At home and abroad

How I wound up cuddling little pigs in Kyoto

October 15, 2024October 15, 2024jdewyzeLeave a comment

The short answer is we got templed out. Kyoto has more than 2000 temples and shrines. When I was planning our Kyoto itinerary back in San Diego, visiting a dozen or so over the course of four full days seemed reasonable. Got that one wrong.

For one thing, I wasn’t prepared for how overcrowded the most popular sites would be. I had read that tourists were overwhelming Kyoto but I didn’t take it seriously; I figured the mobs would be gone by mid-October. I also read up on the times of day to best avoid crowds. But it turns out it’s hard to succeed at that.

The famous Fushimi Inari Shrine is open around the clock. If we had gotten there at 7 in the morning, we probably *would* have encountered few other visitors. But we didn’t make it there till a bit after 8, when people were beginning to stream in.

The shrine is notable for its tunnels of traditional Shinto gates.

In search of some solitude, we found a side path up the mountain, which, though gateless, was eerily beautiful.

We found small weird side shrines filled with innumerable foxes, the ancient god of rice and the reigning presence at this shrine.

People also place miniatures Shinto gates in the side shrines.

Toward the top of the mountain the gates — and other tourists — started to multiply.

The further we went down the main path, the more crowded it got.

The only other time Steve and I have been to Kyoto — back in 1979 — the city reportedly attracted 6.5 million visitors. I just read that in 2023, more than 75 million came. We saw more foreigners than we had in Hiroshima, and at every major attraction we encountered the kind of crowds that fill Disneyland the week after Christmas. It takes energy to push your way through that.

After Fushimi Inari’s congestion, Steve and I returned to our Airbnb and took a short nap. Around 4 that afternoon we set off for another of Kyoto’s most popular temples: Kiyomizu-dera —more than 1200 years old and filled with great architecture…

…also many, many other visitors (contradicting what I’d read about how they would be largely gone by sunset.)

Many of the tourists wander around in rented kimonos, apparently to better savor the ancient Japaneseness of the place. These two looked Japanese but were speaking English with American accents.

Steve and I enjoyed taking it all in. Still, the concentration of visitors shocked us: all the clueless individuals blocking pathways as they posed for selfies; the surround-sound chatter; the constant need to change your pace to squeeze through clusters of bodies.

The next morning we tried even harder to get to our next touristic vortex as early as possible. But Arashiyama is on the far western edge of Kyoto, and it was 8:45 by the time we woke up, walked to the necessary train station, rode the train, and found our way to the famous pathway through the dense bamboo forest.

This is what it looked like when we first arrived.

Around 9 the buses began arriving and disgorging their loads.

We did find some calmer enclaves to explore in the vicinity. We had the beautiful garden created by a Japanese movie star famous in the 1920s almost to ourselves.

Here and there we saw the first evidence of the approaching autumn.

Back in the center of town, it was a steep 20-minute climb up to the Arashiyama Monkey Park, a preserve that’s home to wild native snow monkeys (the northernmost species of monkeys on earth.) The climb surely must have discouraged some visitors. But not that many, or so it appeared.

Hilariously, the humans had to enter a big cage in order to feed the monkeys who were peering in at them from outside.

A half-hour boat ride on the Hozu River felt soothing.

Even more serene was our visit Friday morning (Oct 11) to Saihoji (aka Kokedera), a Zen Buddhist temple renowned for its beautiful central pond…

…and vast expanses of emerald moss. It’s an exceptionally peaceful place to meander.

The only reason it wasn’t crawling with tourists is because the temple managers strictly limit the number of people they let in every day. (I had to make my reservation months in advance.) Each visitor also must begin his or her visit by sitting in silence and copying a kōan (a sort of Buddhist religious verse) to settle the mind.

We weren’t allowed to take photographs in the central hall, where we did the copying. But this is what it looked like from the outside.

As delightful as the Moss Temple was, by the time we made our way home, I felt like I had used up all my temple-visiting energy, at least for this visit to Kyoto. Steve shared my feelings, so we decided to scrap the rest of my careful plans, in favor of… shopping.

Nintendo’s headquarters are in Kyoto, and the company has recently opened several retails stores throughout Japan. The Kyoto branch, just ten minutes from where we were staying, was another mob scene. But fascinating!

We also visited the Kyoto Railway Museum. And I spent some time in the pig cafe near our Airbnb.

Pig cafes are a spin-off of the cat cafes that first appeared in Japan about 20 years ago; those are havens in which one can relax, relieving stress by stroking purring felines. Dog cafes followed some years later; the pig cafes are a further iteration.

I’d read about such places, and talking with the Czech tourist at our beef dinner in Kobe fanned my desire to visit one. She’d been to a pig cafe in Osaka and raved about the experience. Steve was mildly revolted by the idea of paying money (a little under $15) to interact with farm animals. But he couldn’t talk me out of it, so I made an appointment for a 30-minute session at the MiPig Cafe in one of the shopping arcades near our Kyoto Airbnb.

I had to take off my shoes, stow them in a locker, and climb to the second floor of the narrow building. An attendant assigned me to one of the four low tables in a room containing 8 pigs — two older ones and 6 youngsters all about 7 months old. My companions at the other tables were a German family (mom, dad, and three adorable kids) and a couple from somewhere in Latin America.

I can now understand why the Czech woman fell in love. The young “micropigs” have outrageously long eyebrows, and they wag their tails as vigorously as puppies. They looked and smelled very clean. When they needed a toilet break, they leapt to their hoofs and trotted over to a piggy version of a litter box to relieve themselves.

One of the mother pigs immediately settled in on the Latin American guy’s lap, and several of the youngsters soon followed her.

I’m sorry to report: they did not steal my heart. It seemed clear to me that what the pigs most loved was to snuggle up with other pigs.

It took a while, but the German lady won over the two big pigs and two youngsters.

One of the sweet young attendants kept trying to entice at least one piglet to me. But for the longest time, they kept returning to Señor Pig Whisperer.

Finally, “Bobby” settled into my lap, and a sibling joined him. The attendant took a photo, documenting my success.

I petted them a bit. They snoozed, oblivious. I really wanted to feel Bobby’s snout, but the attendant warned against this. It might provoke him to bite me, she said.

Puppies, I later pointed out to Steve, would be a different experience. Maybe I should check out a dog cafe! He retorted that I will have my own puppy to snuggle soon enough. We fly home tomorrow evening and pick up Vanessa (our current service-dog trainee) on Friday.

I resisted this puppy cafe across the street from our Osaka hotel. But barely.

Little Boy’s Target

October 7, 2024October 8, 2024jdewyze2 Comments

One-tenth scale model of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima: “Little Boy” on the right. “Fat Man” on the left hit Nagasaki three days later.

I didn’t need to visit Hiroshima to understand that terrible things happen when you drop an atomic bomb on a city. I learned that lesson as a little girl, growing up during the Cold War; everyone knew about duck-and-cover drills and bomb shelters (the likes of which of course my family couldn’t afford). As a 7-year-old, I knew a single bomb could incinerate me and everyone I loved in an instant, and I thought poisons would linger in the air and ground for an unimaginable aftermath.

Visiting Hiroshima reminded me of all those things. Steve and I had three full days in the city, and the first thing we did on our first morning was walk to Peace Memorial Park, minutes from our hotel. We spent more than two hours in the Hiroshima Memorial Peace Museum.

It contains displays that plead for peace and inveigh against future nuclear holocausts. But mostly, the museum is a literal chamber of horrors — evoking in shocking, gritty detail what a single bomb did to the city and the 350,000 men, women, and children who lived in it.

This video recreation was gripping. First you see the city on the morning of the bombing. Streetcars and pedestrians move through the busy urban core. Then the viewpoint swoops up to that of the US pilots at 30,000 feet. You follow the bomb as it hurtles down. The world explodes and when the dust settles almost everything has been flattened, annihilated.

I was riveted by these, the only two photographs from that morning. You can almost smell the burned hair on the dazed survivors. You see flesh peeled off, hanging from the bodies.

The museum tells so many stories, both horrifying and heartbreaking.

When we had absorbed as much as we could bear, Steve and I walked through the surrounding park in bright autumn sunshine.

Parts are grand. Parts, like the pathways through the trees, are soothing.

We appreciated several other striking monuments, including the Atomic Bomb Dome.

The museum contains models of what the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall looked like before and after the bombing.

Today it’s the only remaining building of the few in Hiroshima that survived the initial blast and subsequent firestorms. Many people wanted to tear it down, but a decision was made to keep and rename it the Atomic Bomb Dome.

It’s a haunting landmark, but nearby Steve and I found something that fascinated us even more. We’d read about the bomb’s “hypocenter” — the spot directly below where it exploded. In the case of Little Boy that was about 2000 feet above the ground (roughly four blocks overhead.) We looked for the hypocenter in Peace Memorial Park, but it’s not there. Google Maps led us to it, a 3-minute walk from the Atomic Bomb Dome, outside the park and down a short block with a 7-Eleven on the corner. It’s so inconspicuous you could walk right by and miss it. But there is a little plaque, and looking up next to it gave me chills.

That was the sum of our A-bomb tourism. With the rest of our time, we did several fun things. On Sunday we rode a local train for about an hour to the town of Saijo, renowned for its concentration of craft sake breweries.

It reminded me of an outing in the Napa Valley.

The town also boasts an archeological park containing a 1400-year-old kofun — one of the mysterious keyhole-shape burial mounds in which ancient Japanese rulers were interred.

The *kofun* were ringed with levels of ornamental vessels (today represented by plastic replicas.)

The next day we took a river ferry from Peace Memorial Park out into the Inland Sea to reach Miyajima Island, famous for its striking Shinto shrine torii (ceremonial gate).

We ate more wonderful meals, strolled through gleaming commercial streets, and reeled at the thought that not in our lifetimes but close — so close! — everything everywhere here in all directions was smoking rubble. You’d never dream that was possible if you didn’t know better. Hiroshima today looks more prosperous and well-maintained than San Diego, and experts say radiation levels long ago dropped to no higher than they are anywhere else on earth.

I found that inspiring — evidence of how resilient people and their environments can be. Steve and I both were also struck by how many non-Japanese we encountered in Hiroshima —- more than anywhere else we’ve been on this trip. Large buses disgorge Germans and French and Americans and others. I heard people speaking Spanish and Hebrew and Russian and Korean and other languages I didn’t recognize. I wondered if maybe people all over the world feel Hiroshima belongs to all Earthlings — a warning.

Steve at one point expressed the wish that Putin and Biden and Bibi and Trump and Kamala would go to that museum and just look, long and hard, at those displays. Would it impact any of them? Maybe not.

So what’s a girl to do?

Is it worth going to Shikoku? Part 2

October 5, 2024October 6, 2024jdewyze2 Comments

From my last post, you might think the main reason for visiting Shikoku is the food. Steve makes this case, and I have a hard time arguing with it. We consumed amazing meals; tasted the freshest seafood we have ever eaten. We ate most of it in simple, inexpensive settings, like the marvelous food court in central Kochi.

Hirome Ichiba contains dozens upon dozens of stalls selling all kinds of food and drink. On the Monday night we were there, the scene was every bit as lively as the beer halls of Munich or Singapore’s hawker centers.

We ordered several dishes. One was this delicious eel, one of my favorite types of seafood.

I doubt I’ll ever forget the seared bonita we got for lunch the next day in a little fishing village on Shikoku’s Pacific coast.

Its freshness was stunning. And the total bill for both of us was $12.75.

Still, we enjoyed more than just the food. Think of the following as postcards from some highlights.

Our time in the mountain villages took us back in time.

This is the matriarch of a family that for four generations has run the Japanese inn where we stayed. She still appears to do a lot of the cooking.

The dinners and breakfasts included with our stay were delicious.

All the rooms are Japanese style. This was ours.

Our hostess was tiny in stature but bright and welcoming in spirit.

Not just the mountains on Shikoku are wild. So are most of the rivers.

We took a short, placid cruise on the Yoshino River through Oboke Gorge. but if we’d wanted to ride some rapids, that was an option just downstream.

The next day we drove along the Shimanto, known as the last wild river in Japan. No dam has been built along its course.

Many bridges like this one span the Shimanto. The absence of railings is intended to make the structures less vulnerable to being swept away by floods. Neither of us was eager to walk all the way across one of the *chinkabashi*. But it was fun to watch a steady driver motor across.

We got a strong reminder of the potential menace of the sea in the little fishing village where we ate the world-class lunch.

This way to a tsunami evacuation shelter.

Posters warned that a tsunami could roll in and wreck havoc within minutes of a quake offshore.

Steve and I found one of the town’s tsunami evacuation towers. It’s that round thing in the distance.

We climbed it and at the top enjoyed a lovely seascape. A couple of local old guys were also up there, shooting the breeze.

With all the danger on land and sea, I could understand how Shikoku residents might develop a rich mythology about the creatures — occasionally helpful but often evil or malicious — lurking in the landscape. They’re called yokai, and we spent an entertaining hour at a museum in the Oboke Gorge that explains a lot about them.

This is a *tanuki*, an evil “raccoon dog.”

Who wouldn’t want to visit a place inhabited by the likes of those guys? So my answer to the question of whether it’s worth visiting Shikoku is an emphatic hai!

Is Shikoku worth visiting? Part 1

October 5, 2024October 5, 2024jdewyzeLeave a comment

Our final stop on Shikoku was Matsuyama, the island’s biggest city. We only had a day and a half, but we made it to three of the city’s most highly praised sights:

One was Matsuyama Castle, one of the largest and best-preserved fortified dwellings in all Japan. We went on a rainy afternoon when it was easy to conjure up the samurai ghosts. (Good English translations of the displays helped.)

It was even more impressive than Kochi’s well-preserved castle, which we visited while there. The weather was better in Kochi, so when we climbed to the top-most level of the tower, we could better appreciate the great views.

The second major site we visited in Matsuyama was Ishite-Ji, one of Matsuyama’s many Buddhist temples. There I was disappointed to find the main building under renovation. But the grounds were wonderfully atmospheric…

…filled with nooks and crannies, some quirky, some beautiful.

We also crept into a a weird meditation tunnel chiseled into the rocky stone that abuts the temple complex.

It looked much darker and creepier to our eyes than it looks here, as captured by my iPhone camera.

Most exciting to me was catching sight of several arriving pilgrims. The Shikoku Pilgrimage is kind of a big deal on the island. Religious devotees try to follow a circuit that includes 88 temples; reportedly it takes 2-3 months to do it on foot. While achieving this would give one great bragging rights, it’s not on my bucket list. Still I was happy to glimpse some of those who were called by it.

The third Big Attraction in town is Dogo Onsen (onsen are hot springs and the bathing facilities around them). This one is said to be the oldest in Japan (3000 years old? So they say.) You have to pay an admission fee to enter the 130-year-old main resort building (Dogo Onsen Honkan). Because we had failed to bring towels and robes with us, we paid about $27 for the two of us to enter, bathe, and get not only towels and robes but also tea and cookies.

I should explain here that Steve’s not a huge fan of Japanese bathing, which we have done many times over the years. In 1979 we visited a town where the streets were filled with freshly scrubbed people strolling around in just robes and sandals. In 1982 we went to an onsen in the north where men and women soaked together, au natural, in lovely outdoor pools. On this trip, we used the communal baths at two places, both of which reminded Steve he finds nothing appealing about sitting in hot water with a bunch of other naked men. I’m more of a fan of the whole experience. I learned the rules of Japanese bathing way back on my first trip to Japan.

Here’s one rendering of the rules I saw recently.

Steeping myself in very hot pools alongside other naked women is so wildly different from anything back home, I find the rituals interesting — and the hot-water dips relaxing.

At Dogo Onsen, Steve was a good sport and accompanied me into the spa (though we couldn’t soak together. In most places, it’s a sex-segregated activity.)

We were allowed to sit together in this room for our after-bath tea and cookies.

We enjoyed all three of these activities, but two other things happened that seemed more wonderfully, quintessentially Japanese. We stumbled on one while walking to the onsen through one of the town’s pleasant covered malls. An odd sight caught my eye:

A colorful store containing a long wall lined with spigots.

We realized the spigots poured tastes of maybe two dozen kinds of citrus juice.

It seemed the juice was squeezed from varieties of fruit hybridized and grown in Ehime Prefecture. We recognized a few like blood orange. But most were alien: Seminole juice? Buntan?

A taste of the buntan, for example, cost $1.68. The displays showed the sweetness, acidity, and bitterness levels of each offering.

We picked out three to share; the total came to $5. None of them tasted exactly like the orange juice or tangerine juice or grapefruit juice we know from home.They weren’t blends of those, but squeezed from wholly different fruit, clearly related but different. As we walked in, customers of all ages were streaming in, happy to be trying something new, as people here tend to be.

Our other striking experience came on our final night on Shikoku. We’d wanted to eat somewhere good but close to our hotel; Google Maps showed us at least a dozen candidates within a 5-minute radius. We selected a highly rated one which looked to be just a half block down a little street almost directly across from where we were staying. We followed Google’s directions and were baffled to find a dark alley containing no sign of any commercial establishment (even though Google said it should be open.) We walked in various directions, increasingly frustrated. Steve was certain Google was simply wrong. But I pushed for one more careful walk through the alley before we caved and went to the nearest burger joint. And there it was!

A sign for the restaurant we were seeking.

We climbed an unpromising set of stairs…

…pushed open the door, and were greeted with a cry of welcome from the solitary figure working behind the counter. The room was lovely — sleekly elegant with lots of warm wood tones. Music played softly in the background. The only other person in the place was a single woman nursing a drink at the bar.

Steve and I wound up splurging on the Matsuyama Special. But what a fabulous range of deliciousness it included.

It started with three kinds of appetizers. (The one in the middle is fish. The others are vegetables.)

The sashimi made both of us swoon with pleasure.

Then came more vegetables and fish dipped in a delicate tempura better and deep fried.

The creamy, eggy custard contained fresh mushrooms.

Dessert was two of these strange fruits, which the chef seemed to be saying were grapefruit. They tasted like Concord grapes to me, but huge and very juicy.

This lady did it all, single-handed. We paid $115.69 for all that food, two beers, and tax. (There’s never any tipping or charge for service in Japan.)

Then she presented us with a pretty paper bag containing Japanese snacks and some candy. Her gift to us for coming to dinner.

Driving illiterate

October 2, 2024October 3, 2024jdewyzeLeave a comment

It looked tiny, but our little *kei* car handled well and felt surprisingly roomy inside.

After making a big loop around Shikoku, in the course of which we logged 579 kilometers (360 miles) on the odometer, we safely delivered our cute little Suzuki hybrid to the Budget car rental office in Matsuyama yesterday afternoon (Wednesday, 10/2). The experience taught me a lot about driving in Japan, and I’m happy to share some key lessons learned.

The bad:

Traffic flows on the left, and that requires some adjustment. However, after all Steve’s driving experience this past year (including our motoring all over Zimbabwe and braving four left-hand-drive Caribbean countries over really bad roads crammed with terrible drivers), he has never been more tuned up for driving on the left. He said the switch hardly required any mental adjustment.

But both of us are essentially illiterate here, and Japanese road designers communicate a lot of information via signs. Although most big intersections included town names written in Roman letters…

…many warnings were incomprehensible. It all required adjustment.

Would you recognize that this is a stop sign? it took us a while.

Google Translate has been indescribably helpful on this trip, but we couldn’t use it while moving at 30 or 40 or 50 miles an hour.

This was a rare case where we were able to figure out the sign meant “Road construction ahead” because the traffic stopped long enough for us to use Google Translate.

Google Maps worked reliably and made it almost effortless to navigate. Still, being unable to read the signs was often unnerving.

The good:

There’s a lot to love about road-tripping in Japan. Every highway we traveled was in excellent condition, with never a pothole in sight.

We didn’t see a single wreck anywhere, not even any traffic cops. The other drivers were perhaps the best we’ve ever shared the road with — universally law-abiding and courteous. No one tried to pass us, even when we were going slower than they obviously wanted to go.

Most of our travel was in mountainous areas where drainage ditches were necessary to channel rainwater. But unlike in the Caribbean, the Japanese neatly cover almost all their drainage channels, so I never was terrified we would edge into one of them and wreck our vehicle.

On Grenada or Jamaica or elsewhere in the Caribbean, this would be an open, menacing hazard.

The ugly

We rented the car because we wanted to visit some very isolated rural areas. In such areas, we found a fair number of one-lane roads. These would have been much scarier (and more dangerous) had the Japanese not installed countless mirrors that enable drivers to see around the bends. I got adept at spotting the mirrors and checking to see if someone would be coming at us.

Only once did we come to an impasse. In this case the solution was obvious: we backed up, as did the two cars behind us, until we got to a spot in the road where the truck could pull around us.

The quintessentially Japanese

Picking up the car from the Budget office in Takamatsu was fascinating. We had to fill out many forms and the frazzled young woman behind the counter required us to watch a video on her tablet that illustrated in graphic detail all the bad things that could happen if we didn’t watch out for bicycle riders, or we sped around corners, or we broke other common-sense rules of the road. Before we left the office to check out the vehicle, the clerk presented both of us with a small gift.

All these steps took so long she didn’t spend a ton of time explaining the GPS system to us, so we never really understood it.

The robotic GPS lady voice chided Steve every time he went over the speed limit or braked too hard or turned too abruptly to suit her, which was annoying. Then she started giving us driving instructions that contradicted the sensible ones from Google Maps. After a few days, we began thinking of her as an addled vagrant who’d somehow found shelter under our dashboard where she muttered to herself and occasionally called out misinformation. Finally we figured out how to turn her off entirely.

Although the roads we traveled were sometimes single-lane, we were astonished by the enormous amounts of work — and concrete! — the Japanese have put into shoring up steep roadsides to prevent landslides and damage from falling rocks.

Here’s another — and a flagman signaling that workers up ahead were adding more.

Steve says a big reason the Japanese economy has stagnated for several decades is because the politicians have borrowed so much money to spend on huge infrastructure projects. He notes that they have borrowed the money from themselves (Japanese bond holders) and the expenditures have resulted in Japan having great roads and trains and other public infrastructure (this in contrast to many other countries that shall be nameless.) But that’s a subject for another kind of blog.

We’ll be on Shikoku for one more day, using public transportation again, including the ferry we hope to take to Hiroshima (back on Honshu) tomorrow.

The scarecrow village

September 29, 2024September 29, 2024jdewyze2 Comments

We’re alive after more than two days of driving around, but I’ll wait to share what it’s been like behind the wheel (and in the front passenger seat.) I don’t want to jinx us before we turn in our little Suzuki WagonR in two and a half days.

We rented the car because we wanted to visit some of the wildest terrain in Japan, places where the trains don’t penetrate, deep within the mountains of Shikoku (one of Japan’s four main islands.) Yesterday afternoon we drove into the densely forested Iya Valley on roads notched out of almost-vertical cliffs, byways that often narrowed to a single lane.

The boy peeing into the valley cut by the river far below is an iconic figure.

One of the one-lane sections of the road.

The urban buzz in Tokyo and Kobe and even Takamatsu to me felt more advanced and sophisticated than anything I’ve experienced anywhere else on earth. After 10 days of that, it was jolting to begin passing buildings and one-time enterprises in the Iya Valley that showed signs of decay. Like this facility:

What was it? What did people once do here?

Steve and I were staying in the town of Miyoshi, a base for tourist activities in the area: hiking and mountain climbing. Bathing in hot springs. Walking across bridges that historians think are 800 to 1200 years old, built entirely from vines and planks.

The venerable Kazurabashi bridge was 5 minutes from our Japanese inn.

Six tons of vines are required to hold it together.

It was surprisingly scary to walk across!

Only about 2300 people live in Miyoshi. If there’s a convenience store in town, we couldn’t find it. It felt like at last we were seeing the effects of Japan’s deadly demographics: an aging population, young people opting not to marry or have children. Countrysides emptying out.

The village of Nagoba, about 45 minutes from Miyoshi, experienced this in dramatic fashion after authorities automated the local dam that had been the town’s biggest employer. From a couple of hundred people, Nagoba’s population plummeted to a few dozen. In 2003 an artist from the village named Tsukiji Ayano returned from living and working in Osaka. Shocked by the change in her home town, she started creating replacement people made of cloth stuffed with newspapers. Since she began, Ayano has made hundreds of the scarecrows (kakashi). She’s brought the village back to life in a manner that’s both charming and eerie, as Steve and I learned when we visited it this morning.

A mother and child, long absent in the flesh.

I think these folks are waiting at a bus stop. No signs explain what you’re seeing. That would shatter the illusion.

We arrived a little after 10 in the morning. For a while, we encountered nobody but the scarecrow people.

Scarecrow people sat at the side of the road. Scarecrow people toiled in the front yards.

We read online that Ayano has tried to reincarnate everyone who lived in the village of her childhood.

Certainly the scarecrow people feel like individuals.

I was amazed to note that most of the figures have eyes made from buttons. They feel so lifelike.

They surprised me, like this guy, hanging out in a tree.

Ayano has filled the former kindergarten and elementary school with scarecrow children and their families. She’s packed the school gym with personalities.

Steve and I wandered around for almost an hour; toward the end of our visit other tourists were trickling in. We never saw any sign of Ayano, however, although we read that she lives in the village and works in her studio there. We were never asked at any point to pay anything; we have no idea how Ayano survives to create her art. It felt like a gift.

I particularly appreciated these guys. Had they worked at the dam? (You can see it in the photo in the distance.) How had they felt when their jobs disappeared? Where did they go? I’ll never know.

Kobe beef. And other small bites of a city with a big heart.

September 27, 2024September 27, 2024jdewyze3 Comments

I’d never tasted Kobe beef. So how could we visit Kobe without dining at least once on its eponymous dish? We couldn’t.

Tuesday morning (9/24) we took a bullet train from Tokyo that whisked us south. We ate bento (box lunches) that we bought in the station.

We checked into our hotel, and that evening got to the Tor Road Steak Aoyama promptly at 7. I was hungry. Kobe has countless restaurants serving pieces of the highly marbled Wagyu cows; picking a dining spot is a challenge. I had decided to follow the advice of an online blogger (Tom Bricker of Travel Caffeine) who offers a ton of information about Japan travel. In his itinerary for Kobe, Bricker was effusive about Tor Road Steak House, so back in July I made a reservation through the restaurant’s Facebook page. It was a relief when the staff actually seemed to be expecting us.

I was startled by the scale of the operation: just a single long gleaming teppanyaki grill (think Benihana) filling the end of a small room. The grill appeared to be set for only eight patrons, and ultimately only four of us were seated: Steve and me and a friendly couple from Prague. We later learned that a bigger group had canceled at the last moment — bad for the restaurant but great for us. The evening wound up feeling like a family meal.

A wiry guy in a white jacket and chef’s toque took his place behind the pristine cooking station. He introduced himself as Shuhai, grandson of the woman who founded Aoyama 61 years ago. Two facts immediately became clear: 1) he was a master with knives and heat and 2) also quite the entertainer. As he cooked — first a round of vegetables, then a 9-ounce chunk of sirloin for Steve and me, he bantered with the four of us nonstop.

He told jokes; answered our questions. It almost distracted me from his moves, which were deft and complex.

The raw ingredients of our main course and accompaniments, before Shuhai began to work with them.

After sautéing very thin slices of garlic, our chef cooked the veggies.

He served us each the freshly grilled tofu, eggplant, zucchini, mushroom, and garlic.

…and sectioning it into bite-sized morsels.

He then divided the Kobe beef cubes between the two of us.

We finished off with dessert while the chef buckled down to the demanding work of cleaning the grill.

Everything was delicious, but the beef really was extraordinary — tender and suffused with unctuous savory flavors — not at all like chewing on a piece of beef fat.

I wouldn’t want anyone reading this to think beef-eating is Kobe’s only attraction. The region is also famous for its sake, so on our first afternoon, Steve and I visited a museum devoted to the art and history of the local rice wine.

Besides learning about how you make sake, we got to taste three free everyday offerings. For an extra 500 yen (about $3.50) per person, we were able to try three higher-grade versions of the rice wine, dispensed by a machine.

The Hakutsuru Sake Brewery Museum also boasted excellent life-size historical figures.

The next day, we took the ropeway up the mountain next to our hotel. It deposited us at the Kobe Nunobiki herb garden, one of the biggest and best herb gardens in all Japan.

Views of the city and distant sea line were dazzling — as were those of our hotel (the nearest skyscraper to the cable car line.)

The garden offered many beautiful plantings, along with some unusual features.

We were able to stop for an herbal foot-soaking.

And we found some delightful ways to relax.

Then we hiked down the mountain, stopping at a 100-year-old tea house for lunch at seats where we could look at the Nunobiki Falls, ranked among the most impressive in Japan.

Wednesday afternoon we found our way to this building: the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake Memorial and Disaster Reduction and Human Renovation Institution.

It may sound like a mouthful, but Japan is vulnerable to so many disasters — earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, cyclones, flooding, and mudslides. Kobe suffered a particularly dreadful earthquake back in 1995, and this museum shared what happened then in terrifying detail, along with the efforts to mitigate the impact of such disasters today.

We had a far more peaceful experience Thursday morning at the Takenaka Carpentry Tools Museum, just a short walk from our hotel.

Surprisingly engaging and beautiful, it explained some of the mysteries of traditional Japanese wood construction, covering everything from the tools employed to the raw materials to the gorgeous finished products.

Yesterday we hustled back to the train station to catch more trains for the island of Shikoku, across the Inland Sea from Kobe. We’ll be traveling on Shikoku for 8 days, doing something we once thought would be more terrifying than some of those natural disasters — renting a car and driving ourselves around in it.

Six of the best things we did in Tokyo

September 24, 2024September 24, 2024jdewyze1 Comment

I can’t describe all the interesting things we experienced in Tokyo, but for me the biggest highlights were:

1) Checking out the new Toyosu fish market

I had been to the city’s central fish market on two occasions over the years, both seared into my memory. The Tsukiji market was a huge ancient property to which fishermen every morning delivered a staggering quantity of items to feed this country’s appetite for every conceivable product of the sea. Visitors could just stroll in and ramble through it, a thrillingly dangerous pastime as you dodged forklifts careening through the dim, narrow aisles, past fishmongers wielding bloody saws and axes and flashing knives. On offer were massive tuna and every other kind of fish, banal and exotic, along with a vast menagerie of mollusks.

Then the city decided to build something bigger and more modern. The Toyosu fish market replaced Tsukiji in October of 2018, and we were eager to see it. After the long plane rides followed by our monorail and subway journey Thursday night, we didn’t feel like dragging ourselves out of bed at 5 am Friday morning. We only got out the door about 7 am, and it was 8 by the time we reached our destination. That was well after most of the commercial action had concluded, but even if we’d arrived two hours earlier, I’m sure I would have been disappointed.

The new market is enormous and welcomes visitors even more clearly than its predecessor did. But now you walk through surgically clean corridors that feel endless.

They take you to a gallery overlooking workers far below. No blood or guts were evident; no fishy smells.

This was the view of the wholesale fish floor from the visitor’s gallery. Not yet 8 a.m., all we could see were a few frozen carcasses.

Another enormous building houses a wholesale produce market, but it wasn’t any more interesting, as seen from the visitor’s gallery.

I’m sure it’s safer for the tourists and probably the workers too, a Brave New Fishmongering World that I wouldn’t have missed seeing. But I walked away grateful I also had tasted its raw and juicy former incarnation.

2) Having my mind blown at the city’s two teamLab centers

I almost never go to art museums when I’m outside the US. It’s not that I don’t enjoy looking at paintings and sculptures. But for me most museums pale in comparison to walking around and taking in the architecture and shops and street-level glimpses into local life.

The teamLab art collective doesn’t make ordinary art, however. The collective started more than 20 years ago in Tokyo and has evolved into an eclectic crew of so-called “ultratechnologists” — engineers, artists, animators, architects, and other specialists who create spaces in which participants can lose themselves in fantastic, “borderless” wonderlands. Two are currently open in Tokyo: teamLab Planets (just a short walk from the new fish market) and teamLab Borderless. The latter first opened in 2018 and immediately became the most visited museum in the world (according to the Guinness Book of Records folk.) It then closed and an expanded version opened in February, 2024. Steve and I went to both installations (one Friday morning and the other on Sunday.)

We loved them both but Planets was our favorite. We had to take off our shoes and stow them in lockers, not because this is Japan but because visitors enter by ascending a long, dark ramp down which water streams.

Later we reached an enormous room filled with knee-deep water. Against a mesmerizing musical backdrop, digital fish swam around all us waders, changing course in reaction to our presence. Sometimes the fish transformed into flowers. Petals dropped off and floated through the water and turned back into fish.

I’ve never experienced anything like it — and what we found in the other “galleries.”

Mirrored walls and ceilings and floors contribute to the sense of infinite wonders.

In this gallery, you could lay on the floor and be showered by what felt like all the flowers in the universe.

The gigantic balls in this room changed color — in response to the music. And the visitors’ presence?

The Planets site includes two beautiful gardens, this one populated by alien shapes nestled in mossy beds.

In a second one, we lay among a moving profusion of flowers that appeared to be growing down.

It made me wish I could take every one of my family members and friends to both of these amazing experiences.

3) Attending the sumo tournament

I’m also not big on spectator sports at home or abroad. But sumo is so wildly Japanese it tickles me. The giant wrestlers only compete in six big 15-day-long tournaments a year. Only three of those are held in Tokyo. When I learned that one of the Tokyo tournaments would be wrapping up during our visit, I couldn’t resist getting tickets.

Steve and I went Saturday afternoon, the second to the last day. We watched the action for about two hours, and now that I’ve seen it I can offer a few pointers to anyone thinking of following in our footsteps.

— Because I wasn’t sure how much we would enjoy it, I bought us the cheapest seats (about $65 apiece) Even in the highest sections, we could see all the action clearly.

With my camera’s telephoto lens, I saw a lot more. Here are the highest-ranked competitors taking a ceremonial turn around the ring.

Still, it would have been even more fun and exciting to sit closer to the ring. I wouldn’t want one of the best seats because they’re not “seats” at all but mats on the ground. Also, the wrestlers occasionally get thrown into the front rows, and having one land on you looked like it could be painful.

— The wrestlers go through a lot of ceremonial posturing before they start grappling each other. They throw salt into the ring for good luck. They slap their massive bellies to ward off evil spirits. They play chicken games that trigger the fight. But it didn’t take long to puzzle out the basics of what was happening; figuring it out was part of the fun. The action is very brief but often exciting, and the bigger guy by no means always wins (that video above notwithstanding.)

Wristbands? Keychains? Other tokens? You could buy it all.

— Wearing some sumo gear would enhance the fun. There was a lot of it on offer. The crowd was in high spirits and many were clearly devoted to their favorite wrestlers.

Fans waiting outside in the hope of getting an autograph.

4) Strolling through the neighborhood shrine festival

Most Japanese will tell you they’re not religious. But they sure do love a good shrine festival. Both Saturday and Sunday afternoon and evenings, the streets leading to Akagi Shrine (just a five-minute walk from our hotel) were jammed with folks of all ages; their good mood was contagious.

Portable shrines like this one are part of the action.

But it’s also a chance to drink and eat delicious things like these takomaki — octopus pieces deep fried in delicious batter.

5) Dining on Memory Lane and walking home

I was so in love with the Kagurazaka neighborhood where we were staying it was hard to leave it to go eat dinner somewhere else. But Steve and I also were huge fans of the “Midnight Diner” Japanese television series, and we wanted to see the neighborhood in which it was set. That would be central Shinjuku, just a few subway stops away from our hotel. It’s so densely crazy you almost expect to see air cars zipping among the skyscrapers.

It felt like a miracle when we found the entrance to Omoide Kotocho (Memory Lane), a jolly throwback to 1980s-era Tokyo.

Steve and I quickly found a seat at a table on the sidewalk.

We couldn’t resist ordering some of those octopus balls. They were stunningly delicious.

The “Golden Gai” area is as close as you can get to the world of the Midnight Diner and its master chef.

When we were ready to head home, I checked Google Maps and found it was just a 45-minute walk back to our hotel. We opted to do that and were surprised to find that within 15 or 20 minutes, we were moving once again through peaceful residential streets.

6) Shopping for new tatami mats with Yoshi

Steve met Yoshio Fukushima through work 45 years ago, give or take, and the friendship that developed between them is stronger than ever today. (They e-mail a lot.) Seeing Yoshi on this trip was a huge pleasure. He’s now 85 (but could pass for 60.) He has a wonderful sense of humor.

When we alerted him that we wanted to replace the 40-year-old tatami mats we sleep on at our home in San Diego, he kindly looked into where we could buy some. He found a well-reputed shop that makes them just a block or two from our hotel.

With Kagaharu San, who has worked in the shop for almost 50 years, we discussed details ranging from the mat dimensions to the quality of the straw covering to the mat interior and trim color. Then Yoshi took us to lunch while the owner worked up a price for us. (It turned out to be about $122 per custom-made mat.)

Steve and me with the owner of the shop.

So we’ve paid for three of them. After we return to San Diego and triple-check the dimensions, the artisans will fabricate them. We’ll still have to get them across the Pacific Ocean, but we’re confident we can work it out.

We had to leave Tokyo this morning (Tuesday, September 24). From Tokyo Station we boarded a bullet train bound for Kobe — the start of the part of this trip when we’ll be visiting places we’ve never seen before. Also leaving town on the same train was one of the sumo wrestlers. Somehow that felt lucky.

On the road — with both our iPads

September 18, 2024September 18, 2024jdewyze2 Comments

Near the end of our recent Caribbean travels, I realized I had left my iPad on the Arajet flight from the Dominican Republic to Jamaica. I never got it back; had to buy a new one. So this morning when we climbed into our Lyft to the airport, the first words out of my mouth, after checking its spot in my backpack were, “I have my iPad.” It wasn’t until we had reached the airport that Steve realized he had forgotten his.

It was 7:25 a.m., an hour and 45 minutes before our scheduled departure for Honolulu. What to do?!? We made a split-second decision to pay the Lyft driver (Moe) cash to drive us back to retrieve it. On the way to the airport, we had chatted up Moe and learned that he grew up in Istanbul. Although he’d lived in San Diego for 24 years, we assumed he would still know a thing or two about hauling ass behind the wheel of a vehicle. Indeed he got us home in under 30 minutes (only running one red light) and back in about the same amount of time (pushing his Corolla up to 75 mph on I5 South).

One thing I learned from this experience is that, IF the gods are smiling, it’s still possible to arrive at the San Diego Airport just 5 minutes before one’s plane is scheduled to board and get to the gate with time enough to buy two cups of Peet’s coffee. (It’s helpful to be traveling only with carry-on luggage and to have TSA Pre-check status.)

Another insight is that if one of us verbally confirms that she or he has their iPad, it would probably be a good idea for the other one to follow suit.

Hopefully we can remember this lesson in the weeks ahead.

Could Steve survive a month-long trip without his iPad? It’s pretty unimaginable.

Kanpai!

August 31, 2024September 13, 2024jdewyze2 Comments

I’ve loved many of the 90 or so countries to which I’ve traveled, but Japan is my favorite. That’s why Steve and I have broken our cardinal rule for it; we go back. Steve first traveled there when he was 8 years old, and he accompanied me in 1979 for my introduction to the land of the rising sun. Since then we’ve returned five times. The last two were brief stopovers on the way home from elsewhere in Asia, but the other visits were substantial, including a month-long home-exchange in Tokyo in 2001.

I also traveled back to Japan in my mind in 2020 and 2021, when I had two big trips arranged. For each I secured real tickets. Figured out the itineraries. Reserved all the accommodations. But Japan closed its borders in an attempt to keep out Covid, and that clobbered the first trip. I figured the country wouldn’t be locked down for long but I was wrong about that and had to cancel the second trip too. Now, however, it looks like we’re really about to return.

We’re scheduled to depart Tuesday (September 17) on an itinerary that will take us to Tokyo, Kobe, the island of Shikoku, Hiroshima, Kyoto, and Osaka. More than half the time, we’ll be in places that are new to us.

This also will be the first time I’ve ever blogged about Japan; I didn’t start this site until 2010, and all our big visits were before then.

I don’t expect to lack material. So stayed tuned.