Armchair-travel-plus: Finding Japan in Portland

I was laying in bed last night contemplating my mortality. If yesterday had been my last day, it was singularly unremarkable. Death is inevitable, and as they say - you can't take it with you. That leaves me with today. This is why I travel: to gather experiences to make today something different, something new. And in between trips, I try to see home through the eyes of a traveler.

Cherry blossoms at Waterfront Park

Which brings me to cherry blossoms, that symbol of the fleeting beauty of life. The Japanese cherry trees along the northern end of Waterfront Park bloomed in full glory this year, in a rare week of spring sunshine in Portland. There was actual hanami, festive picnicking under the trees by young people and families. It was a tiny sliver of Japan in Portland.

When we came back from Japan last fall, I went through withdrawal and started seeking out bits and pieces of Japan in our immediate surroundings. Some was pure armchair travel - like my marathon of Japanese movies. Some was already well-known to us - like our favorite izakaya and conveyor-belt sushi (see list below). Others were more subtle, like the cherry blossoms.

Japan: Just Like in the Movies

Japan makes fun movies. Really good, arty movies, yes - but generally speaking, if I want art, I'll read a book (personal preference).

We prepared (and decompressed) from our Japan trip by watching a silly amount of not-serious Japanese movies - which led to a lot of gleeful "that's just like in that movie!" or "that's just like in Japan!" To illustrate, five of my favorites (complete with Maggie haikus):

Train Man (2005)

online geeks unite!

makeover of nerd to woo

rich girl from subway

Train Man combines that classic rom-com motif of geek makeover with mild commentary on the then-new world of online socializing. It's a light movie.

Akihabara at night: prime time.

"That's just like in that movie!" Meet Akihabara, the neon-lit consumer technology district of Tokyo. Tokyo has a neighborhood for everything: teenage girls (Harajuku), disconnected expats (Roppongi), plastic food (Kappabashi). Akihabara is for the computer geeks; megastores akin to Best Buy but with entire floors dedicated to the most advanced technology in toilet seats anchor buzzing streets lined with small discount stores and parts shops with bins of electronic bric-a-brac piled on the sidewalks. Pachinko parlors and video arcades glare with florescent lighting and pavlovian chiming. Females are few, other than those dressed in costume advertising various forms of male entertainment (school girls, yes, but also Princess Leias).

Other contextualizing Tokyo movies: Shall We Dance? (note the role of the elevated JR train lines throughout the film); Lost in Translation (speaking of disconnected expats in Roppongi). Granted, Lost in Translation is not Japanese and not even particularly sympathetic to Japanese culture - for the Japanese version of the same themes, I recommend Murakami's After Dark.

Konnichiwa

As the daughter of a journalist, I am convinced that a major component of the skill of traveling well is the ability to talk to people - something that does not come easily to us introverts. (Indeed, this is something I've written about before, in the context of our trip to Morocco and traveling by myself in Utrecht.) After our two weeks in Japan, I decided that such interactions are only partly dependent on serendipity - there is a science to this, too. 

The samurai district of Kanazawa: talking about a closed society...

In a country like Japan, reputedly a closed society hard for casual visitors to crack, having actual conversations with the Japanese requires some forethought. Here are four places to start:

A Tourist's History of Japan

Not all World Heritage sites are created equal (Wieliczka salt mines and D.F. Wouda pumping station, I'm looking at you). 

But Japan does it right: their sites are entertaining and educational. Those in western Honshu, the heartland of Japanese tourism, provide a CliffsNotes of the country's history - what every visitor ought to know about Japan. To illustrate, here's what we learned from the region's many UNESCO sites.

1. Itsukushima Shrine (500s)

Shintoism

The story: Mt. Misen on the island of Itsukushima (colloquially known as Miyajima) has been worshipped since pretty much forever. The island came to be so sacred, no one could be born or die there, and commoners were verboten. 

A Shinto shrine was established at the base of the mountain in the sixth century, though the present buildings date merely from the 1200s. They sit on stilts over the water; it is said that at high tide (if you squint your eyes right and tilt your head just so), the shrine looks as though it were floating. 

Miyajima's famous torii gate and ninja deer

I read someplace that this design allowed commoners to visit the shrine without ever setting foot on the sacred island: they would steer their boats through the giant torii gate set out in the sea and approach the "floating" shrine by water. Whatever the original purpose of the sea-bound torii gate, it is now one of the most photographed landmarks in Japan. Indeed, the entire island of Miyajima is considered one of the three most scenic places in the country. (Yes, there's a list for that.)

What is Shinoism? The "native" religion of Japan, Shintoism is closely tied to nature and is heavy on the ancestor worship. Shinto traditions are still a major component of Japanese life, even though most Japanese describe themselves as non-religious.

The highlights: 

• The central streets of the village of Miyajima are thick with the Japanese domestic tourism industry (toy shops, candy stores, cheesy restaurants), which provide an anthropological adventure for foreigners. 
• The sea around Hiroshima is known for its giant oysters, which in season are sold on the streets of Miyajima, grilled in their shells to order.

Making momiji at the Traditional Crafts Center

• Miyajima is also known for a cake-like cookie (momiji manju) filled with sweet bean paste, which you can watch being made by Rube Goldberg-esque machines at many of the aforementioned candy stores. Better yet, head to the Miyajima Traditional Crafts Center (just to your left as you exit the ferry terminal) to take a short momiji-making class. We took ours with a teenaged school group, which kindly helped tutor us in the fine art of cookie flipping. 
• Like Nara (see below), Miyajima is home to free-ranging deer. Unlike Nara, these deer are aggressive when you try to eat your momiji in front of them. Seriously, one reared up on its hind feet at me. Not charmed. But from afar, they add character to your photos of the shrine.
• Miyajima is a good option for a romantic night in a traditional inn, at least if you don't have kids in tow. This is where we had our fabulous/fascinating experience at the People's Lodge, complete with our multi-course haute cuisine feast (as described in a prior post). 

Good to know: I highly recommend taking a class at the Traditional Crafts Center as a brief and light-hearted introduction to the local culture. Miyajima is easy to reach from Hiroshima; you do not need a car on the island. Note your JR rail pass covers the JR ferry.

Educational Value: Medium
Entertainment Value: High
Kid appropriate? Yes, but keep them away from the deer.

Traveling in Japan: All You Really Need to Know

Shibuya crossing, Tokyo

We were relieved to find that Japan - despite its very different language and very different culture - is a surprisingly easy country to visit. This is thanks primarily to the kindness and hospitality of the Japanese people; all you really need to navigate the country is a willingness to ask for help, a little bit of patience, and just a handful of practical tips: 

• Be prepared to pay cash. Yes, surprisingly, the world's most advanced economy operates primarily on a cash-only basis. This includes many restaurants and traditional hotels.
• Rail pass. You want one. It makes you a traveling God. But it's tricky: you have to buy it in advance from a limited set of vendors (see here).
• Stamps. If you are traveling by train, bring a blank book: every station (and I mean every station, even the local JR line stations in Tokyo) has its own stamp. Yes, stamp, as in the rubber and ink pad variety. Supposedly, the Japanese are avid collectors of stamps, but I only saw preteen boys and other foreigners hunting them down. Still, the hunt is a fun challenge - and the resulting collection a pictorial diary of your travels.

Not-so-cheap-eats Japan

Though we survived primarily on noodles, fried food, and department store takeout while in Japan, we did step out on select occasions.  My favorite not-so-cheap eats in Japan, roughly in ascending order:

1. Teppanyaki

The preparation of our third course.

OK, so it's Benihana (not that anyone under the age of 40 has ever been to Benihana, including me) - except, as with most things Japanese, the Japanese version is way classier.  Our teppanyaki experience came with fancy cotton aprons (much more Martha Stewart than plastic bibs) and a server-to-patron ratio of about three to one. 

Our personal chef grilled our premium Japanese beef at our table as we munched salad and sipped delicate broth; he used the rendered fat to cook a third course of Japanese vegetables, accompanied by miso soup. I have rarely eaten a plate of steak so quickly or with so much pleasure.  A personal motto of mine: if you're going to eat a mammal, make it count.

2. Izakaya 

Japanese drinking establishments are not, it turns out, just for drinking. It is expected that you order food - ideally amply, though I think exceptions are made for foreigners - which, combined with the generally overpriced beer, makes izakaya a not-so-budget option. 

Our most traditional izakaya experience was in Takayama, a quaint town high up in the Japanese Alps. A local had recommended Kinoene to me, and whenever we asked someone else for directions, they would get a wistful look in their eyes and say, "Ooohhh, Kinoene!" We took this as a good sign.

Templed Out?

In Europe, it is easy to get churched out.  I have few distinct memories of cathedrals; there's just a cold, gray haze of feeling vaguely impressed.  Heading to Japan, we were warned of a similar experience, particularly in Kyoto, of becoming templed out.

I have to say, it didn't happen to me.

I am sure it is possible. Temples (Buddhist) and shrines (Shinto) are everywhere - and I do mean everywhere: tucked between old buildings in historic districts, hidden in the midst of rows of shops, at the end of every street. Markets have their own shrines; city corners and country roads have little Jizo buddhas. Torii gates are omnipresent.

It's interesting, when you consider that Japan is not a particularly religious nation. But despite the sheer quantity, my interest never waned. 

For one thing, shrines and temples in Japan are interactive experiences - even for outsiders. Take my favorite temple experience, Todai-ji, which sits in a giant park alongside other shrines and temples in the center of Nara: like an amusement park for the soul.  Tame deer approach looking for treats and pause, like zen masters, to be petted. The deer, messengers of the gods, defy cynicism: they are simply too, well, endearing.

Todai-ji itself is ginormous, built to house a ginormous bronze statue of Buddha. 

Happy Signs

Inspired by Megan's chronicle of really weird Japanese stuff, I was all prepared to scout Japan for awesome signage.  But then I got distracted by the food.

Still, I collected a handful of signs that just made me happy:

Cigarettes with attitude not welcome here.

Is teletubbie confused because of the canoodling or  because he's inexplicably in a subway car?

Truth in advertising.

My favorite, however, was simply the byproduct of translating from one exceedingly difficult language into another exceedingly difficult language.  The mountain town of Takayama is known for its sake brewing; the sake distilleries are marked by giant cedar balls outside their doors.  One shop had a refrigerated case with rows of sake bottles and little clear plastic cups: a self-help sampling set up.  

Sake distilleries in Takayama.

Score! I thought.  I was oblivious to the middle-aged Japanese men staring at me as I worked my way methodically across the rows.  Somewhere in the middle of the second row I noticed there was a typewritten sign taped to the back of the refrigerated case:  "Please do not sample the minors or the drivers."

Fair enough.

Cheap Eats Japan, Part II

Where was I? Ah, yes: noodles.  Plentiful, delicious, cheap -- but also just the tip of the Japanese convenience food iceberg. And so we move on to that second major Japanese food group, fried.

Fried food on sticks:  

Kushiage (which I think literally translates to "fried food on sticks") is exactly what it sounds like.  Any kind of vegetable and almost any kind of animal product is panko-crusted and deep fried to order, served with shredded cabbage and a sweet dipping sauce (in which you should never double dip).  As the Japanese know well, fried food goes best with beer, and it's the beer that will run up your tab in such places - each skewer on its own costs less than $2.  Greatest novelty: frying quail eggs turns them into squishy eye balls with the most amazing gooey yolk when you bite into them.

Lotus root has a most distinctive shape.

Okonomiyaki: 

Though kushiage could give it a run for its money, I would have to say Japan's premier drunk food is okonomiyaki.  Seriously, I don't understand why every college town doesn't have an okonomiyaki hole-in-the-wall diner, or why Portland appears still to be lacking an okonomiyaki food cart (Note to Portland: Get on it).

Okonomi-mura

One of the best cities for okononomiyaki is Hiroshima, where there is an entire building downtown (Okonomi-mura) made up of tiny okonomiyaki stalls. It's a little tricky to find the internal staircase that winds up through five or six floors of okonomiyaki paradise, and once you do, it's hard to differentiate one from another.  

We picked one on the fourth floor that seemed like it had been around for a while, was hosting three middle-aged Japanese business men, and was staffed by an older man with a yellow towel tied around his head who looked entirely displeased to see us sit down before his grill.

Cheap Eats Japan

Not gonna lie: Traveling in Japan is expensive. It's a wealthy country, goods and services are priced surprisingly consistently (so don't go holding your breath for bargain basement deals), and the exchange rate is most definitely NOT in your favor. Don't get me started on the exchange rate.

But eating in Japan: not expensive.  At least, not if you can content yourself with the Japanese equivalent of fast food.  

Now, I don't want to mislead you - we're still talking about spending $8-$15 a person here.  But there is a surprising diversity of options at that price point.  In fact, our love of street food and cheap eats while traveling reflects not so much our Yankee frugality (OK, maybe it does) as the thrill of cultural exploration.  

Breakfast noodles in a Tokyo back alley.

Noodles: Noodles are king. In Japan, one could eat noodles for breakfast, lunch and dinner and still respect oneself in the morning. Noodles are ubiquitous, and they are diverse: both in type (udon, soba, ramen, somen) and in context - from the somewhat upscale to the very back alley.  

At the higher end are the soba and udon shops that make their own noodles.  These places tend to lay claim to historical pedigree and have extensive menus with an overwhelming set of options for what to have on, in or with your noodles.  

Take, for example, Ebistu, a noodle shop that has been around for 150 years, give or take, in the alpine town of Takayama:  

Everybody Hearts Bullet Trains

You can tell a lot about a country from its trains. Consider, to stereotype wildly, the Germans (pride in efficiency and punctuality), the Dutch (cheerful utilitarianism), the Polish (working their way from the second world to the first), the Americans (they prefer cars). The same is true for the Japanese.

Most obviously, there's the impressive engineering of the shinkasen (bullet trains). Everybody loves the bullet trains. And the Japanese love to be cutting edge. The bullet trains have achieved engineering fame for Japan for the last fifty years. Cruising along at nearly 200 miles per hour, you may as well be standing still: there is no rocking, no swaying; no jostling or clicking or clacking. 

Which leads us to the most remarkable aspect of riding trains in Japan: QUIET. Not only is there no noticeable train noise on the shinkasen (except when entering or exiting tunnels), but there is absolutely no talking on cell phones. It is a rule that is consistently displayed on all trains - no using mobile phones in the passenger carriages - but so discreetly that I didn't even notice it until half way through our trip. Japan is a rule-following country; following rules demonstrates respect, avoids shame, makes the community look good.  If you're asked not to talk on your phone in the passenger compartments, then you don't talk on your phone in the passenger compartments.  Indeed, I think it might even rise to the level of a taboo, so uniformly was the rule followed.  This fundamentally alters the experience of riding on trains: it is a restful, nay even peaceful, experience.  This quiet is the major reason that I suspect Jeff ranks riding the trains as his very favorite Japanese experience. 

Information overload.

Adding to Jeff's enjoyment (being an engineer and a systems guy) was the train network's precision and maximum efficiency. Trains are never late. And I don't mean more or less on time, I mean to the second. In the busiest stations, trains are spaced as close as a few minutes apart - just long enough for passengers to step on board. To ensure all runs smoothly, stations are full of information (if you know where to look - and how to decipher it) about which train carriage will stop where for a given line, and even what car you want to be on (for local trains) if you are switching at another station. Particularly busy stations have painted lanes on the platform, colored-coded by line, so passengers can queue efficiently for the rapid series of arrivals.

An illustrative example: We found ourselves passing through Osaka's main station at the beginning of a three-day weekend (unbeknown to us at the time). Three-day weekends, you should understand, are a serious matter in Japan; as one Japanese explained to me, Japan has an excessive number of national holidays (15) because the workaholic Japanese would never take vacation otherwise.  Being the weekend of the second Monday in October, the entire country was celebrating Sports Day, which commemorates the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.  (No, really.)  

Culinary Curiosity and the Truth about Kobe Beef

It is a truth near-universally acknowledged that a yuppie on vacation must be in want of a cooking class. Cooking classes provide precisely the sort of cocktail party anecdotes beloved by the typical yuppie.  For example: "When we took our cooking class in Sicily, our instructor  insisted we try raw cow jaw at the local market. Raw cow jaw, carved right off the head!  Even the flies and the strays wouldn't eat our scraps!"

(True story.)

Inside Taro's home.

If you travel much around Japan, you will soon learn how rare an achievement it is to be invited inside a Japanese home. Our Kyoto cooking class snagged us just such an invitation, though I have not yet turned it into a full-fledged cocktail party anecdote.

Like most Japanese homes, Taro's uses space efficiently and elegantly.  The kitchen is not much larger than those found in American studio apartments, but with thoughtful planning and his wife's mis en place, Taro can accommodate up to three couples at a time.  Indeed, from the recipes to the lesson design, Taro's was the most organized tourist cooking class we've yet taken.

Elegant efficiency.

But recipes are generally of secondary importance for yuppie-appropriate cooking classes in foreign locales. The primary purpose is a sort of cultural immersion, with perhaps the side effect of picking up a new technique or two along the way.

To illustrate, a sampling of my take-aways from Taro's class:

Koyasan: The Legendary Stuff of Legend

Before we left for our two-week trip to Japan, a friend gifted us David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, a novel about Dutch people in Japan in the late 1700s (so basically, it was perfect for us). Half way through the book, the story takes a gothic turn when a main character is spirited away to a remote Shinto shrine hidden in the mountains, run by an evil abbot who hides his salacious and murderous plots behind a veneer of religious ritual. I was just reaching the dramatic climax the night we slept at a remote Buddhist temple high in the mountains, surrounded by towering cedars, a sprawling graveyard, and the nocturnal sounds of the forest.

Spending the night on Mt. Koya (Koyasan) was my favorite of favorite experiences in Japan precisely because it was the legendary stuff of legend - the stuff you read about in books but don't expect to experience for yourself. And in turn, every part of our 24 hours in Koyasan was my favorite part, which, when you think about it, is an exceedingly impressive return on travel investment.

Favorite Part #1: Getting to Koyasan.  Osaka, the closest major city to Koyasan, is huge, sprawling, and disorientating to newcomers - the Houston of Japan. Somewhere within the metropolis of Osaka, you switch to Koyasan's private rail line: just two diminutive cars on narrow gage track that winds through increasingly remote farmland (trees weighed down by bright orange persimmons) and then up into the mountains (verdant forests of bamboo and cedar green, filtering the sunlight to a gentle dimness).  In between isolated one-room stations losing their battle with the forest moss, there are sudden vistas of the rolling folds of the mountains, green fading to gray with distance.

Playing chicken on the funicular.

When the train can climb no higher, you switch to a funicular.  The mountainside is so steep here that the rows of seats inside the cable car are nearly vertical.  The short ride tests your faith in the reliability of Japanese engineering.

But that's not all.  After you safely disembark, there is still a bus ride into the heart of Koyasan, down a narrow curving road kept in perpetual darkness by the surrounding forest.  The road opens up into the central intersection of Koyasan, and suddenly everything is white walls and sunshine.

A Japanese Welcome

This is a story about hospitality.

First, some scene-setting: Our first day in Japan, jet lag woke us up at 4:30 in the morning.  That gave us enough time to squeeze three days of activities into one.  By 8:30 that night, we had explored Tokyo's early morning fish market, spent four hours on trains and as many hours hiking around the mountainside shrines of Nikko, and navigated Tokyo's subway system during rush hour to meet someone for drinks in one of city's flashy high-rise districts.  By the time we made it back across the metropolis to our quiet neighborhood, our legs were jelly, our brains were fried, and our old friend jet lag was back with a vengeance.  We also had not yet had dinner.

Problem is, our hotel was in such a traditional neighborhood of the big city, there was no English anywhere in sight.   This was one of the few times in Japan where we had to struggle to decipher Japanese characters, and the hand-drawn map from our innkeeper that marked all his favorite local restaurants was defeating our travel-weary eyes.  Add to this that the Japanese, like the Dutch, tend to eat early - so by 8:30 on a Monday night, many of the noodle shops and family restaurants had already closed.

The Yanaka neighborhood

So there we are, on a poorly lit backstreet in the Yanaka district, looking back and forth from our crumpled little map to the name of an establishment as though it would all suddenly become clear to us, even though it assuredly wouldn't.  We were totally spent.