As I began to write this, I realised that it has been almost a month since I sent my last installment. I would be greatly chagrined were this not the norm for me. All of you who know me well probably worry when I write more often than once a month! Anyway, I guess I have a lot of ground to cover.
The most significant event of the past few weeks was our Kansai Ryokou. Kansai is the region in Japan that contains Kyoto, Nara, and Osaka. (ryokou simply means "trip.") We set out on a Tuesday, leaving at the unfriendly hour of 07:00, I think. The bus proceed to Nara, which took some three and a half hours, as I remember. Nara, as some of you may know, was once the capital city of Japan, way back in the day (or, as the Japanese say, mukashi). It is currently famous for containing the world's largest wooden building. Said building is an otera (Buddhist temple) in the midst of a beautiful park inhabited by tame deer, of all things! The deer are smaller than their American cousins, but I am not sure that I would call them mule deer. They are very friendly and quite cute. Unfortunately, I did not take my camera, as I was out of film, so I did not get any pictures of them. However, several of my friends did, so I will see about getting some pictures from their negatives. Anyway, inside the otera is a rather grand Daibutsu (Great Buddha). It is made of wood and gilded in metal. In fact, mukashi ni, its face was coated in gold!
After Nara, we proceeded to Osaka, the merchant capital of Japan (making, I guess, the merchant capital of the free world!). We went to another otera once we arrived in Osaka, then hit the hotel where we were to spend the night. This hotel was right outside downtown Osaka, so we ate at the omnipresent McDonald's (hey, I know good food when I see it!) and then walked around in the city for several hours. Before letting us off the leash, our assorted sensei-tachi warned us that this was a "dangerous" section of Osaka, meaning, I think, that there was a reported incident, once, that someone felt unsafe! In America, if someone warns you that a place is dangerous, it means that you will be robbed, or at least shot at. What a disappointment when we were not approached by a motorcycle gang!
The next day, we headed to Kyoto, our final stop. We went first to the Kiomizo temple, one of the most famous in Japan. The reason for this is probably the breathtaking view of Kyoto that it affords the lucky kankoukyaku (tourist, but doesn't it sound less offensive in Japanese?) who dares to climb the wide and gradual path to the top of the mountain. I am being overly dramatic, tis true, but the view is spectacular. Again, I will try to nick someone else's pictures for the sake of you, my beloved audience. On the way back to the bus, we ate at McDonald's again. Yes, there is a McDonald's about half a kilometer from the temple, a mark of a thoroughly civilised country if I ever saw one!
After Kiomizu, we went to the coolest part of Kyoto, a shopping district by the name of Arashiyama (sometimes called Ranzan). The reason that it is the best part of Kyoto is not because of the shops, but because of the Hozugawa, the river that runs beside this district. It was in this part of Kyoto that much of the tremendous fighting during the Bakumatsu took place. In fact, the river is said to have "run red with blood" after a huge fight between the Shinsen gumi and some Isshin shishi forces. It was awesome to be in this place of supreme historical import. It is so important to the history of Japan that one could say that World War II started here in the 1850s!
Allow me to explain myself by way of a short lesson in Japanese history. It is hard to know where to start, given about three thousand years of history, but a logical place should be just prior to the birth of the Tokugawa shogunate, the most famous and longest lasting of the shogunates in the history of Japan.
In the year 1577, a young man by the name of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the son of a peasant, found his way into the service of a young Oda Nobunaga, who would, in the coming years, become the most powerful warlord in Japan. Hideyoshi rose through the ranks of the men in Nobunaga's employ to become Nobunaga's most trusted general. So, in 1582, when Nobunaga was betrayed by one of his own generals, Akechi Mitsuhide, and committed seppuku (the stylised suicide rite of the samurai better known in the west by its more vulgar name, haru-kiri), Hideyoshi was in the perfect place to seize rulership of Japan. And seize it he did, though I am skipping over the details, which are very interesting, but not so related to the narrative at hand. The easiest way to sum up his activities is to say that he came close to realising Nobunaga's goal of unifying Japan under his own rule.
Hideyoshi's downfall was his ambition, surpassing even Nobunaga's own more famous ambition, which led him to dream of conquering all Asia. His demands to the Korean government to allow Japanese troops safe passage through Korea in order to invade China were met with offended silence. Hideyoshi then decided to invade Korea in 1592, which he did with early success, capturing Seoul by May of 1593. However, his supply lines eventually grew too long, and Korean guerrillas were able to harrass them to the extent that when the Japanese troops finally clashed with the Chinese, near Pyongyang, they could not win. A ceasefire was negotiated late in 1593. Unfortunately, Hideyoshi, who had in his old age perhaps come unhinged, did not realise that his dream of conquering all of Asia could never be fulfilled, decided in 1597 to try again. This invasion ended with his death a year later.
After another brief period of turmoil, the young Tokugawa Ieyasu seized power, and thus begun, almost simultaneously, the famous Tokugawa Bakufu (or Tokugawa Shogunate) and the period of Sakoku, or National Seclusion. About 200 years later, by the opening decades of the 19th century, the once mighty Tokugawa had lost so much of its power, that in 1853, when the now famous Black Ships of Commodore Perry sailed into Tokyo Harbour to demand that Japan open trade with the United States, the government could do nothing but agree to his terms. This was the bell that tolled the final defeat for the Tokugawa Bakufu, and Japan soon entered a period of bloody turmoil commonly know as the Bakumatsu (or literally, "The End of the Shogunate").
It is the belief of myself and some prominent Japanese historians (historians specialising on Japanese history, not necessarily Japanese themselves) that the Pacific War was inevitable from the moment Perry forced open the country.
Anyway, whether or not this is the case, the fighting during the Bakumatsu was the fiercest in the capital city of Heian, modern-day Kyoto. By the time the Meiji emperor assumed the throne in Edo, which was then renamed Tokyo (or, "Eastern Capital"), some of the bloodiest and most interesting history of Japan had been written in Kyoto. The battle of which I previously spoke was but one of many between the Shinsen Gumi, the elite "police force" who were the most powerful agents of the Tokugawa Bakufu, and the various and sundry forces collectively known as the Isshin Shishi, who supported the Meiji emperor.
Needless to say, I was blown away to be standing on the same streets as some of the most famous samurai in Japan's long history.
So, that is my trip in a nutshell. The only other things of interest to happen to me recently were surviving a small, distant earthquake and going to a Japanese Baptist church!
First, the earthquake. I was lying on my bed, reading something or other, when I felt a small tremor. Believing that it was simply a caffeine-induced hallucination, I thought nothing of it and continued quite undisturbed with my reading. The next day, I discovered that my hallucination had apparently been a mass one, as several other people reported similar experiences. Some even went so far as to speculate that it was an earthquake. I quickly verified this on the Internet and breathed a massive sigh of relief that I had lived through such a powerful thing! :)
As for the visit to the church, it so happens that one of my Japanese teachers is Christian. When I mentioned to her my desire to get more Japanese practice, she invited me to come to church with her and several of the other ryugakusei (foreign exchange students). I readily accepted, very interested in how Japanese Christians conducted their services. It was at the same time very Christian and very Japanese. After the service (in which we sang some very familiar hymns with very unfamiliar words!), we went to "Sunday School," where we sang "Joy to the World" in English, Korean, and Japanese. As the only two native English speakers (or for that matter, speakers of English at all), the duty of coming up with the words fell upon the shoulder of myself and a girl from the Phillipines. Bouncing the words off each other, we were able to produce the first verse, quite an accomplishment! After Sunday School, we retired to the Fellowship Hall, in a very Baptist way, to eat udon (Japanese noodles, similar to those found in chicken noodle soup), of all things! In the South, the fare would have been somewhat different, fried chicken and devilled eggs, I think.
Well, that is all for this installment. Until next time, I remain:
-Josh Glover