Darren Holloway

Photos from my November 2009 trip to Japan to photograph the fall colours are now up on Flickr.

I am too lazy to make 110 individual links.

I’m in Nara right now, despite the amazing fact that I somehow missed my train stop when it was the last stop on the line. Yes, when the train starts going the other way, you know you’re doing something wrong.

I woke up this morning at the photographer-friendly time of 5:30 a.m. and walked over to Nara Park. It’s huge. And full of really tame deer.

Deer and Japanese Schoolgirl in Nara Park.

Being there so early in the morning gave me a chance to catch the good morning light, and catch the monks in the act of… well, whatever the heck he was doing.

Sunrise at a temple in Nara, where a monk is throwing water around.

Around 4:00 p.m. I was getting pretty sore and tired – I’m not used to spending 8+ hours on my feet, so I spent the rest of the day studying Japanese.

There’s nothing like climbing a mountain to teach you how out of shape you are.

Yesterday, I went to Mount Takao, which involved taking the subway 14 stops to Shibuya station, realizing that I meant to go to Shinjuku station instead, three stops on the JR line to Shinjuku, then taking the commuter railway for 50 minutes to Takaosanguchi. Then, a simple 4 km walk up 600 metres of vertical to the temple at the top of the mountain.

Oddly, there were a few maple trees at the station that were in glorious fall colours, but higher up on the mountain, most of the trees had yet to start turning.

About 3/4 of the way up, there was a reasonably good view of part of Tokyo, which stretches as far as the eye can see, yet it’s still beyond comprehension that 35 million people live here.

Tokyo from Mt. Takao

Since the days are short, I took a ski-lift chair down from about 2/3 of the way up the mountain. It was very Japanese; you stand on a conveyor belt and the chair sneaks up on you; at the end, you step off onto another conveyor belt. The whole way down, it was either 3 metres off the ground, or three metres above a raised platform with net so you wouldn’t hurt yourself (much) if you fell, yet there was no bar to keep you in the chair.

It’s just started drizzling here in Tokyo; today I head off for Nara, where it’s cloudy and expected to be sunny tomorrow.

Here in Tokyo, it is (a) cool and (b) raining. It started getting dark around 4:00.

But at least I found my first maple tree in Koishikawa Koraku Park…

I’ve got all the bookings done for my second trip to Japan; I went in the spring to photography Cherry Blossoms, now I’m going back to photograph Fall Colours.

This is my Itenerary:

And here it is on a map, along with my trip earlier this year.

Things/Places to see/go:

Tokyo

Takao san Mount Takao, Temple, Hiking, Foliage.
8:00 am to 5:00 pm. Keio Railways offer the cheapest and fastest connections to Takaosan. Direct semi-limited express trains, which take about 50 minutes and 370 yen, leave the underground Keio Shinjuku station every 20 minutes. Takaosanguchi Station, the train’s terminal station, is located at the foot of the mountain.The JR alternative is by Chuo Line from Shinjuku to Takao Station (540 yen, about 50 minutes), where you transfer to the Keio Line and ride one more station to Takaosanguchi Station (120 yen, 2 minutes).

Rikugi-en Gardens
9 a.m. to 5 p.m. It is a short walk from Komagome Station on the JR Yamanote line and the Tokyo Metro Namboku Line.

Koishikawa Koen Gardens with good fall colours.
9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Koishikawa Korakuen is a 5-10 minute walk from Iidabashi Station (various JR and subway lines) or a 10 minute walk from Korakuen Station on the Marunouchi and Nanboku Subway Line.

Kyoto:

Tofuku-ji Said to be the best place for fall in Kyoto.
9:00 to 4:00. Tofukuji is a 10-15 minute walk from Tofukuji Station on the Keihan Main Line and JR Nara Line. By JR, Tofukuji Station it is just one station from Kyoto Station (2 minutes, 140 Yen by local train).

Fushimi Inari-taisha The ten thousand tori.
24 hours! The shrine is a three-minute walk from JR Nara Line Inari Station, 10 minutes from Kyoto Station. It is a five-minute walk from Keihan Electric RailwayMain Line Fushimi-Inari station.

Kiyomizudera Temple The “balcony” temple.
Hours 6:00 am to 6:00 pm. Kiyomizudera can be reached from Kyoto Station in about 15 minutes by bus. Take bus number 100 or 206 and get off at Kiyomizu-michi or Gojo-zaka, from where it is a 10-15 minute uphill walk to the temple.

Eikando Temple The “Maple Leaf” Temple. Lit up at night!
Evening hours are 5:30 to 9:00. Due north of Nanzenji Temple. From Kyoto Station, take city bus #5, and get off at “Nanzen-ji Eikando-michi.”

Gots to Sleeps Some!

MTWR 16-19 Jimbocho Sakura Hotel, Tokyo.
2-21-4 Kanda-Jimbocho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 101-0051
Jimbocho Station, exit A6 (Been there before; don’t need directions ;) )

RFSU 19-22 Nara Ugaya, Nara
4-1 Okukomoricho, Nara City, Japan
From JR Nara station (5min): After coming out the station, go past a Lawson (a convenience store you can see on your right) and cross the street. Keep walking straight and you will find UGAYA guest house on your right just before the end of the street.

UMTWRF 22-27 Guest House Yahata, Kyoto
544 Yahata-cho, Gojo-agaru, Nishinotoin, Shimogyo-ku, Kyoto-shi 600-8455
Take Kyoto city bus and alight at Gojo Nishinotoin．1 minute walk from any bus stops on Gojo Nishinotoin.

FS 27-28 Jimbocho Sakura Hotel, Tokyo

Logistics

Narita -> 東京 Tokyo 1000 円
1. Take the Keisei express train.
2. At Oshiage station, change to the Hanzomon subway line.
3. Get off at Jinbocho Station Z07.

東京 -> 奈良 Nara 14050 円
1. Tokyo Station
2. JR Nara Station

奈良 -> 京都 Kyoto 610 円
1. JR Nara Station
2. Kyoto Station

京都 -> 東京 13520 円
Should be obvious ;)

At the end of November, I’m heading back to Japan for two weeks to photograph the fall foliage.

Links:

• Google Maps-like Fall Foliage Meter.
• General Fall Forecast

One question everyone is asking me since I got back from Japan is “How well did you do with your two semesters of Japanese? Were you able to get by?”

The answer is yes and no… I have the vocabulary of your average three-year-old child, and grammatical structures to match. In English, I would be able to say “I would like to buy a ticket on the Shinkansen to Toyko,” in Japanese I could get the point across with “ときょに　しんかんせんで　いきます　おねがいします”, which literally means “To Toyko using Shinkansen Go Please.”

In fact, “___ please” turned out to be quite a useful little phrase. Ordering in restaurants became a matter of looking around, seeing someone eating something that looked good, and saying “that please.” Of course, it didn’t always work out – Theoretically, if nobody was eating anything that I wanted to eat, I would have to leave, hang around outside for 10 minutes, then go back in and try again.

Another thing I wasn’t prepared for was all the kanji. You see, Japanese is written in a combination of two alphabets and thousands of Chinese characters called kanji. And my courses don’t teach any kanji.

Because of this, you find yourself left in situations such as arriving at the train station and wondering when the next train to your destination is leaving…

Then you have to find the station on a map and figure out how much the ticket will cost…

And, of course, once you figure it out and buy a ticket, you have to try and discover (a) which track the train is departing from, (b) which car you should be in (because sometimes the trains end up splitting and going in two directions), and (c) which seat you have to sit in.

By the way, awesome bokeh in the background on that picture!

Sometimes it didn’t matter that I couldn’t read kanji, because the meaning was completely obvious:

And other times, my lack of kanji-ability didn’t matter, because I doubt it would have helped me figure out what some things were:

The English on the box says “Flash Over: Here is the thing I have been longing for. Transformation of extra quality is now completed. Experience yourself with this satisfaction.” Given that this was on a shelf near the boob cream, my theory is that it’s either a herbal anti-depressant or a vibrator.

I had brought my Japanese textbook with me, and I decided to go back to the beginning and start looking up all the Kanji for words that I didn’t know. Of course, studying isn’t exactly barrels of fun while you’re on vacation, so I decided to force myself to learn – I decided I would only order things in restaurants if I could read the name of it (with the help of a dictionary, of course) off the menu. Of course, I was buying most of my meals at convenience or grocery stores – this was to save money, not an unintended consequence of not ordering food I couldn’t read. (yeah right, says the peanut gallery.)

I had some success and some failures. For example, I decided to have coffee and cake in Shibuya, and managed to figure out how to say the name of the one at the bottom right of this picture:

Of course, when the waitress came and asked for my order, I opened the menu and immediately mental-blocked on whether the ショート　at the end was pronounced “shouto” or “tsuuto”, so I just said the first part. Which, of course, is the name of the dessert at the top of the menu. Incidently, it’s “shouto” for “shortcake.”

I also discovered that riding the train or bus became a free game of kanji-flash-cards, as they both would display on a screen the same of the next stop in both kanji and english. Sometimes I had no clue – Sometimes I had almost one part. And this was my great triumph; three weeks in, I successfully read the name of this bus stop.

Obviously, I’m easy to please – “His great transformation occurred when he read the name of the bus stop.” If my life was a novel and that was the back-cover copy, I don’t think I’d buy it.

Tonight, I had nowhere to stay. I couldn’t extend my stay at the hostel in Kyoto because they were full, and I couldn’t show up in Kanazawa a day early because they don’t have a room for me tonight. After much deliberation, I decided to just take an easy day, then spend the night in a manga cafe.

I took the bus from the hostel to the JR train station and put my bags into lockers (600 yen, about $6) and took only my Japanese textbook, dictionary, notebook, pens, and my camera with the 50mm/1.8 lens with me.

I spent most of the day hopping around between different coffee shops; studying for a few hours, then moving to try a different chain. Got a lot of studying done!

At 10:00 pm, I headed over to the Manga cafe, and between my basic Japanese and their broken English, managed to get everything arranged.

So here’s what I get for 2750 yen, or about $27 (350 yen membership + 2400 for 12 hours):

I get all the bizzare Japanese soft drinks and soft ice cream I can handle. I’m drinking a pepsi float I made right now – tastes pretty good, but could use some rum. Perhaps I’ll run down to the convenience store and pick up a $3 mickey of Captain Morgan’s rum; yes, booze is incredibly cheap here.

More Manga (japanese comic books) than I could read in a dozen lifetimes, especially since my rate is about 15 minutes a page, what with having to look up all the kanji. Note this is just one of the rows of bookshelves.

An eerie walk down the row of dimly lit cubicles with zen sand sculptures under the transparent floor and “relaxation” music quietly playing.

In my cubicle, I have a PC, a Playstation 2, a 24″ television (not shown) and a small safe for my valuables that I managed to lock without setting the combination – Did I mention about having to look up lots of kanji?

I also have a sofa that’s long enough to lie down on, but not quite long enough to fully stretch out. Still, it’s far better than airplane seating.

Not shown – washrooms, showers, beer vending machine, row of slot machines, &c.

Now, granted, there’s other people moving around, making noise, &c, but that was true at the hostel. I just wish I’d thought to bring my earplugs with me for tonight…

I should have come to Kyoto first, rather than going to Tokyo first. Here in Kyoto, you can’t swing a dead panda without hitting three temples and two shrines, yet I’m beginning to show the dreaded signs of shrine-and-temple burnout.

Every day that I’ve been here, I’ve come up with a plan, and then ended up discarding it because I’ve become lost. I think I can safely say that Kyoto’s subway system is the worst one I’ve ever experienced.

To wit: There are different subway companies here, as seems to be normal in Japan. However, unlike Tokyo, they don’t share stations – they built stations a few blocks away from each other. And in many cases, they give the stations the same names. So, you think “I have to walk a few blocks to transfer to the Maratumatchi station,” but you walk in the wrong direction and find the other Maratumatchi station, then try to figure out where the heck you’re going.

Plus, add the fact that the closest station to the hostel had its name changed recently, and it doesn’t show up on most metro maps under either name, and you may judge my agony.

On the positive side, or negative, depending on your point of view, as of today I had to unfold the duffel bag that I brought to pack with stuff to bring home. I’ve been resisting buying anything that I couldn’t cart around in my backpack, but I finally found a few things that I’ve been searching for almost since I arrived, and I didn’t want to take the chance that I won’t find them again.

As of tomorrow, I have one week left… and as is becoming traditional, two photos…

Darren with cute girls, this time in kimonos.

Sakura and Building detail

From Okayama, I made my way to Osaka, with a six-hour stop in Himeji to visit the castle and take pictures. I don’t have any to upload right now, as they’re all in the hands of the Japanese postal service right now.

Overall, I have to say that Osaka has very little to recommend it, other than the really cool ryokan that I stayed in. When I arrived and was shown to my room, there was a teaport, a container of tea, a thermos of hot water, and some Japanese sweets sitting on the table.

Oh, and they have just as much neon as Tokyo, but at least they do interesting things with it. This was taken about 3 blocks from my Ryokan, which took me from the “wall to wall girlie club zone” I was in to the “overpriced European brand name shopping zone.” They’re beside a bridge over a river, or at least they are now – it appears they’re trying to pave over the river or something.

Neon signs in Osaka, Japan

I left Osaka this morning, and headed to Yoshino, which is another Japanese World Heritage site, which means temples galore. I even got to see a procession of monks on their way to chanting time.

I saw lots of pretty things in Yoshino…

Darren with Cute Girls in Yoshino, Japan

And there were lots of Sakura as well – not as many as in Tsuyama, but still plenty.

Sakura Blossoms in Yoshino, Japan

I’m in Kyoto right now – My lack of advance planning has me staying tonight in a $200/night hotel, and tomorrow moving to the $25/night hostel.

On the train from Yoshino to Kyoto, there were a pair of girls sitting across from me who kept looking at me, then glancing away when I caught their eye. In good fun, I pulled out my notepad and pen and wrote 何を見ますか :), which means, or was meant to mean, “What are you looking at?” I then looked out the window, waited about 30 seconds, then flipped over the notepad so they could see it and looked back to see them collapse into a frenzy of giggles.

Once they had recovered, one of them pulled out a notepad and wrote Where are you from? in English. I replied (via my notepad) in Japanese, and for the next 20 minutes or so, we had a conversation in each other’s native tongue across the aisle.

Anyways, now I’m in Kyoto, and my first impression is “wow, there are a lot of white people here!” I’ve gotten used to seeing two or three other white people a day, and all of a sudden, there’s packs of five to ten of them.

I’m planning to spend a couple of days here in Kyoto, then off to Kanazawa, then back to Toyko. I only have 10 days left of my vacation! Auuugh!

There were two day-trips I wanted to make from Okayama: Takamatsu, and Tsuyama. Takamatsu has one of the “top three” gardens in Japan, and Tsuyama is regarded as “the best place to view cherry blossoms in this part of Japan.

Given the blooming is still happening, I figured I’d go for the garden yesterday, and give the blossoms another day to open before going on to Tsuyama.

In hindsight, bad decision. Why? Yesterday was a nice day. Today it rained all day. And Tsuyama’s Kakuzan Park was all that it was cracked up to be and more – absolutely beautiful, and would have been more so if there had been some sun.

Tomorrow morning I’m off to Osaka, with a brief stop in Himiji, then on to Kyoto. Schedule changed due to lack of foresight. ;)

The funniest thing happened to me today…

I was in Ritsuin Park in Takamatsu, and a little Japanese girl, probably about six years old, ran up to me and just stared. I mean the whole, mouth-open, utter amazement stare. I said “Konnichiwa” (hello) to her and she just kept staring.

I think I must have been the first white person she’s ever seen…

So where have I been?

I spent three days up in Nikko, a little temple-town in the mountains north of Tokyo – it snowed on me. I could have gone to Canada and been snowed upon. Then again, Canada doesn’t have the “see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil” monkeys – They’re in Nikko. And, of course, I saw them and forgot to take a picture.

After Nikko, I went back to Tokyo for a few days, then headed off to Okayama, which is where I am now. Today I day-tripped to Takamatsu, and tomorrow I’m going to Tsuyama. After that, off to Kyoto.

Whistling at the wind

There’s something to that old saying about not whistling at the wind. For example:

1. In the last entry, I mentioned that I was only backing up my photos to my portable hard drive, because the Internet was too slow to back them up across the Pacific ocean. Whistling at the wind. The hard drive died on me when I got to Nikko, and I lost my first day and a half of photos. My solution now is (a) make two seperate DVD backups, (b) mail one to home, and (c) mail one to work.
3. When I mailed back DVDs, I decided to mail back my rain pants as well, since it hadn’t rained yet, and I needed the space in my bag. Whistled at the wind. Poured on me the next day.

I hate Visa

I seem to have developed a routine:

1. Try to buy something with visa card.
2. Be declined.
3. Call visa – yes, I know buying things in Japan is outside my normal spending pattern. That’s because I’m in Japan!

Toilets

I have now experienced the whole spectrum – the trough in the floor, and the high-tech “heat the seat, wash your butt, and motor down the lid” type. It shouldn’t be too hard to guess which one I prefer.

Time to start burning more DVDs…

Last year, I bought myself a really nice watch; it had the two features I consider essential: a countdown timer to tell me when the laundry is done, and charging by sunlight so I never have to replace the battery.

However, it’s a resonably expensive watch, which I didn’t feel went with my style of budget travel (ignore the $8000 of camera gear I’m carrying, of course)

Long story short, I bought a cheap $20 watch for the trip.
When I arrived in japan I spun the hands foreward 14 hours to make up the difference from crossing the international date line.

And tonight, when I arrived at the hostel, they told me I had already checked out. “ummm, I’m leaving on the 25th for Nikko.”

“it is the 25th.”

Turns out spinning the hands doesn’t change the date – you have to pull the stem out to a different position to change the date.

Fortunately, they still had a bed available for me. I emailed the hostel in Nikko and told them to charge me for tonight (aka for my stupidity) and asked if I could still show up tomorrow.

It’s raining here in Tokyo today, so I figured this would be a good day to find an Internet cafe, download my photos, and just rest a bit.

Getting around
The Tokyo subway system is incredibly good, once you figure out how it works. There’s enough signage in English that you can at least figure out which side of the tracks to board on, but that’s about it.

Once you get off the subway, it’s a whole different story. Apparently, in a city of 12 million people, they never found it useful to give names to their streets. The only streets which have names are main roads, and that’s because the Americans during their post-war occupation basically said “unconditional surrender means do whatever we tell you to. Now name some of your streets so we’re not always getting lost!”

To wit: The first time I tried to go to Akihabara, I ended up walking the opposite direction from the metro station. Given my “keep going, you must almost be there” mentality, which once had me drive half way through Vermont while looking for a park in New Hampshire, I just kept going and going, until eventually I gave up, found a subway station, went back to my starting point, and had to walk the other way.

Things which are cool

Japanese cell phones. Holy crap. So cool! Unfortunately, because Japan uses bizarre variations of wireless standards (they’re like the Microsoft of RF standards, apparently none of them will work in North America. Dang, I’d be willing to give up my iPhone for one of these cool phones.

Things which are hot

Besides Japanese women?

I’d heard about the Japanese vending machines, which are on every street corner and provide drinks, occasionally food, beer, cigarettes, and apparently, in the right part of town, bras and panties. But nothing had prepared me for the first time I put in my 120 yen, pressed the button for a can of coffee, and near burnt my hand on the can.

Hot coffee. In a can.

I’m on a quest now, to find which brand I like the best.

Things which are not fast enough

The Internet link back to North America. I brought a portable hard drive with me to download my photos from my digital camera, and I figured I’d also upload copies to my web server so that I would have two copies for safety. This didn’t quite work out, since one photo took over 7 minutes to upload. Granted, my camera is 22 megapixel, but still…

Things that hurt

My feet. Before I left, I had minor surgery to remove some ingrown toenails, thinking it would be better to deal with a few days of strange walking before than having my nails poking into my feet for a month. And it was the right decision – I haven’t had any problems with my toenails. Now, blisters, that’s another story. It has become quite obvious that sitting at a desk for 10-14 hours per day is not appropriate preperation for walking around for 12 hours a day.

Silver linings

Because my feet hurt and my legs were sore last night, I really just wanted to soak in a bath for a while. Unfortuately, the hostel only has showers. The silver lining is that it made me go out to a sentou, which is a public bath house. Now, in North America, “bath house” generally means “gay pickup joint,” which it fortunately does not here; here it’s more like a spa or a hot tub.

According to one of the guidebooks, until the mid-late 20th century, Japanese houses didn’t have baths, so every few blocks would be a sentou, where the locals would go to bathe. Nowadays, there are far less sentou around, but there’s still more than a thousand here in Tokyo.

The guidebook said that if it was your first time at a sento, you should watch the locals and do what they do. Of course, as an uptight North American, watching a bunch of naked men is not the easiest thing in the world to do. Yes, not “clothing optional” – since when does anyone wear clothes to the bath? That is, other than frugal travelers like myself, who will occasionally shower in their clothes, because it saves time over washing clothes and body seperately.

Anyways, you sit on a stool, clean yourself up completely, then go into the bath. And “hot tub” is quite an appropriate term – the thermometer read 43 degrees celcius, which is 109 degrees in fahrenheit. Hot hot hot. I only lasted a few minutes. But damn, did I feel good afterwards.

So where am I?

Right now, I’m in a Manga Cafe, which is a place where you pay an hourly fee to sit around, read manga (Japanese comics), use the Internet, or sleep. As I look around, I see four people sleeping. But, at 400 yen (about $4) an hour, it’s a pretty cheap place to spend the night if you have to.

Sakura update

Oh yeah, the whole point of this trip: photographing cherry trees in bloom. I’ve seen a few early bloomers, but the blossoms are basically in the very early stages of blooming now, which is perfect – I timed it right, more or less.

Pictures?

No raw converter. No photoshop. Ergo, no photos ready to post yet.

Where next?

Tomorrow I leave for a few days in Nikko, about two hours north of Tokyo. Apparently a combination of national park, dozens of shrines, and rich tourists. I will not be one of the latter.

With exactly two weeks to go until I leave, I’m starting to actually do some planning ;)

I just got home from REI, buying some super-fabric travel clothes that weigh nothing and dry instantly. My goal is to make the whole trip with only one bag. And it looks like I’ll be able to achieve it – I put everything I was taking into the backpack, and it all fit, albeit just barely.

On the plus side, this was a test of packing everything – I’ll pretty much always be wearing some of the clothes I jammed in, unless I decide to become “the naked tourist,” which isn’t too likely.

Here’s my planning map, with embedded Sakura forecast. I still have Sendai marked as “on the itinerary,” but given how far north it is compared to everything else, I think there’s about a 50/50 chance that I’ll give it a pass.

Just some links…
(more…)

The first 2009 Sakura forecast for Japan is out, and auuugh! They’re early this year! And the front is expected to move fast!

Current forecast (first flowering date – full bloom date)

Okayama: March 24-April 1
Himeji: March 24-April 2
Kyoto: March 24-March 31
Tokyo: March 21-29, March 26-April 4 (different parts of the city)

My plan, such as it is, for my Japan trip next month.

Today, there’s a about a month until I leave for my Japan trip.

When I tell people I’m going, they ask “Where are you visiting and for how long”, I reply “I don’t know.” This always seems to lead into confusion.

Going to Japan has been at the back of my mind for about five years, but last year, seeing some photos of the Sakura (Cherry trees) in full bloom made me decide that a good goal for a trip would be to photograph Sakura. So I decided I would fly to Japan in the Spring of 2009, and follow the blossoms.

And therein lies the problem; Trees are extremely bad at keeping to human schedules – they bloom when they blooming well feel like it.

Fortunately, Cherry Blossom season is a big thing in Japan; so much so, that the country’s meteorological agency publishes forecasts of when the flowers will be blooming in different regions of Japan. As of today (16 Feb/09), they still don’t have the 2009 forecasts posted. According to my web-research, the first one is generally published between mid-February (now) and the beginning of March.

Add onto this that I’m really bad at sticking to dates when traveling. If I find somewhere I really like, I like the freedom to stay a few extra days. If I pass an interesting-looking place on the train, I like the freedom to back-track and just add it to my itinerary.

However, I do have a preliminary list of places I think I want to go… Some may get pruned, some may get added, but this is my “basic plan” at this point:

1. Okayama
2. Himeji
3. Kyoto
4. Kanazawa
5. Matsushima
6. Kinkasan
7. Tokyo