Time off for gathering data

Tonight I am setting off for this massive, crowded monster-that-never-sleeps usually called the capital of Japan, Tokyo. So expect a break here, while I’m off having adventures, exploring the strangest of strange and generally enjoy this time off right until my return on the evening of the 30^th of December. Afterwards I’ll do my best to bombard you with posts about all these strangest of strange, adventures etc.

Meanwhile: いってきま～す！

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Regarding cars

We all know – and, judging from the numbers of ones seen on the street, somewhat appreciate – Japanese cars. They are thought of as reliable and quite good, not necessarily one’s to scream about, like the supercars in Top Gear, but for the average Joe Japanese cars seem to be just right. When not considering subjective opinions or personal tastes, that is.

However, I think that not many people realise that Japanese cars in Europe are usually different to those on the streets of Japan itself. I’m not going to go into technical details, I simply don’t know them and they’re not what one sees first. What one sees first is, well, how they look.

Allow me to use a dog metaphor here. If we assume that, let’s say, Honda Accord is a labrador retriever – long body, long snout, gentle curve at the back – then an average Japanese car, such as Honda Life, is a pug: it looks as if someone squeezed it from both ends so that it takes up less space.

I rode in cars like that a few times (my host family two years ago had a similar one), so I can assure you that they are like the TARDIS: bigger on the inside. One is sat quite high, but there’s plenty of leg room, though it may be uncomfortable for tall people.

What’s more, this trend doesn’t stop at your everyday Joe’s cars – among others, I’ve seen pick-up trucks looking like this.

At first these cars cause some mixed feelings, partly surprise, partly amusement (mainly because of the striking likeness to a pug). But when you think about it, they’re not that surprising after all, though, of course, they can still be funny, nobody is going to forbid anyone to giggle or smile at the sight of such a car. In Japan there aren’t that many places that wouldn’t be built on already and finding a parking space in the cities is a problem (naturally, the bigger the city, the bigger the problem). Often, when we manage to get somewhere high up and get a night-time view of Japan from above, we’ll notice that that the only places that are not lit up are mountains too high to build on and in some places – the sea. I’m sure this changes a little bit in the countryside, but even this isn’t that “empty” either. And when there’s little space, a compact-size car like these is making perfect sense because it’s not wasting said space: it parks as close to the wall/barrier/whatever as possible, leaving enough room for others.

Of course, let’s not demonise nor get too far with the generalisations: “normal looking” cars exist in Japan as well and are nothing unusual. I can’t tell what type of people are more likely to buy which one, but now that I think really hard of it, I seem to remember that in the Osaka-Kobe region, where I lived two years ago, I’ve seen far less of the “normal looking” cars than in Kanazawa – and if that’s true, it’s likely to confirm my theory of saving/making good use of free space, which there is more of in Kanazawa and around than in Osaka-Kobe and around (third and fifth biggest cities in Japan in terms of the population; to compare: Kanazawa is thirty fourth).

How many pugmobiles can we find on this university parking?

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五箇山、富山県 (Gokayama, Toyama-ken)

As a sort of way of congratulating us for surviving our mid-term exams, on Thursday we went on a trip to Gokayama, area of the city of Nanto (南砺市) in Toyama prefecture. It was a brief trip, we spent more time in total on the bus than in Gokayama itself, but if it meant: a) having no classes; b) spending some time with our Japanese foster families; and c) seeing something interesting, the every minute there was worth it.

Gokayama is known for thatched-roof houses that remained there since the Edo period (1603-1868) – they are even on the UNESCO’s World Heritage List, along with similar houses in the nearby Shirakawa-gō, in Gifu prefecture (白川郷、岐阜県).

And, believe it or not, that’s it really. Sure, upon paying Y300 you can enter one of the houses and see what life in a village like that was like or what tools they were using – in this case mainly spinning-wheels to make silk (entrance was not allowed to the very top floor where silkworms where kept), farming and making saltpetre – but one would have to be very keen spinning-wheel enthusiast or very passionate about history to spend there more than a few minutes tops.

For me the landscapes were a lot more interesting. The handful of houses, five tops, were at the bottom of the valley surrounded by high mountains and a river on one side. If anyone feels like escaping the civilisation or needs some fresh air, then Gokayama in the middle of the week, when there aren’t many tourists (apart from us there was only a small group of pensioners that arrived later) seems the perfect place for that. And from the pictures in leaflets I gather that in winter, once proper snow falls down, it’s even more gorgeous: white all around and with such a fluffy coat the thatched-roof houses literally look like taken from Christmas cards.

Plushies in the souvenir shop - coz who doesn't want a leek plushie?

Fire burning here would be warming the upper floors where the silkworms were.

Kids stay at home, full stop.

Room where guests would be made welcome.

But tis still a tad too warm for snow.

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高岡市、富山県 (Takaoka-shi, Toyama-ken)

I spent this weekend in Takaoka, in the Toyama prefecture, where I participated in a so called Monitor Tour. Simply speaking: people speaking the most popular languages amongst tourists (English, French, Korean, mainland Chinese and Taiwanese) were invited to take part in order to help improve tourism in Takaoka. The trip was entirely free, including accommodation, food and transport (and they weren’t trying to save, everything was top notch!), we simply had to “work” for it by doing a questionnaire about what’s good, what isn’t and how to improve it.

Seeing as me complaining isn’t really interesting to anyone but a very small handful of people, and most of them are the trip’s organisers, who are now probably considering all the feedback they got, I’ll only focus on the good stuff. Besides, my complaints were mostly referring to things which a regular tourist (whose perspective we had to look from) wouldn’t get to because they’re not really within typical tourist’s interests; only sometimes the complaining was due to lack of information about a certain place in languages other than Japanese. And I did come back happy, so there’s honestly no point talking about the bad stuff.

In Takaoka there are three main things worth noting: Takaoka Daibutsu (高岡大仏), park Takaoka Kōjō Kōen (高岡古城公園) and Zuiryū-ji temple (瑞龍寺).

Takaoka Daibutsu is the third biggest Buddha statue in Japan, right after the ones in Nara and Kamakura. This one is over 15 metres tall and weighs about 65 tons – definitely impressive when it emerges from between the buildings, since the poor guy was unlucky enough to be in the area with slightly more taller buildings.

Unfortunately, the statue that you can see here isn’t the original one. That one, carved in wood and covered in gold leaf, was destroyed in a fire – the one that remains today was finished in 1933 and is made out of copper. On the plus side the entry to the tiny temple area inside is completely free, unless somebody wants to donate something. I hear that you need to pay to see the Buddha statue in Nara, so it’s good that Takaoka City kept this one free. Though seeing how it’s outside and is, well, big, they’d probably have some troubles in making people pay.

Statue guarding the entrance.

Statue guardian on the other side.

Plan of the statue.

From the Buddha statue there’s only a short walk to the park and if someone isn’t interested in the history of Japan, they should go at least for the pretty views. Now the park was dominated by autumn foliage, but apparently in spring, when the cherry blossoms are blooming, the view is just as gorgeous.

This was one of the places where at least a leaflet in English would come in handy. Even if someone doesn’t have an interest in Japanese history or in the particular bits of the park, it’d be nice to at least know what they’re called, to be able to tell where one is. Though from the leaflet in Japanese, which includes a map, one can get enough of a sense of direction, and if one is a thinking tourist who doesn’t just blindly go to the “pretty pictures spots”, they can guess a fair bit about the castle. The fact that there’s a moat and quite a few small bridges joining the “islands” of the park and the castle grounds, is enough of a clue that this wasn’t anyone’s summer house, but that it was an actual defensive castle. The castle itself isn’t there anymore, I think it was destroyed, but there are some temples, a museum and quite a lot of statues, mainly of the feudal lord Toshinaga Maeda, in the park, beside the scenery.

Statue of the feudal lord Toshinaga Maeda

On top of that we were lucky enough to witness a traditional Japanese wedding ceremony while walking through the park, just when the newlyweds were posing for pictures. Beautiful!

Best wishes to the newlyweds!

Zuiryū-ji temple was, actually, the first place we visited during this trip, but since to me all temples/shrines in Japan are very much the same and one needs to have a very serious interest in the topic to be able to pick up on the differences, I’m talking about it last.

Zuiryū-ji was built around the XVII^th century. Some parts of the original temple – namely the first front gate and some two buildings on the side before the main site – burnt down, but they managed to save a fair bit of it and a lot was rebuilt in the first half of the XIX^th century. Like you’d expect from a Buddhist temple, it has an aura of tranquillity (if you ignore the other tourists), very good for meditating. I know because on top of the visit the monk who was showing us around taught us how to do zazen (座禅), the Buddhist praying/meditating position. And then we put the theory into practice. I think I’m not suited for Buddhism though: the moment my legs started to hurt (which was quite early, as was the itchy nose and other earthly uncomfortable things), instead of meditating and not thinking, I kept thinking quite intensely about how my legs hurt and how uncomfortable I am. Well, there’s something for everyone…

Statue at the entrance.

Buddha's altar.

The prayer room where we performed zazen.

Other than this the only really interesting things were the practical experiences of Takaoka’s traditional crafts that we got to have. Namely they were metal casting and painting lacquer ware.

The bell straight after taking out of the cast.

Lacquer pendant with the designs outline.

Finished pendant.

Well, I’m not going to go on about the hotel we stayed at, suffice to say that every student (and probably not just a student) would be impressed when accommodation on a free trip turned out to be a four star hotel. But to end the post with something nicer than that, let me share a photo of my lunch on the first day of the trip (in an expensive restaurant by Zuiryū-ji, let me add).

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In a Japanese high school

One of the subjects I take is a Japanese Education class. But it’s not just lectures, note-making or discussions – every now and then we have an opportunity to visit various schools, and the first one we went to was the Kanazawa Nisui Prefectural Senior High School (石川県立金沢二水高校, Ishikawa-ken-ritsu Kanazawa Nisui Kōkō).

Entrance to Nisui.
http://www.nisui-dousoukai.com/page17/index.html

Although most of the day was organised especially for us, I managed to get a glimpse of the real everyday life of a Japanese senior high student. I won’t mention the uniform; I think everyone already knows enough about Japanese uniforms. But, for example, it was very interesting to be able to observe classes a little bit. I was allowed into a physics class (which I don’t understand even in Polish or English, nevermind Japanese – and judging by the equations, the students were quite advanced!) and advanced English class (it was done all in English and the students engaged in some discussions and were made to share opinions of various subjects). What’s more interesting, the students there can choose a profile, humanities or sciences, and then take only classes from that profile. Does that mean that there goes the stereotype of an Asian high schooler who memorizes quantum physics and advanced maths, and calculates everything in their head with the speed of light?

Classroom without the pupils.

Left from the previous class.

Though just being able to get into a Japanese high school was a great experience. Schools can’t just let anyone in and an average high schooler sees their school every day, never even knowing that there could be a different one, so they’re not going to take pictures just for some potential foreigners to see. Nisui is quite pretty – and surprisingly big, even though we kept to one building only. Although for such a big school I was surprised at how small their library was.

A gallery where pupils can eat lunch or hang out, and where they have assemblies.

But, as one would expect, the most interesting were the students themselves. One hears so much about Japanese students studying hard day and night, taking extra classes and going to cram schools, under pressure and stressed out… yet when you finally face one, not only they don’t look overwhelmed by all this, but they seem to be happy that their daily life looks like this. I tried not to look too shocked when the group of girls who showed me around and talked to me said, that they spent part of their summer holidays at school taking some supplementary classes – more!, they themselves said that they enjoyed it. I cannot imagine that there is anywhere else where a high school student would say that spending some of their holidays can be fun.

Place to study on the corridor.

In the end the time flew by (though we didn’t have much of it in the first place, two, maybe two and a half hours) and I was really sorry when the time to leave came. I’d gladly talk to the students a bit more, observe some more everyday classes or even their lunch time. But it doesn’t look like it’s likely to happen as next we’ll go to a different school.

A picture left on a steamed up window.

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Weathery

There’s a saying in Kanazawa: 弁当忘れても傘忘れるな (bentō wasuretemo, kasa wasureruna), which simply means „even if you forget your lunch, do not forget your umbrella”. And the longer I’m here, the more I observe what’s happening outside, the more I agree with this saying.

On the one hand weather forecasts in Japan are very reliable. I haven’t yet had a day where I’d check the forecast in the morning on the Japanese Meteorological Agency’s website that would not come true. But even the best weather forecast will not warm us when exactly the heavens shall open and a bucketful of rain will fall on our heads.

Though on the other hand, in Japan almost everything is made to be convenient. So at nearly every corner there will be a konbini, where not only we can buy the forgotten lunch from the saying, but also an umbrella. And if there isn’t a konbini, there may be a hyaku-en shoppu. Or a supermarket. Or maybe even an umbrella shop.

That being said, it’s always better to have one’s own umbrella and not get wet in the first place.

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Kenroku-en times two

Taking my friend from Oxford’s visit as an opportunity to get out, yesterday I ended up in Kenroku-en for the second time round. Well, technically it was second and third.

Although I did not manage to get there for the actual moment of suspending tree branches, I had the opportunity to see the effects of this, during the day. As much as I find the idea of suspending branches to protect them from the winter snow’s weight a bit weird, the view is definitely very pretty. It reminds me of Japanese umbrellas, with trees hiding underneath them instead of people. Adorable.

And in the evening of the same day there was a so called light up (ライトアップ, raito appu) at Kenroku-en too. At that moment I really, really regretted not having a better camera or at least a tripod. Otherwise taking good pictures in darkness is near impossible, and so most of mine are out of focus and blurred, and don’t do the justice to all the magic and charm of a lit up Kenroku-en.

On the smooth surface of the pond the reflection was near perfect - which, sadly, my camera doesn't reflect.

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