Blog Detail
- An Oriental Odyssey in Ancient Nippon
- Tour of Japan Tour Plus North & South Korea Option
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DAY 1- Uneventful 6 a.m. Qantas flight to Sydney, but our JAL flight was cancelled because of a faulty onboard weather radar and we are taken to an airport hotel where we are given the options of flying out to Tokyo the next morning on JAL or taking an overnight Qantas flight to Tokyo. We choose the latter so that we won’t miss any touring of Tokyo.
DAY 2- Arrive in Tokyo and check into luxurious Palace Hotel overlooking the Emperor’s Palace. We meet Koji-san, who immediately charms us by telling a funny story about his daughter who went to Australia looking for a boy to marry but came home empty-handed and instead became a secretary to a Sony executive. She regularly accompanies her boss to the golf courses to take dictation as he plays with clients but she also has to carry his golf bag and, therefore, is really a caddy. Koji-san’s M.O. obviously is to spin a story like this as a way of explaining how intensively Japanese businessmen work. We get his drift, and henceforth appreciate how Koji simultaneously lectures and entertains us. After a nap we visit the vast Tsukiji fish market, where large tunas sell for up to $100,000 each. We take a citywide tour of Tokyo, including the famous Ginza shopping district, and go to the top of Tokyo Tower, a poor replica of Paris’ Eiffel Tower. We wonder that no one at the tower seems embarrassed by this blatant knock-off, but Koji explains that “Japanese are great imitators, they imitate everything.” We visit the Asakusa Kannon Buddhist temple and after dinner fall into bed, exhausted.
DAY 3- We drive to Mt. Fuji and the clouds part just long enough to see this beautiful, very symmetrical peak, which, as usual, is snow-capped. We drive up to the 5th station near the summit for viewing and then drive to Hakone for lunch and a tour of the national park there, including a boat ride on Lake Ashi. Some things we notice on the drive to Fuji: enormous net cages everywhere for golf driving ranges (they are crazy about golf here, and we wonder why more Japanese don’t win in the pro circuit). We notice lots of “love hotels” along the highways with bizarre names like “Creative Seeds.” Couples rent rooms in these hotels by the hour for trysts, as do prostitutes. We also notice endless numbers of kareoke clubs called “Big Echo” (a nationwide chain) and baseball diamonds everywhere with Japanese boys running about in smart uniforms.
DAY 4- We travel by bullet train to Echigo, where we change trains for Kanazawa. The sleek “Shinkansen” bullet trains hit 300 km per hour and roar into stations for only 2 to 3 minutes, during which time passengers disembark and others embark. When time is running out during rush hour, professional “pushers” wearing white gloves give a heave-ho against the crowd to wedge everyone inside. Aussie guide Scott Smiles discovers the importance of moving quickly when he is trapped inside a bullet train in Hiroshima and finds himself headed for Nagasaki a day ahead of the rest of the group. The bullet trains are staffed with impeccably dressed hostesses and when they and the conductors enter or leave a coach they always turn and bow politely to the passengers. That’s Japan: everyone is polite to the max, except when they are in queues. Then they push and shove with sharp elbows until they get ahead. I reckon that’s because this is a small country crowded with lots of people and they have to push hard in crowds to survive. We arrive in Kanazawa and visit the beautiful Kenroku-en garden. For me, gardens usually bring on symptoms of some narcolepsy-like disorder, but these gardens really are beautiful and meticulously laid out with tiny bonsai trees and row upon row of cherry trees. We visit the famous samurai street where descendants of Japan’s ancient warrior class lived in the original samurai houses.
DAY 5- Koji-san starts the day by explaining how Japanese businessmen exchange cards. They each read the card given and, after deciding his relative importance to the other, makes either a deep, 45-degree bow or a slight head nod. Koji also explains how entire conversations consist of nothing more than “Hai!,” which is Japanese for “yes.” People often say “yes” when they really mean “no,” Koji explains. That’s the Japanese way. They are just being polite. Example: “Can I have a pay raise, please?” Answer: “Yes, you cannot have a pay raise.” Koji adds that “This is like your song, “Yes, we have no bananas.” He’s priceless. We drive to Shirakawa-go, a mountain village with scores of large, very old thatched houses, and then onto the Japanese Alps city of Takayma, where we see the end of the annual Spring festival, do some shopping and then plunge into the “Onsen” hot springs baths at our resort. The baths are segregated by sex, and we men are startled to see a cleaning lady march right in and start collecting towels. But then we decide most of us are over 70 and our bodies wouldn’t interest her. We gorge ourselves on a dinner of Hida beef—all you can eat—and they keep bringing it on. At home, Hida beef costs a fortune.
DAY 6- Koji is teaching us Japanese words: Ohayo (good morning), kon nichiwa (good afternoon), arogoto (thank-you), o-kina (thank you in the Kyoto dialect). He makes us sing a song with the words to learn them faster, and we get a new word every day. After lunch we board our first-class train coaches and travel to Nagoya, where we change to a bullet train and travel high speed to Kyoto. The other group’s guide, Kyoko-san, is from Kyoto, which in 750 B.C. was called Nijo and was Japan’s capital. With her knowledge about the city’s restaurants, Kyoko picks a great place for dinner each night of our stay there.
DAY 7- We tour Kyoto, starting with the Nijo castle, built by a shogun feudal lord (a generalissimo) with special floors that chirp like nightingales when walked upon, thereby alerting the owner to the presence of ninja assassins. We also visit the gold-plated Kinkakuji temple and the old Imperial Palace. Building dates are relative, aren’t they? At home we call a 150-year-old house “old,” but here we walk right past buildings dated back to 610 A.D. without as much as a glance.
DAY 8- We have an excursion to Nara, another ancient capital of Nippon 1,300 years ago. We visit the Todaiji temple, known as the world’s largest wooden structure, which contains a golden Buddha, and the Kasuga Shinto shrine, with its 3,000 stone lanterns. Koji is a Shinto, as are most Japanese, but he explains most people dabble in Buddhism also to hedge their bets. Shintoism is more free-wheeling and worships nature and ancestry, while Buddhism is stricter in its doctrine. “We are Buddhists by day and at night we drink Saki and go to kareoke like Shintos,” says Koji-san. We return to Kyoto and on the way Koji reminisces about being a teenager during the U.S. occupation of Japan and how happy he was when Gen. Douglas McArthur decreed that the emperor was no longer a divine leader. Koji says that because of McArthur’s order he no longer had to memorize the names of all of the emperors and their children, and teachers started urging boys to learn baseball instead because it was considered to be democratic. “I liked this democracy very much,” Koji says with his usual deadpan face. We visit the famous Gion Corner to see a show of traditional dances and Japanese music. We also walk around the Geisha district, as Koji explains that Geisha girls originally were intellectual companions to important Japanese men, but that the line between that and modern-day party girls, or bar girls, sometimes is blurred. In any case, it is raining this night, and the Geisha girls are off the street.
DAY 9- We take the bullet train, at 300 kph, to Hiroshima, where an estimated 300,000 people died on the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, as a result of the first of two A-bomb explosions in Japan. The city of mostly timber structures was instantly wiped out, leaving the steel shell of one domed structure, whose remains we visit. Koji tells us, with sadness in his normally happy face, that horribly burned victims jumped into the rivers to escape the heat, unaware the water was boiling at 5,000 degrees. The museum is haunting with its images of the victims, and it’s hard not to be shaken by the magnitude of this disaster. We see thousands of little paper cranes on display in Peace Park to commemorate a little girl, Sadako Sasaki, who, stricken with radiation, vowed to make paper cranes every day until a cure for her leukemia was found. Her brief life ended before a cure was found, and so Hiroshima’s children continued the project. We are greatly moved by the stone steps of a bank building onto which the image of a man who was incinerated by the blast had been etched. But we are also touched by Japanese schoolchildren who randomly stopped western tourists and handed them handwritten messages of prayers for peace in the world. That night we have a splendid dinner of okonomiyaki pancakes filled with cabbage, squid, prawns and other delights, and then a half dozen of us, including John, Kym, Marcel and his partner, Sonja, head for the “Big Echo” kareoke club, where we rent a sound studio and howl the night away to songs made famous by the Beatles, Aba, Cat Stevens, John Denver and the like. Some of had laryngitis the next day, but we had fun.
DAY 10- We board yet another bullet train for Nagasaki, making stops at famous Japanese ceramics centres, where the wives have a shopping frenzy and the men are stricken yet again my the mysterious outbreak of narcolepsy. The tour doctor, Marcel, has no explanation for the outbreak. We notice as we leave Hiroshima that the hotel’s manager, assistant manager and senior staff line up to wave our two buses goodbye. This happens everywhere we stay, and I try to imagine this happening in Australia or the U.S. We overnight in Nagasaki.
DAY 11- We tour Nagasaki, which was A-bombed 3 days after Hiroshima. Because of anti-aircraft fire from the Mitsubishi shipyards, the B-52 bomber dropped the bomb on a less-populated suburb and only 70,000 people died. But the statues in Nagasaki’s Peace Park are evocative nonetheless. The city is a bit on edge because just a couple of days ago Nagasaki’s mayor was assassinated by gunmen from the Yakuza, or criminal gangs, for reasons that are unclear. Koji-san tells us about this mafia-like mob, but he is always careful to spell it out letter by letter rather than say the name. I think he believes it’s dangerous to mention the word in public, or maybe he’s just having us on again. We visit the 400-year-old Sofukuji Temple, and also the Glover Mansion, the first western structure built in Japan after the start of the “new dawn” of western industrialism ended centuries of isolationism and xenophobia in Japan. Thomas Blake Glover, a Scottish merchant, built the sprawling compound of houses on a hillside after marrying his Japanese wife, Tsur, on whom the American author, John Luther Long, modeled “Madam Butterfly” in his novel. In Giacomo Puccini’s opera treatment of the story, in which Madam Butterfly awaits the return of her lover, U.S. Navy Capt. Pinkerton, the heroine’s role was famously played by Japanese singer Tamaki Miura.
Day 12- We drive to Kumamoto via Unzen, visiting the steaming “Big Hell” volcanoes in Shimabara, and then take a ferry across Ariake Bay to Kumamoto. Dinner tonight features another all-you-can-drink Saki deal, and things get a bit silly at our table.
DAY 13- We leave Kumamoto for a day trip and our bullet train speeds us to Kagoshima, where we visit the famous Iso garden with its pretty bonsai trees and summer house erected by Nariakira Shimadzo, who built Japan’s first factory in 1854, making cannons and heavy machinery after 17 young men were smuggled out of the country to learn western technology in the United Kingdom. We return by train to Kumamoto.
DAY 14- We tour Kumamoto and its enormous Kumamoto (shogun’s) Castle, built by Kato Kiyomasa, a feudal lord of unusual stature (6’ 3”) for a Japanese man. We walk up six flights of stairs for a spectacular view of the city from this castle, which was built in 1588 and is where the ninja assassins originated. It is one of 17 shogun castles built before the feudal domain system was abolished in 1871 and replaced with a modern governmental system. We then visit the beautiful Suizenji Park, and later drive to Mt. Aso, which Koji tells us in Shinto mythology is where the great-grandson of the Goddess of the Sun came down from heaven, married and started the succession of emperors that led to the late wartime emperor, Hirohito, and his son, Akihito, who is currently emperor of Japan. Mt. Aso is the world’s largest active caldera, and at the rim, which we reach by cable car, thick clouds of smelly gases rise up before us. We return to Kumamoto for our farewell dinner in the hotel’s banquet room.
DAY 15- We drive two hours by bus from Kumamoto to Fukuoka Airport, which Koji-san explains was the base of the World War II Kamikazes, or “Divine Wind,” pilots who flew suicide missions against Allied warships in the waning days of the war. Koji explained that in 1271 and again in 1284 Mongol armies sailed against Japan but both times were wiped out by typhoons, which the then-emperor called “Divine Winds.” As Japan braced for an Allied invasion in 1945, “that crazy man,” as Koji called prime minister Hideiki Tojo, promised the people that another divine wind would yet again save the country. Young pilots then stepped forward for suicide missions and called themselves “Kamikazes.” We fly from Fukuoka to Tokyo and board our JAL flight for Sydney, hoping that the two guys up on the flight deck aren’t into the Divine Wind thing.
DAY 16- We arrive home in Melbourne, exhausted but with Koji-san’s oft-repeated words ringing in our ears: “I will show you everything in Japan, everything!” Well, we may not have literally seen everything, but we saw a hell of a lot and we also learned a lot from this delightful man, Koji-san, our new friend. Japan is a fascinating, confusing, frustrating, exciting, warm, friendly and wonderful country, and we’ll think of it often as we continue exploring this great big world of ours.
Sayonara!
