Savoy on Society: Just a Skosh of Kyoto, by Charlie Dickinson

his past May 10th [1999], my close associate and I got on a Delta wide-body at PDX, and three in-flight movies later, we disembarked in Nagoya, Japan. It was our vacation and a choice possibly underway years earlier. (A callow youth of nineteen reads The Way of Zen by Alan W. Watts with photographs of the famous rock garden at Ryoan-ji in Kyoto. He imagines one day he might be there.) Or I could say as Oregonians, we traveled west to the next stop, a place where the food was to our liking and things reputedly worked.

Over the years, naysayers would offer reasons to delay, if not avoid, going to Japan, a primary one being “prohibitive expense.” (The reality was Nancia and I spent, exclusive of airfare, a grand total of $2,632.91 during 17 days in Japan. That compares with 1995 expenditures of $2,135.99 during 19 days in Italy, no dollar value given to eight days free lodging with friends in Florence).

Still, as we rode the airport bus into town and I smiled at a sea of tiled roofs, many a pleasing cobalt blue, the kanji characters everywhere had an undeniable impact. I might as well have parachuted out to the dark side of the moon for all the sense any of it made. And I am a person for whom words, I like to think, matter. Matter enough that I had learned a skosh (one of our few Nippon-derived slang words, from sukoshi) Japanese.

At Nagoya Station, a fellow passenger, a salaryman, impeccably dressed, carrying a smart business case, followed us off the bus. He noticed us puzzling over the small map to our youth hostel I had pasted to a 3x5 card for any eventual taxi driver. The salaryman spoke English acceptably well. I said we wanted to turn right off Hirokoji-dori at the newspaper building. He took out a pen and carefully wrote on the card “Asahi Newspaper” in kanji characters to help the taxi driver.

t the line of spiffy taxis — black and polished, outside; white lace seat covers, front and rear, inside — I motioned to the lead driver. He pushed some buttons and like that rear doors, trunk lid opened. He hurried out for our bags and set them in the trunk with white-gloved hands. Although he didn’t speak English, that was fine with me. I thought it refreshing to be somewhere the concept of “casual Fridays” was mercifully foreign.

I held out the 3x5 with its small map and put my months of language tapes to the test, “We there want to go.” I pointed to the turn off Hirokoji-dori and the salaryman’s kanji. “Asahi,” I added. He got it and we were off down the wrong side of the road (later, we were to learn walking proceeds to the left too.).

At some point, responding to the driver’s remark that I understood Japanese a little, I rattled off, “Mada jozu ja arimasen,” (I’m not very good yet), which I’d learned was a proper self-deprecating Japanese reply. The driver slapped his steering wheel and beaming, said, “Okay!” From then on, any potential for communication difficulties evaporated.

He carried both our bags inside Aichi-ken Seinen-kaikan. He showed the clerk our 3x5 card and asked if it was the youth hostel on the map. She said, “Hai, hai” (yes, yes). He left for his cab and minutes later was back. He wanted to see the youth hostel business card. Nothing less than a bet-his-life assurance we were at the right place would do.

Such voluntary help and kindnesses from Japanese would grace our vacation for the next sixteen days. Forget about xenophobia and the Japanese. In their treatment of clueless gaijin (foreigners) surrounded by kanji, we were among what must be some of the more caring and attentive people on the planet.

fter two days in Nagoya, we bullet-trained away to the cultural riches of Kyoto. Our accommodations for twelve nights were at the quirky and charming Tani House, renowned among budget travellers worldwide. Picture an old (circa 1937) traditional, two-story Japanese house, put it in a quiet neighborhood next to the functioning Daitoku-ji Temple complex (the soft pealing of temple bells before six, if you’re awake, can only enchant) and a walk away from the star attractions of the Golden Temple (Kinkaku-ji) and that famous rock garden at Ryoan-ji.

Bargain-priced sleeping was on futons in the men’s or women’s dormitory rooms. But as a couple, we opted for a traditional Japanese room. With sliding rice paper shoji on two walls (exposed wooden beams and unpainted mud-and-plaster elsewhere), the privacy was more visual than auditory. Yet despite the diminutive size of the tatami room (I measured it at 6 feet 5 inches by 10 feet 6 inches — excluding, of course, the futon closet), we were surprisingly relaxed and happy and, with a communal kitchen, de facto members of an international family of Aussies and Americans, Brits and Germans, Japanese and East Indians, among others, that came and went.

English-speaking Mrs. Tani (whom the Lonely Planet guidebook rightly characterizes as “jovial”) gave us directions and we settled in what was soon our Kyoto neighborhood.

outines simplified the days. Every morning, one or both of us would go out, down the one-car wide Funaokahigashi-dori to the sidewalk of Kitaoji-dori, past the walls of Daitoku-ji, mindful that booking bicyclists also shared the sidewalk, and cross to Bake House Petit France for a few fresh pastries (some included breakfast fillings of egg or sausage or cheese). From there, a few blocks up the street to the FamilyMart convenience store for cartons of juice and cold caffe latte, then back to our room, where futons closeted and our lone table and cushions centered in the room, we ate. Next we would plan our day of sightseeing and fill up the rucksack. Then we were off on one of the Kyoto loop buses (often #206) that ran the route both clockwise and counterclockwise.

After a day of walking through temples and shrines, enjoying a lunch where we found it of cold soba noodles (once my soy dipping sauce included not only green onions and wasabi, but a raw quail egg too) or grilled eel or tempura, and after such secular excursions as an afternoon geisha dance performance in Pontocho, we were back to our neighborhood.

In the pre-dinner hour, we wrote postcards, then walked to Pororoca, the local food store, and loaded up on takeout sushi, yakitori, vegetable dishes, apples and bananas, and sometimes, drinks. Usually, we bought the drinks, cold green tea, Cokes, and such at FamilyMart because they had a better chilled selection. And if we wanted beer with sushi, it was a few more doors walk to Snappy’ Oasis (whose other offerings were chiefly cigarettes and spunky manga comics).

hen we were at a Kyoto cultural draw, phalanxes of tourists, exclusively Japanese, surrounded us. Especially school children. By the hundreds they came to Kyoto (one school girl said it was for three days) from all over Japan. Unlike our earlier trip to Italy where at tourist attractions other tourists (Germans, Brits, even Japanese) buffered us from the natives, in Japan we were invariably the lone gaijin among the Japanese (okay, once we ran into a Japanese-American member of the Seattle ballet company).

The school children loved “interviewing” us and after we dispensed with their “Let’s Talk to Foreigners” questionnaire, we would try chitchatting. Then came the inevitable pictures. At times, we had to work through clicking group snapshots with as many as eight proffered disposable cameras. We also talked to older Japanese, sometimes in Japanese, sometimes in English (I especially liked one woman who shared my interest in novelist Haruki Murakami).

Perhaps, though, we most enjoyed seeing the Japanese as themselves during a Sunday we spent at the Kyoto Botanical Gardens. Close to the entrance was an imposing glass building, a conservatory large enough to house, by my count, five distinct climate zones. A room of cacti, for example, led to a room of orchids: The place really delivered on Nipponese technical prowess.

Leaving the conservatory, in the vast outdoor gardens, past the bonsai, past the peonies in bloom, we found a series of ponds with the timeless beauty of trees and water. At least half a dozen artists were busy painting watercolors, easels set up at pond edge.

At the far end of one pond, middle-aged men congregated with cameras, excitedly talking among themselves, moving tripods. My first thought was they had caught sight of an especially attractive koi (carp). As I walked around the pond to get their perspective, I saw that these Nihonjin were excited about something far more subtle, yet powerful, much as the rock garden at Ryoan-ji left me with a feeling I can only describe as contentment.

For in the water were broken rushes, the stems angling back into the water. On that Sunday afternoon, there was a wash of light that gave these photographers something near perfection: The tranquil water mirrored the bent-over rushes so that these men, using every trick in their camera bags, could photograph the tubular trapezoids that wedded the tangible to the intangible against still water.

he last days of our stay in Kyoto were marked by a fortuitous accident. I had a black cap, sweat-stained, ten-years-old, that without fail was hot to wear in the sun (the only thing going for it was the logo of surfboard maker Rusty). In a Kyoto shop, I saw a white baseball cap, classic black stripes and letters, for the Hanshin Tigers. That, I decided, was my new cap. The Rusty cap joined Kyoto trash and sightseeing again, I was a gaijin with a Japanese baseball cap.

What happened next caught me by surprise. People noticed my baseball cap. An elderly man, who probably spoke not a word of English, came up and said, “Tigers, Tigers, Tigers,” pointing to my cap. The story is that the Hanshin Tigers, out of the Osaka-Kobe area and with many fans in Kyoto (including Mrs. Tani), are the Chicago Cubs of Japanese baseball. Losers, underdogs — true, but Tiger fans never give up. And 1999 could be the year. For they are in second place in the tough Central League (two games back at this writing).

One school girl asked if I was a Tiger fan. “Of course,” I said. By then I’d seen two Tigers-Giants games on TV, which they won, when we made a trip down to Okayama for two nights. And for those last three days in Kyoto, when yet another fellow would pass by and say, “Hanshin,” I’d reply, “Hai” (yes), and give him a thumbs-up. It made me happy seeing him happy.

I’m back in Portland, Oregon, and through the reach of the Web, I can sit in front of Nancia’s Mac and follow the Hanshin Tigers in living color snapshots at Michael Owen’s Web site. Yet Tiger cap perched on my head, perhaps sipping cold sake from a hand-painted souvenir cup, it’s not quite right. The next time I visit Japan it will be to join those crazy Nihon Tiger fans at Koshien Stadium in Nishinomiya. Will I have time for the rock garden at Ryoan-ji? I’m not sure.

Amida Buddha himself might call this personal progress.

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