Day 5 & 6: Kyoto

Things I can check off my list today:

• See geisha in Gion.
• Have conveyor-belt sushi.
• Buy a yukata and geta.
• Eat unagi.
• Visit a castle.
  

As you can see, our trip to Kyoto was very fruitful. We started out the day on the Shinkansen, Japan's bullet train. The trip to Kyoto, which would have been about 8 hours by bus, took us about 2.5 hours on the Shinkansen. It was great.

We stayed at a little place called Kyoto Gardens, which was a little hard to find. By the time we arrived there, we were starving. Fortunately, there was a Chinese restaurant next door, aptly named Chinese Food. It wasn't like authentic Chinese food, at least, nothing like what I had while working at a Chinese food restaurant in Orem, where they served sweet-and-sour pork and chow mein, but, at the end of the night, cooked amazing dishes off the "red" menu that we didn't even hand to people unless they looked Chinese. It wasn't like the American Chinese food I have grown up on. Rather, it was a third kind of Chinese food: Chinese food cooked by Japanese people. It wasn't bad. It was just...different.


Here are my parents in front of the cashier at Chinese Food.

After lunch we took a bus to Gion, where we saw more shrines. I hope I am treating the Japanese people, my ancestors included, with proper respect when I acknowledge that there are a lot of shrines in this country. I have only seen a few compared to how many there are, but I feel like I've seen a lot. Here's a picture of my parents in front of one:


That said, I appreciate the way Japanese people honor their ancestors. It's interesting to be in Japan, where many of my ancestors came from, and to find myself so grateful for all that they have done for me, which, in large part, included emigrating to the U.S. Here's a shot of my parents on their way up to an area with a cemetery filled with thousands of family stones:


As we were headed up to look at a Kannon statue, which I apparently have no pictures of, I thought I spotted geisha going down an alleyway. My parents scoffed when I told them. In their defense, we had seen many people wearing kimono and yukata who were not geisha, and they asked me how I could tell the difference. I responded that I just could. So, they indulged me, and we headed down the alleyway where, minutes earlier, I thought I had spotted geisha.

I should pause now to admit that I am fascinated by geisha, although I acknowledge that some subtle forms of sexism and oppression surround them. In American culture, there are a lot of misconceptions about geisha. To clear up those misconceptions, I recommend the book, Geisha, A Life, which is the actual memoir of an actual geisha, as opposed to the book Memoirs of a Geisha, by Arthur Golden, who took the same story and fictionalized it in a way that left the woman it was based on angry enough to pursue legal action and write her own book. Here is a link to the Wikipedia entry on geisha, for those interested in the history and origins of these women. One of the books I read estimated there are less than 100 left in Japan, and most of them are in an area of Kyoto called Gion.

And, sure enough, within a few minutes, we saw geisha. They seem to belong to another time, and yet they stood there for pictures, like they were characters at Disneyland. I was a little embarrassed to be taking their pictures, but at the same time, I was in total awe.

I read in one of my guidebooks that there were places in Kyoto where they would dress you up like a geisha and take your picture. I thought it sounded just a little too hokey.

That said, this isn't as bad as it looks. We went into a store that sold very reasonably priced yukata, which is a less-expensive, cotton version of a kimono. I wanted one, and we were trying to figure out why they were all the same size. A saleswoman swooped in and explained, through my dad, that you could adjust them. She then whipped a yukata off a rack and started putting it on my mom. Before my mom could protest that she was sweaty, the woman was tying the obi around her waist. After she finished with my mom, she put the same yukata on me, to demonstrate that it was a one-size-fits-all kind of outfit.


Don't be fooled. That's actually me, not another geisha.

Anyway, despite the fact that she offered no English, and my mom and I spoke no Japanese, she was a great saleswoman, and we left with three yukata, three matching obi, and a pair of geta (Japanese wooden sandals).

I hate my regular clothes now.

We went back to our hotel to freshen up before dinner.

For the most part, our dining out has been mostly about convenience, hence Chinese Food, or recommendations from my brother. However, when we decided to go to Kyoto, I looked up restaurants in the guidebook and decided that the place we needed to have dinner at was Musashi Sushi. Luckily, it was only a few blocks from our hotel.


At Mushashi Sushi, a conveyor belt goes around the room in an oval shape. Inside the oval are a few sushi chefs, making nigiri and maki as fast as they can. On the outside of the oval, guests are seated at stools or tables, ready to grab food on plates as it goes around on the conveyor belt. Each plate has a couple of pieces of sushi on it. All plates were 137 yen.


I got my mom to try her first unagi (eel). Her response? "If you see some more come by, you can grab it."


Needless to say, we all walked away full.

The next morning, we decided we wanted to see Nijo Castle before we headed back to Tokyo. It was awesome!
Here are Mom and Dad outside the entrance to Nijo Castle. It was right around the corner from our hotel, which was nice.

My dad is a big fan of the movie Shogun, a miniseries based on a book by James Clavell which starred Richard Chamberlain. I think his favorite part of the castle were the life-sized figurines of shogun figures in the rooms of the castle. Unfortunately, we were not allowed to take pictures in this part of the castle, so here's another one of my parents in front of the moat.
Also, we learned a lot about defense. Sometimes, I think my dad pictures himself in complicated scenarios, like on a desert island, or as the ruler of an empire, and tries to figure out what he would do. He talked a lot about the various levels of defense the shogun used to protect himself. The most famous is the nightingale floor. The floorboards in the palace move up and down when you walk on them, and rub against one another, making a sound like the cheeping of a nightingale, which you can hear all through the castle. It's a little less sophisticated than security measures we have today, so I think it would be funny to see some sort of old-school Mission Impossible take on the nightingale floor.

Again, we couldn't take pictures of the floor, so here's one of me and my dad in front of one of the gardens on the castle grounds.