Copyright © 2000 LeeAnn Heringer

Chapter Ten

Sayonara

Japan was a very short trip. We were only on the ground for 7 days. We never got out of Tokyo because it was such a short period of time and there was so much to see there in the city. I would have liked to have seen Mt. Fuji reflected in the lake and the Ryoanji Temple Zen Garden and a sumo wrestling match and a hundred other things. And because it was so short, everything seems like static snapshots and random thoughts rather than the broad sweep that you would get from a longer visit. But we did have a “theme” for the trip. Whenever Dean and I travel, somewhere during the trip we decide on a catch-phrase that best sums up the experience. For example, during our trip to Alaska, we used the phrase “To the Yukon” until we discovered that we were never going to get anywhere close to Yukon territory. So then we used the phrase “Watch out for the rocks, eh?” Because in one situation the group of Canadians kept repeating that phrase until we understood that this was a question and we were expected to respond to it.

Our theme for Japan was “We’re going to stop for coffee any moment now.” Because there we were in the land of coffee shops and would literally go days never stopping for coffee (though at times we desperately needed it) because we kept getting distracted at the last moment and something would postpone our achieving coffee-ness.

We did buy Dean a new wedding ring to replace the one he lost a year and a half ago at the farmer’s market. After he lost 95 pounds, his original ring was too big and just slipped off and was lost. We talked about buying a replacement ring in Florence because the local Florence specialities are leather work and gold, but all the gold vendors in Florence seemed too tacky and overpriced for tourist trade. Fortunately, Akiko was with us in Japan to help us with the translation or I don’t think we would have attempted purchasing the ring. We bought it in the Ginza in a 7 story jewelry store where wedding rings were on floor 5 and the 7th floor was the diamond museum.

I did a momentary glimpse of this bright blue bridge with scenes of women in kimonos carrying parasols and samurai on horseback in wrought iron along the pedestrian railing.

We went to the special exhibit of Japan’s National Treasures at the Japan National Museum and lock stepped shuffled in this enormous crowd along the glass cases, moving slowly along these elaborately decorated scrolls right to left. Elbow to elbow with white haired grandmothers and students. Japan seems to have a system where the emperor and his empress early in the twentieth century, having seen the treasures of places like Egypt taken from of their country and placed in foreign museums, declared a wide variety of things, anything from scrolls to fans to paintings & sculptures to swords & armor to kimonos, national treasures which meant that they were considered priceless and could not be brought and sold or removed from the country. The scrolls and wall hangings were beautiful, but then we’d go through a section (still locked in this slow moving shuffling line because if you got out, you weren’t getting back in) of calligraphy and sutras. One scroll was titled as Certificate Given to Disciple Showing His Progress Towards Enlightenment and I had a sudden flash of those gold stars they give you in grammar school. We collect diplomas and awards to pin up on the wall behind our desk. This guy had a certificate that he was progressing towards enlightenment. Imagine what kind of bragging rights that gives you. It would certainly shut down all those people who went to Ivy League schools.

All the sutras and sculptures of Buddha, including a magnificent Trinity that had at it’s center a Buddha like standing figure with the 20-30 Shiva arms, each one holding a very intricate gilded tool (like a wrench) or a flower or a teapot or a little dead head on a stick or a belt buckle with a swastika.

We managed to get lost in Asakusa and found the Kannon Temple with it’s enormous red lanterns and crowd huddled around the “porridge for 157” sized incense pot waving in the blessed smoke that is supposed to rid your body of disease and random evil spirits.

I don’t know if my experiences in Japan were typical. Talking to people here in the US who have more experience on the ground in Japan, the open-friendly-smiling-fun-loving Japanese I enjoyed so much are supposedly that way only during cherry blossom season. One person credited this with the fact that during cherry blossom season, some Japanese (perhaps the more visible Japanese that I saw) start drinking early in the day. And my question to Dean was do we have an equivalent national festival that American’s all celebrate? There’s 4th of July, but this has been PC’ed out of existence so that very few people actually touch fireworks anymore, you view them like TV with a professional chosen sound track. There’s Mardi Gras in New Orleans. There’s the Superbowl. Is there a festival or celebration that brings us together like the cherry blossom season brings the Japanese together?

Well, back to the grind. The Japan journals are officially closed.