Three Tanka Tales From Tokyo: "Kublai Comes To Tokyo," "Legend of the Golden Sperm," and "Frogman Takes a Bath"

The Rise of Empires

Leaving the the LeRouges behind, I made the overnight trek to Tokyo, where I spent the day before heading to Mt. Fuji, but before the day was through a new empire of sorts had begun. Sumo had found itself in new hands. Hakuho beat Asashoryu, the Yokozuna, and had paved the way for his all but inevitable promotion to the position himself. The interesting bit is that neither of them are Japanese; they are both Mongols. So it seems after all of these generations, Kublai Khan has, in a sense, claimed Japan for himself. I have written a Tanka poem (a little like a haiku, only with two additional 7 syllable lines tacked on the end):

Kublai Comes To Tokyo
Add Her To His Sum
His Golden Dreams Eye Japan
And Kublai Did Come
No Kamikaze Favours
Empire Made And Sumo Won

As I was arriving in Tokyo, I read that Harajuku plays home to the teenage fringe get-together each Sunday (this was the day) where alienated teens from all over Tokyo come to be alienated together and play willing spectacle to the gauking tourists. Well, I couldn't resist the temptation to be one of those tourists, and had to go see just what this was all about. It was interesting. Not quite what the book made it out to be, but it is nice to see that fringe cultures are alive and kicking in Japan.

I spent the rest of the day wandering about shopping districts and circumnavigating large skyscrapers until I couldn't brook it anymore. I went and successfully changed my bus ticket for an earlier time out of the city, saving me time and money, without the "I have no idea what your saying to me" look I had grown accustomed to by this time. Haha. Victory is mine. I was so proud that I had to email Camille and Denise as soon as I got to Kawaguchiko at the base of Mt. Fuji. They were like proud parents - or at least proud as pet owners who had just taught their monkey a new trick - with a "that's great Cory." But one takes compliments graciously when they come one's way, and pretends that sarcasm is a trick of email or fibre optic cables. That's how I roll.

Fuji San

The venerable Mount Fuji is notoriously shy, and one might say selfish, when it comes to hiding from the limelight that people with to shine upon it. It is more often than not shrouded in clouds and even a glimpse of it is considered somewhat fortunate for most of the year. So for the brief views I spied, I will consider myself lucky. The weather was gorgeous in the morning, brightly lit by the sun, but nicely regulated by a cool breeze that made my 20 km bike ride around the lake quite a pleasant one. I also managed to successfully dodge all of the sites I had thought I would like to see. 20 kms is not an especially awesome distance, but I was surprised by the ease with which I peddled it, realizing that perhaps I'm not in quite as bad shape as I have been convincing myself I am now that I am officially "an adult" as some would have it (my mom) or "old" as certain people named Denise seem to believe. Now what to do about these chest pains ;)

The afternoon was cloudy and cool, but I had to chuckle at myself when I walked by the digital Time and Temp sign that read 17.2C which to my reckoning used to be a pleasant temperature, not one I thought belonged to vast tracts of subarctic tundra. So I bought my train ticket and lazily wiled away the afternoon in the hostel, not venturing out until the evening had come and I thought a nice warm Onsen experience would be a good idea. And even then I got wrapped up in burning pictures onto CD and forgot all about it. I briefly felt like I had wasted my time by not going out to wander more than to go purchase my bus ticket for the next morning, but then I realized (this is after only about 20 seconds of contemplation and guilt - see this trip has been good for me), I can do whatever I feel like doing. So I did; I didn't do anything worthy of note.

Return to Tokyo Town

I returned to Tokyo the next morning and found my Hostel with great ease and ventured out to visit the neighborhood of Asakusa in which I found myself. The big draw in Asakusa is the Sensoji temple, and the tourist market, which are interesting, but my attention. was breifly distracted. As I walked toward my destination I saw something that Camille and I had mentioned. I had put it in the back of my mind, and couldn't remember what they had said about it, but I just remember "...something something ... the golden sperm ... something something ..." which is all that flashed back when I caught a glimpse of a GIANT golden sperm atop a black building. What the...? "Gadzeuks," said I. "Be this the legendary Golden Sperm of which Camille and Denise spake?"

I was torn, twisted, and pulled. Temples to the left of me! Sperm cell to the right of me. What is an adventurer to do? It must have seemed to onlookers that Rainman had made an appearance in the neighborhood, because I would make a step towards Sensoji, then stop and make one towards the strange shrine to shiny metallic sperm, and then repeat the outward manifestation of my inner curiousity a number of times, all the while muttering to myself incomprehensibly. In the end, my inner cat won out and I just had to find out who in the hell would put a golden sperm on top of their building. It turns out that Asahi, a major brewing company would do it. Why exactly does rather escape me. But I can only assume that it is to draw people like me to their brewquarters to spend some money. It certainly worked, only that they weren't open.

It's okay. I don't find Asahi to be great beer. Japanese beer, is too flavourless for my tastes anyway. But I do love the slogans: Upon them are written says like: "Drink this beer for good times," "A Beer to make you forget your bad day." "Four of these beers will make you believe you are Frank Sinatra reincarnated." "This beer will make you attractive to women that are way out of your league, and give you the power of flight." "This beer will allow you the wherewithal to implement your plan to take over the world." You know all the usual promises that beer companies would get sued for in North America when they failed to deliver. It inspired me to write tanka poem number two:

Legend of the Golden Sperm
Giant Golden Sperm
Sits Atop Brewmaster's Shrine
Fills You To The Brim
Mind Impregnated With Lust
But Performance Cannot Shine

That night I learned an important if somewhat obvious lesson: The Tokyo Metro map is NOT drwn to scale. My first day in Tokyo had seen me trot between stations with abondon, but the similar apparent distance between Roppongi and Shibuya, proved to be rather less similar than I had suspected. After an hour and fifteen minutes of hoofing it, I finally arrived in Shibuya to snap a night photo of the ever busy crosswalk, made famous by Lost in Translation. Oh well, the excercise is welcome. That's the great thing about big cities with lots of interesting things to see, and poor traffic conditions: people have to walk. This may be one reason why Japan, unlike its North American counterparts, is not full of fat people.

Glory Found Nikko Bound

Tokyo is an interesting place. One cannot deny it. There is much to see and do, and you would be hard pressed see and do it all in the space of a few days. Knowing that I wouldn't see it all, and that I'm not a big fan of cities. I decided to bail for a day and head out to Nikko, the site of the famous funerary complex dedicated to Tokugawa Ieyasu - the unifier of Japan. I was interested in seeing all of this, but more thrilled about the idea of hiking through the national park culminating in a dip in the Yamoto Onsen.

This little jaunt was not only one of the highlights of Japan for me, but one of the highlights of my trip! Granted, I do love the outdoors, and when I can be out in the forest with the mountains in sight, even somewhat diminutive ones, I am at my happiest as far as sightseeing is concerned. That being said. I was so thrilled to be out here, and I had the sense of "traveller victory" noting that I was the only foreign* tourist in the whole of the national park. I didn't see another white person during the whole duration of my visit to the park. I had discovered it. Okay this is untrue in an absolute sense, since it's even in the Lonely Planet. But for the day, I was the lonely trekker, and I couldn't be happier for that fact.

*that I could visibly or audibly identify

At one point I thought I saw another white person, and my elation collapsed momentarily, but as I got closer, I realized it was just a sun-averse local, who bid my well as I passed; my excitement returned. I was again the sole foreign presence. I laughed a little to myself when I arived at Ryuzu falls a teacher with a class pointed at his camera. I thought he wanted me to take a picture, and as I reached out for it, he took two steps back and waved his class in to stand around me; it was me he wanted in the picture. Proof of the victory. Gaijin are apparently a rare sight in these parts.

After having lunch on the shore of Lake Yunoko, where periodic discharges of acrid sulpheric air coloured the taste of my mostly tasteless sandwich, I made my way to Yumoto. Yumoto is neslted into the confluent base of two mountains, where it keeps warm by the thermal springs which run under the city, and percolate up at its northern end. I had some trouble locating exactly where the Onsen was, and a Japanese family noticed my predicament. They didn't really know where it was, but of course they helped me to find it, and walked me right to the door when they did finally figure it out for me. They even talked to the woman at the door, and explained (I understood this much at least) that I didn't speak Japanese, but that I would like to come in). The woman graciously allowed me to, though I suspect they were officially closed while they tested out the fire alarm, because the place was swarming with Japanese workers.

Aside: If a job can be done with three people in Japan, there will be six people doing it. This may merely be a function of needing to employ such a large population in such a small space. Camille often pointed out that the job of many a construction worker could be done with a pylon and a sandbag. I don't say that to be mean; I actually quite admire the Japanese insistence on social responsibility, in this case making sure that most people have a job. But, it also explains why the Japanese economy remains sluggish even a decade after the official recession came to an end. I, for one, would take social responsibilty over economic dynamism any day, if forced to choose but one.

But I digress...As I was led to the bath room, I found that it was not like the fancier onsen I had been to in Tsuwano, but an old-school wooden box that made for a bath. The open air and the cold water faucet only added to my excitement. This was a rustic Japanese experience, most definitely worth its weight in gold. The 500 Yen (about $5CAD) was good value for money. The water though might as well have been lava. It was SO hot it took me a long time to get in. The woman showed me that I could use cold water if it was too hot, but the tub was so huge, and being constantly replenished by the hot spring water that there is little the tepid tap water would have done to ameliorate the fire water. I did finally get in, making sure to cover my bits, ensuring that only a couple of generations of homozygotal material was destroyed in the process.

It was the kind of heat that you can stand, just barely, if you don't move. The second you do, however, the fresh water slips in to take the place of that which had cooled closer to body temperature to scorch you anew. Ah, oo, ai, jeezuss! I couldn't stay in long, I surely would have cooked. This made me contemplate the question, Frog or Man: which is the wiser of the two? A frog will be thrown into scorching water and jump right out, but will allow himself to boil in water that is slowly heated to extreme temperatures. Man on the other hand will get out of water that becomes too hot, but will with all due intent persist until they can submerse themselves entirely and tarry there far longer than is healthy for a person to do so. It's a question for the ages, one that inspired the crowning glory of my tanka trilogy.

Frogman Takes a Bath
Frogman Takes a Bath
Too Thin For Water So Hot
Covering His Bits
Hop Hop Hop Submersion Burns
Good Enough So Out He Pops

Tokyo Revisited

For the most part, I have made my way without much difficulty. The language not being much of a barrier, anymore than most places. This is mostly thanks to Camille's and Denise's dilligent, if hurculean, effort to get me, an eager but fumbling student, to learn Japanese successfully. I did, however, accidentily buy an eraseable pen, an invention meant to mock and taunt left-handed people the wold around. But this particular pen, more than being an inconvenience to lefties, was perhaps the single most inane writing implement ever to have been developed in the modern world. Unlike older eraseable pens, which mostly smudged of the writing surface with eraser or left hand, this one rubs off with the friction of eraser, hand, or any point of contact with, let's say, competing postcards. I carefully mangled my arm to write two postcards without erasing everything I wrote immediately afterwards with my lagging pen hand, and saved that trouble for my backpack. The 2 hour journey on the train created enough friction between the cards to pretty much erase the entire collection of words and symbols present on each of them. Gah! So I bought a new, felt pen, which would only write if you tilted it in a way that did not work conveniently for my left handed orientation - it's a conspiracy I tell you. Bah!

I spent my last couple of days in Tokyo wandering around and seeing stuff for the most part. But most excitingly, I got to spend some time with my friend Tohko who I met whilst volunteering in Estonia (this is perhaps my funniest blog entry, in my own opinion). One of my main goals in coming to Japan was to go out to Karaoke. "How can you come to Japan and not go to Karaoke?" I pleaded, cajoled, guilted and derided Camille and Denise, admitting the huge failure. This was a seige of wills I was destined to lose. But Tohko, as it turns out, loves it. So we went with aplomb.

We sang for an hour, renting one of those private booths. Tohko, for her part, is a very good singer. She complimented me on my great voice, but the Japanese compliment you for doing anything they consider remotely Japanese no matter how badly you suck at it, so I took those compliments lightly. I know I'm a crap singer, but as much as that is true, I couldn't give a damn any more than I could throw myself into orbit. So we sang our hearts out and then went on a failed quest to find Purikura. Giving up, Tohko suggested that I come out to her mom's place in the morning. She wanted to meet me, one of the freedom fighters of the Estonian incident, after learning of how we stood up to the infamous Valdo. So I went out the next morning, getting up at 4:30am (I calculated this would help me minimize jet lag on my return to California) to have a traditional Japanese breakfast cooked for me.

Japanese breakfast is very much unlike western breakfast. For all intents and purposes it is lunch, served very early in the day. I enjoyed trying the various foods, dried fish, sweet egg rollups, miso soup, various greens, tofu, green tea, shredded fish flakes, I even tried Nato for a second time. I have now conclusively determined that it is my second least favorite food on the planet, preceded only by Uni which made me nearly vomit (but that was years ago amid much laughter and a forced entry into a women's bathroom, which I was wise enough not to repeat here in Japan). I enjoyed it a great deal, and it was a real pleasure to meet Tohko's mom.

Following breakfast, I went out for one last session of purikura with Tohko. I think we did fine work, and I was glad to have a solid set with which to leave Japan.

My only disappointment was that the Iga Ninja museum I had read about and mistakenly believed was in Ueno park, was in fact not in Tokyo at all, but in Iga Ueno. Doh! No ninja for me. Or, perhaps it really is there and only so stealthily hidden from view, that only other ninjas can visit it. That would explain why exactly the woman at the information counter told me that there is not ninja museum in Tokyo. Ah ha!

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