Anne, Frances and Richard in Japan,
October-November 2007

So we walked went back back through the park and marvelled at the teens playing extreme dress-up on Harajuku bridge. This was also our first exposure to the fashionable Tokyo walk -- a pigeon-toed and knock-kneed slouch, preferably in stiletto-heeled or platform-soled knee-high boots. It being the Sunday before Hallowe'en, many of the kids were dressed up in costume and "trick-or-treating" through the stores, who also had their staff in costume handing out candy. One street was blocked to traffic so that there could be an informal parade.

A monorail ride through just exactly the kind of glass-steel-concrete towers that 1950s magazines said would be the world of the future took us to Teleport Town on recovered land in Tokyo harbour, where we toured the museum of emerging technology. Richard and Anne were in their element investigating the robotics displays.

Most of Monday was consumed in just getting to Kumamoto in the southern island of Kyushu by bullet train. We couldn't take the very fastest, most direct Nozomi train because our Japan Rail passes wouldn't work on it. Anne was starting to get the message about her parents' bizarre tourist habits - either we'd eat at a really nice place for an insane price, or we'd grab snacks or eat at a hole in the wall, and hey, the last of the big spenders, a meal for all three of us would cost $22.

There were three draws in Kumamoto - a huge castle, a famous "strolling garden" Suizen-ji, and Danny Schwartz, the brother of Anne's friend Beth, who is taking a third year abroad at a Kumamoto university. We fed Danny lunch the next day (okonomiyaki, an egg-flour batter that you fill with a bowl of veggies and, if you wish, some meat, and then fry for yourself on a grill in the middle of your table) while he imparted some of his new cultural learning. E.g. the women on the street who are dressed like tarts are normal teenagers. The real tarts are the ones wearing prom dresses.

We also made some cultural discoveries of our own. Drainage canals are very clean with water so clear that you can easily see the plants growing at the bottom and the koi swimming around. School children are all in uniform with coloured hats. The proper way to exchange money with a shopkeeper is with both hands, often on a special little tray.

To Richard's unbounded delight, our train ride to Akamizu ("Red Water") inside the huge Mount Aso caldera included a "Train of Alishan" section. This is used to get up a very steep slope. The train stops at one station, then the tracks are switched and it goes into reverse to get part way up the slope, stops on another siding, the tracks are switched again, and the train goes forward again, thus describing a backwards "Z" up the side of the mountain. This was delightful to Richard in particular because his MaSci students had had to make their Lego robots get all the way up a "Train of Alishan" track in one of their competitions, and now here was the real thing.

The ryokan we stayed at in Akamizu was a large, old-fashioned resort with outdoor hot baths from the volcanic springs. Franceswas the only one of the family who appreciated the baths, though. Their dinners consisted of more than a dozen small plates, all with the most exquisite presentation. The parents had quite a bit of fish both cooked and not-so-cooked, while Anne had a greater variety of vegetables and tortured tofu. (The results of torturing tofu are, we're happy to say, mostly very tasty.) She's fallen in love with Japanese autumn vegetables, from chestnuts, to all the varieties of sweet potato, to what they call pumpkin and we'd call squash.

Two nights there let us spend a whole day tramping around the Aso caldera and the one most active crater within it, Nakadake, bubbling with sulphurous water. The whole area was a mixture of Niagara Falls-type kitsch (ferrocement hemispheric hobbit houses in the Aso Farmland Resort, next to the performing monkey attraction) and natural beauty. We sampled both offerings: buying rock ornaments from a pathside vendor, riding the cable car to the crater and hiking along paved or wooden paths. Spotted a raccoon-like animal fairly close to the volcano museum (and he was cooperative in posing for my photo) and a large praying mantis on the path beside the road. The crater was really impressive, with a wide variety of coloured rock layers. One section reminded me strongly of the photos from the Mars rovers - and coincidentally, there were "rover tracks" in the black sand!

Later that afternoon, while Anne was Internetting, we strolled around the town of Aso and found both a very old temple (8th century) and some very new-looking statuettes. We're really not very clear on these religious obects, but we found them all over the place, and often wearing bibs or aprons.

Kyoto

More train-zooming the next day took us to Kyoto and another ryokan that we'd found through Japanese Guest Houses - a Web-based business that acts as an intermediary between curious tourists and traditional Japanese hotels, neither of whom understand each other's language or expectations particularly well. (In addition to its reservation service that allows you to specify whether you want a private bathroom or vegetarian meals, the site explains everything from how to enter the ryokan to how to bathe...) The Hotel Matsui offered Anne more tortured tofu, plus a few less-successful delicacies, while Richard and I feasted shamelessly. This time the meal was offered in our room on little trays on the tatami mats, with a waitress who had good enough English to explain what we were supposed to do with the food. No, I can't kneel for a whole supper. As soon as she was out of sight I sprawled my legs out in front of me -- and so did the others.

We had not nearly enough time to do Kyoto justice and must go back for at least another week sometime, though whether that should be in spring tree-blossom and iris time, summer lotus season or the peak of their fall maples will be a hard choice. Between the charming crafts stores and gorgeously-presented food stalls, just a handful of the temples and shrines that had appealed to us at random from the guidebook, and the natural beauties of the hills where Japanese maples were just starting to turn, the Philosopher's Walk along a canal, a bamboo forest and tiny perfect lakes and rivers, we didn't leave ourselves any time at all for the museums and other indoor delights. The temperatures, as elsewhere, urged us just to keep enjoying the outdoors - 18 to 20 degrees feels like heaven after Manila. We rented bicycles in one park so that we could visit more of the shrines and temples in our short time there. But then we got lost looking for the bus to the Golden Temple. However, that meant that we saw it at its best, lit with that late afternoon sun making its reflection glow in the surrounding lake.

I should mention the bicycles: everywhere we went, people used bicycles as a normal form of transport. They were usually single speed with hand brakes, a kick stand, a simple lock for the back wheel and practical baskets on the front. You would see all kinds of people riding them without any special outfit or special shoes (quite funny to see a fashionable young lady in stiletto boots hop on her bike and fit the pedals in the arched insteps of the boots.) It was SO refreshing to see so many cycling or walking, and it really had a wonderful effect of reducing traffic and air pollution.