Blizzardboy | A Kiwi in Japan

One of the most pleasant experiences these fair isles have to offer is that of a visit to an onsen or hot spring. Particularly rewarding after a hard day hitting the slopes on your snow board, there is nothing better than leaning back and relaxing in the hot waters of some rural spring and watching the snow flakes flutter down amongst the bathers.

With a truly huge number of hot springs, and a corresponding range of quality from the superb resorts down to dingy joints that haven’t seen a cleaning cloth or a builder since some time in the 1960’s finding the perfect hot spring can be a challenge. If you live in the country it probably isn’t so much of a problem, just ask around at your local drinking hole and you are bound to start a veritable fireball of a discussion amongst the regulars on the respective merits of the plethora of springs to be found in most parts of Japan.

If you live in the big smoke of Tokyo you will want to get your hand on a guide book, and if it is the idea of soaking away those aches and pains of city life in some beautiful out of the way onsen, then I would highly recommend Anne Hotta and Yoko Ishiguro’s well researched A Guide to Japanese Hot Springs.

Featuring 160 select hot springs scattered the length and breadth of Japan, A Guide to Japan’s Hot Springs offers a wealth of information to the traveller – hot spring newbie or onsen connoisseur alike. If you are looking for a romantic getaway from Tokyo then this book will be indispensable in helping you select and unforgettable destination. Or, if you are looking for some apres ski action (something Japan is sorely lacking) then this book should do the trick.

Surprisingly Chiba has no hot springs worth speaking of. Tokyo gets a mention with the Rokuryu Onsen, (near Ueno and comfortably close if you are staying around the Akihabara / Ueno parts of Tokyo), but it is in the rural areas that A Guide to Japanese Hot Springs really bubbles.

Like the last two off the main-stream guide books featured (Tokyo for Free and Kanto Pilgrimages (day walks around Tokyo)) this book is highly recommended if you are looking for something special during your time in Japan.

# Title: A Guide to Japanese Hot Springs
# Authors: Anne Hotta with Yoko Ishigura
# Paperback: 284 pages
# Publisher: Kodansha America; 1st ed edition (April 1986)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0870117203
# ISBN-13: 978-0870117206

If you would like a copy, you can pick up a copy from Amazon by clicking here: A Guide to Japanese Hot Springs.

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Tokyo has an image of being one of the most expensive cities in the world, a city where spending ten thousand dollars on an evening entertaining clients, where everyone sports their Louis Vuitton status symbols as if they are truly unique. But of course being a city of 24 million people things are a little more diverse than that reputation would have you believe.

Of course such frivolous nights are possible, even though they are less common than they were during the effervescent bubble of 20 years ago and the yen, being as weak as an American democrat, makes Tokyo an even more affordable place to visit than one might imagine. Even more affordable though, if you are struggling on an unpaid Nova teachers salary, are the free activities and attractions on offer in present day Tokyo.

Tokyo for Free, written by Susan Pompian is a great resource if you are looking for free adventures in Tokyo, or just something interesting to do on the weekend.

With over 300 free attractions there is something for everyone in this book – from watching Japan’s famed sumo wrestlers practicing, through to visiting the home of the Imperial Family in Tokyo, as well as a range of the truly bizarre such as the worlds only Parasitological Museum in Meguro. Whilst being a few years old now – published in 1998 – most of the attractions mentioned are still open and still free.

Tokyo for Free has sections on Parks, Museums, Martial Arts and Sports, Gardens and Festivals, Libraries and Galleries, the Performing Arts and museum-like Antique stores, Super showrooms, free views and temples and shrines. So there is a huge range of things to do for just about anyone.

We have been to a few of the places mentioned in the book, including the wonderful view from the Tokyo Metropolitan Government buildings in Shinjuku, the aforementioned Parasite Museum as well the Fire Museum in Yotsuya and the Bank of Japan’s Currency Museum in Nihonbashi.

One negative for this book is a lack of a geographically based index – which would make finding nearby places much easier. But like the Exploring Kanto book I reviewed earlier, Tokyo for Free is a wonderfully useful resource to liven up ones life in the land of the rising sun.

# Title: Tokyo for Free
# Author: Susan Pompian
# Paperback: 464 pages
# Publisher: Kodansha International (March 23, 1998)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 4770020538
# ISBN-13: 978-4770020536

You can pick up a copy from amazon.com: Tokyo for Free.

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Tokyo is a magnificent beast of a city, a circuit board of buildings stretching far across the Kanto Plain, rolling on into the surrounding provinces of Chiba, Saitama and Kanagawa. Home to 24 million souls by day and 12 million at night. Tokyo is one of the megalopolii. A concrete jungle where space is the ultimate luxury.

It is easy to forget, when one lives in Tokyo, that there is more to Japan than just office buildings, subway lines and harried office workers. To forget that out beyond the confines of the city there are mountains and rivers, farms and rice fields, open spaces and yes, even nature.

Michael Plastrow’s excellent Exploring Kanto: Weekend Pilgrimages from Tokyo is a guide book for day walks one can do from Tokyo. Covering 33 routes it offers a plethora of options for those looking to get out of Tokyo for the day.

These 33 walks follow the order of, and cover the 33 temples of the Bando ‘Sanjusansho’ Pilgrimage. As Plastrow writes in the introduction:
The Bando circuit is dedicated to Kannon, (Avalokitesvera in Sanskrit), a merciful bodhisattva who is supposed to have thirty-three separate manifestations (hence the number of temples on the circuit).

The book covers 9 walks in Yokohama’s Kanagawa Prefecture, 1 in Tokyo, 4 in Saitama, 2 in Gunma Prefecture, 3 in Tochigi Prefecture, 6 in Ibaraki Prefecture and 7 in Chiba Prefecture. We have been on a couple of the walks in the book and found it to be a useful guide – not just to the temples themselves, but also to local sites of interest that one passes on the way.

Published in 1996, it is a little dated in parts but overall the temples and walks described in the guide book are all still there making this book still as useful as when it was first published. Bus and train times may well have changed in the interim however there is enough in this book to make it a valuable addition to ones bookshelf during ones stay in Tokyo.

Highly recommended as a source of inspiration for what to do whilst living in Tokyo.

# Title: Exploring Kanto: Weekend Pilgrimages from Tokyo
# Author: Michael Plastow
# Paperback: 256 pages
# Publisher: Weatherhill; 1st ed edition (June 1996)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0834803321
# ISBN-13: 978-0834803329

This book is reasonably hard to find, you might get lucky with one of the second hand bookstores in Tokyo – such as Good Day Books in Ebisu, or you should be able to pick up a copy from Amazon.com: Exploring Kanto.

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Japan’s war crimes during the Second World War are well recorded and widely acknowledged, however when thinking about the war, it is easy to overlook the fact that at some levels the Japanese soldiers during the war were human and like all human beings had feelings, knew beauty and desired for peace.

The Harp of Burma by Michio Takeyama is a novella that traces the experiences of a company of Japanese soldiers from the final period of fighting through internment by the British in the south east asian country of Burma (now known as Myanmar). This is no Platoon or Thin Red Line, war is important to the book, but more important is music, and to a lesser extent Buddhism.

This is a moving book. The soldier in the unit documented by The Harp of Burma have taught themselves to sing, to make instruments and to play them to a level that made them famous amongst the occupying Japanese soldiers. Just how “Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast” is clearly delineated.

My own readings about Burma have been limited to George Orwell’s work whilst stationed there, and accounts of the current regimes brutality. The differences between Orwell’s colonialism and the bond that Buddhism provides the Japanese soldiers and the local citizenry are stark. And compared to the current situation in Burma, The Harp of Burma paints a picture of much happier times.

This book is well worth reading, both for another angle on the Second World War, as well as for a peek into what Burma was once like, and hopefully can one day become again.

# Title: The Harp of Burma
# Author: Michio Takeyama
# Translator: Howard Hibbett
# Series: Unesco Collections of Contemporary Works
# Paperback: 136 pages
# Publisher: Tuttle Publishing (June 1968)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0804802327
# ISBN-13: 978-0804802321

You can pick up a copy of Michio Takeyama’s classic The Harp of Burma by clicking here.

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The post-war period in Japan was one of immense social change as Japanese society adjusted to the shock of defeat and to the occupation of Japan by American forces and their allies. Osamu Dazai’s The Setting Sun takes this milieu as its background to tell the story of the decline of a minor aristocratic family.

The story is told through the eyes of Kazuko, the unmarried daughter of a widowed aristocrat. Her search for self meaning in a society devoid of use for her forms the crux of the novel. It is a sad story, and structurally is a novel very much within the confines of the Japanese take on the novel in a way reminiscent of authors such as Nobel Prize winner Yasunori Kawabata – the social interactions are peripheral and understated, nuances must be drawn, and for readers more used to Western novelistic forms this comes across as being rather wishy-washy.

Kazuko’s mother falls ill, and due to their financial circumstances they are forced to take a cottage in the countryside. Her brother, who became addicted to opium during the war is missing. When he returns, Kazuko attempts to form a liaison with the novelist Uehara. This romantic displacement only furthers to deepen her alienation from society.

Famous as it is in Japan, I wouldn’t recommend The Setting Sun. The translation comes across today as being dated and stilted. If you are looking for a novel focusing on the decline of the aristocracy I would recommend Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, which while having no relation to these fair isles does manage to capture the decline of the nobility without sending the reader to sleep.

#Title: The Setting Sun
#Author: Osama Dazai
# Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation; Revised edition (June 1968)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0811200329
# ISBN-13: 978-0811200325

You can pick up a copy of Osama Dazai’s The Setting Sun by clicking here.

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Foreigners come to Japan for as many reasons as there are brands of sake, they come looking for their own image of Japan, be it that of samurai ninjas, pokemon-ed kitty chans, or sony-ed nec’s, or tea gardened geishas.

Village Japan by Malcolm Ritchie is the anecdotal record of a British gentleman, very much into Buddhism and married to a Japanese woman and his experiences living in the rural Japanese village of Sora. Sora is located on the Japan Sea side of Japan, in Ishikawa Prefecture on the Noto Peninsula. This area was in the news earlier this year when, on March 25th 2007 a magnitude 6.9 earthquake struck the region destroying a large number of the traditional houses and buildings the region is famous for, as well as killing one person and injuring 160.

The traditional Japanese way of life and its decline is a central theme of this book. Ritchie rues the destruction of the way of life that he found on the Noto Peninsula, an agrarian way of living essentially unchanged since the introduction of rice cultivation to the Japanese archipelago.

Don’t get me wrong – being close to nature and living in cyclical harmony with nature is certainly a very valid way of life, and important too if we are to continue living on this planet in the manner we are accustomed to, however, Ritchie I think fails to point out just how hard this lifestyle really is, and therefore, why it is so unattractive to normal Japanese people in this day and age.

The anecdotes are amusing, particularly those dealing with his neighbour, the venerable Old Man Gonsaku, and the way that this book details a slice of life almost entirely unrecognizable from that lived by the majority of present day Japanese people make this book a well worthwhile adventure into the heart of Japan’s rice field past.

There is a review of Village Japan at Links.net.

# Title: Village Japan: Everyday Life in a Rural Japanese Community
# Author: Malcolm Ritchie
# Paperback: 239 pages
# Publisher: Tuttle Publishing (June 1999)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0804821216
# ISBN-13: 978-0804821216

You can pick up a copy from amazon.com by clicking here: Village Japan.

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Just finished reading The Twilight Years by Sawako Ariyoshi and thought I would put up some thoughts on it.

Ariyoshi is one of the Japanese authors I enjoy the most. Her style is unpretentious and unassuming and reminds me of the likes of Joseph Conrad. The Twilight Years is no exception to this. Set in post World War II Tokyo, it tells the story of a Japanese family as they deal with their ‘grandfathers’ senile dementia.

Published in the 1970’s this novel was a big hit in Japan selling in excess of 2 million copies. The period the novel focuses on is prior to this, and one of the central themes that the novel revolves around is the generational gap between those who experienced the war and those born after the defeat.

The main character is a woman by the name of Akiko who works as a typist at a Japanese law firm in Tokyo. She is married to a typical salaryman who has risen to a managerial level in a Japanese company and could almost be taken as the stereotypical image of a person in such a role at that time in Japanese history. He works a 6 day week and fails to understand the younger workers in his office – particularly in the way they do not feel obliged to wait for him to finish has work on Saturdays before they go home. Many of the workers in his generation were like this and it is still quite common even now.

They live with, when the novel opens, the husbands father and mother, as well as their son. This living arrangement is still common in Japan, especially rural areas, but not so common these days in the main centers such as Tokyo or Osaka. The passing away of the grandmother leads to Shigezo, the grand father losing his marbles so to speak and sets off the events that make up the novel.

Compared with Akiko, the husband had it easy. Uncommon as it was for a ‘housewife’ like Akiko to work during this period, societal pressures meant that she was also responsible for all of the household chores (which she squeezed into Saturday as much as possible in order to be able to enjoy one day off a week). Once grandpa went senile her workload increased dramatically, leading her almost to the point of collapse, and this is where the novel derives much of its force.

The level of description of such mundane things as meals, through to elaborate detail on such rituals as Buddhist funeral rites in Japan make for fascinating, if at times macabre reading, and the novel as a whole serves in many ways as a much better historical record of the period than any historian could pull off.

At a more human level the interaction of the characters, especially the main character Akiko with Shigezo is touching. I think one of the characteristics of great authors is the way they manage to convey a sense of trial, the moral dilemma, the great question that pulls the characters first one way, and then the other. Ariyoshi pulls that off with aplomb in The Twilight Years.

The Twilight Years is highly recommended if you are interested in Japanese history from a personal perspective, or if you just want an elegant read dealing with the trials and ‘dribulations’ of living with the elderly.

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Have you ever read a novel that wasn’t a novel? Have you ever considered what a novel is for that matter?

Michel Foucault in his preface to The Order of Things talks about a moment of epiphany he experienced when reading the Argentine writer Borges:

This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought….

The passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.

There are books like that, incredibly rare, that seep through the ether, float around the world, the room, the mind. Genichiro Takahashi’s Sayonara Gangsters is one of those. A little teaser for you, taken randomly from page 193:

“Welcome Home”

12.

I walked over to the snoozing Song Book.
Her legs were aligned, sticking out perfectly straight.
Her hands were arranged neatly on her knees.
An open comic book lay under her hands.
Song Book makes no effort to follow the story when it comes to comic books. Song Book just likes looking through them, jumping from scene to scene. She goes on gazing for ages at scenes she likes. That’s how she reads comics.
Song Book falls asleep gazing at her favourite scenes.
I gazed gently down over Song Book’s shoulder at the scene unfolding beneath her hands.

I thought it apt to create my own taxonomy of Sayonara Gangsters.

The passage quotes a ‘certain Japanese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘characters are divided into: (a) immortal gangsters who die (b) virgil the poet as a fridge (c) ectoplasm becoming chair (d) the author Thomas Mann who did not exist (e) “Henry IV” (f) barman with wings (g) poetry school teachers (h) pontum adspectebant flentes (i) James Joyce expounded (j) “One After Another, Like Bowling Pins, the U.S. Presidents are Toppled by Gangsters (k) GILA monsters (l) potty poetry (m) a manifesto for the Fat Gangster, inelegantly expressed (n) JOVIAN pinky promises.’

Other reviews have said more normal things:

If readers are capable of ignoring the voice inside that wants to yell out that none of this makes sense, they will be well rewarded.

It’s about feelings rather than rationality

; it’s about the journey not the destination. This is a novel that will immediately captivate daring readers.

or,

Reading it can feel like sharing a tiny room with a manic kitten. Sayonara, Gangsters seems

mostly interested in amusing itself

, unfolding in accordance with private rules. Only you can decide whether this whimsical novel is worth your time, whether the emperor has clothes, whether or not he knows, and whether or not it matters.

Indeed.

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The River Ki by Sawako Ariyoshi

This enchanting book traces the life of Hana, respectable eldest daughter of the Matani family through her marriage into the Kimoto family and the growth of her family. The concept of marrying into another family is still strong in Japan and historically speaking this is a key point to understanding the traditional role of women in society. This, and the relationship of Hana to her mother-in-law and her quest to gain acceptance as a Matani provide the main drive of the novel. Her relationship with her grandmother, and of her daughter with her are telling in terms of the shifts in the way of thinking that occurred within certain sections of society during this period. At the same time, historical and political events drum an incisive counterpoint to her life.

Hana was educated at Wakayama Girls High School during a period when it would have been rare for a woman, even from a wealthy, well-connected family to receive an education; particularly an education outside of the sphere of the Buddhist temple system.
Starting out during the Meiji period, this novel deals with the changes that take place in Japanese society up till just after the second world war.

I would heartily recommend this novel, for the historical insight it gives into pre-WWII Japanese life, but more importantly as a great read.

# Paperback: 243 pages
# Publisher: Kodansha America (July 30, 2004)
# Language: English
# ISBN: 4770030002

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With Tokyo being the world’s tenth largest city (officially clocking in at 8,130,408 – but that would be living here, not coming in to work from the bed towns of Saitama, Chiba and Kanagawa) it can appear that the only nature inhabiting this sprawling concrete jungle are the few trees in the city’s parks, the evil looking crows and the multiple instantiations of salarymen. I have been here a couple of years now, and I have seen a lot of carp, the odd turtle, a giant toad, some rats and a diverse range of insects.

So it was nice to pick up Nature in Tokyo by American naturalist Kevin
Short. He writes with humor, and insight, as he explores the explores the intricacies of Japan’s ecosystems with  a keen eye for details. He reveals an abundance of plant life and some intriguing animal species – many of which are unknown in the West outside of zoos and botanical gardens.

Highlights include the unique breeding habits of the indigenous Japanese fire-bellied newt, the nocturnal mischief of Japan’s raccoon dog, the mating rituals of the red dragonfly, and the lush swirl of life on Tokyo’s tidal flats and coastal marshes.

A good read if you want to find more in the way of nature in Tokyo -
beyond that cockroach crawling through your kitchen.

Nature In Tokyo
Kevin Short

• Paperback: 328 pages
• Publisher: Kodansha
  International (JPN) (February 1, 2001)
• ISBN: 4770025351

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