Sayonara Japan

Thanks very much for reading my blog! I've been home for about two weeks now, so this will be my last post. I'll leave you with three of my favorite pictures of Japanese English. The flying pan cover came from a big discount store near my house and the green content of crab head is from a sushi place in Kyoto. The menu notice about horidays was in a curry shop in Kurashiki.

I hope you enjoyed reading my blog, I really enjoyed writing it!
Catie

Onomichi

Onomichi is a little port town about an hour from Hiroshima. It's famous for having a very, very high concentration of temples, and there's a big loop walk that takes you to see most of them. Our guidebook warned that the temple walk takes most of a day and that you'll be sick of temples by the end, so we opted to walk to the beginning of the ropeway (seeing a few temples along the way) and take the little cable car to the top of the hill for a view of the sea. We saw plenty of temples on the way to the ropeway and it was nice to see the pretty, pink plum blossoms which are blooming at the moment. The views from the top of the hill (the third picture) were really spectacular and I've heard they're even more extraordinary when the cherry trees are blooming, but cherry blossom season hasn't started yet.

Thanks for reading! I'll write one more post about Japan and then I'll have to stop because I'm home in America now.
Catie

Kobe

After Himeji we spent a night in Kobe, a city famous for its beef. We saw the beef advertised all over, with lots of pictures showing heavily marbled steaks, but we didn't try it, so I can't tell you if the freshest steaks of the best beef in the world are really worth the price (the lowest price we saw was about 50 dollars). Kobe doesn't have too many attractions, so I don't think it's too popular with tourists from outside Japan, but people who live in other Japanese cities like to visit for the shopping, sea views, and nightlife. Apparently a few foreign teachers who lived in the city where I lived visited Kobe and immediately applied for transfers to the Kobe branch of their school.

The first picture I posted shows Kobe's Harborland, which is a tiny amusement park. Next is the Kobe earthquake memorial, which I found very poignant. Instead of creating a memorial, the city preserved a small section of the harbor as it was just after the quake so you can see the devastation firsthand. It's an idea that I think they must have gotten from Hiroshima's famous (and also very poignant) A-Bomb Dome, which is the shell of a government building from very near the epicenter of the bomb, preserved just as it was. The third picture is a view of the Maritime Museum and some of the harbor from our hotel balcony.

Thanks for reading!
Catie

Himeji Castle and Kokoen Garden

These are a few shots of Himeji Castle and the garden next to it, Kokoen. We went on a rainy Tuesday morning and it only took us about two hours to tour the castle and the garden. Himeji Castle is the most famous castle in Japan because it's very well-preserved and very beautiful. Many of the famous castles you can visit in Japan are reconstructions, but Himeji is an actual feudal castle, so it was nice to see it and walk around inside. There are some interesting ghost stories associated with the castle and my favorite was about a servant girl named Kiku who was framed for stealing a dish after she foiled an assassination plot. The would-be assassin framed her and she was tortured to death and then thrown in a well, and apparently you could hear her crying from the well until she was honored as a goddess, which appeased her spirit. The first picture is a view of the city taken from the top of the castle, and the second picture is the castle taken from the grounds.

We also went to the lovely garden next to the castle. We probably wouldn't have bothered with it because it was such a rainy day but we bought the combined ticket for the castle and the garden (admission to the garden was only about a dollar when combined with castle admission) when we went in the castle, so we thought we might as well take a look and I'm glad we did. The garden was divided into small sections, unlike any of the others I've seen in Japan, but the sections were about the same with streams and ponds filled with koi, stone bridges, and trees. The third picture shows my favorite stone bridge and the biggest pond in the garden which was filled with huge koi.

Enjoy the pictures, I'll update soon with pictures of Kobe, where we stayed the night after seeing Himeji. I'm back home in America now, so I'll do two more posts to finish up my pictures and then finish the blog. Thanks for reading!
Catie

Hadaka Matsuri (Naked Man Festival)

The Hadaka Matsuri is a traditional Shinto (the native Japanese religion) festival in which almost-naked men fight for a magic stick, called a shingi. The man who touches the stick is guaranteed good luck for the entire year, so it's a pretty big deal. I think the date of the festival was originally determined by the lunar calendar, but now it's set as the third Saturday in February. The festival is celebrated at a few different temples in different parts of Japan, but one of the biggest celebrations is in the town of Saidaiji, just twenty minutes from where we live.

The main event doesn't take place until midnight, but in the afternoon and evening there are other activities, including an all-female taiko drumming group performance, fireworks, and a contest where little boys compete for rice cakes or treasure tubes. Unfortunately we missed all of that because most people were working in the daytime, so we got to Saidaiji around ten. The streets leading up to the temple are all lined with food vendors and they are absolutely jam-packed because it's a small town and ten or fifteen thousand people go to see the festival every year. Up until about ten thirty anyone is allowed to look at the temple but after that they make an announcement (in English and Japanese, lest there be any confusion) that only naked men are allowed in the temple. It's easy to get swept up in the excitement of the event, and all four of the men in our group ended up participating, even though only one of them had planned to partake!

Any man is allowed to participate, all you do is go to the changing tents and buy the requisite outfit: fundoshi, which is the loincloth that sumo wrestlers wear, and tabi socks, which are a bit like slipper socks, I guess. After changing you have to run through some sacred pools to purify yourself and stop to pray on your way to the temple. The temple gets more and more crowded and then finally at midnight they turn off the lights and a priest throws the shingi into the center of the crowd. After that it's all over in about five minutes. No one I know has ever even seen the shingi, much less touched it, and I think that's partly because some of the Japanese teams have 30 or 40 men working together and strategies to make sure they have a good chance.

I hope you enjoy the pictures, I didn't have much luck getting good shots because it was dark and crowded. The first shot is a food vendor on the road leading to the temple, then a shot of the temple around 11 when the naked men were starting to gather, and finally a fundoshi-clad man on the street after the festival.

I've only got one more week in Japan and then I'll be heading home, so I'll probably be doing one more post. Thanks for reading!

Catie

Ikura Caves

A few weekends ago I went with my friend, Jess, to see a cave in the tiny town of Ikura, about an hour and a half into the mountains from the town where I live. It was a cold and snowy day and the town was almost entirely deserted. The first picture shows the shops that line the path to the caves, but they were all closed and dark. When we asked the people at the ticket office if there were any restaurants close by they told us that everybody was on vacation and our best bet was to walk slowly back to the train station (Ikura only has one train per hour) and eat when we got home.

It cost us 1000 yen (about 10 dollars) to get into the cave, and they gave us a map (with English translations) that named the formations we would see and also informed us that the cave walk is about 1200 meters long. The entrance to the cave is at the bottom of a cliff, close to the Takahashi River (which formed the caves) so we pretty much just walked up and up once we got in. The walk was very nicely done with lights and a little bit of music and recorded explanations playing (which we, of course, couldn't understand). Some parts of the path were a bit narrow and there was water everywhere but we made it through with just a few bumps on our heads and wet shoes.

The last picture shows a formation that may have been called 'soldier's pavilion' but I can't remember for sure. My favorite formation name was 'appearance to wear clothes of water' or maybe 'waterfall in which it hears only of sound.'

Thanks for reading! Soon I'll post about the Naked Man Festival, which I went to last weekend!

Catie

Japanese Cemeteries

I got hopelessly lost on the way to Korakuen the other day and stumbled on this cemetery on a hill. There were paths up the hill all along the road so I took one and it led me up past lots of different graves and into a wooded area. The path was slushy so it was a bit dangerous going back down, but it was a nice walk on the way up.

I don't know much about Japanese graves, but according to wikipedia there's a space underneath the stone for the ashes of the deceased (nearly everyone here is cremated). I also read that sometimes when someone dies before his or her spouse the spouse's name is engraved on the stone as well but it's painted red and then the red ink is removed when the spouse dies. I've never seen that, though.

My apartment in Fukuyama, where I used to live, looked out over some temples and there was a graveyard right behind my apartment building. From my balcony I could see memorial services and people tending the graves. The whole place was very clean and new-looking, unlike the graveyard you can see in my pictures, but even in this old cemetery there was plenty of evidence that people had been there recently, like the fresh flowers you can see in the last picture.

Thanks for reading!
Cate

Korakuen in the Snow

We've had a bit of snow here lately so today I went to see Okayama's famous garden, Korakuen, which I'd heard is extra beautiful in the snow. Korakuen is considered one of the three most beautiful gardens in Japan and I've been there twice before: once in November, 2006, right after I arrived in Japan (I wrote a blog post then, too) and once last summer in the evening to see the garden lit up.

The snow was starting to melt by the time I arrived at the garden but there was still quite a lot. In the first picture you can see Okayama Castle, which makes a nice backdrop for the garden. Thanks for reading!

Cate

Japanese Apartments

Happy New Year! Akemashite Omedetou Gozaimasu!

I wrote a little about my apartment when I first moved in, but I have a few pictures I took when I was moving out (when it was actually clean!) so I thought I'd post those now with a note about Japanese apartments. Apartments here are generally very, very small but mine, at least, was well-designed. When you walked in you would be in a hallway with the shower and toilet on your left and the washing machine, kitchen, and cupboard on your right. At the end of the hallway there was a door into the living/dining/bedroom. The closet in the main room was designed so that the clothes hang in the top half and the bottom half is where you're supposed to store your futon in the daytime. The room was probably about nine feet by eleven or twelve feet, so it was cozy but it heated up quickly in the winter and cooled quickly in the summer.

Bathrooms are designed so you can wash yourself before getting in the bath, which means that there's a drain in the floor and you can just soak the whole thing when it's time to clean it. The kitchen was just a sink, a burner, and a mini-fridge below the burner. I attached two pictures of the main room so you can get an idea of the size. These pictures were obviously taken when all of my stuff was already gone so they make it look more spacious than it actually was. One big advantage of Japanese apartments is that they always come with balconies because almost no one has a dryer so you need somewhere to hang your clothes.

I enjoyed living in my wee little apartment and it was a good experience to live like many young Japanese people (although it's very common for young people to continue living with their parents until they get married, and sometimes after they're married), but now I'm living in a house with an actual kitchen and a bit more room to spread out, which is a treat!

Thanks for reading,
Cate