Japan: Narita Home Stay and Kyoto Parade

Our plan was to travel for two years, starting with Asia.  We left, true to D’s usual, and by this point obligatory, timing , what was before his birthday on October 21st.  We had ‘open jaw’ tickets with multiple stops.  First stop: Japan.  Although the ticket said ‘Tokyo,’ the airport is closer to a small town, Narita, and being small town types ourselves (Balfour in the Kootenays and Salt Spring Island in the Strait of Georgia, a ferry ride away from a mall or recreation centre), we chose to stay there, at least for the first few days.  As this was long before the internet world of sites like booking.com, I cannot recall exactly how it was we found a place to stay with a family in their private home.  What we’d call a ‘home stay’ now.  Perhaps we found it in the Lonely Planet, or Asia on a Shoestring or The Backbacker’s Guide to the World (I just made that one up).

In the entryway to the house, a small vestibule for the ritual taking off and putting on of shoes, there was a full size suit of armour.  For a Samurai warrior.  Our host, who spoke passing English, was clearly enthused by our interest in the armour, and told us all about it, starting with the fact that it belonged to one of his ancient relatives.  So he was a direct, and very proud, descendent of a Samurai warrior!  D is determined he tried the warrior’s helmet on and that we have a photo of him in it, but if we did, it’s somehow missing from our otherwise pretty extensive library of ‘1981-82 Asia’ photos.  More’s the pity.

Another thing I don’t have photos of, but very vivid memories of, is a large wooden hot tub in the family’s home.  First a squatting bucket and bowl bath with warm, but not hot, water.  A bit awkward, but no worse than the ice cold bucket baths of South America.  Then mounting a little set of stairs – a ladder really – affixed to the side of the tub.  And then a slow lowering into the water that was just this side of boiling.  I couldn’t stay in very long.  Just too hot.  My whole body lobster red.  Wondering, in the case of the male population, is this an ancient form of birth control? 

And no photos either of my favourite word ‘Daitoku-ji,’ which we heard every time we took a bus in Kyoto, which was often.  ‘Dai-toko-gee!’  It was said in a sing-song kind of way that for some reason tickled my fancy.  Daitoku-ji is a huge zen temple complex.  We never went there, instead preferring the smaller temples with their lovely treed and grassy compounds where deer lay undisturbed.

What I do have photos of is a parade we went to in Kyoto.  It’s called the Jidai Matsuri, and it’s held every year on October 22nd, the anniversary of the founding of Kyoto.  It’s a huge parade, with people in costumes from almost every period of Japanese history.  Lots of Samurai warriors, and women in fabulous kimonos.  And horses, beautiful big horses.  So I can leave you with those photos at least…  










Location: Kyoto, Japan

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Finding – and marrying – the right travel partner

Image
Sometimes memory is selective.  Maybe filtering out what it considers to be inconsequential experiences, ideas, and bits of knowledge.  Housecleaning, as it were.  In any event, although I’ve frequently told myself and others that I first met my now husband at Easter time in 1981, in fact I’d met him not once but twice before.  Evidently those times didn’t ‘count.’  But for the record, here’s the truth.  Well, as I recall it now, some 45 years later. One of the paintings for my Velito story In the fall of 1979 I was still ‘just back’ from a six month solo adventure in South America.  I was slowly – very slowly – adjusting to the cultural shock of re-entering a society and culture that seemed, to me, to have too much of everything but still wanting more.  I had no fixed address, but was temporarily staying at a lakeside resort on Salt Spring Island.  I spent my days writing and painting an allegoric...
Read more

Japan: Final impressions, Osaka, October 28, 1981

Image
What better place to write my final impressions of Japan than here, sitting in one of the very few seats provided in the Osaka airport with a tv blaring nonsense right beside me?     Having driven for almost an hour through a sea of industrial crap – Japan’s ‘countryside.’     Every inch of the landscape seems to have been claimed by industry, and the air is thick with smog and diesel fumes.    From this standpoint, it will be a relief to leave. It will also be a relief to leave behind the expense – of food, accommodation, and transport.    There are also a number of things about Japanese culture that I find disconcerting – some almost frightening, especially if I consider that this may be the direction in which all of us are heading.  These are the main things that I find somewhat off-putting:           Their obsession with ‘face’ and appearance.  Women, men and children clearly pay a lot of attention ...
Read more