CHAOS WASHING MACHINES

We are back from Japan, which was an incredible trip in all ways.

It was really very nice to return to Seoul, and a surprising and welcome feeling that we feel so comfortable here in that it really did feel like coming home.

Part of that happy homecoming may have been that after living in minuscule Japanese hotel rooms with bathrooms better suited to a sailboat for two weeks our tiny apartment here feels spacious and glorious.

Traveling was easy and not as expensive as I had feared (though nowhere near cheap). You could eat good food in decent amounts for not much money if you looked. This included the horsemeat sushi they served at a restaurant in Kyoto, only 137 yen for two pieces (about a buck thirty).

It didn't help the financial situation of the trip to arrive and find that my Korean ATM card doesn't work in Japan because, as the KB bank representative in Tokyo told me helpfully: "You can only use the ATM card if you are Korean and [here he looked me up and down] you are not Korean." Apparently, the KB bank in Korea and the branch office in Tokyo don't share the same computer system so there was no way to access my money. The two branches do share the same color scheme, so maybe they should get the designers together with the computer techs. American standards of banking and the sanctity of property (this is my money!) are not universal. All of the limitations of "me not being Korean" was no doubt in the five pages of boilerplate (in Korean) I signed when I opened the account.

Fortunately, you can sell your blood plasma and organs quite readily in Japan, so we ended up with enough money for traveling...

To make a sweeping generalization, I found Japan quieter, politer, cleaner, slicker, and in many ways less interesting than Korea. The many differences between the two places were really surprising to me, and I realized that the more roughedged and very human scale of everything in Korea is much more to my taste.

We traveled to Tokyo, Kyoto, Nagasaki, and Fukuoka and took day trips to Osaka, Nara, and Shimabarra. I will spare you an accounting of everything we saw, but certainly the ubiquitous Buddhist temples were the highlight of the whole trip in every spot we visited. Kyoto is famous for them, of course, but there were magnificent ones all over the place.

Nagasaki was by far our favorite city we visited. We spent four days there and need to go back. The bomb was actually dropped north of the central city (though it is so built up now you would never know it) and the city is vibrant, friendly, and in a beautiful setting ringed by mountains and water (though the city itself is not especially beautiful. It helped that the lantern festival was going on and the whole town was ablaze and incredibly lively with music, parades, incredible Chinese acrobats, and delicious pork fat in white dough sandwiches sold about every three feet.

It was, in fact, almost impossible to get a hotel room in Nagasaki. Dumb luck on our part that we happened to reach town on the opening day of the festival, and even dumber luck that we happened to stumble upon a room at a beautiful new hotel unknown to us after fleeing the rathole we had picked randomly, which lacked heat, light, cleanliness, or, in fact, any other guest dumb enough to stay there.

It occurs to me that a travelogue of the trip would not capture the experience nor make for very compelling reading either in all likelihood. We took a staggering amount of pictures (to be expected upon unleashing people with two digital cameras and a new baby in a foreign land, a perfect storm of shutterbugging) but if you really want to see our travel pictures you have to come visit and we will project them on a wall for you.

I do want to post a few pictures to give you the flavor of the country as Nunal saw it.

I saw this sign outside a bar on the first day in Tokyo and figured I had hit the jackpot.



But when I tried to enter the bar, it turned out to be some kind of hostess bar with zero mariachis in sight.

The hostess bars, which they have here too, were most striking in Nagasaki, which had dozens of women wearing formal gowns standing in front of clubs trolling for takers.

I was really struck by the number and variety of mangled English signs all over Japan.



We saw a much higher percentage than here in Korea (which makes sense, since the incoming Korean president just announced that all high school graduates here should be able to converse in English).

It was almost too easy to find signs to chuckle at, but this one was particularly good. Maybe Zen poetry?



This is the huge Senso-ji temple in Shitamachi in Tokyo. The day was so bright and there was so much incense that it looks something like I am standing in front of a poster.




This is a pretty standard touristy shot, but this Buddha in Nara was really astounding and overwhelming. It is in the largest wooden structure in the world.



Deer run free all over Nara, they are not shy.



I think every tourist in Nara must take a picture like this. Nevertheless, it is quite an experience to have to push through a pack of deer nudging against you or licking your jacket.

This is us at what is supposedly the largest reclining Buddha in Japan. It is in Shimabarra, which is a tiny town huddled near an enormous and very active volcano about two hours from Nagasaki. You get there by a little one-car train that runs along the Kyushu coast, quite beautiful.

I was thinking that this was going to be a Nara-sized Buddha, but it was not.

In any case, the true Buddha is Enlightenment. We just were using this spot for a family photo op.




This gives you an idea of what Nagasaki looked like at night all lit up, the colors were really something.



Same as in Korea, Lil Buddha was a big hit with people in Japan everywhere but Tokyo. (Tokyo is such a huge, fast moving, and sophisticated city, and there are so many westerners, that nobody bats an eye at you.) She must have had her picture taken hundreds of times. She also got us interviewed by a Nagasaki TV news crew, though we didn't see the broadcast.



Finally, this incredible pig array was in a large permanent structure in the main square at the base of Chinatown in Nagasaki during the festival. The heads are all real, as is the little piglet seemingly holding court. Each head has a tail pulled through a loop on skin on its forehead. The lanterns were beautiful and all, but this array of pigs was really striking. I have some other pictures of it on another camera I will post later.



I did wonder if such a thing would be allowed to stand in a park in the US?

I have an array of pics on another camera that I will get up here at some point.