Random observations about Japan

We interrupt this travelogue to note the following random observations:

- The bars in Japan are as small as the guidebooks say, and often on the upper floors of buildings so you’d never stumble across them. You have to know exactly what you’re looking for and even then they’re hard to find as maps are often wrong. The main gay district in a city of 12 million was virtually deserted at 12:30 on a Wednesday. Contrast that with Soho or Dupont Circle. In a country where conformity is prized, gay culture lags far behind the West.

- Smoking is regulated much differently in Japan. Both indoors and outdoors have designated smoking areas, a practice of which I approve. OK, sometimes it wasn’t pleasant being inside with cigarette smoke, but I was visiting a smoker; if I hadn’t been, I’d have sat in the non-smoking section and been unmolested by cigarettes. So it’s better for smokers, and also better for non-smokers, since being outside doesn’t mean being unwittingly assaulted by cigarette smoke which is inevitable since smokers don’t have the option of smoking indoors.

- Crime is so low that people don’t even lock up their bicycles. And in Kyoto, you show your bus pass when getting OFF the bus. Now that's trust.

- People wear surgical masks not because they're paranoid of catching colds, but because they HAVE colds, and don't want to spread the germs to others.

Japan travelogue continued - Kyoto

Monday morning, kjersti and I got up sort of early. The plan was to spend two days exploring Kyoto. We took the Shinkansen bullet train, another item ticked off the bucket list, and were there in practically no time. It wasn’t cheap, but it was worthwhile. We arrived and found our hotel with no problems. I had elected to stay at a “pod hotel”, not simply for the money saved, but also to experience this Japanese phenomenon. I drew the line at sleeping in an actual pod, though, and paid 10 quid extra for an actual bed and space you could stand up in. The bed was larger than I’d expected, and the hotel had a dorm-like atmosphere. The breakfast was included, and turned out to be quite generous and contained no fish whatsoever.

Late July in Kyoto is hot hot hot. The upside of this was that there were far fewer tourists than there would have been in spring or autumn. The downside was that it was hot hot hot. Kyoto is a medium-sized city that has a 70s feel to it. We bought daily bus passes which got us easily to and from all the major attractions, most of which were shrines. Seeing Kyoto involves wandering round and looking at things, but in 37C (96F) heat this wasn’t terribly easy. There were frequent stops at cafes for iced coffee and air conditioning.

Kyoto is full of shrines and temples. Our first stop was the Nishi-Hongan-ji Temple, Kyoto’s largest. It was a huge compound of buildings, many of them reconstructions of the 17th century originals. Kjersti said that the Japanese don’t place the same value on buildings being original that we do in Europe – replicas are considered just as good. The temple interiors were lavishly decorated with gold ceiling lamps and altars, not what I’d expect from a religion as ascetic as Buddhism. We wandered around there for a while, then attempted to visit the Tofukuji Zen Buddhist temple, but got lost in winding residential streets. An elderly Japanese woman approached us as we were obviously lost, pointed out the right direction, then discreetly followed us to make sure we went the right way! That’s Japanese courtesy for you. Eventually we found the temple just as it was closing for the day. We decided it would be fitting to take the Zen view that it’s not in the arriving, it’s in the journey. ;)

From there we headed north towards Gion and had a wander through the streets heading south from the pagoda towards Kyoto’s most picturesque temple, Kiyomizu. This was tourist central. Narrow streets filled with upscale souvenir shops, cafes and restaurants. It had a similar feel to the Citta Alta in Bergamo, only Japanese. Again we arrived just as the temple was closing, but made it our mission to get an early start there the next day. We then went to Gion, the geisha neighbourhood which also features lots of restaurants and bars and really feels like old Japan. We took in a taster performance of Kyoto culture – tea ceremony, dance, kabuki – then had a delicious dinner. Last stop was a drink in one of the teensy Gion bars which reminded me of a houseboat. We got our drinks for free because the onions the cook started to chop while we were there made my eyes water so badly!

The next morning we headed directly for the Kiyomizu Temple, arriving just as it opened. The bustling shops of the previous evening were all shut, and Tourist Central was a sleepy little town. We got to enjoy the temple and its adjoining shrine before the crowds appeared, buying lucky charms and drinking from the holy natural spring that led to the founding of the temple. After a coffee stop we wandered north via lots more temples, including the newer Nanzenji Temple with its gigantic Buddha statue and memorial to World War II’s Unknown Soldier.

It was now getting very, very hot indeed. As long as we followed a north-south route, with some shade available, we were OK; but heading east-west in direct sun was staggering. I now understood the need for parasols.

As the almost unbearable heat of midday kicked in, we reached the canal where we looked unsuccessfully for a Music Box Museum, then instead went to the not-terribly-well-named Modern Art Museum whose main exhibit was on the influence of Japanese screen printing on Western styles such as art deco. It was very interesting. We then took in the Heian-Jingu Shrine but cut that visit short to head over to Nijo-jo Castle, on the west side of town. We arrived just before 4pm, last admission time, only to discover the castle was closed to visitors on Tuesdays in July. Doh! Next best thing was to go up the Kyoto Tower, where we viewed from above the sites we’d seen earlier in the past two days. We had decided to give the Imperial Gardens a miss since they frankly looked boring.

Kyoto is a very beautiful city that gives far more of a sense of the real Japan and its history than Tokyo. It’s also a lot more tourist friendly, with English more widely spoken and better signage. (I once again took time to appreciate that by accident of birth, I grew up a native English speaker.) I left Kyoto feeling that, other than Kjersti and Harajuku, there’s really not much reason for a tourist to visit Tokyo: it’s a huge city like New York, only more expensive and incomprehensible, but with polite inhabitants instead of rude ones.

Japan travelogue concluded - Fuji and more Tokyo

(Yes, I did type this up on the plane)

Wednesday: Back in Tokyo. I had by now concluded that my and kjersti’s holiday schedules are a bit different. I like to get up, do stuff, come back in the late afternoon for a few hours of relaxation/shower/change and head out for the evening. Kjersti likes to faff until late morning, then go out and stay out until late at night. Basically just take a normal day and do everything three hours later. So my thought was that instead of waiting (more or less) patiently for Kjersti to be ready to go out, what I could do is head out early and see the things she’d already seen or wasn’t interested in. Good plan, but Wednesday morning I was a bit tired and decided instead to have a catch-up-with-work-emails few hours. And Kjersti wanted to see Mount Fuji, which sounded like a good half-day excursion. We took the bus to Lake Kawaguchi, the largest of Fuji’s Five Lakes.

Because of the scorching heat in the city I would have expected hordes of Tokyoites to have flocked to this nearby rural escape, but it wasn’t the case, so Kjersti and I had no queues at all for the lake boat trip or funicular up the mountain where we were able to see Mount Fuji peeking out from behind clouds. I was surprised to see that it isn’t snow covered all year, as I had thought. The downside of it being low season was that all the restaurants were shut, so we grabbed some quick grub at the bus station and then went back to Tokyo.

Wednesday was our night out on the town. We took in four different places:
- Decadence / Deca Bar – the "goth" bar in Tokyo. It wasn’t goth at all, not even Lolita goth. It was painted in day-glo colours and was playing candy rave. A couple of the patrons were dressed in black punky attire, that’s about as goth as it got. The blue-haired, European owner welcomed us personally, which was nice, and apparently typical of the Golden Gai bars in Shinjuku which are just as tiny as the guidebook says. Forget Gossips, Deca Bar was about the size of Slimelight’s upstairs bar.
- Christon Café, downstairs from Deca Bar. This space was amazing and I wished I could have been there on a goth or, even better, fetish night. It had all sorts of religious and profane icons, gargoyles and crucifixes, massive stained glass ceiling fixtures, plush sofas and a cocktail menu like the London Stone’s. Kjersti’s cocktail came with glowing blue ice cubes, and the food menu looked excellent as well. This was the first place that gave us free bar snacks with our drinks.
- Advocates Bar – From here we headed toward the Ni-chome gay district in search of the Kinswomyn lesbian bar, which Kjersti had unsuccessfully searched for once before. We didn’t find it, but we were close enough to have stumbled across a different gay bar, Advocates Bar, with outdoor seating. This bar was big enough to seat four or five, as well. We had a drink there and then asked the barman for Kinswomyn. It turned out it was just round the corner so up we went.
- Kinswomyn – For the best known lesbian bar in Tokyo, this place was about two-thirds the size of my lounge. It was really nice though, with a rounded bar and a small but attractive clientele, and another owner who personally welcomed us and gave us snacks. Kjersti and I noted what a refreshing change it was to be in the company of women who weren’t dressed like little girls. There was seating for maybe a dozen, and room for three or four people to dance if they didn’t flail about very much. We had a drink there and collected some flyers, then caught a taxi home, where we discovered much to our surprise that it was 2 in the morning.

Thursday

I had entertained the idea of getting up early and going to the Imperial Gardens, but by the time I woke up it was no longer terribly early, and Kjersti, surprisingly, was keen to get up and out as well. We first went to the Edo Tokyo Museum for some history of the 1600-1868 Edo period. This museum was very comprehensive and English-speaking friendly, with lots of exhibits and large models of towns, etc. It didn’t shy away from the lives of prostitutes in the "pleasure quarters" of the period; apparently the poor girls had a lifespan of just 22. The shoguns paid their warriors in rice which they exchanged for money. Isn’t that fascinating?

Overloaded with information, we then went to a lesser-visited neighbourhood for some shopping and exploring, but again it got very hot. Our final stop was to hop a taxi to Roppongi Hills, an ultra-modern and upscale mall which was frankly a relief after the heat of the city streets. We had a delicious late lunch and did some shopping. Unfortunately, the only store in the complex which sold lingerie was Diesel. But of the dozen bras they had for sale, one of them fit. Hurrah! I am a Japanese size A! Sadly it was cotton and pink so I didn’t buy it.

We then headed up to the top of the Mori Tower for a 360 degree view of Tokyo, including Fuji in the distance. It was impressive indeed and by now I could identify some landmarks. They had a roof deck as well, so we went up as the sun set and the lights came on across the city. This was cool enough, but on top of it they had some Disney celebration going on so that every 15 minutes clusters of mirror-balled Disney characters would come to life, a laser light show would come on and dance-pop versions of Disney tunes would play. This display truly epitomised Tokyo, really. After dark we headed downstairs to the Mori Modern Art museum, which WAS modern art and featured new works from the Arab world, and then a final meal of top-class sushi in the Tsujiki fish market district near Kjersti’s place.

Friday

Last chance to do anything in Tokyo. I once again failed to get up in time to visit the Imperial Gardens, but Kjersti said they’re boring anyway, and I had to fulfil my bucket-list ambition to go bra shopping in Japan -– ( Boring bra stuff behind cut )

And then it was back to Kjersti’s to collect my bags and head to the airport, where I got to the counter with no time at all to spare, but was very pleased indeed to find they had oversold the flight and therefore I got a free upgrade to business class. Result! It’s Korean Air, so despite my being a numpty and forgetting to reserve a vegetarian meal AGAIN, the meal choices have all had delicious fish. What a great way to conclude the most expensive holiday I have ever taken in my life.