Tokyo for a Week!

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OK, before you start reading this let me say its not finished. I started writing this when I got back from Tokyo and life got in the way. its still in the way. i didnt want to waste all of the incredible writing I did do though, so heres my first couple days in tokyo. we didnt hitchhike all the way there, just to nagoya, but we hitchhiked all the way back to nagoya on the way back so we made one full trip. good times, here ya go

This past week was Golden　Week, a holiday in Japan that consists of a holiday on Wednesday and Friday and a day off in between just for the hell of it. So with three days off from school Garrett and I decided to skip the other two and hitchhike to Tokyo and stay there for a week. It almost worked...

Day 1

We started Saturday, April 29th, at Gojo in Kyoto at around 2:30 p.m. That was our first mistake. Kind of late to try to hitchhike 515 kilometers but we gave it a shot anyway. We went to the 99 yen store bought a permanent marker and some blank folders to write on and got laughed at by passerbys as we held up our signs trying to get to Tokyo. We waited... waited... ok no one was coming so we decided to leave. While we were doing so I dropped some of the signs right before the entrance to the subway and while we were picking them up we were offered a ride. Amazing? What chance? Apparently this is just how hitchhiking works.

The couple who picked us up were traveling to Nagoya which is not quite Tokyo but is a good start. They were very nice and when we got to Nagoya they insisted on showing us where their favorite restaurant was for unagiyaki (fried eel) which is considered one of Nagoya's specialties. The real amazing part of that is knowing we were college students they gave us each money to make the specialty affordable before they left to go to the business meeting they were traveling to Nagoya for. The kindness of the Japanese to never ceases to suprise and amaze me.

After dinner, we headed for the train station for a variety of reasons including the fact that we didn't want to get a hotel, Garret's wanting to get to Tokyo quickly because his brother was possibly there alone, and because hitchhiking at this point probably wouldn't have got us there in time we tooka shinkansen the rest of the way to Tokyo. It was a little pricey but Garrett hadn't ridden one before so it was a necessary experience. We arrived in Tokyo around 11:00p.m. and called our friend Yutaka who we had met in Kyushu and found our way to his apartment in near Chofu Station. We had a toast to our travels, chatted for a little while, and went to bed. A rather uneventful first night in Tokyo but we were just glad to be there, not lost, and with a free place to stay and a friend who wanted to show us around all week.

Day 2

The next day was Sunday the 30th of April and we decided to visit the Imperial Palace and Yakusuni Shrine before trying to find Garrett's older brother Corey. Yutaka-san guided us on the trains and we first stopped at Shibuya on the way up Tokyo Station. At Shibuya we walked around and were amazed although not quite shocked at how many people there were. We browsed some shops which was obscenely expensive by my country-boy standards (I've never seen a truckers cap for $70 before) and generally enjoyed soaking in the larger than life atmosphere of the district.

We eventually moved on to see the Imperial Park but ended up seeing mostly just the outskirts due to reasons I'm still confused about but something to do with having to meet people. We still ended up waiting. Nevertheless, we mostly went straight to Yakusuni Shrine which is just north-west of the park and is a shrine dedicated to everyone who died during the wars in the Meiji Era (please correct me if I'm wrong on that). The difficulty is that in addition to the souls of the innocent enshrined here, there are fourteen Class-A War Criminals who had been secretly enshrined there also, including Foreign Minister Matsuoka Yosuke who has been blamed for the alliance with Nazi Germany. The controversy is that every year Prime Minister Koizumi visits the shrine and pays respect to the souls enshrined there. This has hurt normalization of relations of other countries, especially Korea and China who were victims of the atrocities commited by these War Criminals. Koizumi tries to separate his personal life in visiting this shrine to honor the innocent victims between his political life but such distinction is controversial and difficult and his yearly visit is highly politicized and covered by the media. In addition, there is an complementary museum supported by right-wing conservatives next to the shrine glorifying Japan's military past which is also a source of contention. Solutions to all of this is to create a different shrine to honor the war dead precluding the war criminals or to create a secular monument honoring the same but these attempts at compromise have currently gone no where.

So, because of all this Yakusuni Shrine was one of the places Garrett and I both had really wanted to go when we went to Tokyo. The shrine itself was relatively normal and Garrett and Yutaka paid their respects, but the museum was the interesting part where Japan was portrayed as an innocent victim in its military past. This inability to accept responsibility for actions is the source of criticism for Japan although numerous public apologies have been cited from the Japanese side. Many believe that the contentious issue of Yakusuni Shrine is the biggest obstacle facing Japan's diplomatic relations with China and Korea.

After this we finally met up briefly with Hideo and then with Garrett's older brother and his friend Mirin (sp?) and we went out for a quick bite to eat before splitting up until later. Mirin went to a baseball game at the Tokyo Dome, Garrett and Corey started drinking early so they could catch up with each other, and myself and Yutaka went back to Yutaka's apartment because Yutaka was going to practice his breakdancing (he's quite good) with a friend of his and I was going to watch. When we got back it turned out the breakdancing wasn't going to happen because Yutaka's friends motorbike had broken down so Yutaka and I hung out for a bit before I headed back to Shibuya to meet up with everyone else.

When I got there we were heading to Karaoke to meet up with more of Corey's friends who were in Tokyo with him. I can't remember everyone's names but they were fun people and we had a good time. We stayed too late for the trains though and since Garrett and I had a ways to go to get home (the taxi cab driver just laughed when we asked how much it would cost us to get a ride home) we just crashed in a 24-hour restaurant and they were nice enough not to kick us out.

Day 3

5:00a.m. Decided to leave the restaurant because the trains were running again. Duh. Walking through Shibuya early in the morning was almost eerie. While during the day and at night the streets are swarming with people, around this time the streets were nearly empty. We found a vending machine with mountain dew and caught the train back to Chofu where so we could get some real sleep.

We woke up around 10:00 or so and were planning on meeting our friend Hideo in Hachioji at his school, the Soka Institute. This deserves explantion. The Soka Institute, although a secular school (because Japan doesn't allow religiously associated schools), is funded and mostly run by Soka Gakkai. Many of the students there adhere to this 'religion' although it is not required for attending the school.

Here comes a brief academic lesson: Soka Gakkai is a branch of Nichiren Buddhism and was founded in 1937 by Toda Josei. Soka Gakkai itself means value-creation education system and this organization focuses on faith, practice and study. It is incredibly pervasive and although it has only been in existance for seventy years, it has more than 12 million members in 190 countries. It's ability to expand is incredible. The organization is extremely peace oriented and is focused on achieving "the happiness and welfare of all humanity." Their views are extremely appealing in that it is believed one can achieve rewards in the current life and not just the afterlife. Additionally, one could hardly argue with their stated goals and they do incredible work towards peace in the world.

Since 1960 Daisaku Ikeda, a charismatic and incredibly influential individual, has been the president of Soka Gakkai. He has received honorary doctorates from universities all over the world and has been awarded the United Nations Peace Award, the International Tolerance Award of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Rosa Parks Humanitarian Award. He has supported the arts worldwide, written extensively and is the guiding helm of Soka Gakkai.

Basically, everything this organization outwardly does sounds good, but naturally there is controversy. For one, the way in which the members view Ikeda is considered by some to be almost cultish as he is practically worshipped. Soka Gakkai is also criticized for wanting to politically take over Japan through its Komeko (Clean Government) Party, and for strong actions taken against those that oppose it. For example, a book was being published that spoke against Soka Gakkai and the author received incredible amounts of hate mail, threats and pressure, even from the Prime Minister in Japan at the time, to not publish the book. Ikeda has also been accused of rape and ex-members report that they experience abuse for leaving. Even within the organization there is intense pressure, especially to give large amounts of money to the organization, even to the point of pressure to give the last of one's money away to the group.

Japanese people speak about Soka Gakkai in hushed voices although the organization accounts for 10%!o(MISSING)f the population. Most Japanese are distrustful and it is interesting to know that of the many honorary doctorates Ikeda has received (I think the number runs around 150), none of them have come from Japan.

So, all this controversy had sparked our interest and Soka Gakkai has been a sort of closet-hobby among the people I spend time with during my time here. Two of my friends are writing reports on it and the rest of us have heard lots about it along the way.

So this is why we went to the Soka Institute. To learn what all of the controversy was all about and to visit our friend Hideo who we had met in Fukkuoka, who is a Soka Gakkai member.

We arrived on campus on an empty stomache and so we went to the cafeteria to eat. It was a normal cafeteria, nothing cultish. I had curry and rice and it was pretty good. At this point we had met with Hideo and he introduced us to his friend with whom we immediately started our questions about Soka Gakkai.

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