John Milito: Geisha Hunter

We spent January 3rd through the 5th in Kyoto, and then Angelica caught her flight from Tokyo on the 6th. I'll try to cover everything. Here goes.

The first place I'll mention is Nijo Castle. I feel like the name is a bit misleading, as it doesn't resemble a castle as one would usually imagine it. It is more of a fancy palace with moats and a wall surrounding it. In a small stroke of bad luck, the fancy Ninomaru palace was closed for something involving the new year that I didn't quite grasp. As I said, the whole castle complex is mainly comprised of moat, wall, and palace, and I could see the first two from the outside. I was a bit perturbed as I felt like I was misled into buying a ticket that didn't have much worth. But anyway, besides all the gaudy gold artwork, the main attraction for me in the palace are the "nightingale floors". The floorboards inside are specially rigged so that the slightest movement of the floor makes a chirping sound. This was designed to make it impossible for some sneaky ninja to try to creep in and kill the shogun without being discovered.





The tail end of a children's taiko performance in front of Ninomaru. A small consolation prize to make up for the closed palace, I imagine.

I haven't a clue what these things were by the water. They seemed to be bales of straw somehow stacked to look like a coral. For what purpose I couldn't say.

At some point during our travels we happened upon a shrine with a bit of oddness to it. Everything was covered in pigs. Pig statues were plentiful, and at one side of the grounds a long glass case was filled with all kinds of piggy knickknacks. Quite strange.

Here you can wash your hands in the water pouring from this boar's mouth. So fresh, so clean.


It got even better. Here, inside the shrine walls, are two pigs in a cage. There was a time table posted, and the was a pile of various toys: included a soccer ball and goal, leading me to believe that these pigs would be performing in some way. Doesn't seem very religious to me, but whatever.


Here's an interesting shot. Note the piggies framing the action. This is the year of the rat according to all that Chinese astrology stuff. It just so happens that I was born in the year of the rat! Woohoo. In Japanese I would say that I am toshiotoko(literally year-man). Angelica and I spotted a huge rat in Tokyo, and I took this as a very auspicious sign. Booyah.


How many ways can you possibly eat mashed up soy beans? More than you care to discover, friend.

While riding the bus on our way to see yet another shrine, we spotted some festival-looking activity and promptly jumped off to check it out. Sure glad we did.

I discovered a new form of deliciousness. So a candy apple is just an apple on a stick dipped in red candy, right? Well, I found a peeled mandarin orange on a stick dipped into ORANGE candy. I know. It seems so obvious now that its here, but the best inventions always do.


Here we've walked past the party and are entering Solemntown.

Then it happened. A bit of added commotion drew my attention. A small crowd of Japanese with huge cameras were following around a line of four geisha, all hurrying towards somewhere out of our sight. I lived in Kyoto for a combined 6ish months, and I saw geisha maybe two times, so it was extremely lucky that Angelica could see them.




This seems like an excellent time to talk a bit about Geisha. First of all, they aren't prostitutes. I'll go ahead and get that common misconception out of the way. Second, I've been trying to educate myself about this but I'm still a bit confused. I think that the ladies in this picture are Maiko, which is an apprentice Geisha. My understanding is that they dress up more strikingly that a full Geisha, in part because their stunning beauty is meant to compensate for their lack of mastered skills. Those skills include the use of various classical Japanese instruments as well as poetry, tea ceremony, and traditional song.

The Maiko in their natural habitat.


The last big thing we did on our trip was visit Kinkaku-ji. Kinkaku-ji is probably the most popular spot in Kyoto. It is a small temple set out into a lake. Oh yeah, and its just about completely covered in gold.

Near Kinkaku-ji, donation turned game of skill. I really wanted to get a yen to land in that cup.


Another nice looking spot near the Kinkaku.

We spent a spot of time near Kyoto Station on our last night.

Interior of Kyoto Station

One of the weirdest sculptures I've met, located in Kyoto station.

We spent some time playing around in a nearby gift shop dedicated to Astro Boy merchandise.

Do you have your ticket to the robotic gun show?


Angelica and a host of bewildering characters.


Here are some other unrelated yet noteworthy little things.

Oh, but I have a big friend who could stomp a robotic child any day.

Angelica at the Imperial Gardens. Everything imperial was closed up behind a high wall. Needless to say, it was a short trip.

We tried some butaman from a street vendor. It's steamed dough with a meat mixture inside, pork in this instance.

After riding so many super packed trains, Angelica was excited when we got on this completely empty one.

Angelica did her best to load her luggage with the heaviest things she could find, and it was my job to drag it through all the trains stations. The bag was so heavy that the handle broke off.

Angelica's time in Japan ended on a pretty good note. Back in Tokyo with a few hours to kill before her flight, we went back to kaminarimon in Asakusa. If you recall,(here's the post if you don't) this was one of the first places we visited while in Tokyo the inital time. Then, though, it was dark and deserted. Now it was a bustling marketplace. Its hard to imagine that the two places are the same.

As people crowded and pushed to get a picture under the famous big lantern, I was happy that we got ours when no one was around.

Possibly more little souvenirs than I have ever seen in one place.

2/3/08 Kyoto: Day 2

We arrived at our second hotel a few hours before check-in, and so were unable to really get settled before we started out again. We checked our maps and the closest place that looked interesting was Toji temple.

Toji occupies a fairly large area slightly south-east of Kyoto Station, and it wasn't too much of a problem to walk there. I was initially impressed at the size of the parking lot and the number of tour buses coming and going. This led to me to believe that we had found an important place. The five-storied pagoda in Toji is the tallest wooden structure in Japan, according to Wikitravel.

The outskirts of the temple had a better than average selection of the charms and the other templey things that are always present at religious points of interest.

I recall at some point we were at another nearby temple, but they were so close to each other that I don't think that there was much distinction between the two. Anyway, here are a couple highlight temple shots in no particular order.

Here is one of my favorite pictures from the trip. Angelica against a wall of what I assume to be prayers written on individual pieces of wood.


Here is another good of us with a priest that Angelica corralled into getting a picture with us. The look on the priest's face is memorable.


There was small gathering of people praying pretty intently to a statue of what I think is a monk.


A closer shot of the monk.

When we reached the center of the grounds where the most important buildings were situated, I was pleasantly surprised to see that a small flea market was in progress. I love these little sales, and I think that Angelica enjoys them as well, although we are generally hunting for different kinds of things.

Because the prices there are much more subjective, haggling is an important skill in Colombia, and I enjoy watching Angelica in action. Our bargaining styles are pretty much opposite, as I am a bit more calculating about how much things are worth and should cost, and Angelica is cute enough that the numbers don't really seem to matter. She just jokes around with people and smiles until the price goes down. Fun.

Angelica scored some piggy banks shaped like sumo wrestlers, and some nice wooden (heavy) statues as well. There were lots of cool antiques, but they were mostly too expensive for my tastes, so we stuck to more garage sale-type merchandise.

A bit of commerce taking place in front of a large temple building.

The admission to see the pagoda up-close was a bit expensive and seemed unnecessary.

Next I thought it might be nice for Angelica to see the Gion district of Kyoto, a well known neighborhood famous for geisha and its nice atmosphere. I would say it embodies the image that most people have when they think of Kyoto: plenty of stone-paved streets and traditional buildings. According to Wikipedia, Gion is the setting for much of the novel Memoirs of a Geisha.

Yasaka Shrine in the area had quite a bit of New Years festival going on (despite the fact that it is already two days past), so we stopped in to check things out.

A central stage features plenty of lanterns, each notes a sponsor of the festival.

We had dinner at a pretty fancy place in the area, Angelica had a good size sukiyaki and I had a dinner set with all sorts of interesting things going on. The waitress gave us plenty of help on how to deal with the pot and all the many utensils and condiments. There was never enough room on the table for all the stuff they kept bringing out.

We did a bit more walking in a more modern part of the city before bedtime.

A policeman gives warnings to illegally parked bicycles while standing next to an impressive statue, a woman with a sword in one hand and a fan in the other.

Here's another look at Kyoto Tower, this time from the front.

We eventually made it back to our hotel, which was nice, but not overly so. It did have a couple of technological wonders, though.

Behold! No matter how steamy the bathroom got, there was one spot of the mirror that was always clear. What hath God wrought?

Here is a brief and goofy video I made concerning the toilet. Enjoy.

Notice that the flusher isn't even connected to the toilet. Its on the back wall to the right. Insanity!

1/29/08 First Day in Kyoto

The afternoon of January the second was our first day in Kyoto.

Kyoto(wikipedia, wikitravel) has a special place in my heart. It was the first Japanese city that I stayed in for any serious amount of time, and on my second trip I studied Japanese for a semester in a university there. That said, Kyoto is a bit like the ugly sister I never had.

It is a jungle of concrete cubes and power lines not that unlike Ashikaga, only with bigger gray cubes. The little green patches surrounding the temples are like an oasis in an urban desert. Hidden among the building-boxes is the where the romantic city hides. As I hear cited over and over, Kyoto is the only large Japanese city spared from allied bombings in World War II. As a result, it has an abundance of pre-war wooden buildings, temples, magic.

Our lodging was quite near Kyoto Station, so it wasn't long before we had dropped off all of our gear and were out exploring. We had seen a sizable place that looked important during the cab ride over, so we started off in that direction. While I have lived in Kyoto for some time, there are so many bazillion temples and shrines that many of the places I explored with Angelica were new to me. Anyway..

Higashi Honganji is a giant temple dedicated to someone or something important. One thing about Kyoto is that the ridiculous number of temples really brings down the level of importance in my mind of any one of them. Long story short, there are two very large twin buildings on the grounds. I didn't bother trying to take any pictures of the structures themselves as one of the temples was under renovations, and it was enclosed in airport hanger-looking structure, mammoth in both size and out-of-placeness.

The fountain here was a pretty excellent dragon. This gentlemen is preparing to wash his hands and gargle in a little cleaning ritual done before one prays. When he is done with the little ladle he is holding, he will hold it vertically, letting the remainder of the water wash his fingerprints from the handle. Now that's clean.


This picture has unfortunately got some super glare going on, but I felt it needed to be addressed. Its a big rope, at 68m in length and 375kg in weight. The rope had a very informative sign, which read:

THE HAIR ROPE
This is one of the many ropes , specially made of the hair of followers who wished for the success of the hall's construction in 1895. As normal rope, at that time, was of very low quality, hair was preferred. They were used in transporting and hanging the huge beams which you can see today in the main framework of these two halls.

Gross.

Well Angelica had really been wanting to see Tokyo Tower, which I added a nice picture of a few posts ago. Unfortunately by the time we had wandered over there, it was already closed. So when she spotted the Kyoto Tower, it became a must-see. I'm not real impressed with the tower, but I figured the view would be nice and maybe we could spot someplace else that we wanted to check out.

Several crab restaurants have these massive crabs clinging to the walls. I'd say I've seen at least five of them during my Kyoto days. Some of the fancy ones even move their massive claws and legs.

So Kyoto Tower was the very next place that we went. The base of the tower is the height of touristy. Having lived in Japan in someplace other than a big touristy city, I could spot the things that were made solely for the enjoyment of foreigners. I bought I couple little things though, one fun thing was a little key chain of Spiderman hanging off the top of the tower we were about to enter. Junky, I know, but it looks cool.

I also took this opportunity to buy some yatsuhashi for Angelica to try. It is one of Kyoto's famous foods. Its basically a sweet dough made from rice. I bought Angelica some of the raw version which is sold wrapped around a dollop of anko, or sweet bean paste. It was as delicious as I recall. The other version of yatsuhashi has been baked, and has a taste that reminds me of ginger bread.

The base of the tower was a bit too much tourist for me. I also felt like the entrance to actually ascend into the tower was a bit under emphasized, perhaps to help you forget why you entered the madness in the first place, therefore wandering and buying more junk.

The elevator ride to the top had much the same feel as the shinkansen ride had earlier in the day. Lots of super polite people in uniforms. Lots of unnecessary bowing. The view from the top ended up being pretty nice, and it was high enough that we could even see the outskirts of the nearby city of Osaka, a major metropolitan center.

This view of Kyoto from the tower illustrates my perception of the city as a pile of gray boxes. Note the large gray airport hanger in the center of the picture. This was what the temple we visited earlier was sitting under.

Breathtaking. Angelica and the view were nice too.

I think this person's name is Ms. Tower. Pretty shameless anthropomorphic little creature. Nice dresser, though.

So the tower definitely serves a sightseeing purpose, but I hear that there is a bit of controversy about its existence. It is way taller than anything around it, except maybe the massive Kyoto Station from which it stands opposite. It is a giant, bright orange and white thing reaching for the sky. This in a city many look to as the cultural an historical heart of Japan. I vividly remember reading the brochure handed to me at the elevator entrance. It featured a picture of the interior of the tower, with two geisha walking proudly inside. It went on to explain that the "candle-like shape of the tower blends in well with traditional Kyoto". Something along those lines. Pretty much a joke for anyone with eyes.

At the risk of breaking time continuity, here is a nice night time view of the street in front of Kyoto Station. Kyoto Tower can be seen, well, towering.

I figured we had had enough sightseeing for one day, so I took Angelica to the more modern shopping area. Its pretty nice. Not only are there department stores, but several of the streets full of shops are completely covered, making viewing possible no matter the weather.

One of the many covered streets that intersect each other. Many people were still on their new year vacations, so things were quite busy, as you can see.

This colorful little shop was selling quite a large selection of chopsticks. It was one of those places that is so small and filled with merchandise that I was worried about turning around, lest I knock over something expensive.


Not even a walk through a glitzy business district means that you will escape the temples. Occasionally they can be found among a full street of businesses, seemingly unaware of the clash, or just unwilling to move. This one had a pretty cool Buddha statue in it. It had a nice incense smell to it as well.

Another thing to keep in mind with Kyoto, is that tourist attractions all close around 5ish, so you pretty much either have to go eating or drinking, or go home.

Any time of day or night, if Angelica saw a temple bell, she was going to ring it.

We wanted to get the feel of the Japanese ryokan for a night, without getting the feel of a public bathroom for four days. A ryokan is a traditional inn that is especially prevalent in Kyoto. While they do have a bit of romance to them, they lack many of the amenities that modern lodging provides. Ours was a pretty typical example. It was simply some bed rolls laid out on the tatami mat floor. I think we both appreciated the atmosphere, but neither of us complained when we were packing our bags the next morning to move to the real hotel.