BACK TO START Osaka and Nara

Transcription

1 Osaka and Nara We spent our last two nights in Japan back in Osaka, the huge, fascinating city that we visited early in the trip (cf. Travelogue 3). It had taken about five hours by plane, coach, and taxi to travel from Yakushima, and we were tired but pleasantly surprised to be upgraded to a nice suite on the 30 th floor, the snazziest digs of the trip. It was past our usual dinner hour, but we found a nearby restaurant for our penultimate dinner in Japan: Kobe beef sashimi and a seaweed and lettuce salad. We were the only patrons in the intimate downstairs establishment where we were served by a pleasant young woman with whom we conversed via smart phone translation apps. She was excited to learn that we had lived in the Netherlands, where she was planning to move next year to be with her soccer-playing boyfriend. Some of the beef had been lightly torched. We spent much of the next day, Thanksgiving, Thursday November 23, and our last full day in Japan, in nearby Nara, a city we remembered from years ago for its deer. The Sika deer are still there, some 1,200 of them, freely roaming the 1,240-acre grounds of Nara Park and the many Buddhist temples and the Shinto Shrines. The deer were once

2 regarded as messengers of the gods in the Shinto religion. Back then, if you were to kill a deer, you would pay with your life. Nara s deer lost their divine status after WWII but are still protected. Today, while the deer were theoretically wild, in fact they were quite tame, tolerating, if not welcoming, the attention of visitors, especially when offered the deer crackers sold throughout the park. Some of the deer had learned a cute trick: they solicited treats by vigorously bobbing their heads in a kind of cervidaen Japanese bow.

3 The entrance to the Tōdai-ji temple in Nara was crowded. The UN World Heritage Tōdai-ji Buddhist temple complex and its Great Buddha Hall houses what until 1995 was the world's largest bronze Buddha statue. (That honor today is claimed by Nanzo-in near Fukuoka, cf. Travelogue 8) The crowds were dense near the temples and shrines, so we skipped visiting inside Tōdai-ji with its mere second largest Buddha and instead walked several miles through the splendidly colorful fall foliage of the parks outer reaches. We had a modest lunch and returned to Osaka by subway. While Christmas is widely observed in Japan, American Thanksgiving is not. We would have preferred turkey and dressing, but settled for yakitori and beer. We found a cozy basement restaurant near the hotel, took off our shoes, and watched the chefs grill various cuts of chicken on short bamboo skewers over a small brazier. Both the breast and unintuitively more expensive thigh meat were served with a delicious dipping sauce and a tiny dab of extremely spicy pepper paste. We took a long walk around Osaka the next morning, as our direct flight home did not leave until the afternoon. Traveling with carryon luggage does not leave much scope for shopping, but we hoped to find something manageable in one of the kitchen supply shops that we had noticed there a month earlier. Locating the shops in Osaka s endless shopping tunnels was an adventure itself, as was exploring aisle upon crowed

4 aisle of often mysterious cooking paraphernalia. We eventually bought a small rectangular skillet, the kind used for the multi-layered Japanese omelet that we had made in our cooking lesson earlier in the trip. (cf. Travelogue 1) We checked out of the hotel, mailed back our marvelous Wi-Fi hot spot, and headed for Osaka s Kansai airport. The flight was long but uneventful, and we arrived home at noon on Friday, thanks to the 17-hour time difference, several hours on the clock before we left Japan. For a few more pictures of Nara and Osaka, Go back to the start and click on the Picture Gallery link. Epilogue By any measure our month in Japan was a very full one. We explored seven islands and slept in 13 cities; rode 18 trains, 21 buses, and five ferry boats; walked about 96 miles; and visited too many temples and shrines to count. Here, in no particular order or significance, are a few concluding observations about amazing Japan and its people: Public transportation was excellent everywhere. Trains and buses were on time, to the second. Station stops were impressively brief, a minute or less in the case of a Shinkansen. Train and bus stations were typically large and labyrinthine, but place name signage usually included Romanji (Latin letters), and stops were frequently announced on board and in the stations in English. Most towns and even neighborhoods of the larger cities had tourist information offices, where someone spoke English, sometimes fluently. Although English proficiency in general is low (Wikipedia puts Japan at 35 th amongst developed countries), and we speak negligible Japanese, basic communications was never an issue using the Google Translate application on our phones. As a precaution against disease, many people wear white surgical masks, which casts a disquieting clinical air to the street. In contrast, people we encountered in public were friendly, polite, and helpful. In several instances when asking directions, people went way out of their way to help, even accompanying us to our destinations. Trams were sometimes crowded, and it was not unusual for someone to get up and offer us their seat. People bow a lot in Japan, even to foreign tourists. A smile and nod to most anyone will earn a return smile and at least a small bow. We ve read that children are taught the etiquette of bowing at an early age, and companies provide training to their employees in how to execute bows correctly. We were impressed that train conductors and tea cart ladies bow when entering and leaving a rail coach, even when we were the only passengers. Checking into or out of a hotel would generate copious bows from every employee in sight.

5 Finis Japan is racially very homogeneous. Ethnic Japanese are said to make up 98.5% of the total population. Outside of Osaka and Kyoto we saw few Caucasians, and only once encountered other Americans tourists, two couples in a hotel dining room. There were lots of other tourists; we saw whole fleets of tour buses, and one large Chinese cruise ship. According to the English language Japan Times, rates of tourism have never been higher. We were struck by the ubiquity of public rest rooms, which was significantly greater than in any other country we have visited. Western toilets, a rarity during our first visits to Japan, are now commonplace, as are baby seats on the ladies side. Everywhere we spent the night, including the Buddhist temple, used electric models. Without exception we did not see a city street in Japan that didn t look recently scrubbed. Paper, cigarette buts, debris of any kind were simply nonexistent. Smoking in public is quite uncommon, even illegal in many outdoor places. Ice cream is widely available, mostly the soft kind, but we saw no one eating it in the street. Something else that was missing in public: trash cans, which stuck us as ironic given the Japanese penchant for elaborate packaging. Even a simple box of cookies might have several layers of wrapping. Something we did see a lot of on the sidewalks: bicycles. They are very popular but are ridden on the sidewalk, not on the street. Riders adroitly dodge pedestrians who seemed nonplused by having to share the sidewalks. Surprisingly, we witnessed no mishaps. Another impressive feature of Japanese sidewalks is the use of tactile paving to assist the visually impaired. These bumpety yellow strips were ubiquitous on public sidewalks and in train and bus stations. As tourists, we did not get a very reliable view of the cost of living in Japan, which is reported to be about 18% higher than at home. Based on our restaurant meals, this seems about right. A Japanese burger and coke, which you should realize that we tried only for the sake of cultural comparison, went for about $9 or $10. One cost difference compared to home, however, is that there is no tipping in Japan, not in restaurants, not in taxies, not anywhere!