waist only, to the world's oldest permissions. From the street and distracted by the Godzilla statue peeking out over a tall building, we were unable to distinguish.

The restaurant was lovely, with an elaborate wood-carved mural over the bar at which we sat. At each table was a tablet on which we could tap our order. It was easy to find what we wanted by the giant pictures, and guess as to the "add to order" button, but it turns out we were wrong. We found the thing that lists the account so far, and we saw that our gyōzas weren't showing up. No, you need to hit a few confirmations before the order is finally sent. We never figured it out; the waitron had to show us. "Is this what it's like to be an old person using technology?" I asked my cohost. She nodded vigorously.

The gyōzas were perfect, better than any I'd had at home, the sake all one would hope for.

On the walk back, we passed by the Nigerian touts. Avoiding them, their aggressive pitch if you start talking with them, their offers of free beer, was a piece of strong advice given by the Internet before we left. "There's no such thing as free beer." Looking up at each building, you'll see a sign indicating that there's a bar or restaurant at every floor, not just the first. The great majority are just boring old bars, but if you're escorted to a high floor by somebody with sinister intent it's that much harder to escape. We switched to Spanish as we passed by and continued to our first conbini unmolested.

I'd had high expectations of the convenience stores. A long time ago I'd visited Taiwan, where the 7-11 had an abundance of things you could make with hot water, and a hot water dispenser so you could do so. This one, a Family Mart, was far more food heavy than the usual in the USA, but wasn't otherwise remarkable. As I understand it, it's entirely reasonable to subsist off of conbini food, but being there among rows of fridge cases, I wasn't feeling it at all. We got an onigiri (rice ball wrapped in seaweed), tapped our subway card to pay, and continued walking. There's an elaborate plastic arrangement to keep the seaweed away from the rice, keeping it dry and fresh. I failed to read the manual before opening, and we fumbled with working out how to eat without chewing plastic.

The Hôtel did have a remarkable top-floor bar. We didn't order anything, but hung over the ledge observing the buildings. The taller buildings seemed interspersed among shorter, with no central-downtown focus. A great many of the buildings had sloped top floors (Mansard roofs, if you want to name them after a dead French guy). These implied to me a zoning rule about what's visible from the street, not unreasonable given how narrow the streets are. My cohost noted the lack of buildings from the era when architecture was better, because Tokyo was flattened during WWII.

Here's a jet lag tip: screw up your sleep schedule before you leave. This is especially important when you're 11 time zones away. Maybe doing so is how we survived this late, but by the time we went down from the rooftop to our room it was ten-ish and we passed out within seconds of seeing a bed.

☆ The water festival

My cohost commented that by day the area looks like a concrete jungle. Indeed, I looked up more, and saw the upper floors of these buildings built during the boring architecture period. We passed through the range of bar/restaurant/girls bars back to Shinjuku station, which merged with a mall above it. We ate at the food court. A little quieter, lower ceilings, but otherwise like one in the US, especially given that there were three Hawaiian restaurants in a row with English-language iconography (e.g., "Pacific drive-through"). The gyōzas were not much better than what I'd get out of the freezer section at a US supermarket, and we went and got a few onigiri to hold us over (we read the instructions this time).

My cohost's friend, J, met us by the cat, and led us to the subway out to the water festival. J was a flight director for a Japanese rocket company, and had lived here for a year, so made for a reliable guide.

As soon as we got off the subway we saw the crowd and the water jet. Coming closer, we saw the fireman in the shiny spherical helmet that is the choice of all manual laborers across the country. He was spraying a team of about twenty people carrying a small shrine on a bamboo platform, three meters to a side. Given the heat, the spray must have been deeply welcome, and the team lingered for a few minutes, rotating the shrine in a circle a few times under the spray. We called for the fireman to spray us, desperate for some respite, though that was obviously not a real option.

We thought we'd missed the show, but the teams carrying shrines kept coming. Each had a very similar design, but a different color scheme, and each represented another neighborhood.

An older man walking a bicycle handed us a black and white poster out of the bike basket, featuring lanterns and a lot of text, which J explained was about the local neighborhood, whose shrine was passing by now. It was awkward for me, because there was no way to reciprocate the gift, not even so much as looking at the poster he wanted us to have and understanding what it says. I nonetheless rolled it up and carried it for the rest of the day.

We watched more teams carrying more shrines past the fireman until the novelty wore off and the heat started to win. As we started walking and checking out whatever was on display, like a booth with a drummer and behind it a guy sketching it in pencil, or a shrine on a bamboo conveyance on a side street, it started raining. We went quickly from ¿How can we get respite from heat? to ¿How can we stay dry? We hit the conbini, where my cohost bought an umbrella, which I dismissed as unnecessary because we all have rain coats, and I bought a sake, because there's nothing keeping you from going to the convenience store and buying yourself a sake to walk around with.

It was terrible. Tasting notes: water, rubbing alcohol.

At the approach to the temple there was a stage on one side, and a long row of vendors, mostly food, mostly strong-smelling grills. We got strawberries in melted caramel and observed how easily the slowly hardening caramel could pull a filling. Hanging out under the umbrellas, J told us about her life here. She'd concluded that dating Japanese men was impossible, partly because of the language barrier (J had no interest in learning much Japanese), and partly because of the expectations of the passive wife who is there more to play a rôle. The companionate marriage is still not much of a thing, and men are more-or-less expected to go out to the night clubs to find female attention from somebody who isn't their wife. There was a big spender out there somewhere who kept inviting her to things and buying bottles of booze that are an order of magnitude too expensive, but who seemed to have no romantic interest.

She said that yes, she gets some funny or cold treatment because she's a gaijin (foreigner), but then it's much more tolerable than her life in the USA, where as a black woman she had to deal with the problem of helping people feel unthreatened by her, like not walking too close or carrying things at the store prominently and away from her body. Skin color is an irrelevance in Japan, she tells us, because the difference between native and gaijin is all that matters.

On the stage, the karate demonstration began with the kids, who did set patterns while exhaling an aggressive grunt at every beat, up to the grey-haired adults whose floor work was nothing but grace.

We wandered out to an Indian restaurant, which wasn't open yet, and so re-wandered to an izakaya, which had a copy of the poster we'd been carrying on the wall. J talked about space and mission control, we had a pitcher of beer, we went upstairs when the Indian restaurant opened. There, she showed us photos of her new place with the pride normally reserved for baby photos. It had a stellar balcony and a rent a fraction of what one would be paying in a U.S. city.

Some after-the-fact checking verified the overall impression that we got: land is cheaper than in the U.S. I live in a mid-sized U.S. city of 700,000 people, where 2,500 USD will get you a 35-tatami studio apartment in this neighborhood. Searching online for five minutes on English-language sites, I found 30-tatami apartments in the dead center of Tokyo, the largest city in the world, for under 2,000 USD.

Shinkansen

AKA the bullet train. I felt the same stress one feels about an airplane while trying to catch this train (German: torschlusspanik, literally "gate closing panic"), though in the end it's just another train. On the way to it, we pushed our way into a crowded bakery to pick up some train food, and fell into a little snafu because we didn't have a tray and how can you get food without a tray.

The seats are large and you barely notice the acceleration. I missed the view of Mount Fuji because when I thought to look up it was already about 20 minutes behind us. Women walked up and down with food to sell, looking incredibly professional in their businesslike but femme uniforms, offering a polite smile to all. As one passed by I noticed, on a chain protruding out from under the small of her back, a small can of mace.

☆ A walk around the neighborhood

Our lodging was deep into a residential neighborhood, and it took a bit of effort to get to the bus stop and find the thing, though the miracle of GPS was there for us. We walked a block or two from the train station, stood in the rain with no shelter, took our seats, and then the bus drove right back to its first stop: the station. But it was for the best, because the train then filled to capacity, and the luxury of a seat became evident.

The house is an unassuming suburban affair, with a carport in front. The proprietor lived on the first floor, and the top had three rooms he rented. He was one of those fussy ones who was concerned about us screwing up who knows what. Go ahead and use the pot to make ramen but you must put the ramen on this tray to take to your room.

The standard measure of room size is the tatami, which has a different exact measurement in different places, but is basically two meters by one meter. An eight tatami room is thus 16 square meters, which wouldn't be a lot with a bed on one side. Without one, it was a very comfortable size to hang out in. The futons were already laid out on the floor. We passed out quickly, only occasionally waking to realize that a typhoon was overhead. In the morning we rolled the tatami to one side and got the rain gear together for our jaunts.

By the arrangement of goods at the first shop we saw, with a central island and two aisles either side, with the islands in the center displaying goods on easels and other such nicenesses, I could tell this was a health-ish store. The language of store layout is universal. A good variety of goods, but only one or two of each on display. Many things marked vegan or otherwise indicating that they're more natural than other foods. We bought a pouch of curry for vegans.

Looking at the digital map, my cohost noticed a coffee icon, and was enthused by the thought of a twee coffee shop. We hadn't even noticed it when we passed by the first time because there were no windows, no sign, and the door was very short, an arched portal carved out of a larger door. [I don't know if it's directly relevant, but here's some trivia: the standard design of a tea house has a too-short entry, so you're forced to bow on entering.] It took no time to establish that nobody was there, because it was only about ten meters wide, four meters deep, and 2.5 meters high.

I once came across an academic article on the rise and fall of the hipster district of Changchun in Jilin, China. The café owners pushed personal expression at every opportunity. One said, "My initial goal was to find a place to put my CDs, books, and other favorite things, and a place to talk and drink with friends." Another said, "I wanted people to know that this was a coffee shop with attitude."

Perhaps this is what lower land prices gets you: it's possible for one person who wants to build a space to do so.

Returning to the coffee shop at this end of Kyoto, the decor was a mix of hipster elements like records and cassette tapes, vintage thrift store things like old tools, African masks and tchochkes, and New Mexican patterns painted on the bathroom door and adjacent wall. The proprietor did eventually return, and was as friendly as could be given the language barrier. He's college educated, and has lived here in Kyoto for fifteen years. The shop was indeed his, and clearly his labor of love. This man had opened up his head for all the world to see, and we were sitting inside of it and drinking.

I ordered the coffee and whiskey, because I could, and he put some sugar and the whiskey (the Black Label good stuff) in a copper pot with a long handle, and set it ablaze, de-boozing it. Once the alcohol taste was gone, the whiskey and coffee flavor did indeed prevail. I have trouble picturing Western places doing this, because who would burn off perfectly good booze.

With loose zoning, you have vendors on otherwise residential streets. What stood out about the gravestone vendor on the way home, among the usual granite obelisks, was the Hello Kitty tombstone, I suppose for burying a child. If you lived here, you'd see that every day on your way to the conbini.

From there we could see the driveway up to a temple, so we walked up. The temple had an archway on the approach to it, effectively its own structure, with a roof and space for displays of statues. The lintel is raised, I think because demons would trip over it. They had painted the elaborate supports under the roof with white trim, giving it a more modern look. Then you pass by the simple gravel parking lot and the vending machines, and then you're at the temple itself. It was closed, with a sign on the gate stating something about the typhoon. We admired the simple yet grand woodwork, then went around to the side, which turned out to be the cemetery.

The cemetery was of course crowded with obelisks. Maybe it's a job perk of working at the temple that this is where you'll wind up? There's enough space under some stones for a body, but not all. Around the corner from there were some more typical looking buildings, which we guessed might be residences.

Back to the important things: the next conbini. This was our first Lawson's, which stood out only in a larger booze selection, from a $3 bottle of Suntory whiskey on up to the $25 bottle of Suntory whiskey immediately adjacent to it. We got some microwaveable rice and mochi balls manufactured to look like watermelons.

On our return, we had the opportunity to make full use of the tatami room: a curry and rice meal (on a tray) seated on the tatami, with our teas, tisanes, and mochi balls manufactured to look like watermelons. All very pleasant.

Nara

By now the typhoon had made landfall. The entire way to Nara, it was raining, giving everything a slightly more surreal feel, and far less crowded streets.

If you're at the end of the train car, there's a small ledge by the last seat. The ride is smooth enough that I could put open beverages on it and not think about it.

Nara's park is famous for a few things, the most immediately obvious being the deer, which are everywhere, and at this point domesticated in the sense of knowing humans will feed them if they follow the protocol. My cohost did so, and had a lovely time doing it, and was only slightly headbutted when the deer saw her walk away with crackers still in hand.

The rain came in waves, as it does in a typhoon. We continued admiring the foliage, whose differences I'm too tree-illiterate to describe to you, until we arrived at the main temple.

There was a queue forming, we were maybe tenth in line, which we took to be a good sign about the possibility of something happening. The rule was that the lantern festival would be canceled if there was enough rain to snuff out a candle, and yes. Nonetheless, here we all were. The traffic control people were waving their wands, the barriers were up, the guy with the megaphone saying whatever it is that he was saying. My cohost divined that he was telling everybody that the gate would open in ten minutes. When it did, we entered the courtyard, didn't stop to take photos, and so were the first people to stand before the world's largest Buddha statue.

Everything about it was made to make you feel small. He was in a traditional pose, seated with one hand up and another holding a lotus. He was sitting on a giant lotus, which was itself on a pedestal large enough to hold the statue on the lotus, the gold backdrop with little sub-Buddhas floating around, the altar in front. The pedestal itself was already maybe 2.5 meters tall, meaning that you were already looking up at the Bhudda's platform. If the lotus were floating on a pond, you're underwater.

At the in-temple gift shop, my cohost bought me a blessing in a little plastic tube, to attach to motorbikes and bicycles.

We got caught in a torrent on the way home and took the bus three blocks. With no visibility the bus, at about 25\% capacity, was its own island, one engine failure away from being a dramatic bottle episode.

The neighborhood again

Next morning: still raining, which was very much preferable to a bare and relentless sun.

We started up the hill in the rain, past Hello Kitty, past the temple gates, and saw another temple (Eishoin) further up. We wandered past the gate and onto a garden by one building, where there was the smell of cooking (not sure what), indicating an occupied building. Continuing up the hill, we discovered that this temple compound was connected to the one from yesterday.

Past the drug store, where we looked for some other kind of grain alcohol, but left empty handed, up to the Koshi-Ji temple. I'm gonna be honest with you here: it's hard for me to say anything distinctive about this one. It's our third temple, but not our last, and I'm too far out of the game to understand the nuances. This one had a distinctive three-level pagoda next door, the high-rise of its time.

It connects to the next temple via "The Philosopher's path," which is a walk along the river and behind people's houses, and which seems to be one of those quotidian things tourism bureaux and city planners give a clever name for the sake of building up. Take it as a reminder that any sidewalk could be a philosopher's path if you so choose. The path passed by one or two temples we didn't stop in to, knowing they were closed and a little overwhelmed by rain, but we did stop for a break in a phone booth.

The Otoyo Jinja, along the path, was an open space with a covered stage and surrounding booths in front of three shrines. It felt a little like the sort of thing video games would be based on. Are there non-player characters in the booths? Which shrine do you walk up to? It was deserted but for one guy with a camera, who walked away shortly after we arrived. We started with the shrine on the left, nicely illuminated in the rain, with lights strung overhead. Each was themed around a different animal. If this were a video game there would be some means of picking up one item from each shrine to unlock the next gate, but we touched nothing and instead walked back to the stage, which provided a touch of cover from the rain. This lasted only a few seconds until a woman in one of the booths on the side yelled at us.

Nanzen-Ji Kiun-In is an enormous temple complex, though all I can remember about it was the aqueduct. It was built in the railroad era, circa 1890, and looked it, with high arches befitting a railroad bridge passing through the temple grounds. We hiked to the top and walked along its path. On one side was the hill it was winding around, and on the other a view of a good deal of Kyoto, a cemetery and temple rooftops in the foreground, red torii gates in the far distance. I don't recall what we discussed; I presume we philosophized.

We conclude this evening with a walk to the local supermarket. Across the street was the neighborhood shrine, replete in lanterns—I mistook it for a restaurant and my cohost made fun of me for it, though later we found restaurants that had exactly this hundred-lantern look. We played with the fountain, established that the supermarket across the street was closed and we'd have to come back, and went home.

The lantern festival that almost happened

We missed a few transport cues along the way, but eventually got to Arashiyama, where there was to be a lantern festival in the evening. One of the benefits of missing the train was that we rerouted to the streetcar. We compared it to the streetcar in Pasadena, CA, which strolls its way through residential neighborhoods at close proximity to houses. This route had a straight shot, and we were in the back, so we could admire the railway corridor through the neighborhood. Bikes were passing along every intersection after the streetcar passed through.

At the station were rows of pillars, each with a different kimono fabric pattern. This foreshadowed the bamboo forest we were on our way to, as did the tourists snapping photos every few meters. Many here were Japanese women in kimonos.

Outside the station was the first real tourist strip we had seen, with kitsch vendors selling something for every stereotype of Japanese culture. Further down, we made it to the temple where we were gong to have lunch.

Lunch was about forty bucks each, so it was going to be extravagant. Following Buddhist tradition, it would be vegan—yes, in Japan it's the vegan food that's the real high dining experience. We were seated in a room with nothing but tatami and four low tables along one side and two on the other. Then the food came, eventually nine courses, from pickled yuzu to a creamy soup I couldn't identify for you, to an eggplant turned into a perfectly salty and creamy paste, with the paste baked inside the skin of the eggplant slice, to a yuzu paste-filled dumpling which I saved for dessert. The tea was barley tea, the standard table beverage; the place from a few days ago with the mediocre gyōzas was giving away iced barley tea free with your meal, bottomless. A family of four was seated a few minutes after us in the row of four along the wall opposite ours. Having seats in a row is not conducive to conversation, and they didn't talk much during dinner, which may in centuries past have been the tradition and which is now, when everybody has a cell-phone, the norm. This was advantageous to us, because I'll be honest with ya, we weren't totally sure about how all this stuff is eaten. They started with a bit of rice, then used the rice bowl throughout the meal to catch drips. Yes, it's OK to drink from the soup bowl, which is why we didn't get spoons at first.

A colleague who had been to Japan before said that he'd done the gamut from temples to fine dining where they serve you on their knees, and the implied obsequiousness made them a little uncomfortable. Though, it turns out that if you're serving people on floor-level tables, the only way to do so is getting on your knees to set down the trays. After the family of four left, they wiped off the tables on their knees despite having nobody to bow or scrape to.

The bamboo forest was further up in the garden, and was as promised, with points in the center where it was impossible to see anything but bamboo and fellow tourists. Bamboo is a miracle tree that grows densely, and is useful for all sorts of things, like how when a telephone pole in Tokyo has a wire coming to ground, it will be protected with a bamboo sleeve. When constructing a new office tower, it's perfect for making scaffolding. At one point the dirt in the bamboo forest had been displaced and you could see that a bamboo tree's roots are thin and close to the plant. Despite this, the trees here grew to maybe ten meters in height. But once we looked further into the forest, we saw dead bamboo more-or-less covering the ground in many parts. A few trees were growing at or had slumped to an angle, adding interest to the painting of all vertical lines.

The gardens themselves were nice. We could look in on the villas, whose entrance cost extra, but were divided by the gardens only by a divider asking us to not cross over. We peered in with our monocular. Traditional Japanese architecture, like traditional Muslim architecture, is mostly about open spaces open to the breeze, where you can congregate and/or chill on the floor. As such, it's easy to look in, but there isn't necessarily a lot to see, usually just one decorated wall. From The Book of Tea by 岡倉 覚三 (Okakura Kakuzō), specifically about tea rooms, but consistent across most traditional spaces:

"The tea-room is absolutely empty, except for what may be placed there temporarily to satisfy some aesthetic mood. Some special art object is brought in for the occasion, and everything else is selected and arranged to enhance the beauty of the principal theme. One cannot listen to different pieces of music at the same time …. Thus it will be seen that the system of decoration in our tea-rooms is opposed to that which obtains in the West, where the interior of a house is often converted into a museum. … A Western interior permanently filled with a vast array of pictures, statuary, and bric-a-brac gives the impression of mere vulgar display of riches. It calls for a mighty wealth of appreciation to enjoy the constant sight of even a masterpiece, and limitless indeed must be the capacity for artistic feeling in those who can exist day after day in the midst of such confusion of color and form as is to be often seen in the homes of Europe and America."

We still had time until the lantern festival, so we walked along the water, away from town and on the other side of the bridge. Japan was built by sudden eruptions and earthquakes, and the rocks seem more jagged and steep than other places I've spent time in. The hills by the river were indeed impossibly steep, and their impossible stature was held in place by retaining wall after retaining wall. Looking uphill at a waterfall, you'd see it cascading over a long sequence of walls. This is perhaps the payoff of a temple being at the top of this hill for centuries: if you build one new retaining wall every decade, you'll have a hundred retaining walls scattered all round. We did spot a post that had as its first two characters the kanji for Kyoto, meaning that yes, your tax dollar had gone toward at least some of the mountain's infrastructure.

The Obon festival has two draws, two things set on fire: lanterns sent down the river, and five massive kanji-ish characters on five hills, also to be lit ablaze.

We knew the temple would be closed, but went anyway for the walk and the (partial) view. At the top we could see the kanji character for big (大) constructed from wood on a mountain far away, and could look up at the even higher monastery, which had kept us walking with a repeated promise of great views, on signs and even in manga format. Returning to the town was an annoyance for all the cars coming through. It's a big day for the monks, I suppose, the supplies were coming in. There were even slopes built onto the stairs to allow a car to go as far as we had been able to go, and likely farther. Nonetheless, my feelings about having to step aside for cars on the side of a cliff were as you'd expect.

It was about 6:30 when I took a position on the railing of the bridge. The river was boisterous after the typhoon, and we all wondered whether the lanterns lit along the shore would be placed into the water to drift away with the light of lost loved ones.

Cutting ahead two hours: no, they left the lanterns, hundreds of them, along the shore in a huge display, they also lit lanterns in the five kanji and shapes carved into the mountains. We could see the torii and the big character 大 from where we were standing, but there's also another big, a sailboat, and kanji for glorious dharma.

We stood for two hours as others of all nationalities crowded behind us and then eventually worked out that the lanterns would not be floating down the river, because as soon as they would be put into this fierce water they would capsize in an anticlimactic and, given that these are memorials to the recently departed, depressing and potentially traumatizing way.

The kimono forest at the train station was now lit up for night, and we were able to get in a few more photos before having to return.

Post lantern festival

Morning the next day. We got off the bus by a pedestrian arcade, which was closed, which bummed us out a little because who doesn't love pedestrian arcades. As a consolation, there are springs streaming through the town, which was a reminder that such things don't exist in the USA: they're all underground, no doubt in pipes, because water must be controlled (and real estate sold). But walking along the water was cooling and all-around pleasant.

The hôtel itself had been open for only a month, and so was super modern (and still had some fumes, I think from the carpet, that messed with my nose).

Beds, not futons, but they were on the floor of a slightly raised segment, simulating futons in a sort of way. Adjacent was an area with a low table for ground-sitting but hefty cushions made available. The other half of the room, the Western half, had a kitchen and dining room table and chairs.

OK, yes, Japanese toilets are of the highest tech. There are bidets, always electric, because water is essential for cleaning things. Some do have a button to play music or spew white noise, which you understand better when sharing an eight tatami room with another person. But I was not prepared for a toilet that senses your presence and lifts its own lid as you approach. This is how royalty live. For the dudes, there's a button that lifts the seat as well. After this, I felt like such a savage lifting my own toilet seats for the rest of the trip (and probably the rest of my life).

To pause on this for one more beat, after a toilet is flushed, there is a hose that refills the tank, inside the tank. Well, if you move that hose to above the tank and put a hole at the top for the water to fall into, and neaten it up a little, you have a small sink for hand-washing which starts as soon as you flush, and which drains into the toilet tank as always. Saves a liter of water, multiplied by a population of 125 million people.

The view from the rear was of the usual apartment buildings, though one had an observatory on its roof (though the rust on its side indicates disuse (but who knows)).

Hanamakoji street was right by us. It's where the geisha bars are. All the clubs are private, so it's not an inviting space: bars on the window, frosted glass, boring by day. The area is still a tourist favorite because the geisha at some point have to show up to work, walking down the road like the rest of us, and tourists will play paparazzi and pounce upon them to take a thousand photos.

We were supposed to meet with friends of my cohost at a restaurant they had selected for us, but logistics intervened. We decided to head to the place they recommended anyway, getting there by walking along the Kamo river, a pleasant and (post-typhoon) active river sunken down so the cars weren't as noticeable, until we found the bridge with the restaurant they had selected for us.

The theme of the place was American food. They hit it perfectly—exactly like what we'd get back home. Even the Indian curry was exactly the sort of Indian curry you'd get at a U.S. restaurant. I was a little embarrassed to be there. If you're taking the time to travel to a place to experience something different, and then eat at TGI Friday's, I am judging you. And there we were, among a fifty-fifty mix of Asians and Whites, having a sandwich.

We finally met with the friends at a confectioners' shop. It went for modern, sleek, clean, and the desserts were small and expensive. Our hosts told us about their child care arrangements, and how they've very subsidized, then you pay on a sliding scale based on income. The neighborhood shrines are also subsidized, it seems. I got an overall sense that, being that they have jobs, everything is extremely comfortable for them.

Later, we went for a walk to find an arcade whose stores were all closed earlier, but they were all closed now at end of day.

Somewhere in here, we established that everclear is illegal to sell in Japan, but the rubbing alcohol they sell at the drug store is the same (ethanol; in other parts of the world it's methanol), but may have a higher water content.

Just outside the mouth of the arcade, though, we saw a place advertising 10,000 ¥ for a kimono. That's cheap regardless, even if the thing is used. Over and over we saw tourist places that would rent you a kimono for a few hours for 3,000 ¥. A tea house which will appear below would give you a little kimono wearing lesson for 3k, and here we were with an older lady and her store, doing it for cheap. The first floor was an extension and revelation of the proprietress's brain, laid open for us to wander in. It was mostly amusing junk; I found a Yamaha harmonica probably made some time in the 1900s.

She quickly brought us to the top floor, which meant that buying something was inevitable. The top floor had one side with a manikin and open space, she said for kimono-wearing lessons. The remainder was tables covered in kimonos, and racks of more. Looking over the fabrics, you could see the same eras of fabric materials and styles here as elsewhere. There were kimonos that were obviously from your grandparents, or further back. The ones from the 1970s and 1980s were bright polyester patterns.

My cohost paid for the kimono, the proprietress threw in the harmonica for free, and we carried on, one of us looking more Japanese.

I have a friend whose Socials feeds are full of her, a very White woman raised in the Northeast USA, living in India, engaging in Indian rituals, wearing Indian clothing, and generally…culturally appropriating. I asked her about it, and she said that the concept of cultural appropriation is an invention of the USA, and in the rest of world she has explored, she always found it flattery, even, to attempt to place oneself into a host culture's culture.

The walk to our selected ramen place was stressful, because we knew it was closing in about 45 minutes, and then we saw the line, a bunch of people sitting in chairs in a set back space in front of the shop with assorted kitsch on the walls. The shop's logo was of a cartoon woman either slurping up wavy tan noodles or puking into a bowl. They guy inside took our name, but would we really get in and seated and fed in time?

After all that stress, we learned that when a Japanese restaurant says they close at 8PM, they mean they'll seat anybody who walks in the door up to 7:59, maybe even a few minutes after. Once we realized this, the weight lifted and we got to admire the ramen, in its coconut milk base, topped with every kind of vegetable. I also learned that it's pretty nice to get sesame seeds ground from a pepper grinder, though my attempts to replicate this at home failed.

Torii gates

Next morning: lunch, then the torii.

A torii is a simple gate, for when a massive separate structure isn't sufficient, usually painted orange with a black crossbar at the top. I've read that passing through one is good luck, or indicative of an important transition; whatever you'd like. The supports of the canopy at the train station were painted orange to give the impression of a sequence of torii. If you're a commuter from here I suppose your life is full of good luck and important transitions.

Past the tourist strip where you can buy shaved ice or rent a kimono for 3,500 ¥, we get to the main gate/pavillion/temple complex, as grand as any of the others but in the orange color scheme of the torii. Then, off to the left, the beginning of the hike up the mountain. The torii were relatively small here, maybe 3m tall, with supports of maybe 20cm in diameter, but were dense, with only a few centimeters between one and the next. It took a bit of effort to pay attention to the greenery our tunnel of torii were surrounded by. The tourists like ourselves were even more densely packed, inducing marching to our death vibes. I soldiered on because all the tourist guides promised that at each station, fewer people would continue, and the crowds did indeed thin out.

Every few hundred meters there would be a break in the torii for a shrine and concessions. At some point I saw the crawler that an operator would use to take a pallet of Coke and Pocari Sweat up the steps to their proper place in a vending machine. Across from the souvenir stand, you'd find a shrine, some combination of stone foxes (inari) carrying balls and sometimes dolled up in fabric bibs, stone lanterns, racks for incense and candles, a central stone with a few calligraphic characters carved, and red banners.

Like the retaining walls holding up the temple mountain, this is what age gets you. If every twenty years, somebody built or upgraded a shrine, after 400 years you'll have a good number of rather exquisite shrines—and those Pocari Sweat bottles are what makes it possible to keep it all in good condition. Given a thousand wooden structures standing year-round, we passed by a good number of workers painting and repairing.

We went the "wrong" way at some point up through what seemed to be a cemetery from the density of obelisks, to a lookout over Kyoto. I used this opportunity to make tea. Yes: The ethanol burned cleanly, and the water boiled well enough quickly.

The text on the torii was facing such that you'd only see it on the way down; on the way up all had only two characters: 奉納, meaning "offered." On the way down, looking at what I will presume is their backsides, you see the calligraphy on each, each with a different message in carved into the wood and painted black. As an illiterate, I'd taken them to be words of wisdom, terms of high significance to accommodate the high significance of the torii and the shrines.

They're advertisements. The sponsor or the gate has their name carved into it, and the occasional romanji name of a TV station or what I'm assuming is a Latin American restaurant (La Puerta, of course, and I recall my pride in being able to read "America" in the katakana adjacent). Here's a price list for the various sizes.

Vocab digression

Through all of this I'd been spending much time distracting myself by looking at street signs, trying to sound out the text. I'd spent some time looking at some alphabets before arriving, so I was able to sound out some things.

For the unfamiliar, let's build Japanese. Hiragana is a syllabary, meaning that most symbols (except vowels and N, for some reason) are a consonant-vowel pair. There is a corresponding set, Katakana, for loan words that would sully the purity of the Japanese language if the original Hiragana alphabet were used. This alphabet generally looks like somebody hired a graphic designer and said "Make Hiragana's symbols look more angular and modern." There are some close subtleties: you know the shrugging face that was everywhere circa 2021, with a little smirking face? That smirking face シis the shi Katakana character, but if the shrugging guy has eyes looking down instead of sideways ツ, then it's the tsu character. If it's winking and has only one eye ソ, it's so. "Bad user experience", my cohost commented about the rewrite. There's also Romanji, meaning the plain old English/Spanish/Italian, general Western alphabet.

Next: kanji. Start with some simple radicals, like a dash 一, which we'll name ground, and a two-by-two grid 田, the rice paddy, or the person 人, an inverted V formed by two nicely sloping lines. Use those to make characters, sometimes one radical being one kanji, like that straight line being one.

Some are immediately comprehensible pictograms, like center is a square with a vertical line through it 中. Sun is a square with a line through it 日; moon is similar but curvier 月. Those count as radicals, that can be combined to form single characters. The kanji for bright is famously a sun by a moon 明. The pictograms are fun, but you quickly get to things at aren't pictorally descriptive at all, at which point you just have to memorize the vocab as with anything else.

The pronunciation of Katakana, Hiragana, and how Japanese pronounce Romanji, is exactly as on the page; the pronunciation of the kanji character is completely arbitrary. This is as in English, where the text on the page is just a suggestion of how pronounciation should go, except the gap between sound and vision is still greater.

Then there's the actual vocabulary. Japanese breaks the promise of one character for one concept. "Entrance" is enter followed by mouth, 入口. That's a distinct concept, expressed via two comprehensible characters. Exit is leave-mouth 出口, and portals you may enter and exit from have the combination: 出入口. Again, we're lulled into thinking that we can understand what's going on, but often characters are used solely for their pronounciation or have no pleasant pictographic story. Kyo-to 京都 and To-kyo 東京 share one character (capital 京) but not the other.

Grammatical elements are in hirigana. Below, I'll refer to the short story In a Grove; the の (pronounce no) is the equivalent to the English apostrophe-s possession, so we have 藪の中 meaning grove's center. This is typographically awkward, because you either have a typeface where grove is too small to make out, or where the simple swirl of の is huge and sparse.

All those little things about pictograms and the easily recognized possessive form, all the little trivia I'm telling you about, kept me in the game, guessing at every sign and every scrap of paper. But the pictograms are nothing but a lure, because most of the language is kanji with no discernable back story and no way to guess at pronounciation. It was a puzzle I knew I wasn't going to beat, but I kept playing anyway.

The ryokan

Momijiya Bekkan Kawanoiori is a rich-people hôtel and my cohost declined to tell me what she'd paid. The shuttle from the train station was definitely a positive amenity. Where we got on, another Japanese couple got on, where I recall the man was nodescript and the woman gave the strong impression of caring deeply about hair and makeup and not doing things that would fuss her manicure. For my part, I'm indifferent to having people insist upon carrying my backpack around. They did so as we crossed the bridge over the stream, ten meters below, from the road to the ryokan complex. They walked us through a tiny village, what turned out to be the dining hall, then a few private cabins, then into the main building. After confiscating our shoes, they sat us all down in the front space, by the interior rock garden, and told us when dinner was and the hours the shared spa is open.

The room was an expanse of tatami, with a nice table on one side, tea set laid out for the tourists. The hôtel phone was in an alcove by the side. We changed into the provided yukata (hôtel-grade kimonos). Outside, on the room's patio, we found a bean bag chair and a sort of giant (no-handle) tea cup, easily big enough for two or three people.

At dinner, at the pavilion overlooking the river ten meters below, the entertainment were maikos, apprentice geishas. They looked the part, with the pale makeup and overdone hair. For one of the two, the primary activity was conversation. She handed us a small name card, a souvenir which souvenir-hunters may admire, and attempted to hold a conversation despite English not being part of the Geisha's education. The other danced. The music was not in eight-bar blocks like typical Western music. Her movements were isolated, with the head and neck doing a great deal of the work.

This was dinner theatre, though the most remarkable thing about the dinner was that it wasn't all that remarkable. My cohost went back to the room to grab the small bottle of soy sauce which we'd kept from making dinner at the hôtel with the smelly carpet. Liberal application made the food work.

After dinner, I tried the public onsen for a few, which was mostly nice for having windows that retract to all but remove one wall. But I was already somewhat bored by the experience. If there's any social aspect to them, I'm missing out as one who doesn't speak the language. Though from anime, my understanding is that one is expected to not really talk, and just enjoy the relaxation, speaking only as much as is necessary to advance the plot.

I headed back to our room, and we played a card game that required a tatami or two to play. Space is the ultimate luxury.

☆ The Gold Pavilion

Most of what I remember about it is that it is rather large, actually covered in gold, and its expansive grounds were far too hot to be wearing a backpack and lugging a wheelie bag along gravel paths.

It was a short jaunt anyway, because the tea ceremony was starting soon. The tea ceremony was run by one woman in a house near the pavilion. For 3,000 ¥, she'll take you upstairs and show you how to properly fit a kimono. For the tea ceremony, we sat in the tatami room in the back, facing a small garden through a glass wall. This was aimed at English speakers, though the English of one Spanish woman seemed to be hanging by a thread. Another guy was in long hair, broad skirt-like pants, and a black t-shirt, an ensemble that made it very clear that he first discovered Japan via anime.

Our hostess told us about the process more than showed us, painting the picture of samurai wandering the countryside, being received in this formal process. The tea—matcha only—is passed clockwise around the room. To the person on your left, you apologize for taking the tea first, then that person thanks you for handing off. She didn't characterize it as fun. As we went through the motions, it wasn't.

My brother refers to matcha as the veal of tea. The tea leaves are left in shade, underfed and picked too young so that the leaves would be tender, easily ground to powder. It's one specific type of tea, and a Chinese purveyor might have matcha, but will also have teas at various levels of fermentation from green to black, offering a wealth of different flavors. Pu'erh is fermented enough that it tastes like the Earth it came from (my cohost: "it smells like pet store"). There's even white tea, to which I've always had an aversion ever since a Russian told me that it's a euphemism for when you can't afford tea so you drink plain hot water. In Chinese circles, if money is tight, you might mix the tea with barley, which imparts what is usually described as a nutty overtone. There are so many kinds, but the Japanese tea ceremony is matcha only.

Compare to the Chinese tea ceremony. The above-mentioned Book of Tea will tell you about how the tea houses are built, the art you put up to discuss while admiring the tea, how tea passes from vessel to vessel in a process whose primary goal is making tea that tastes good. Soviet supply chains aside, a bag of tea is not prohibitively expensive, and I picture Chinese peasants of centuries past for whom the evening's entertainment is twenty grams of tea.

Somehow in the process of crossing the strait to Japan, this structure for holding conversations with visitors and family became a hyper-formalized ritual in which conversation outside of the scripted lines is verboten. In the Q&A, the questions were about how often this is done at home—infrequently—then her setup at home—really just barley tea. I deeply appreciated our hostess for being forthright about the process, and comfortably smashing the dreams of the tourists of enjoying this process with guests at home. Every day, tourists come in and hand her money to learn about what they expect will be something like the Chinese tea ceremony, and she patiently explains how that's not what they're going to get at all.

She let us leave our bags in her entryway, which gave us a chance to try the golden pavilion again. It was a far more pleasant stroll along the expansive grounds. Yes, it really is that golden.

Okonomiyaki

It's an omelette, would be the reductionist way to describe it. But it's prepared on a griddle in front of you, and it's covered in anything you want—I got ramen noodles—and one is expected to cover it in a cross between A-1 sauce, plum sauce, and soy sauce. Recommended, though acquiring some may require a trip to Japan.

☆ Lake Biwa

The train line hovered over the ground, supported by maybe 25m pillars, a completely dedicated right-of-way higher than the trees around here grow, beyond where animals of all types would get in the way. This is what you do when you truly care about on-time, reliable performance of your trains: you spend millions to give them a dedicated platform, where absolutely nothing happens but trains passing. I've only seen such treatment given to autos before.

The sun on the Japanese flag is blood red, and though the sun only looks like that in the sky in cartoons, it felt like that every day. Sweat dribbles down all of me, and more than enough people carry a sweat rag. That umbrella my cohost bought after the storm was a life-saver as a parasol.

The lake ws as halcyon as one would hope. Jumping ahead to the next morning, as we walked along the coast back to the train station, the grounds up from the beach, where trees grew, was covered in picnicers, with the same chairs, grills, tents we're all familiar with.

Here at dusk, as the heat was dissipating and the light was dimming, things were more subdued. Small groups all along the lake, kids with sparklers, conversations over boom boxes playing 80s pop. We silently waded in the hip-deep water as the sun set.

☆☆ The temple

The people at the ticket counter for the bus to Eiheiji temple wanted to make it clear that we're taking the 3:30 bus and the last bus back is at 4:40. This was not a problem for us, as we would be staying until tomorrow. When we arrived, the only people to get off the bus, we were quickly pointed in the right direction, to the check-in area, a hospital-like bureaucracy desk where we were asked to show our admission paper and passports. We were shuffled upstairs where everybody else was already there, watching a video about the temple. Its theme was something about the four seasons at the temple, which was low enough to deal with the sort of miserable heat we'd been dealing with, and high enough to see snow upon snow.

My late-arriving cohost and I were still a little confused about some things, like why did everybody else have slippers and we were somehow barefoot, and what did we miss given that everybody else already had their stuff in place. I noted that you can burgle some slippers from the bathroom, and from asking around found that we hadn't missed much of anything.

The room we dropped our stuff off into (I'm speaking for the me; I assume the women's is identical) had enough tatami along to comfortably sleep the six of us plus a few more. Outside the rooms you had what felt like a church rec room, with a Coke/Pocari Sweat vending machine, some nice decorations of various sorts, like a decorative map of the premises, and parquet floors and a bulletin board giving the schedule and ground rules.

It wasn't long after settling in that they took us to the room for zazen. First the most basic instructions, about the three hand positions our hands would be in for basically the entire time while public facing: when walking, one fist cupped into the other hand; when greeting, palms together in Western prayer position, close to the chest; when meditating, fingers cupped and touching. We marched up to the next floor, elbows as high as possible, or not at all depending on how into it any one person was.

The sitting room itself had room for sixty-two acolytes, each in their own seat. I had time to do the math. The seats are tatami with a large wooden border at the front which we were told is sometimes the dinner table. Some seats were in front of a paper screen; some had a wooden back, with a low shelf. Bow to your seat, bow to the person across from you, position yourself onto the cushion in lotus pose, in a ritualized manner that avoids putting your butt on a food surface, turn so you are facing the back of the seat, sit still for 45 minutes.

We found it notable that what you do with your body, including the rather uncomfortable lotus pose (I have a steel rod in one leg; see a previous travelogue), is carefully controlled, but what you do with your mind is very simple: think of nothing. Just stare at the wood grain until you aren't thinking about the sort of matters you think about all of the rest of the day.

Not noticing that you are staring at the back of your space is known as "annihilation of the shelf", and is very different from the goal of meditation at the end of your yoga class, where you are to clear your mind for the purpose of some sort of improvement of the self. I looked it up, and zen is a cross-language game of telephone whose origin was the sanskrit word for meditation. It is an offshoot of the wide path of Buddhism, which still has its origin in the Hindu mythology of blue gods with many arms and who become time, destroyer of worlds, when needed.

But the focus shifted, and likely shifted further when Master Dogan brought Zen to Japan from China by establishing this very temple. Master Dogan gets mentioned often, enough that I got a little uncomfortable about the reference to the person over the tenets, though I guess I don't complain when the story of Siddhartha Gautama (aka the Buddha) is retold as often as it is.

The wood grain looked something like a conic section, and I spent some time trying to think through what the original tree must have looked like to produce such a grain pattern. There must have been a bend up and a bend back in the wood. Perhaps the carpenter chose the tree because of it. Have you ever noticed that between the main rings that count the years of the tree, there are fainter striations, that mark the seasons? I think it's winter that gives us the dark rings, so especially when the rings are further apart, you can count out their rhythm: spring, summer, fall, winter, spring, summer, fall, winter.

My legs started to hurt, and it was clear from the subtle sound of shuffling that it was the same for others.

Oh, and there's a stick. If you start to fall asleep, they'll thwack you with it, in an appropriately ritualized manner. The person sitting next to me got thwacked. He was the nerd of the group, who has been inducted into Buddhism and could speak extensively about the many forms of practice, and the many types of pain your legs go through during a 13-hour day of sitting very still. Writing about it now, I'm suspecting that he may have faked the nodding for the purpose of attracting the attention of the monk with the rod. I myself had contemplated doing so, so I could tell people that I'd been thwaked by a monk at Eihei-ji, but it felt a little dishonest for the sake of getting the metaphorical t-shirt.

At the beginning and end of the period, the monks present the rod to nobody in particular, as far as I could tell from the corner of my eye. When they walk with a prop, they hold it up and forward as far as their arms will allow, giving the impression that the prop is moving and they are following behind as it levitates. They have an imaginary grid on the floor, moving only in straight lines at right angles, occasionally stopping to rotate 90 degrees. I kept a side-eye out for it because when they did so it marked that, after some business, the session was coming to a close and I only have to hold out a little longer before I am rewarded with being able to feel my legs again.

In most but not all end-of-sessions, we were treated to a short, set percussion piece for bell and wood hammer. You may have at some point heard it, as it has been occasionally coöpted for angular orchestral works.

We bowed at the appointed times on the way out of the room, all broke up for a brief break (the Spaniards went straight to the smoking room), and made our way to dinner.

In the dining hall, the lead explained the process to us. First we say a brief prayer, which was transliterated and translated for us on a sheet of paper, but I successfully worked out was also printed on the paper wrapper for the chopsticks, and posted in calligraphy on the wall. The food was laid out in six bowls plus the rice bowl. Open the rice bowl, put the lid to the right of your tray. One person whose English seemed limited put the lid to his left and was quickly corrected. Put the chopsticks on the rightmost dish, pointing to the right. Take a dish, with both hands, and hold it close to your face as you eat from that bowl only. Kiko the first year monk will demonstrate. We do not talk while eating. Our leader himself simply watched as we ate. My cohost, always a slow eater, got to dessert after everybody else was already done, and we all waited about a minute or two as she munched, staring into space and looking at her food, avoiding eye contact, as everybody did through the whole meal. Others didn't know what to do. It's one thing to not know what to do with yourself in silence in the semi-privacy of meditation, but what to do with yourself in silence in the social situation of a row of eaters is a new, more awkward problem entirely. After about a minute, the leader continued anyway, leading us in the one-line concluding chant, then leading us single-file back to our rooms for a bath room break.

In the basement was another onsen—two, for men and women, even though all the monks are men. With no private shower, I bathed in the proper onsen manner of sitting on a low stool and pouring water over myself with a bucket. It's honestly a very efficient and direct way to do the business of cleaning one's body. Standing is against etiquette, and all those showers I've taken standing in a bath tub now felt like more effort (and water) than necessary. There were three of us in the hot bath itself at the same time. We didn't talk about much, and I lost interest and left after a few minutes.

Next was a double-session, with ten minutes of half-step walking meditation to bring sensation back into our legs between the first 45 minutes of sitting and the second. I don't remember much of what happened here; I think I was looser about leg position, partly because I was starting to wonder what would happen if I cut off blood flow to my legs for several minutes. Every cell in my foot needs oxygen to survive.

9 PM: lights out. We unfolded our futons, arranged the sheets, then cut to 4:15 AM. The morning bell was too faint for most of us to hear, and it was obvious that the 4:15 meditation was not going to happen on time. I went up to the zazen room at 4:20, and was first to be seated. The session was cut short, and I was … disappointed. I had allowed myself to be comfortable, forgot about constricted blood flow, and was feeling my self relaxing away. Nonetheless, breakfast was upon us, whose procedure was much like before, but with smaller portions and wet, dissolved rice (porridge or gruel, depending on your translation).

From there, we were led along the stairways and hallways up to the main temple.

We were later told that this is a 420 tatami space, and over a hundred monks would be part of the service. At the front was the altar, with a Buddha far back enough to be not quite visible or at least less prominent. To stage left, a giant steel bowl to be used as the low drone percussion, and to the right a wooden bell of similar size for the pizzicato hight notes. Between the bell and the altar were two lions looking much like Oscar the Grouch with their mouths open, indicating understanding that can be expressed with words (we were later told), and symmetrically on the other side two Oscars the Grouch with mouths closed, indicating understanding which cannot be expressed with words.

First the elders, in sand-colored robes followed by what I assume are one step down in the hierarchy in all black. They were soon followed by the masses of monks, many of whom stood out as younger not only because of fewer wrinkles, but by their fidgeting with the sleeves of their robes and looking around the room. They lacked focus. Soon all were in place, two grids of monks around a central aisle. Under their sleeves, they all had prayer rugs. Much of the standing and kneeling and bowing, especially given the prayer rug, was reminiscent of the goings-on in a mosque.

We were led to the front to light incense to greet master Dogan. Take a pinch of loose incense from the left, then hold it in your fingers as you take a goshu-pose bow, then put it onto the burner to the left. Then the chanting began. We had been given accordion-bound books with transliteration of the chants on one side and translation on the other. Content-wise, the chants as listed included a few about the power of meditation, how if you were led to execution the knives would break; one of Hindu mythology about the blue-necked one and the creator of the universe; one with rather explicit instructions on how to meditate, including notes on foot position when entering lotus pose.

A reminder here that the hirigana (and katakana) Japanese alphabet is a syllabary, where the great majority of characters are a consonant followed by a vowel. When chanted, this generates a very consistent rhythm, almost like a roomful of cheerleaders for its flow and bounce. I got into it, even though I had no idea that I was singing praises to the blue-necked God until afterward.

Our names were announced to the group, which may have been a millennium of custom about how visitors to the temple are treated, but felt like a bit more attention than I deserved as a tourist who doesn't speak the language. We were also brought to another incense stand in the back toward ourselves to light a pinch for the peaceful rest of our ancestors.

Acolytes handed out books, using the right-angles-only walk, carrying a pile of books on a pedestal, for the chants it seems not all have memorized. Some were not synchronized, and all read at the same time at their own tone and pace, giving a brouhaha that merged into a drone.

The recession was unceremonious, and our leader returned after all exited to give us the tour of the temple grounds. There was another sanctum to the Buddha of healing a few steps down the hill, then the gate. The gate is most famous for being where applicants stand, without food or water and likely in snow, to petition entrance to the order. It has two signs, one to the effect that one should not cross this gate unless one is willing to undertake the arduous process of seeking enlightenment, and on other noting that this gate is always open and unblocked for anyone to enter at any time. Indeed, there was no barrier, just a sign saying Do not exit. Later, a few people didn't see the sign and walked through, and somebody hustled forward to send them back through the gate.

Between these spaces were a good number of covered stairs and hallways, which gave me the strong impression and feel of a university, except everybody walks with their hands clasped and elbows out. On the right of the complex is what had been the main administration building, where people cooked, did the finances and such. Our leader talked of his recollection that he was encouraged not to cook with a striving toward flavor, but a striving toward heart. If you have heart, then flavor will follow. I recalled our breakfast of gruel given only a minimum of crushed sesame seeds for flavor beyond the love.

Then, the show was over. We could leave our things in the rooms until 9 and walk around. We did so, and it's incredible how quickly we became tourists again. Elbows were no longer raised (I tried more than others, still), our return to the now-familiar sanctum was for the primary purpose of snapping pix, and we carried an air of excited fun more than eager students. Soon, the first tour busses arrived, and we got to experience the truest experience of the Eihei-ji monk: our private space being invaded by random tourists nosing into everything.

The alps

We got a ride from one of our fellow acolytes. The highway was much like any other, perhaps excepting that billboards aren't a thing, and it was often raised the way the train rights-of-way are. Big box stores and the usual automotive world was present. Having arrived at Kanazawa a little early, we were able to walk around a little before the next train. This was unpleasant. We were still in the state of overwhelming heat, and didn't have a great idea of where we were going to. This was a car-centric area, and a good number of streets had no crosswalk, and you had to take the stairs underground, then pop up on the other side. Those things are indicative of a disdain for pedestrians and I usually avoid them, but in this case they were actually welcome as a respite from sun. The market, a primarily linear covered arcade, mostly sold fish, which is ex-post obvious.

Block or two further down was the castle. Past the gates the lawn was as much as you'd expect from an English castle, perfectly mowed. I read somewhere once that the castles of old were typically surrounded by short-cropped lawns so that marauders didn't have trees to hide behind. This sounds true, and doing the research to fact-check it would take a great deal of time, so I'll state it as a fact, and presume that's why the lawn here is so well-maintained. We had large parts of the walk to ourselves, because who would be insane enough to wander open fields during what is either a heat emergency or just feels like one. The castle itself was whitewashed, which gave a sense of Tudor style, though the roof is the clay standing in for bamboo we've seen all across the country. With no pagoda-like towers, it felt like an expansive villa, and we turned around to find our next train.

Making a bigger effort, we did find a place selling mochi among the fishmongers, including the kind in the bamboo leaf that delighted us so at the templar meals. We took the bus three blocks to the station and boarded the next train.

Many busses and trains later, Takayama. We're in a more industrial area, without a lot of shining infrastructure or tourist traps. There was one: the historic village. The historic village included houses from around Japan transported and/or reconstructed to this hillside and pond. It achieved its goal of being educational.

All the houses were wood frame, mostly with thatched rooves. The most impressive such roof was thatch piled upon thatch, maybe 70cm thick. I suppose that's what you need to keep the rain out using plants. Inside, all the houses over a certain size had a hearth: a square near the center full of ashes, with a hook above, often shaped like a fish with mouth agape to hold a pot. It's not quite ironic that a hook would be shaped like a fish, but let's call it bemusing. The signs repeatedly pointed out that a fire would be burning at all times, partly for warmth, but also because the smoke is good for the ropes and thatch of the roof. That's right: no chimney. Smoke just filters through the roof. I like the smell of a wood fire as much as you do, but it must have been perpetual. The hearth had unadorned wood flooring around it, then further from the door you would find the tatami spaces where people might actually live. In some houses these were proper rooms, while in others it was the open floor plan I'd expected from movies and comics, where half the house is in tatami and paper room dividers can be pulled into place as desired. Few interior spaces were truly walled off. One open floor plan house had a fully walled off shrine in the center. Upstairs was never very inviting, and felt more like a storage space than somewhere I'd want to sleep—and the higher you go the more smoky it must have been.

The houses all had an entrance, cut out from the raised platform on which the rest of the house is built, where you would take off your shoes. We tourists were encouraged to do so, and could freely walk around the house in our socks. This delighted me. It's hard to imagine a Western museum that would tolerate such a concept, because it's just too hard to explain to people that they should take off their shoes. I've basically given up on having a shoe-free house back home. People see the shoe rack and pile of shoes in the entryway, hesitate for a second, then walk on it.

As a final aside, the hearth-and-smoke setup was not quite up to modern code, but the core concept of tatami plus paper screens, even that lowered entry space for the shoe transition, looks like the many lodgings we'd had to date. If all that defines a space is walls and flooring, there's not much that needs changing over the centuries.

Dinner in Takayama turned out to take some searching. My cohost and I both have some things we decline to eat, partly out of ethical concerns and partly out of a thing where my cohost will puff up, suffocate, and die. I know there are people who will revise their ethics depending on context, like if they think it's unethical to eat dogs, but are in a place where people eat dogs then they drop their ethical objections. I understand the sentiment, but it feels like not having ethics at all, or expressing an opinion that all ethical beliefs are context-dependent and therefore invalid. It's OK under Japanese law to have sex with 13 year olds, but I didn't drop my ethical beliefs about that either.

All of which means we ate very well and in abundance, every day, but via searching for places that wouldn't put dashi (fish reduced to a liquid) on everything, rather than popping our heads into the first place we saw. All the restaurants we'd hoped to find were closed, though we eventually found a place that was friendly to us, with a proprietor who had his shtick with the tourists down. We got a hot pot and a soup also served over a flame, and he mimed the process of taking the food out from the flame and eating it, complete with ñam ñam and slurping sounds. Eating food is not all that complicated and it felt a little mansplain-y, but he's got years of experience and evidently knows it's necessary with the gaijin more often than not. Five minutes later we heard him doing his pantomime on the other side of the restaurant. The hot pot itself was excellent.

We went up to the rooftop onsen. I showered and headed to the outdoor pool, and hung out for a few more minutes before getting bored. I'll go to my grave without the social aspect of the onsen experience, and without it, it's just a hot tub.

The soba restaurant in the morning was nice, but required a good amount of negotiation. They were nice to us, though, and I promised to leave a good review. Our goal in going to a soba place was a that the buckwheat is grown in this region, and it has a unique recipe and custom. Indeed, the soba was home made, and had a bounce the store-bought stuff, or the restaurant-wholesale-supplier-bought soba doesn't have.

The bus to the ropeway was full of fun. It's an alpen route, with the hairpin turns that require the bus to stop, long tunnels, and views you could imagine being an oil painting. Blue mountains in the distance, then tree-covered mountains, sloping down to a valley dotted by houses on the way down to the stream at the bottom. The bus stopped frequently; this was clearly a popular tourist route.

By ropeway I mean funicular (or gondola). They're always fun, and this one was twice as fun for being in two stages, whose paths are roughly at right angles to each other. Every time the car went over a tower, it would sway a little and the children would all whoop. At the top, we'd see the signage explaining that these hills were formed by volcanic activity, but their steep stature already told me.

We took a short hike to a vista and had tea there. Other people were through-hiking to who knows where, but the last funicular down was soonish, and after about twenty minutes we got to what was a fine view. The stove worked very well, which gave us further confidence that Fuji-San was going to work out. My cohost called me out on brewing too-weak tea, though, and I resolved to adjust my ratios accordingly.

We had a 40ish minute wait for the next bus. Wandering off, we found a tall, straight plant whose pods were big fists held up by sharp 90 degree elbows. Boulders were big enough that the ones by the stream had tops that weren't nearly as water-weathered as their bottoms. Coming out of a pipe over the river, steam arose from the out flowing water. This seam of steam explains the tourist infrastructure and ryokans all up and down the range: everywhere hot water burbles out, somebody set up a ryokan.

Our hôtel is a very standard ryokan downstream from the ropeway. The hostess spoke no English, which confirmed our casual observation that this is a domestic, not international tourist site. Everything about it felt like the stereotypical Holiday Inn, except the room was all tatami, with the usual minimal furniture. We found a manual about how ryokan work for gringos. It explained that the room we were in was a tatami room, with a small alcove for showing a single piece of artwork, that there's an onsesn downstairs with the rules we're now familiar with about not standing up while bathing and such, how there's a banquet-style meal every dinner and breakfast which we did not pay for, how you get your yukata (a kimono casual enough to be on its way to a bath robe) to walk around in, how somebody else puts the futons down in the evening and up in the morning.

Next morning, Mr Moustache Cafe for a quick coffee, which was full of gringo tourists, all of whom manage to congregate right here. We'd somehow discovered another TGI Friday's. The sweet beans on toast were a nice meeting right between Western toast and Eastern sweet dumplings.

The Kamikochi Valley is described as a showpiece in Japan's park system, and it showed throughout. Once you get past the souvenir shops and baggage check at the bus terminal—no wait, let's not get past those yet. There are a good number of buses with a regular schedule that stop here at a national park. Our making a day of the national park without driving an auto is entirely normal and feasible.

Kapabashi translates to the Kappa Bridge, where the Kappa are troll-ish folk creatures, and in a 1927 book, 芥川 龍之介 (Ryūnosuke Akutagawa) documents the story of a man who was walking in this very park when he fell into a hole and discovered himself among the Kappa. They're classist, the poorer ones are expendable. In a memorable scene where the narrator observes a Kappa giving birth, the father yells into the mother's birth canal and asks the child if it wants to come out. The child replies. "'I do not wish to be born. The hereditary mental illness of my father is bad enough—and besides, I believe that life as a Kappa is a poor existence' … But the midwife immediately thrust a thick glass tube into his wife's genitals and injected some kind of liquid. His wife let out a heavy sign of relief. At once, her until now huge belly deflated, collapsing like a hot air balloon when the air is let out." Based on such extraordinary events, the bridge was named.

Much of the foliage was familiar, but the tree frog wasn't, and the terrain continued its pattern of being more angular and steep. We eventually descended back to the river level, to some extraordinary views of the mountain from down here in the swampland around the river. It was nice to sit and admire for a while, but just as the camp stove started boiling for the next round of tea, we got rained on, which mostly meant hiding under things while sitting on the bank, observing.

My cohost left her bag at the bag check, meaning that I was the one carrying everything, which led to an asymmetry where I got whiny and wanted to go back well before my cohost did.

Matsumoto

Our lodging was somewhat home-made by the perpetually perky woman who greeted us and her partner whom we never saw. Everything was brightly painted plywood. The kitchen had the usual assortment of coffee and tea, and a kettle I hadn't seen before. It had thick insulated walls, and a substantial lid that both insulates and prevents steam from escaping. That's billed as a safety feature, but letting steam rise is also deeply inefficient—the water molecules bearing the most heat are the ones drifting into space. I was impressed. I'd spent time with the Zojirushi catalog—US edition—and had never seen anything like it.

We found an izakaya via HappyCow, a delightful little site that never steers us wrong. Indeed, it was small and cozy and an expression of the proprietress's pleasant personality. It was also full of gringos: us, Canada, England, perhaps who had all gotten here via the same system. We still had not yet made it off the beaten path.

Next morning: pick up coffee from the coffee shop, playing Velvet Underground, then the castle. A Japanese castle looks to me like a cross between a Tudor village and a pagoda: the materials are primarily the wood and stucco of the early 1800s, but the shape is vertical, an up-do of a building. We admired the castle's approach, and deep-seated organization of its staff, while an ambulance pulled up and everybody was asked to stay where they were.

The home Anne Frank resided in during the war, in Amsterdam, was once open to tourists so they could gawk at the furnishings of the mid-1900s and get a sense of claustrophobia from it. But the tourist count got too high, so they took photos of everything and removed the furniture. Now you join a tapeworm of a line that runs from the start of the building to the end, and set your focus on the photos on the walls of what the room you are standing in used to look like.

Japanese furnishings are typically much more sparse, so perhaps only tatami had to be removed, but many floors of the castle were barren but for signage and tourists. The stairs were steep, on their way to ladders. We mused about whether people sometimes fall off, especially given the crush of the crowd, and then recalled the ambulance. Some floors had enough structure that the curators could put up a hall of military-type things, pistols and shot of the 1800s, around the perimeter. We lingered at the top floor, little more than an observation deck from which we could admire Matsumoto and its environs.

We descended to get lunch, aiming for a strip that seemed to have some twee shops or such. It was mostly closed, as was the restaurant we'd hoped to go to. We wound up, yet again, at a place closely emulating a U.S. coffee shop, including a big shelf of board games and a waiter from Seattle. He noticed our interest in the board games and told us about how a local game designer often passes by and tests new game designs with him, though the waiter's tastes lean less toward the hard-driving strategic.

Japan has a remarkably active board gaming scene. Even given the post-Catan Euro revival of games that aren't war simulations, Western games still fall into certain tropes. Mediæval castles keep getting built, and the component count and box size keeps ballooning, as the easiest way to make a game more challenging for experienced gamers (with a lot of storage space) is to add more mechanisms.

But setting aside small boxes and more focused designs, it's the breadth of subject matters into which Japanese designers choose to immerse players that stands out for me: Sorting your recycling, one where you play sheepdogs chasing farm animals, diving the deep sea for treasure, Schrödinger's cat, a friendly fish who gathers acorns for you, avoiding Hollywood scandals, Mexican wrestling tournaments, a murder mystery based on a 1922 story which was one of the earliest examples of the unreliable narrator, and being that modern Japan has its own tropes, interpersonal drama in a girls' high school and Kyoto's Hanamakoji street.

Maybe I'll even mention what was originally marketed in Japan as Traders of Carthage but which was re-exoticized for Western audiences as Traders of Osaka, because although it is yet another game about gathering goods and delivering them, the mechanism, in which everybody's blue goods are all on the same blue boat, is unlike any I've seen elsewhere. Yes, Road to the Palace has the same old theme, but the mechanism of shifting columns is unique.

But we were wrapping up at the coffee shop with a shelf full of local and non-local games, where I was amusing myself by the parodying title of Dungeon of Mandom VIII, and its unique push-other-people's-luck design, and heading out to the art museum.

The art museum is notable because Yayoi Kusama is from this town. She's most famous for giant yellow pumpkins with black dots and mirrored rooms full of plush phalluses, but the work here was a little more subtle. A chandelier of grief in a hexagonal chamber flickers uncomfortably. A ladder goes from floor to ceiling, and small mirrors give the impression of the ladder continuing to infinity. We can imagine the ennui and futility of climbing it forever.

But we all know what art museums look like. Let's move on to the supermarket. [Along the way, I passed into somebody's back yard, and shortly thereafter a man with big eyebrows angrily called out to me. Having no idea what he was saying, I shrugged and kept walking. Who knows what would have happened if I could understand what he'd been saying.]

The supermarket was part of a mall, modern and bright, with an abundance of islands of goods on display, and what seemed like an exceptional amount of individually-wrapped chocolates and biscuits, to the point that I had trouble finding any in less extensive packaging.

When I get to a supermarket in a new-to-me country, I look for the thing which is most in abundance. In Portugal it's the mayonnaise aisle. Here, it's the cup of noodles. I don't recall ever seeing anybody use one, and given that there are no trash cans food that leaves an oily and wet container behind isn't a good choice. At home, you own bowls, so putting a ramen cake into one is not a challenge. So I don't get them, yet every food source has them in abundance, and every conbini has a hot water dispenser so you can prep them on the way out.

I bought the kind of noodles that you need a pot for, and we dined in the interior garden of the hostel.

☆☆ Fujisan

On the train to Shinjuku, we knew we'd have to hustle to catch the bus. There was a Plan B, which would get us to Gotemba only five minutes or so before the bus to the path would be ready, but that was tight. This was important, because the bus to the trail only travels every two hours, and starting up the path two hours late would be perilous. We planned the transition on the train: the Internet showed us how to navigate from Shinjuku train station to Shinjuku bus depot. One of us checks the bag full of heavy things at the tourist information station, one of us buys the bus tickets, we meet back at door B-4 to board. When the train finally stopped, we pegged it by walking full speed, and a touch of aggressive jaywalking, with three minutes to spare. Pulling out my telephone, I had a brief panic attack when I saw a passport was missing, but just as I was about to run in circles around the station, my cohost saw that I'd just dropped it right there at our feet.

Over the course of the ride, the bus fell off schedule. Traffic was dense, but I think the real problem was a sequence of phantom stops, maybe every 5km, along the entire highway route. These were pull-overs to the side of the road to a typical-looking bus shelter, with an emergency phone prominently displayed adjacent, but they were on the side of a highway, with massive sound barriers. I have no idea how a pedestrian would get to one, of if a pedestrian found themselves at one, how they'd get out. At each, the driver was obligated to come to a complete stop, fully open the door to allow any phantoms to enter, and only then continue. Each stop raised my stress level by an iota more.

Although we were supposed to arrive 40 minutes early, we instead missed the connection to the next bus by 5 minutes. After regrouping at the 7-11, we decided to make the problem go away using money, by hiring a taxi. The ride to the 5th station was beautiful, featuring twisty tree-lined passages up the mountain. The cab driver rolled down all the windows.

At the fifth station—the first one on the official ascent plan—we briefly spoke to the staff at the information kiosk, though we didn't learn a lot. Then, we were on our way. Fifty meters later, my cohost stopped at one of the many vendors along the path and bought a walking stick. Then, we were on our way. A hundred meters later, we were stopped by the Fujisan management NGO, who asked for a "donation" of 1,000 each. Then, we were on our way. A few hundred meters later, we stopped at a shrine, but didn't throw any coins into the donation box. Then, we were on our way.

The ascent at this point was a path of black rock, a meter below the ground on either side, which was lush with moss and foliage of all kinds. The tree roots were visible on both sides of the path, though the trees didn't seem to mind being so exposed. Flowers were not frequent, which made them especially notable. Each looked fragile and dry, like paper. We would occasionally stop at a treeless meadow to look down on the towns. Gotemba was minuscule—why had it been such a big deal to us before? Some of the hills around it were taller and had more presence.

Along the way we were quickly passed by a few hikers, one couple and one solo woman who not only didn't follow the usual hiker custom of a brief greeting, but didn't even acknowledge us. But we saw them relaxing at the benches of the 6th station. It seems we were at an average pace. Pacing is important to prevent altitude sickness, the body's response to strenuous exercise in thin air. It's no small thing. My cohost told me of a time she took a tour bus up a volcano in Hawaii which didn't take a stop halfway up, and one of the passengers wound up in the hospital. At the least, you get nauseous and feel terrible.

The distance to the 6.5th station was not large, but we were both starting to feel a little sluggish. From the 6th to the 6.5, the 6.5th to the 7th, and so on in half steps, you could see the next station above you as soon as you leave the last. On flat ground, it would be a three minute walk, but the signs said it'd be thirty, and at this point, hours into our hike, each half step took us another hour. My cohost had to stop every few minutes, and although I would have preferred to continue at a faster pace, my heart was also working hard and the stops were of definite benefit to myself as well. But my cohost had it worse, and was starting to make little burps of nausea. Past the 7.5th, she said she wouldn't make it to the 8th, but this was at the halfway point between them so why turn around. We arrived at the end of the four hour hike five and a half hours after we'd started, exhausted.

We dropped our bags in our accommodation for the night. For the same price as one night in a six tatami room in Kyto, one of us gets a single tatami on which to place a backpack, a blue no-brand sleeping bag, and a pillow consisting of I'm not sure what duct-taped into a plastic wrapping, with one of those thin pillow cases you get on airlines that aren't far from paper. This is on the top row of sleeping bags, with maybe twenty people on the top horseshoe of tatami we'd be on, plus twenty below. No shower. You're welcome to use the toilet but deposit 100 ¥ before doing so.

By now we were still enough, and the cold had crept far enough, that I was in a number of additional layers and still left with a few shivers. The camp stove started very slowly, but worked. The tea and ramen flowed, and we sat in the warm-enough twenty-tatami public space of our accommodation and felt better. After hours of struggling with our bodies, all was forgiven. Stepping back outside, Tokyo took up more of the view now that it was lit up, and the coastline could be clearly discerned.

My cohost went to bed and I tried to relight the camp stove, but perhaps there was too much residual water from the drug-store ethanol; I couldn't get it to run for more than a few seconds at a time. I had D-grade ramen with remaining broth still warm-ish from the last round plus a touch of additional heat. But I was no longer at a calorie deficit and was ready to sleep.

The hoodie was primarily nice because it allowed me to pull up the hood and avoid touching the plastic-wrapped pillow in any way. My mind was torn between fighting against my natural difficulty respirating while sleeping (aka sleep apnea, of which I have a rather severe case), and not wanting to inhale the same air as forty plus people, a large percentage of which were coughing through the night.

"Lights on" is at 1AM, though no lights went up. Instead, there was a consensus of rustling to get gear together to hike to the top in time for the 4ish AM rising of the sun. At this point, after all the concern that my cohost would succumb to altitude sickness, it was I who got down from his bunk, walked out into the midst of a dozen people outside the cabin suiting up in their assorted gear, and puked green bile and semi-digested ramen off a cliff. Nobody around me seemed to notice, and no comments were made. I drank some water to clear my throat and tamp down the spicy feeling in my nose, and went back to bed, were I slept much better.

We had chosen to stay at the eighth station so that we could wake up at 4AM and watch the sun rise from above the clouds without the 1AM hike. Yes, it was a spectacle, with the full rainbow filling the sky, the clouds looking like dirty snow and melding in with the ocean, and the rosy fingers of dawn finally appearing forth, turning the clouds a fiery orange.

Then we went back to bed. Our eighty bucks a night only lets us take up residence until 7AM (they'll hold our bags afterward, though, for 300 ¥/hour), so we packed up and went on our way. The ascent was half as slow, and uneventful. An hour and a half passed quickly, and we passed the torii at the top and had officially reached the summit.

There was a village full of shops at the top. Construction was rudimentary, roofs were tin and held down by rocks gathered from around the site (see the photo at the head of this page). But there they were, fully stocked with any beverage you could think of, somewhat nationalist Japanese t-shirts and souvenirs, and whatever you'd like to have for lunch. It turns out that there's a tractor trail, and a regular stream of supplies come up the mountain. This was disheartening to me—you mean I could've taken the bus? But all this infrastructure, this carefully-managed trail, wasn't going to happen with 1,000 ¥ "donations" from every hiker. It came from the same capitalist support that the trail of torii came from. Our hut was named "Edoya" because the Edo emperor allegedly slept at that site once. An emperor travels with his own infrastructure, but for 100k tourists/year, there are tractors.

Fujisan's caldera was, I am told, the depth of the entirety of our 1.5 hour hike this morning, though it looks like you could slide your way down it in only a few minutes. It's not at all consistent, with pure red rock from 7 to 9 o'clock, angular rock that looks like a shrine from just the right angle from 10 to 11, distinct horizontal layer-cake striations from 12 to 3, what looked like a cave but was really just a deep glitch at 4, a martian landscape (a mini-Olympus Mons) back to 7. At the center, dust and mud.

We cooked up, just tea this time, which left us stationary for about fifteen minutes. This gave us time to take photos of a Japanese group who finally made it, chat briefly with a pair of Spaniard women, help out two men who brought a flagpole and Chinese flag to take photos as they saluted. Nothing puts people in a boisterous mood like summiting a mountain.

The way down was boring. On all paths there's a separate path down than path up, for crowd control, and we were on a different trail (Yoshida). There were no steep volcanic rocks to clamber down, just lots of red sand to walk-slash-slide down, partly along that road the tractors take. After a few hours we got to a few people selling horse rides, and from there it was all civilization, with good pavement along parts, and other parts more a walk in the woods than a climb, until we got to the village that was the fifth station. At the bus depot we got a ticket for the next bus to Shinjuku, and went up past the souvenir shop to the restaurant for a while. Between my bouts of napping, I got the impression that everybody on the bus back from Mount Fuji was asleep.

I did wake up near Tokyo. We were on a raised highway, but this time going through Tokyo itself. The highway took up more-or-less the width of the street, so our view was of the third through top floors of a sequence of buildings, each with distinct architecture from its neighbor, some modern, some older, some residential as shown by the laundry drying on the balcony, forming a corridor of our own, unbroken by the usual streetscape of people and objects.

One thing I like about these raised highways through hundreds of buildings is that you can't add lanes. Whatever demand they can accommodate, that's what they will accommodate.

☆ Festival day

The first festival was at the Jingū Bashi Bridge, which we didn't have to look for, because we could hear it when we got out of the train. There was a stage and a dance troupe all in proper Summer festival form. We were expecting cosplayers, but instead got people in dancer-looking costumes walking around, typically in clumps of three or four. ¿Could there really be that many dance troupes in Tokyo?, I mused, and the answer is a definite yes. One after the other came on, each with distinct costumes and perky music. At the opening, one had a set of flag-holders unfurl at once on all sides of the stage. Yes, having a three-meter tall flag behind your dancers does turn the affair into an epic, even after you realize that one of the flags has the name of a fast food chain in Romanji, and that they all feature an enthusiastic but likely suicidal purple chicken. The dancers had some Japanese themes to them, with costumes as you might imagine, women holding fans to give their hands some pop, but I'm not authority enough on dance to say if it was all that different from what you'd see anywhere else. One act had a woman punctuate every move with a yelp, which reminded me of the karate demo from last week.

We thought maybe there's more down the street, and found a pedestrian bridge over the intersection, with people at the base of the stairs holding a sign telling us to keep left. On the other side was a stadium which seemed to have more festival behind ticket gates. But it's nice that we were able to take the pedestrian bridge over. If either of us were in a wheel chair, there would be no way to cross the street, at all. From the height of the bridge we speculated as to where the famous Jingū Bashi Bridge itself was located, and concluded that it must be just out of view.

Coming back to Earth, I scrutinized the map more and discovered that we'd been standing on the bridge watching the dancers all along. The bridge was paved over and, on non-festival days, open to car traffic, so didn't look like anything remotely special. My cohost had expected cosplayers, and one expects that not all cosplayers are members of dance troupes, so we searched a little. Maybe we'd see some along the tree-lined avenue we got to after a quite busy pedestrian crossing, which may or may not have been helped along by a police man with a megaphone.

The loli density was definitely higher. Yes, it's a reference to Lolita, a 1955 book whose female lead is a prepubescent girl named Dolores Haze, but that was seventy years ago and it's a thick book dense with literary references and out of the hundreds of millions who have some association with the word Lolita a tiny fraction have read the book. (Pale Fire is more fun. Read that one, even the preface.) But there's a thread of manga about frail girls in frilly clothing, manga is often sexualized, there's a subthread of Japanese culture that's into Victorian-era Europe (see Studio Ghibli, below), somehow we all got into our heads that Victorian era French maids wore petticoats under short skirts (From an academic study on the matter "In reality, few French servants remembered wearing specific clothes for work."), lots of children's dolls wear better dresses than most actual women, there's that thing about how the age of consent is 13, and fashion and its cross-language description has no obligation to make sense, so every few dozen women would be out in frilly finery, some with the petticoat dresses, some with parasols, some with selected aspects or the gothier interpretation. It was enough to entertain us until we picked our next move. We wandered into adjacent park, where the temperature immediately fell a few degrees and the sound of cicadas suddenly immersed us, and my cohost remembered the thing about owl cafés, an "only in Tokyo" concept that seems to have taken over simply because of its own existence. The first we went to was full, but we could see the boisterous crowds and owl or two overhead behind the crowds and the line to get in.

The next owl café was a few blocks down that tree-lined avenue, which turned out to be the avenue where all the internationally-known rich-people brands congregated. We speculated as to what made these sorts of strips posh and tourist-filled, given that they're a little generic and boring, like if TGI Friday's were retail for people with too much money, and quickly arrived at the Owl Magic Café.

The Magic was about the cards and wands themed bar on the second floor, and after the owltender let us in to the space on the fourth floor, we quickly discovered that there is no food at the owl café, just a row of owls, tied to perches—a one-room petting zoo. The owls had immediately evident personalities. The white owl with the perfectly-formed face, Lupin, pretended to be a cat when petted, doing the contented eye-roll thing and shaking a little, while the larger owl, with the larger talons, just glared at us. The snow owl had a sign overhead that explained that they're famously ornery and that, the author of the sign was told, the owl in Harry Potter was actually four owls, in the hope that at least one wouldn't be in a foul mood for any given shooting. The owl-petting procedure our hostess showed us, of stroking their beaks first, then working up to the back of the head, usually didn't work for us.

After some petting and casual introductions, I asked the one woman working this small space whether the birds were allowed to fly. She said (i.e., typed into her phone, which translated to English that I read) that they get into fights, but nonetheless, a minute or two later she unleashed one, Babu, who seems by my reckoning to be Eurasian eagle-owl (species name: Bubo bubo). Babu eventually settled at a perch by the only screened but open window and looked out over the city. Meanwhile, our hostess unleashed a few more birds, who did not peck each others' eyes out, but instead mostly stood where they were, walking around a little. The large one with big talons we could hold after putting on gauntlets. That one eventually wound up at a perch at a top corner of the store. Business with the owls continued for some time, though I began to feel self-conscious about the mostly-maintained petting-zoo experience of it. The hostess showed my cohost how they get chickens just past hatchling stage—males who were going to be ground to paste anyway—to feed the owls. She got one out and tore it to pieces, feeding some to one owl, some to another.

Before leaving, our hostess noted that my cohost's kimono was not well tied, and led her to the little side-room to help her adjust. They were there for some time, because although our hostess knew the kimono was tied wrong, she didn't know how, and so googled videos about how to tie a kimono, watched them, and then did so. Meanwhile, I was left to watch the owls. As I'd pet the kittenish one, the one with big talons (the talonted one?) would hoot aggressively, making firm eye contact with me. This was one that refused to be pet to begin with, but the jealousy persisted. Maybe it was protectiveness. My few minutes alone with the owl revealed clear inter-owl drama, but I could only guess at how these feathered fellows see each other after being literally chained together for who knows how long.

We walked one block behind the street lined with trees and rich-people shops, and everything was again incredibly quiet and car-free. Those cars that did molest us were rich-people cars (many Porsches). We passed by a white-box art gallery with anime-themed paintings and a sculpture that I'm sure the curator would explain is not pornographic, and what looked like the finest cathedral we'd seen in this city, until we saw the sign pointing to the hôtel lobby.

Our goal was the Natural Lawson ("It's Natural law, son!"), the conbini which pushes for the healthy/ethical/allergic/rich markets. I wanted to be sold by the wonderland that the conbini had been billed as. I wanted to see foods I never would have seen before, pictured a life where I'd head to the conbini all the time for culinary joy. I wanted to understand the cup of noodles. But even when it went healthy/ethical/clean/upscale, it was still in the end a convenience store selling packaged junk food. This one had craft beer, but not the usual conbini sake (not healthy/upscale enough?). A few loli friends were buying onigiri.

I filled my Zojirushi thermal travel mug with water from the Zojirushi water boiler by the counter, and we headed to the next festival, where there would be tables and chairs for us to sit down and have our cups of noodles with the word VEGAN in extremely large letters on the side. We emerged from the subway that got us there by the moat of the Imperial Palace. The moat was a short city block wide, and I marvelled at how many sky scrapers were not built to keep this moat here. It wasn't even the right festival, just one of those little pleasant affairs where they get a perky jazz band and a bunch of food trucks around a tent and form an impromptu outdoor pub, but that was not at all a problem and we had a pleasant time of it all, before moving on to the next festival.

That one was in Rappongi Hills. The hills are a complex, in the real estate sense of being a collection of buildings, and in the colloquial sense of wait I just got off the subway and I am already lost. There is a multi-tier framing narrative around the buildings which form their own mall/museum/whatever space, as you pass between dozens of life-ish sized Doraemon the blue cat figures and a ten meter high spider and try to decide whether to go up or down the next escalator. We found the pavilion where the festival was being held, but the stage was bare by this hour, and there was only a woman in heavy face-paint, a bright kimono, and sprouting occasional balloons (i.e., a clown) by way of entertainment. The vibe was pleasant, but having missed the shows, we headed back via a different route through the Rappongi catacombs.

My cohost had read somewhere that there's an observation deck from the project's main office tower. We wandered, and although we didn't find an official observation spot, we found an elevator to the 49th floor, and pretended we belonged there. It was a library/event space for a university consortium. The open seating had no barriers and we found the view we were looking for. Tokyo spans to the horizon. It had no specific layout, but a generalized glow, with high-rises in a number of locations, because the city is too big to have one downtown. All those raised highways we'd been looking at the bottoms of were visible from here, with the more orange-colored lights making them especially stand out.

Outside of the complex, Rappongi was a somewhat desolate downtown-ish space at night, with far fewer humans than the size of the buildings would suggest makes sense.

The Indian place had good food. Everybody spoke English plus one other language, and the walls were covered in positive affirmations encouraging us to live our own lives and not those others want us to, to maintain a positive disposition, to show our love for those around us. The music was consistently positive. On the way out the proprietor got to talking a little, and told us how he'd moved to Japan decades ago, throwing away a high-paying job in India. When you move, leaving behind all the expectations other people have of the rôle you're supposed to play, that's when you discover who you really are, he told us. He likes the restaurant because it allows him to express his perspective and beliefs to the world.

The Ghibli Museum

I feel a little awkward describing a tourist trap to you, but it was as charming as one would hope, and I'll give it four sentences. I envy the architect whose job is to design what the brochure describes as a maze-like space. It wasn't too amazing, geometry-wise, just six main spaces, two per floor, plus a roof space, a terrace café, and lots of extraneous stairwells.

Content-wise, I'm not sure what I'd been expecting, but setting aside the stained glass Totoros and the kid's playroom with the giant cat bus, the main exhibit Part I was one room showing the magic of film in several different ways, from how you can build a single cell from a set of layers, each drawn separately and moving frame-to-frame in different ways, to how a zoëtrope creates the illusion of movement (and what a zoëtrope it was, with jumprope and flying Totoros and running rabbits), to a steampunk rendition of the movie projector itself, with bona fide film running through it, and then another room above that room with main exhibit Part II, showing original art from the movies, from concept to more finished parts of stills, with many movies (like Grave of the Fireflies and the one about the onsen for monsters) getting their own boards, along with categories like backgrounds, all in the setting of a messy artists' studio. Above that: gift shop.

The music venue

Monday show, five bands, doors at 6:30, show at 7:00.

It took us a minute to find the way down, and even then we weren't quite sure we were in the right place. The place is named, in Romanji, Shangri-la, which the reader will recognize as an invention of a British person (James Hilton) based on his fanciful perceptions of The Orient.

But walk past the coin lockers, haul open the sound-proof door, then haul open the next sound-proof door, and the bass hits you. The interior was largely familiar, with the black-painted floor, red walls, the stage where a stage is supposed to be and a sound booth on the other side of the room. A medium-sized venue, maybe 150 tatami or so, a little more structured than one would expect, with a slight step-down and railings you could lean against halfway down the room, and little cocktail tables here and there.

We opted for a spot along the wall five meters from the stage, where we could watch the audience as much as the bands. The first two bands were both one dude singing while playing guitar, a bassist, and a drummer. I don't have a lot to say about them, so let's focus on the audience. It's a 7PM show, so if you got off work a little after 5PM and had to take the subway, you did not have time to grunge yourself up. Only a few people wouldn't look fine at a professional mixer, like the guy with big blonde Garth hair ("Party on, Wayne!"), and the older guy in the beret. Two women with their drinks on one of the little tables were femmed up, their dancing consisting of swaying and clapping in a manner we'd see again at the maid café we'll go to in Akihabara.

The bar was not prominent, off to the side in a manner invisible from the main stage, and I wouldn't have even known but that the admission came with a free drink ticket (in the form of a guitar pick—nice touch). It likely wasn't the revenue generator a bar in D.C. would be, given that even after your first drink, a drink like a rumancoke is 600¥, or two for 1,000¥.

The last act was especially energetic, making the contrast between their energy and the audience's barely-perceptible bopping almost awkward. Did I mention that in front of the stage, there are substantial barriers, large enough to likely withstand being driven into by a motorcyclist, implying that the designers of this place expected a huge amount of audience excitement.

Though most of the songs were in English, the singers were clearly not native English speakers, as you could tell by the pronunciation and ease in speaking when doing between-song patter in Japanese. From the audience reactions, none of the bands were all that good at band patter. They often didn't bother, and the audience would stand silently while the performers negotiated with their tuners.

Rock & roll did not originate in Japan. That the bar was such an afterthought gave the sense that it was there because clubs are supposed to have a bar, not because booze is a somehow integral part of the experience. If often took me a minute to parse out that the singers were singing in English. I hate the stereotype of Asians as mere emulants of Westerners, but it's hard for me to avoid some sense of playing out of rôles. Pondering this thought, I felt bad about being the racist, but then I realized that Western clubs are themselves emulations of how a Western club is supposed to look and work. If you asked somebody who has never been to a standard music venue how they would design one, I don't imagine they'd give you nowhere to sit, or paint as much of the space as possible black, or that they'd expect that the correct manner of comporting for most of the show is to stand still watching the band while holding a drink in one hand.

☆ Akihabara

We continued out to Akihabara, the otaku capital of the world. My cohost decided that we need to go to a maid café. This is the lowest level of female attention: just conversation and doting. No nudity, but the French Maid costumes have skirts just short enough that you're curious what happens should they have to bend over. The logo of the café we wound up at was a drawing of a person in the maid costume, centered on that gap between too-short stockings and too-short skirt.

The first bragged that it was the first Cyberpunk maid café, the concept being that the hostesses are robot cats built to serve us, the paying humans. There was neon in the windows, as per the late 1980s conception of 2045. But it was full, so they pinged a hostess at another location to escort us over. In the mean time, a man from California, studying here in Tokyo, was waiting on the stairs with us for his turn in the cybermaid café. He told us he's a regular, but didn't answer the question of why (instead going off on why Japan in general). Nor could we hypothesize; nothing seemed unusual about this person relative to any other college-age Asian-presenting person from California.

The maid from the other café personally escorted us because on the way we passed by a good number of touts for other cafés—the streets were veritably lined with them. She attempted small talk, primarily with my cohost, but it was difficult because of her limited English and our never making it past unit 3 in Duolingo's Japanese course.

The other café was aggressively femme, with white walls with pink messages on them, and hearts everywhere.

I never understood the men who strive to be as butch as possible so they can get together with the women who strive to be as femme as possible. One day you finally get the girl and move in together, and now you're buried in pink.

The tables on our side each had a single seat, all facing in the same direction. I turned one around so we'd have two chairs at one table, and was tut-tutted by a hostess. It turns out that the hostesses needed that side to carefully bend at the knees and talk to us. One came to us with a few laminated sheets of paper, held together by a ring. This was the translation sheet, which she dutifully read from with as much charm as possible given the strain of speaking in a language she didn't speak. See, she's actually a cat, and her origin is that she was a lost cat long ago, and a human took her in and saved her, and now she wanted to repay by being obsequiously nice to humans (the word obsequiously was not actually in the script). Be careful drinking the water—it's laced with magic and if you drink too much you might turn into a cat yourself. I made an apologetic face and gestured to my glass which I'd already drunk down. But it's all true: she told us to close our eyes, and next thing you know I had cat ears.

It's a one item minimum, and the laminated menu had a number of options, typically in the 3,000¥ range, because it came with some sort of attention from the women. Or you could just order a drink for half of what a drink costs in a bar back home. I ordered a rum and coke. My cohost ordered an omlette and a latté with a splash of attention, and all the waitresses ran to our table and sang-yelled something which I take to have been an expression of gratitude. They crowded around us and made heart shapes with their hands for five seconds, then dispersed back to their work.

When the latté came, a maid offered to draw something on top with chocolate syrup. I suggested the James Webb Space Telescope, but my cohost went with a cat. When the omelette came, a maid offered to draw something on top with ketchup. My cohost kept it easy with a rabbit, which looked a whole lot like the cat but with different ears. We ate, I sipped my drink and felt curmudgeonly, like one of the gruff heckler muppets drawn into the middle of a frenetic anime. We were amused by the table of four men across the way chatting merrily with the one or two maids who came by every few minutes.

Ten o'clock rolled around and the magic wore off (a maid took off our cat ears), and we were back on the street.

Don Quijote is a department store/entertainment palace. My cohost noted that they all seem to have pachinko parlors under them, and we entered the pachinko parlor first. It was unbelievably loud, the sound of a million ball bearings hitting pegs. Pachinko used to be a game where balls would fall from the top of the machine, then slowly make their way to the bottom bouncing off of nails in various patterns on the board. If they land in the right spots at the bottom, you win something. You have a wheel which moves some of the pegs, which gives you a feeling of control and something to do but is likely useless. These machines had ball bearings and nails around the edge of a screen that is the real focus, like a painting with an elaborate frame. There was a knob underneath; I have no idea what it does and nobody seemed to be doing much more than leaning it in one direction or another, staring expressionless at the screen as whatever animation indicated whatever bonuses are being scored. Between the switch to video and the arrangement of rows of machines and seats, it looked like a Las Vegan slots room. [Yes, that is the accepted adjective form.]

We went up the escalators to the top, to work our way down.

• Top floor: video games. Lots of rhythm games, or tap-the-screen, no joysticks in sight. We played one that involved banging a drum looking much like the kind we saw at all the temples.
• Next floor: claw machines. Many had exceedingly cheap prizes, like cans of assorted energy drinks, which I am confident would be for sale on a floor below, but here you could gamble for the same. The pachinko parlor on the ground floor by now fit entirely into the æsthetic. It's probably a different company for legal reasons or such, because you're gambling for cash instead of just plastic figurines.
• Next floor: the maid café, which was closed by now, and immediately adjacent, sexy maid costumes for you to buy to take home, followed by sexy cheerleaders et al, followed by sex toys and porn. There was a sign in the way of you must be 18 to enter at the head of those last few aisles, but that's not going to deter anybody.
• Next floor: primarily aimed at a different stage in the life cycle, about a third of the floor was plush merchandise with a heavy Sanrio and Ghibli component, a third t-shirts and tourist souvenirs, a third luggage. I don't know if I'm imagining it or stereotyping, but I get the sense that East Asian culture uses suitcases a lot more than Western and I don't have a story here but that there's more shelf space for suitcases than sex toys seems to back up my casual musing. I suppose they make good dressers if such furniture isn't your thing.
• 𝆹𝅥𝅮𝆹𝅥𝅮Don don don/Don Qui-jote/Don don don/Don Qui-jote𝆹𝅥𝅮𝆹𝅥𝅮. They have a theme song and it plays on the PA often. It is as catchy and unpleasant as you might expect.
• Next floor: the electronics and junk food. Yes, matcha everything, which led me to realize that this Akihabara store leans toward tourist-friendly.

It was late now and the only people on the street were a few maids still standing on the street holding signs. Some were standing by a giant trash heap from a store that was now closed for the night and I felt sad for them.

Akihabara's temple, my cohost said, has appeared in numerous video games and comics, so we found our way to it. It's very red and has a large-ish courtyard between the temple and its gate, though we came in via the back way through the garden. There's a large gift shop. The only thing that otherwise stood out was how quiet and pleasant a temple is at night when it is abandoned. You get the sense that the spirits might come down. Maybe, video-game style, they would confront you for invading the space they inhabit, though, outside of video games they are the benevolent spirits the monks and tourists pray to, so they will more likely bless you.

Now for the sad part. The subway is not 24 hours. I convinced my cohost that walking 40 minutes would be a pleasant experience and we'd see a few new things, and I was right, but in the worst way. We slipped over to a neighborhood street, which was wide-ish but not a major road, and then I saw it: street parking. They are infrequent, maybe two or three per side per block, white parking meters, but they existed. Street parking had a toe-hold on the island, and just as Japanese kudzu took over in the southern USA, I could think of nothing but Western street parking creeping its way around every street in Japan. I tried to think about other things, but I can't tell you much of whatever else I saw on that walk home.

Kettle quest

I now wanted a tea kettle. This was our last day in Japan, we'd have to be on the subway at 1, so let's do it.

First we went to the temple, which had the largest lantern you'll ever see hanging under the gate, and a very long approach to the temple itself, which had market stalls the entire way along. If the temple gets a little rent from every stall, they're very set. The temple itself had a very large incense burner, and self-serve fortune booths where you honor-system drop a coin, pull a rod from an opaque box with a rod-sized hole, and use the number on the rod to find a drawer on the card-catalog-like cabinet. If you get a bad fortune, tie it to the wire rack provided. It also had a very large garden, which was a nice respite from the market.

I bought some incense, wrapped in swastikas, but violated rules and took it home instead of burning it for purification there at the temple. At home, I put it in a drawer with the other incense, a small and well-defined space, but it disappeared, preventing itself from being burned in violation of the rules.

We thought the department store next door would be a natural pick. It almost blended in with the market, whose side-stalls stretched into non-templar territory. The department store had been there forever, and had appropriately complicated architecture, with the subway station at the lower level, the department store starting on the second floor, a sixth floor that's offices and (we discovered) is unexitable via escalators. Each department was its own business. You had all the categories you'd expect, but housewares had its brand, as did shoes. Time was running short, so at the book store, we asked in what department we could find tea kettles. The answer was "none", but the woman at the counter went full reference librarian, googling away and pulling out a paper map and showing us where to look, Kapabashi street.

The walk was maybe ten minutes, meaning ten minutes back, and time was running short. But now we were on a quest. Literature professor Thomas C Foster explains that a quest has five components: the quester, a place to go, a stated reason to go there, challenges and trials, and the real reason for going. The first four are about us and obtaining a tea kettle. The last, perhaps this was our last day in Japan and we were wondering how this experience would bleed forward into future life. Japan closed itself off to outsiders for centuries, then re-opened in the last generation, and for tourists looking for something different to do in their own lives, this is the ideal. My question, made explicit by the tourists asking questions at the tea ceremony, but implicit in all of tourism, was what of this culture eleven time zones away I could take home with me.

I have no interest in souvenirs, which are in some ways a little dead and petrified, with the intent of causing you to recall something that had happened in the past. A tea kettle would be an active way of literally bringing a not-entirely-insignificant part of the country and the life back with us. Maybe this voyage can improve my life, blending the cup-of-noodle lifestyle with the Chinese tea ceremony. Or perhaps the quest was simply something to do, a structuring of wandering.

Kapabashi Street was the cookware district, with a long row of stores cluttered with everything you could want. We skipped the pizza restaurant supply store, but dove into maybe six others, walking at top speed. After vigorous questing, we'd found two electric kettles, of the wrong type. Wall of blenders, but no kettles.

My cohost found another department store, we rush there, chattering about the mystery of boiling water. OK, you can do it in the pot you boil your pasta in, but this isn't an oddball specialty item. This location choice was partly because of her main quest and my side-quest, trying to find an elusive restaurant that had been recommended. It wasn't there either. No, they don't have tea kettles; try Don Quijote. Time is short but it's a block away, let's go.

Yes, it had far fewer tourist goods and far more regular-people equipment. 𝆹𝅥𝅮𝆹𝅥𝅮Don don don,/ Don Qui-jote,/ Don don don,/ Don Qui-jote𝆹𝅥𝅮𝆹𝅥𝅮 They have a choice of two kettles, both of which are, in character for the place, cheap. Or quest is over, and we have failed. After a bit of flailing, we did find the restaurant, so her quest was completed. It was 12:50, delicious, and so stressful we barely managed a conversation. But we did our best, and made our way back to the hôtel. They declined to sell us one of their kettles.

We got the train and were noticeably early to the airport, such that we were able to make a leisurely visit to the 7-11 by the gate to get a few onigiri for the plane.