Geishas, art and bum-warming in Japan

Since I got to Australia (yes, I'm a little bit behind with this blog), pretty much everyone I've talked to about my travels has widened their eyes and gone something like, "Ooh, Japan, what's Japan like??" I've found it pretty difficult to give what I'd imagine to be an intelligent answer to be honest. I think as a Westerner you could probably spend months there and still only form a pretty patchy impression of what Japan is like; I only had one week there which was barely time to scratch the surface - not that it wasn't a hugely enjoyable week!

I went to two very different Japanese cities, Tokyo and Kyoto. Tokyo was bombed pretty much flat during World War II, so it's an overwhelmingly modern city. Kyoto however was spared the bombs, and having also been the capital of Japan for centuries before Tokyo took over, has dozens of traditional temples, making it a major tourist draw.

I think I had been nervous that Tokyo in particular might be a difficult place to travel, what with the notorious lack of command of English of most Japanese people and the obvious differences to Western culture. However in reality it really wasn't very difficult at all and I felt very comfortable very quickly. Things are logical and efficient, enough signage is usually provided in English, and, charmingly, those people who do speak English will often ask you if you need help if they see you looking lost or confused.

Tokyo is huge, with a population of around 12 million. There is a comprehensive metro system, albeit that the scale of the city means it takes considerable time to get around on it. Getting in from Narita Airport or back is pretty time-consuming also. The city doesn't have one centre or focal point, which probably explains why nowhere felt overwhelming or oppressive, but pretty much everywhere felt lively. Possibly the nearest to a focal point is Shibuya with its famous Shibuya Crossing across the major crossroads there, apparently the busiest pedestrian crossing point in the world. Japan is a place where rules are obeyed, so a mass standstill becomes a sudden huge surge of humanity every time the lights turn green.

Shibuya Crossing

A good place to start sightseeing is Tokyo National Museum, in the rather lovely (albeit relatively Western-feeling) Ueno Park. It showcases Japanese art forms such as sculpture, pottery and costume down the ages, and much of it is truly beautiful. The Japanese aesthetic is charmingly delicate and probably often a little feminine (for want of a better word) by Western standards, but in no way lacking in ambition or impact. Photography was mostly allowed so there are some photos in my Facebook album.

I found my dabbles into the contemporary art scene particularly impressive too. Mori Art Museum is widely recognised as world class, and the installations there varied from beautiful to energetically zany and hilarious (if you didn't know that a car and assorted household objects including a food blender, Coke bottles and stuffed pandas could be "remixed", you do now!) to political. At the same site in Roppongi Hills is a viewing tower offering magnificent views over the city in all its vastness, but giving an impression of order and substantial green space. The Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography was almost equally stimulating, and I'll now be keeping a keen eye out for any future exhibitions by the excellent Japanese-born but Austrian-based photographer Seiichi Furuya.

At Shibuya is the charming Hachiko statue, of a small dog owned by a professor in the 1920s. Every afternoon the dog would wait at Shibuya station for its master's return from work. Sadly the professor died in 1925, but the poor dog continued to faithfully wait at the station every afternoon, until its own death 11 years later!

Hachiko statue

As a city heavily rebuilt after the war, architectural interest in Tokyo (as in Berlin) seems often very limited. However, one place that is well worth a good walk around is Tokyo Bay, the docklands area where there is (relatively speaking) plenty of space, a modern light rail system and plenty of hyper-modern glass-and-steel architecture - yes, not completely unlike London's Docklands, or the equivalent area in Amsterdam whose name escapes me. However I was disappointed with the National Museum of Emerging Science & Innovation there which I didn't find very accessible - very possibly I'm not science-minded enough by Japanese standards.


The Tokyo gay scene was an interesting experience. Tightly concentrated in one triangle in Shinjuku, it is apparently quite large but varies in its accessibility and openness to foreigners. A typical Japanese bar of any colour is, as I understand it, very small and you won't necessarily find that any locals will talk to you nor that they (or even the barstaff) have the English to be able to. (On those grounds, based on the very limited info turned up by Google, I decided not to bother venturing anywhere gay in Kyoto.) However in Tokyo the reasonably large bar Dragon Men is known for being foreigner-friendly, as is the darker and more claustrophobic club called Arty Farty (!). The latter plays predominantly Western pop music and got unpleasantly overcrowded on the Saturday night I was there. Frankly, my impression was that Japanese gay boys have an attitude; dressed and groomed to the nines with a bit of a swagger, they will strike up friendly but flirty conversation with you in an instant, but then disappear without a word in a flash, never to return. Now I'll never bitch about Swedish boys again! (Well OK, I probably will...) In fairness, take that assessment with a huge dose of salt as doubtless you could get a negative impression from a solitary night on the London scene too, depending on which establishments you happen to pick. :-) And later in the night I did meet a 20-year-old Japanese virgin who was endearingly free of any attitude (or worldliness!) whatsoever.

I took the shikansen, aka bullet train, over to Kyoto; this is quite an experience in itself. Not only does it attain speeds of up to 310 km/h, but it's pretty much always exactly on time, there are up to 11 services per hour, you can rock up to the station and make a seat reservation for the very next train, and it's beautifully comfortable. It really does feel like the future. One trick that I missed in itinerary planning is that for barely more than the (admittedly very high) cost of going from Tokyo to Kyoto and back, you can obtain a week-long rail pass for the entire country - so it would have been more cost-effective to stay maybe 11 nights in Japan instead of 7 and to have added a couple more stops before heading back to Tokyo.

Kyoto's railway station is a huge, comtemporary and rather impressive construction, and it does still possess a large, buzzing commercial heart occasionally indistinguishable from Tokyo. However, Kyoto really is all about the temples, and once you get out of the centre it can feel more like a small town. Japanese temples are probably most remarkable and distinctive for their rooves, constructed out of wood, and often painted in two-tone colours that emphasise the intricate geometric carvings. The biggest roof I saw had no fewer than four separate tiers to it - quite remarkable.

How many tiers on that roof?

There are literally dozens of temples in Kyoto; a handful of them attract busloads of tourists (actually more of them Japanese than foreign), which make the surrounding areas shop-filled melees. Ginkaku-ji is one of the several which has World Heritage status, and was remarkable for the sculptures in the gardens made from what looked like sand but was actually many thousands of small pebbles - but to be honest such were the crowds that any wider appreciation (aesthetic, let alone spiritual) seemed pretty well impossible.

 

Really, this is made from thousands of small pebbles

I found that the real pleasure was getting off the beaten track, which with so many temples to choose from is not difficult at all. My pick was Eikan-do, the headquarters of a sect based around a peculiar legend of the temple's Buddha statue coming to life, walking and talking. There was a real sense of space and calm there, and particularly beautiful gardens and lake.  Also thoroughly worthwhile was taking a short hike into the dense hilly forest to the east of the city, where there's a lovely small shrine in front of a modest waterfall.

I also managed to take in a couple of genuine Japanese major cultural experiences while in Kyoto. Firstly, I went to an onsen, a Japanese thermal bath - there are hundreds of them nationwide. They're generally inexpensive; you don't have to take anything other than your birthday suit, and make sure you enter before getting into your first tub (not doing this is very poor form). The tubs vary from pleasantly warm to (to me) uncomfortably hot. One of them appeared to have some kind of weak electrical or electromagnetic charge, which had me getting out pretty rapidly! Upstairs was a sauna (considerately fitted with a TV) with a tub of ice-cold water outside. Truly when I finished my session I felt absolutely fantastic, at least as good as after a particularly good gym session.

The second experience was seeing a geisha dance. Apparently Japan's famous geishas normally only give private performances which are prohibitively expensive and in any case largely inaccessible to Westerners. However in Kyoto a few times a year they also put on seasons of public performances in theatres, and I was lucky with my timing. The performance featured dialogue and some sort of plot (it seemed to involve a male samurai kidnapping one geisha), so a working knowledge of Japanese would have helped. However I was able to appreciate the supreme elegance of the geishas' costume, make-up and dancing, as well as the intriguing (and decidedly non-Western) music from the live orchestra. After a relatively sedate second half, there were loud gasps from the largely Western audience when a curtain rose to reveal the finale of the whole 18-strong company dressed in their brightest, most elaborate costumes complete with fans. It was a captivating show and I feel very fortunate to have experienced it.

One of the things Japan is probably most associated with by foreigners is cutting-edge technology. Well, the Sony Building in central Tokyo is considered attraction in its own right even though it's basically just a Sony showroom, featuring 3D HDTV (rather dubious I thought), the dinkiest laptops I've ever seen, incredibly high-end cameras and strange 'life planning' software. Vending machines are on virtually every street, selling wide ranges of bottled and canned drinks and cigarettes. Also, many fast-food restaurants (a misleading description as they often sell proper, nutritious food, just quickly) require you to insert money into a vending machine, press the button labelled with the dish you want, take a ticket and go to the counter only to hand over your ticket. Another 'application' (misapplication?) of technology is the common provision at the side of toilet bowls of electronic buttons: one to warm the toilet seat, and a second to activate a spray of water to wash your rear end (and on unisex models, a third button to spray water into female parts). Talk about solving problems that the rest of the world never thought existed...!

Japanese Internet cafes are a remarkable experience also. There are not all that many of them - Japan is not exactly a society where most people don't own their own technology. Those that do exist do much of their trade overnight; as far as I can tell there is no night-time public transport at all even in Tokyo, so if you go out and stay out even moderately late, can't walk home and don't want to take an astronomically priced taxi, you need somewhere to spend the rest of the night. Each user gets their own private cubicle, and you can choose a 'flat' leather seat that you can stretch out and sleep on. There is a huge library of 'manga' (Japanese comic) DVDs, a PlayStation as well as a PC in each cubicle, and unlimited free hot and cold drinks - and ice cream! It's all expensive, but very pleasant.

Unfortunately smoking is still permitted in Japanese bars, cafes, restaurants etc... but it is banned in parks and on the street! The logical consistency of that escapes me somewhat...

It's just a shame that Japan is such a closed, mono-ethnic society. Just about the only non-Japanese people I saw working anywhere were African men working as touts (aggressive and slightly intimidating ones) for individual venues on the city's busiest nightlife strip in Roppongi - an activity that city council signs in the vicinity made clear is illegal. Several times on metro trains I noticed that local people would rather stand than sit in an empty seat next to me; as I have continued to wash while travelling, I can only assume that this was because I was a foreigner. A fellow traveller I've since compared notes with had exactly the same experience in Korea.

However, an overarching impression of Japan was of a respectful, polite society. A middle-aged Indian immigrant to London visiting Kyoto got talking to me at a temple there. He was obviously depressed by his perceptions of anti-social and disrespectful behaviour in London, but expressed jealous wonderment that (a) groups of Japanese schoolchildren visiting temples on school trips were conspicuously quiet and orderly, not rowdy and misbehaved as you might expect, and (b) vending machines can be widely provided on ordinary streets without getting vandalised or stolen from. Fair points both.

Japan is an expensive destination - even if you sleep on a thin mattress on the floor in a run-down 'hotel room' all of about 6'6" by 5', as I did in Tokyo. However, I'm very grateful to the friends who persuaded me that I couldn't possibly miss Japan out of a round-the-world trip, as it was worth every penny, and I'll be looking to go again for a longer trip when time and money allow.