Aesthetics [Japan]

There are at least as many different styles and trends in Japan as anywhere else I’ve been, of course. But more than anything I noticed two aesthetic tendencies that almost seemed to contradict each other. Tradition vs. manga. On the one hand an extremely simple, subtle, minimalistic style (which I really enjoyed) and on the other a very loud style both when it comes to the use of colour and form (which I am slightly more half-hearted about).

I really liked the simplicity and serenity of the traditional building style. A wooden structure, shoji doors, tatami mats and big, empty spaces. Simplicity in the most positive meaning of that word. It gave me such inner peace to enjoy the tranquillity of a temple or the park surrounding it. And this was of course one of my reasons to visit Japan: To enjoy some peace and quiet. To relax. Even though I travelled a lot around, I also managed to enjoy these peaceful moments. It was almost possible to physically feel you beta brain waves turning into alpha waves and your blood pressure reducing. (Click on any of the pictures in order to view full size).

The pictures above are, left to right, from the Manshu In Temple at Kyoto, where I am standing completely lost in my own thoughts, Kinkaku Ji also at Kyoto, and finally a part of the rock garden at Hokoji Hansobo. I felt that so many things in Japan were made with a great sense of detail, precision and a specific sense of aesthetics, exemplified in the pictures below. A plate in the pavement (sidewalk) with the names of two streets in Kyoto, and my lunch at Nikko. We only made a fast ‘pit stop’ for lunch, but even this ‘fast food’ was so beautifully arranged, as always.

One of the first words I learned in Japanese was koke (moss). It was everywhere. We tend to look upon it as a weed at home and do what we can to get rid of it. I returned home with a completely different view. It was so beautiful, especially at the rock gardens, when the sun would shine on it.

Many of the modern buildings could probably have been almost anywhere in the world, but I did see a tendency to use various small geometrical shapes repeated almost infinitely. The first picture below shows the Tokyo Forum, which was almost zeppelin shaped with thousands of squares and triangles in the design and structure. The second picture is from the square just outside the main station at Kyoto.

With the risk of simplifying too much, I’d say that modern Danish architecture is also based upon clean and strict geometrical shapes, but often much larger shapes without the many small details. World famous buildings created by Danish architects include the Sydney Opera House (Jørn Utzon) and the new Triumphal Arch in Paris (Von Spreckelsen). Like the Tokyo Forum, the IT University at Copenhagen, which I attended a few years back, also has an open atrium which spans 5 or 6 floors and lets in lots of light. But the architectural statement is completely different. And believe me, it would definitely be an advantage not to have any fear of heights, when you sat in one of the rooms projecting over the grand atrium hall. It felt like sitting in a box floating above an abyss!

I also noticed the use of repetition many other places, especially in some of the temples. One object may seem trivial and insignificant. It is a completely different expression when you have hundreds, sometimes thousands, of the same or similar objects together. Clockwise we have pictures from Sengen Jinja, Ryozen Kwan-Non in Kyoto, lamps in the Gion district in Kyoto and another picture from Ryozen Kwan-Non.

One of the things that left the most lasting memory with me was walking through the literally thousands of red torii by the Fushimi Inari Taisha Shrine in Kyoto. When you looked at one gate at a time, it was nothing special, but together they were extremely beautiful.

The koi carp was a symbol used for celebrating the boys’ festival. Many people had put up one or two by their houses. But by a river in central Kyushu we stopped to take a look at the hundreds and hundreds of koi carps. Again, a special moment because there were so many of them in one place.

I really, really liked Japanese food (please see my separate post about this) but I did not like Japanese sweets so much. I enjoyed the display of sweets, though. Everything was presented so beautifully and with such a feeling for detail. Even the way they wrapped the box for you was an art.

The last two pictures above represent the second trend I referred to earlier. Very colourful. Very detailed. Very eye catching. Many signs, shop windows, clothes, etc. were dominated by strong colours and cartoon illustrations. One day, I went into a pharmacy as I needed to buy a small bandage and it took me a while to find what I was looking for even though, once you spotted it, it was extremely obvious what it was, as there was a clear illustration on it. My mind, however, was probably still set in Denmark mode, and here such packages look extremely ‘clinical’. I don’t know what to associate with the colours and style of the Japanese pack. Maybe chewing gum?! But the Danish pack certainly looks dull!

Finally, it seemed as if almost everything was available in the pink/fallen angel colour scheme: elevator doors, river boats, markings on the pavement, cars, you name it!

Music playgrounds [Denmark]

I have come across a few music playgrounds during the last couple of years. It wouldn't be fair to say that they are a common phemomenon, but there are a few of them around. However, I have only seen them in Denmark, and I would be happy to hear if anyone has information about any similar playgrounds in other countries.

I recorded the following two clips at the Tivoli Gardens in mid October. The clips are very short, as they were shot with an ordinary digital camera (for stills) and not a digital movie camera, but hopefully they'll still give you an idea of the concept. It just wouldn't be enough with a photo. You need to hear the sound, too!

The instrument made of the plastic drainpipes is known as a 'tæskofon'. The closest equivalent I can come up with in English would be a 'slappophone'.



I was at this particular music playground with a friend and her 3-year-old who simply loves being allowed to make a lot of noise. My friend thought the cacophony made by her son along with all the other 20 children there sounded like a composition by Palle Mikkelborg. (No offence, Mr. Mikkelborg!)

Music playground at Frederikshavn

Getting Around [Japan]

I did not go by either parachute or submarine, but otherwise I think I used lots of different means of transportation. My own two feet (a lot), bicycles, cars, busses, local trains, metro, trams, Shinkansen (a lot), ferries, planes….

Cars
I am no car enthusiast. I don’t even own a car myself. I live right in the heart of Copenhagen where it’s faster to walk from one end of the city centre to the other than finding a place to park. But the Japanese have great cars. And they seemed to change them often. In Denmark you see (and hear!) old bangers coming down the road regularly. I didn’t see that in Japan. And my friends drive the coolest cars I have seen in a very, very long time. In the picture above is a Mazda MX-5 near Mount Aso in central Kyushu.
Seeing my friend retrieve her car from the underground deck was another first for me. I had not seen this system before (maybe I don't get around that much, after all?) It reminded me slightly of a system we had on the old car ferries in Denmark before we "paved" the straits and sounds with bridges. Then, cars drove onto a ramp and were hoisted up to another level by a hydraulic system, leaving room for more cars beneath. This parking lot outside an apartment block in Japan was quite clever. A brilliant system, and a beautiful vehicle!

A few differences from what I am used to: All taxis have automatic doors. The rear door on the left opens and closes automatically. So keep your extremities close to your body or you risk getting squeezed by the door. The other difference I noticed is much more important to me: you don’t have to wear seat belt in the back seat, so most people don’t. I reached out for the belt a few times both in private cars and taxis when there wasn’t even one, and I felt uneasy. I was lucky enough to be able to walk away from a dramatic car crash when I was 25. One and a half somersault with half a screw. They don’t even perform platform diving any more spectacular than that. I hurt my knee – that was all. Realizing that seat belts literally do mean the difference between life and death, I made a promise to myself then and there that I would always wear a seat belt when being in a car. This spring in Japan was the first time I broke that promise to myself. And yes, the fact that I felt "uneasy" about this is somewhat of an understatement. I really wish my Japanese friends would make sure to install those belts for their children, in the back seat! [Please read comments for correction!]

Shinkansen
As far as I understand, the word "shinkansen" means "new trunk line", but I never heard anyone use this term in English. Instead it was the "bullet train". Around 25,000 horsepower, in other words: d*** fast hoof-beats!

I have been in high speed trains before, e.g. the French TGV which is about 5 to 10 per cent faster than the Shinkansen, and yet travelling by train in Japan felt faster. Maybe because we were in densely populated areas along most of the route and the buildings were very close to the rails. I had a distinct feeling the train speed must be faster than a plane travels on the ground right before take off, and I reminded myself to look it up. I got away from that again, until today. The take off speed is 260 km/h for a Boeing 757, 290 km/h for an Airbus A340 and it was 360 km/h for a Concorde. The Shinkansen travels at around 300 km/h. It took a little while for me to get used to the speed with which the buildings and landscape came flying by. Or rather, the other way around! No wonder they have all those safety railings at the platforms. There was a strong turbulence and suction when these trains passed.

There seemed to be only one thing these trains did not have and that was room for luggage. In a carriage with room for around 60 people there would be space for 4-6 suitcases. A large number of the passengers in the Shinkansen were business men who only brought a small briefcase. Still, I knew there must be something I had overlooked. I later found out many people sent their luggage to their destination the day before they went, themselves. As I moved around so much all the time, I couldn’t do this, or my suitcase and I would have made two completely separate travels.
I like travelling by train. I can relax, read, listen to music or talk to my neighbours. Most Japanese people I talked to on the trains seemed to automatically assume I was American. When they heard where I was from, some of them behaved as if they had just caught a rare butterfly. And I found out what most of them associated with Denmark: (Hans Christian) Andersen or Danish pastry. I later found out that could be one and the same thing, as there was a chain of bakery shops called Andersen.

Signs [Japan]

Trying to find my way around in a foreign place means I am more aware of signs than I would normally be at home. All kinds of signs. One of my first days in Japan a no-smoking sign on the pavement caught my attention. In August 2007 a new law* was effective in Denmark banning smoking in all public places (workplaces, most bars & restaurants). What struck me in Japan was the fact that many places smoking was not allowed outdoors. Being a non-smoker I have to admit it was nice to be able to wait for my train at a platform and not have cigarette smoke right in my face. Smoking was only allowed around certain “smoking-area” sections of the platform, even though it was outside.

I found the Japanese people so polite and orderly that I wondered if it was really necessary to have a sign like the one telling people not to spread their legs while sitting in the train. But I liked the pictograms, even though I am not sure exactly what the people on the left are doing. I mean, surely standing up because other people sit with their legs spread, but I do not know what the symbol above their heads means. Other pictures were easy to decipher. Since you rode your bike on the sidewalks in Japan, the message of this picture should be obvious. And I was, after all, in the land of cartoons.

I wrote about my experience going through Tokyo by metro during rush our in a previous post so although an announcement on the wall of one metro station certainly caught my eye, it was not a real surprise for me. Somehow it made sense, even though it was a very unusual rule for me, to say the least. During morning rush hour there were carriages for women only. A friend explained to me that there had been cases of men taking advantages of the extreme conditions during rush hour and groping women on the train. Also cases of women falsely accusing men of feeling them up. As a consequence of this, certain carriages were now designated for women only.

Speaking of feeling up, I never really found out exactly what it was I was supposed to do to the elevator in the Kyoto Tower while descending! "Please take on the elevator when you go down". Yes, being a bit of a hairsplitter and having the ability to see double-meaning and puns everywhere can be a little distracting. Such as when this exit sign caught my attention. I mean, really, I think that is a lot to ask!

How about the name "Kinki Kanko" of a business? It seemed very catchy and easy to remember even for someone who didn’t understand one word of Japanese. (Kinki is a region and kanko means sightseeing). But I would not be surprised if some words or names in my own language may seem as funny or catchy to a foreigner, and I would be the last to see or hear it.

In order to find out why this map was extremely confusing for me you’ll need to open a larger version of it by clicking on it, and then close study the four corners of the world. North is down, south is up, east is to the left and west is to the right. It worked OK for me to just locate a place in the vicinity two streets away and walk there according to my memory of this map, but when I tried to combine this information with the mental “map” of the city I already had, it was an unprecedented challenge of my spatial intelligence to combine the two reversed pieces of information. Can anyone tell me, is this kind of map usual in Japan?

It really wasn’t that difficult to find my way around in Japan, as most signs were also written in Roman letters. However, I did go to a few smaller towns where they did not see a lot of foreigners, so sometimes I found myself waiting at a bus stop with a timetable like this one, and the only information I got was how often the busses went. Not where they were stopping or which bus I needed to catch. Not that it was a real problem. All I needed to do was stick my head into the bus and say the name of the place I wanted to go in an inquiring tone and then get a yes or no from the driver. But standing there trying to decipher the timetable did make me feel like an illiterate.

Finally, at the Hase Dera (temple) at Kamakura, I had a look at the prayers and wishes in a lot of different languages, which people had put up. I just hope Max will never lose his faith!

*Smoking in Denmark:
The law (in Danish)
Article (in English)

Japanese Food

One of the things I always try to do when travelling is to stay away from “international restaurants” and instead eat the same food as the local people do. I found Japanese food absolutely delicious, and I’m sure quite healthy as well. I had Japanese food every day and I already miss it: All the little dishes, the combination of tastes and the beautiful way of arranging everything. I believe the visual impression also matters for one's sense of appetite, and it is often overlooked many other places. This plate was just one dish of the 12 courses. Everything was so neatly arranged.

I really, really enjoyed Japanese food and had it for lunch and dinner, but after the first day I gave up on Japanese breakfast. Fish, soup and rice, etc. just wasn’t a good start of the day for me. So at the ryokan in Kyoto I hesitated when I was asked if I wanted to have breakfast. I decided against it, but the host may have guessed my thoughts because he explained they would prepare anything I’d like. So, I just mentioned I’d prefer some dairy products and/or fruit, maybe a little bread… and got a wonderful breakfast every morning for the four days I was there. When I woke up, I opened the sliding door to the little garden outside my room and lay there for a moment, just looking out into the garden (only one other room was facing this part of the garden). And then I could hear the hostess coming down the hallway in her fast little miniature steps, swoosh-swoosh-swoosh, bringing my breakfast. Now, that was a wonderful start of a new day! When paying for my stay I noticed the breakfast was not listed on the bill so I reminded them about this. “Oh no, that’s complimentary!”

I looked at the food at markets and in shops. Lots of (for me) exotic ingredients. Many different kinds of mushroom, seaweed and a lot of things I had no idea what was. I had exactly the same feeling I have when I am in the Chinese shop in the basement of the building I live in: I do not know how to use most of these ingredients when cooking. And when I have got a recipe and ingredients list to go by, I have a hard time trying to recognize them. But I am pretty sure I can get most of it in ‘my’ Chinese shop, or ‘Sachie’, the Japanese shop here. Unlike the experience I had when I was leafing through a Native American cookbook which was given to me when I visited the Pine Ridge reservation in the US many years ago. I do not know where to get squirrels, skunks, bear’s fat or rattle snakes here in Denmark. I toyed with the idea of going into a shop asking for a rattle snake and adding, “If you do not have rattle snake any good, fat snake will do”. But I doubt anyone else than me would find it funny. And I have tasted a lot of things but I do have a limit somewhere before snakes. OK, I’m straying here… back to Japan! I did see "snacks" on a stick, just to eat as you go, which were octopus tentacles and other very exotic food. Perhaps in this case slightly too exotic. (Your eyes are OK, it is the picture which is slightly out of focus!) Another day, a very hot day, I passed a place selling softice. They only had two flavours: soy and green tea. I had never tasted any of these but decided to have a go at the green tea softice. It was good. But then again, softice mostly is, unfortunately.

I was very eager to try out a lot of different food, and I certainly did. A lot of sea food of which much was in raw form. I do not mind raw (we eat herring that way in Denmark) but I would prefer if it wasn’t exactly alive when it was served! Well, it wasn’t, but there were times when I was tempted to pass on the food. One of many dishes during one meal was sliced cuttlefish. It was served on top of a whole mini cuttlefish, and as they put it down on the table, it moved slightly. Oh, it was dead, but a little wobbly, which made it look as if it moved. I am not a great meat eater. Fish is OK, but I do have a problem with food that has big eyes and looks back at me. I don’t find it yukky at all, but I do get a bad conscience. Maybe I am closet vegetarian? In any case, I did taste the cuttlefish, and it was really good.

Although I tasted quite a variety of Japanese food: sushi, sashimi, tofu, sukiyaki, tempura, teriyaki, gyudon, miso shiru, tamagoyaki, okonomiyaki, kare raisu, ramen, … oh, I can’t remember all the names, I did pass on one thing. With a dish of tempura came this little fried fish, which I assume I was supposed to eat whole (?) Head, finns and everything. I had to leave it untouched. And my friend did the same with the one on his plate. This poor little thing gave its life all in vain as I didn’t even eat it.

One of my Servas hosts tried to give me a crash course about tea. What kind of container to use and how to preserve the taste the best possible way. How to break up the leaves of one kind of tea but not another kind. How to whip up the matcha. What temperature the water had to have according to the kind of tea, etc. (I think we generally use too hot water at home). It was extremely interesting and I wish I could remember all this information, but I can’t.

A lot of the food displays outside restaurants made the food look so delicious and appetizing. Of course they were all just plastic. And lunch for four: you need a lot of bowls! (As always, you can click on the pictures to view a large copy of the picture).

The biggest challenge for me was when we had crabs one evening. Try to picture yourself eating crabs with chopsticks. Not easy, I can assure you. We did pick them up by hand and break them, but getting the meat out of the long legs using chopstick was one of the biggest challenges ever for my precision motor coordination. My host saw I was struggling a bit and went to get me some shorter, wooden chopsticks, which were a lot easier for me to handle than the longer, very pointed and rather slippery set I had been using. I never thought it would be possible to actually miss a lobster fork! Afterwards, I almost felt some kind of achievement. I.e. until I started looking at myself and realized I probably needed a hose-down!

Green Spots [Japan]

The headline does not refer to some kind of exotic disease but to all the small lungs of the cities. I knew Japan was densely populated, but it was much greener than I had expected. I don’t mean the parks and Japanese gardens, because I expected those, but the small patches of green everywhere else. The shoulders and central reservations of the expressways were green, pink, red, white, etc. depending on the season and which trees and bushes were planted there. And everywhere these ‘green spots’ were well-kept and in immaculate condition.

In Fukuoka I saw a building where they had brought up the park to the 12th floor or so. Across the street from my hotel in Tokyo they were restoring a building and the riggers had put up the scaffolding around a tree. I. e. a large branch was in the way, but the scaffolding was constructed around this branch, so the workers would have to climb up or down to get past it. It made me think of the urban renewal in my block when they chopped down everything which was in the way of the builders and their machines. The big tree in our backyard was totally disfigured and is still recovering today, 12 years later.

Some flower beds in the city were an abundance of colours. Very designed, groomed and organized. But other places I saw flowers I usually do not associate with the city, like the beds with (I think they were) poppies by the streets in Ginza, Tokyo. Somehow I thought that wild look was even better than the well-groomed one.

The more unusual green spots I saw were in Kanazawa. By a parking lot was something unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. It can best be described as a vertical garden, I suppose. In the same town, by the Saigawa river, someone had used old ladies shoes, painted pink, as flower containers. Needless to say that was also a first for me.

Private gardens were very small, but I found out you really did not need a garden to have one. What I mean is that many people had lots of plants in the small space between their outer walls and the street. Others had a small display of fresh flowers outside their door. A private home in Kyoto in the same street as my ryokan had flowers in a granite bowl outside. I walked past it every day and noticed it was constantly changed. Not much, just a small detail. My picture was taken in the morning, and when I returned in the afternoon the big leaf had been replaced. Hard to explain but it put me in a good mood to walk past these flowers every day.