Departures: Japan 1991-92: Sakai Temple Mounds and Other Sights

As recollected May 1992, months after the fact

The thread left off at the evening of 12/29. The first notes I have written for 12/30 are a bunch of grammar notes I must have been learning from Jimmy as we watched TV.

One phrase of Japanese I learned from reading about the lives of Japanese Americans was "Shikata ga nai,' which means 'It cannot be helped.' The thing is, no one actually says this. Once again, I had learned the ultra-polite grammatical form of a popular saying, which is kind of a stupid thing to learn, seeing as how popular sayings are things you would tend to say in the more relaxed plain form. Kind of like if someone learning English were to say "Excuse me, but present circumstances require that I drain the weasel at this juncture." Grammatically correct, but people be looking at you funny. Much better to say "Sho ga nai," or even "Sho ga nai, yo!"
"Da me" sort of means can't or shouldn't. It's meaning is kind of vague, but negative. The construction "Sh'ka verb nai" means nothing but verb will suffice. Sort of like last Friday, when I was totally on my last legs, I could have said "Shika nerunai," and it would have meant "I've really got to sleep."

But how rude of me, filling up your head with grammar when I promised that I would describe my visit to the Sakai temple mound. Well, what do my notes say? This time, it didn't snow, so we made it out to Sakai's main attraction-Nintuko tomb mound, one of those hewge burial mounds, oft pointed out as bigger than pyramids. You could only see the moats (this mound was surrounded by three moats. There was a bridge by which you could cross the outermost one, but beyond that it was strictly no admittance.) There was a way to cross them to see across to the inner island, but the way was closed. Not much to see, but the neighboring park was impressive- a mausoleum with impressive rocks, some modern art with bells and these braided paper things (important to Shinto, I think) hanging from it, and a guy fishing in a pond to which Jimmy talked (I'm not as careful with my references when taking these notes as when writing for real. Just to clear up any confusion, Jimmy talked to the guy who was fishing. Not to the pond. The pond presumably didn't speak Japanese or English, and the language barrier can really be a bitch, you know?). Jimmy told him all the places he'd seen, and the guy's suggestion of what else to see: Nachi-Katsuura!

We went to see the garden (There was a garden in this neighboring park-you had to pay for admission, but it was rather cheap compared to most tourist attractions. Plus, with so little to see at the tomb, we wanted to get something out of this trip) which Jimmy had seen there before & really liked, but it was closed for New Year's. I took a picture over the fence.

(This was the only way for me to "look" over the fence, which was too tall for me to really see over. Judging by the picture, this was indeed a very pretty garden.)

We then attempted to take this walking tour which was drawn on the back of Jimmy's city map (This is his map that was complete with numbered areas within chos). We came across a couple of temples, wandered around for a while, and unfortunately got turned around. The walk-tour map had north to the left and left out a lot of streets-eventually Jimmy got us oriented. (Among other things he tried was asking for directions. Have you heard any anecdotes about how the Japanese are so anxious to be helpful that they'd rather give you wrong directions than just say "I don't know; I can't help"? I suspect that those anecdotes are 110% true.)

We continued the walking tour, seeing many temples. Big deal; temples look much like their pictures. Along this walk, we stopped off at a large market. Well, actually it was more like a disorganized produce mall. Over the course of my travels, I would see a lot of covered malls--commercial districts which had had their streets roofed over so that you could walk along a street of small shops without being rained on. This was the only one-building multi-store market I would see. It was a building about the size of a supermarket, and it functioned like a supermarket, except that it was laid out chaotically, with different people running the different sections. Over there was the tofu stand, on this side was the miso seller, and this big section in the middle here was toys, and so on. The miso stand was kind of strange, because it wasn't prepackaged. They just had a big mass of miso laying on a slab. People would scoop it up and put it into their own containers, paying by weight. So, basically, there was this big orangish-brownish pile-O-slime with scoop marks in it. The scary part is that I haven't lost my taste for miso after seeing this.

Jimmy bought a deck of cards for playing this one Japanese card game. The cards are thick, as if they were paper around thin cardboard. At the time, I was struck by the number of Hello Kitty goods for sale in the toy area, but after a while I would become inured.

Here's the notes I took from a momentous occasion:

For lunch today I finally had ramen at a Chinese restaurant. It's not much like instant ramen. There was real meat broth--still watery enough for me to stand. But I think I might actually prefer the instant. But this was still very nice on a cold day.

And some random notes from that day:

Jimmy ordered ("ebi") shrimp tempura. Ms. Tempura-san looked kind of uncomfortable, and when he ordered, she seemed pleasantly surprised and said "Joozu!" (Skillful!) As we walked off, she talked to her friends-Jimmy sez she was saying "When those gaijin waked up, I was scared they wouldn't know how to order!" Though Jimmy could have pointed at what he wanted. Meanwhile I got to see the guy making the tempura-dipping stuff in batter, then in oil. Kind of neat.
America ni, it's kind of annoying that Nihon Ryoori no restaron have TV's going, but it's actually very authentic.

The rest of my notes for that day are taken up with making travel plans for the part of my trip where I would wander around without companions. At the time, I was rather pessimistic about how much I would be able to see. And rather enthusiastic about seeing sights north of Tokyo in the Japanese Alps. I guess it must have been the Kyoto winter that dissuaded me from that course. Anyhow, after retiring for a night of TV about which I took no notes, I went to sleep.

This would be my last night in the hotel Ocean View. The plan was that tomorrow we would meet Jimmy's girlfriend Hiroko at the train station and then go to her relative's apartment for a New Year's Eve banquet.

New Year in Soji-ji [>>]

| comment? | | home |