Land of the Rising Sun

I'm a little late in writing about it, but I spent the first ten days of the month traveling around Japan:

It's a bit weird that it took me so long to get around to visiting Japan, but I have to say it was never high on my destination list.  Crazy, I know, but here's why:

1) Japanese Tourists. I hate traveling to places where there are hordes of Japanese tourists, snapping photos of everything while they grin and make the "peace" symbol. Two years ago I visited Auschwitz and I was practically in a homicidal rage following around a pack of Japanese tourists who gleefully took photos of themselves (and the ubiquitous peace symbol) in front of everything.  All while talking (and giggling) loudly on their cell phones. Anyway, I just figured that if Japanese tourists were so irritating, I wouldn't want to be surrounded by a country full of, well, Japanese people.

What do all major tourist destinations have in common? Japanese tourists and their cameras.

Seriously, just google images of "Japanese tourists", it's so worth it

Scooby (or Godzilla, as I'm
sure the locals thought of him)

2) The first year I lived in Los Angeles I lived in the part of LA dubbed "Little Tokyo". It was a cute part of town that had a ton of sushi restaurants and where the street signs were primarily in Japanese rather than English. The cuteness wore off pretty quickly as I was kept up late at night by the favorite pastime in the local bars - karaoke (or, as I like to pronounce after living there, "karra-oh-kay") and the smell of tempura-fried food. My fondest memories of Little Tokyo were walking my 90 pound wolf dog while the tiny locals ran in fear - I dubbed them my Godzilla moments.

Yeah, kinda like that.

3) I figured I'd hate Tokyo. I just assumed Tokyo would be crowded and hectic with lots of neon signs and anime kids and annoying girls trying to pull off the Lolita look. And while saying I don't want to go to Japan because I'd hate Tokyo is like someone saying they don't want to visit the US because they'd hate LA, it still felt like a relevant reason to not want to go.

4) Japanese culture is very "other". In college I minored in anthropology and loved studying other cultures (part of why I love to travel and see different cultures firsthand). In one of my classes we did a segment on Japanese culture and, of all the cultures I studied, Japanese culture was the hardest one for us to understand and accept. According to that long-ago class, it was still socially acceptable to commit suicide if one shamed their family - and "shame" could be as simple as getting a bad grade in class or losing a job. I suspect the recent recession has lessened that somewhat, but that mentality still felt so foreign to me. I also learned more about Japanese culture while studying World War II - one of the reasons the American military felt that the nuclear bombs were so critical is because the Japanese did not believe in surrender (see Part 2 of this post for more on that).

All of that being said, I did really want to learn more about Shinto (the Japanese national religion) and to see rural Japan. I figured the temples and shrines in the mountains must be gorgeous and well worth whatever frustrations might be caused by Tokyo. Plus, I couldn't think of anywhere else I really wanted to go for the first two weeks of September.

The first main stop of the trip was Koyasan, which is the center of Buddhism in Japan. Shingon Esoteric Buddhism, to be exact. Koyasan is on Mount Koya, so to get there from Osaka we took a bullet train and then a cable car up the mountain. Koyasan is a quaint little town filled with monasteries and temples and loads of monks. We stayed at the Ekoin monastery, where we slept on the floor, ate vegetarian food on the floor (lots of mushy soy products) and learned a little bit about Shingon Esoteric Buddhism. Shingon Esoteric Buddhism involves a lot of meditation and chanting and practitioners believe that the founder of this sect of Buddhism is still meditating in a temple in Koyasan.

The first afternoon in Koyasan, after viewing what felt like endless temples, we attended a meditation class with the monks. Gotta say, meditation isn't really my thing since I spent the whole thirty minutes thinking of how much my legs/hips/ass hurt from sitting cross-legged on the floor. And then dinner was also on the floor...

Our vegetarian dinner at the monastery. My hips and legs hurt just remembering having to eat on the floor.

Our vegetarian dinner. I ate a little of everything, though we were all hungry again about an hour later.



After dinner one of the monks took us on a tour of the local cemetery, which was enormous and included both Shinto and Buddhist elements. What is interesting is that most people in Japan are both Shinto and Buddhist, since both are polytheistic religions and pretty accepting of other paths to enlightenment/heaven. My favorite part of the cemetery was the monk explaining some of the grave markings - for example, many had a depiction of the moon in one of its phases. The idea is that, like the moon, humans also have different phases. Some days we're happy, some days we're sad and so on, and it's important to remember that we will wax and wane just like the moon.

 

The following morning I woke up at the crack of dawn to view the monks' morning ritual and fire ritual. Because none of the monks spoke English, I actually have no idea what the rituals were for (though I'm assuming the fire ritual was for cleansing and purification). All in all, I wish I'd gotten to spend a little more time learning about Shingon Esoteric Buddhism. I had so many questions for the monk (How young were you when you became a monk? Was it your choice or your parents' choice? How did you learn English?), but there were just too many people around for me to hog his attention.

 

Apart from the weird food and interesting accommodations, we also got to try a traditional Japanese onsen, or bath. (Remind me to tell you guys later about my experiences in public bath houses.) Ekoin was helpful enough to provide us some directions on how to use the onsen, since it's a bit overwhelming for us prudish Westerners.

I sort of thought that the people sitting on the tiny stools was an exaggeration. Oh no, you definitely squat on tiny stools in front of mirrors. Awkward!

The onsen in our monastery. You bathe while squatting on the tiny stools to the right in front of the mirrors and then get in the massive shared tub to the left.

While awkwardly trying to figure out what to do and how to bathe myself while seated and in a crowded room of women, I was lucky enough to sit next to a brazen Aussie woman. When I looked befuddled, she turned to me and said, "Don't forget to wash your bum!

Well, this turned into an epically long post, so stay tuned for Part 2!