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Published: March 31st 2011
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My heart beats faster when I look out of the window and see Japan unfold beneath me - the spine of mountains and narrow coastal areas. When we drop height, it strikes me how brown the land is. Of course, I'd forgotten. England is so green at the moment, whereas Japan - or at least the parts of Japan I know - is brown in the winter as it's dry and only turns green when the rains come with the rainy season.
I take the train from Nagoya airport (built on a manmade island) to Nagoya. Once there I have to find the Japan Rail Pass Exchange Office so I can turn in my voucher bought in Britain for a Rail Pass. I catch sight of the front of the Japan Rail Pass leaflet. It shows Hokusai's famous ukiyo-e (wood-block print) of 'The Great Wave off Kanagawa', that well known picture with the huge wave, Mount Fuji in the background and two small boats. Intstantly the images of the tsunami fill my head.
I find my way through the rabbit warren of shopping passages to the office. When I first came to Japan, I would get totally lost in them, and worry that I might have to spend my entire life wandering around Tokyo Station or Shinjuku Station trying to find my way out. But they do have a system, and so I found myself at the desk. The girl gave me a form to fill in, which she then proceeded to decorate with red crayon at vast speed before hiding it from my sight and crowning it with countless numbers of stamping. She then passed me my Japan Rail Pass - and Hokusai's woodprint stared me in my face again. I'll just have to get used to it. Nature is woven into Japan, whether it's the breathless beauty of plum tree blossom or cherry tree blossom, the vivid autumn colours, the earthquakes, or even tsunamis.
On the platform waiting for my Shinkansen (bullet train) to take me to Kyoto, I check the car (carriage) number on my ticket. Japanese trains don't stop anywhere on the platform. They line up with perfect precision with notices telling which car it is. You line up at that point, and when the train comes, punctual to the second, you're on board in no time at all, which allows for very short stopping times.
The conductor - always a man - comes and with much nodding checks my ticket. Then the refreshments trolley comes. When we first came to Japan it was always a young woman who sold the coffees for 300 yen, now it's a young girl who does it, though they are still 300 yen.
I look out the window. The houses are squashed into valleys while the mountains rise steeply above them. There are no gently rolling hills. I recall what a guide once told us - 7% of the land for agriculture, 8% for the population (it could have been the other way round - I can't remember it that exactly), and all the rest is mountains. I don't know how accurate those figures are, but the population is squeezed into a tiny area as all the other land is steeply mountainous.
I walk from Kyoto station to my hotel nearby. It's just as my Japanese friend and teacher, Hisako, told me. Her family comes from Osaka (which is very close to Kyoto), and apparently they scarcely felt the earthquake - just like a normal one. Those happen all the time in Japan. Life in Kyoto is just as it was in Tokyo and Mito before - bright lights, bustling people, trains like clockwork. Obviously I don't know what is going on in people's heads, but on the outside, it's as if the terrible events of the north east haven't happened.
Later in the day I revisited Kinkaku-ji - the Golden Pavilion. I'd seen it with Neil and two of our children back in 1994, when it had only recently been given a new coating with gold-leaf a few years before in 1987. I can remember then thinking it was a bit on the guady side, and it made me think of those very bright shiny miniature Eiffel Towers that are everywhere in all the shops in Paris. Age may give the rest of us wrinkles, but the years have softened Kinkaku-ji so today she shimmered like a sleek bird. As I wasn't part of a tour group as I'd been the first time, I could linger and savour her beauty with the green mountains behind protecting her, and the lake smiling up at her.
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