23 - INTRINSIC TO JAPAN

If you ever visit Japan, be prepared with lots of yen.   Some shops just refuse to accept any other currency, not even dollars, and exchange machines are not always at hand.  The Japanese currency has coins upto 500.  Their coins are in the denomination of 1, 2, 5, 10, 50, 100 and 500yen and for them,  it is just small change.  Keeping this in mind, it was yet a shock for me to read the price tags of fruits.  One pineapple was 1500yen and 4 bananas were for 500yen.

Another odd observation was that, at almost every kerb, there was a game parlour, with loud music blaring every time the door swung to let a client enter or exit.  Bright lights and with a full crowd inside.  So many young adults were patronizing these parlours that it was strange for me to note.  So it  was obvious that the Japanese adults, even middle aged men, enjoy video games, at public places.

Walking along a Tokyo footpath is a very mixed experience.  The sleek world brand shops, and the well heeled crowd made me feel that I was on an alien planet.  So many young boys and girls hold menus and discounted food coupons, trying to coax people to patronize their restaurants.  The pavement itself is an instructional signpost.  Painted on the pavements were messages that designated the areas for the public,  as 'no smoking' zones, 'cyclist friendly', no walking dog zone etc.  Special areas are designated for smokers, and these are labelled on the pavement and on certain closed booths along the metro station.  I recall the first strange sight as we exited the airport on arrival, was of a glass booth that invited smokers to freely enjoy  their cigarettes within its precinct.  So thoughtful towards the non-smoking public, is the Japanese government.

The footpaths are also specially embedded with one inch round metal circles.  These form a path for the visually impaired to follow easily and safely. As the footpath branches out onto a zebra crossing, these circular knobs are replaced by sharper, conical ones.  And they continue along the entire length of the zebra and onto the next pavement.  Even the public phone booths have two separate phones, one at the normal expected height, and another at a lower level, for the wheel chair bound persons.  So thoughtful towards the handicapped is the Japanese government.

The Japanese love their dogs.  They prefer tiny breeds and dress them and then walk with their little dogs in special dog prams.  I saw poodles, all trimmed and bowed, and all the possible tiny, hairy breed like the Pekingese, terriers, the Japanese Chin, the maltese, the lhasa apso..........The dogs were treated almost like their babies,  all dolled up and cute and cuddly and in safe little dog prams.
And the weather is so cool and pleasant, at 16 degrees C,  so most of the dogs are the furry ones that are favoured.

The most wonderful thing was that, I hardly noticed any police personnel, and yet the public place rules were followed impeccably.  I wish this would be replicated in India. 

21 - WASABI AND DREAMS AND FORECASTS............

Japan's tourism revolves around the numerous shrine and temple sites, the rope train ride upto Mt Fuji and the bullet train ride.   And the Hiroshima site, which was not included in our itinery.

We visited the gardens around the palace of  emperor Akihito and empress Michiko.  The fir trees are so strange, they have an  outer space type of a look.   I have not seen such trees even in Switzerland.  All gardens that we visited had a manicured look,  so unnatural.

The shrines and temples are well maintained and aesthetic.   And everything is of wood.  The entire structures, floors walls, roofs, the idols, everything is of wood.   The visit to the Sanjusangendo Hall, with its 1001 wooden statues, was an out-of-this-time-zone experience.  The Shinto Inari shrine with its torii wooden gates that line the entire mountain and the walking path upwards with dark ornage wooden pillars, known as torii gates, forming a shady path, decreasing in size a it went uphill.  All these temples had an entrance ticket and were crowded with tourists and local students, in smart blazers and girls with pleated skirts and keds.  Every temple site that we visted, sold dreams and wishes and forecasts for your personal life.  One hundred yen was the minimum cost, to shake a hexagonal box, pull out a stick from a tiny hole on one side, match the Japanese numeral on it, to a series of drawers that were stacked, open the designated one and take out a paper with a forecast for your future life, written in Japanese and English.   At other temples, you had to drop a 100yen coin into the donation box, then pick up a little one cm bundle, with a little golden charm, then find out what it meant to you, by comparing it to its future forecast list.   And then there were little wooden plaques to buy, to inscribe your wish or dream onto it with an ink pen, and then hang it near the special assigned fence near the sacred spot of the temple.   We saw thousands and thousands of such plaques tied to fences, near every shrine.  Each holy site makes a lot of money by selling dreams and wishes to visitors, and on the entrance ticket too. 

Leading to each shrine, one has to always walk uphill, along narrow streets, lined with tiny shops, selling "Japanese bean biscuits", my description, for the baked delicacies that were being sold at so many places.  A little sweet dough was poured into flat shaped metal toasters, then a sweet bean curd was put in and another layer of the dough, which was cooked over an open gas flame.   Quaint little shops selling very pretty and very expensive Japanese hand fans, hand painted chopsticks, and lots of magnets, key chains and show pieces with 'hello kitty' pictures.  Hot roasted chest nuts were the other snack available.    And green tea ice cream in cones.  Soya seeds, groundnuts baked into some sort of biscuit were also popular snacks.  And none of these were cheap, according to Indian standards.  Each ice cream was 350yen, and chestnuts were 450yen for 250gms.

Being a vegetarian, my travel director, a very accomodating and experienced lady, made sure that I was served veg sushi and a veg bento box meal, at every place that we dined.  So my veg sushi had sticky rice with a slice of green cucumber, rice with a slice of orange pumpkin, rice with a slice of dark orange carrot, rice with a slice of white bamboo shoot, rice with a slice of white raddish, and of course green sea weed and tofu with rice.   All these vegetables replace the different fish that make the original sushi bundles.   But I wanted the green wasabi chutney to liven up the bites, so I applied it generously on all my sushi bites, although my son and the travel director, both warned me that it would be hot and spicy.  I assured them that I loved spicy chutney anyway.  And then that was the first and last time that I shall ever ever eat wasabi.  My mouth was on fire and almost smoking,  and I had to douse my mouth with all the plain sticky rice in my bowl.  It surprised my son to see me use the chopsticks so adeptly to wolf down the rice in a hurry.  But he loves the wasabi Kit kat chocolates.

The Kinkakuji temple, known as the Golden Pavilion is the typical Japanese pagoda that defined my childhood memories of Japanese folklore that I used to read as a child.  This temple is in a lake and surrounded with the unreal looking green trees.  The temple's reflection is seen in the still waters, and it can be viewed without any tourists or visitors intruding into its pristine position, in the lake. 

On our way to Mt. Fuji, we spotted a few Sakura trees, the pink cherry blossoms, but the rains had begun, so we were lucky to have seen any at all. 

Everything in Japan looks unreal and plastic.  The very pretty and well heeled girls, the boys with streaked hair, their cute babies, the tiny breed dogs in special doggie prams, the roads with well behaved pedestrians and silent traffic, the neon lighted buildings at night, the plastic sushi and noodle meals displayed in the restaurant windows, the gleaming bullet train, the public cyclists on the footpaths,  the manicured gardens and space-like firs and birch trees,  the pandas in the Kyoto zoo and even mount Fuji, with its pretty bluish hue, topped with white snow and fluffy clouds near its top.



 

19 - A DIFFERENT PEOPLE

In the far east,  is this achepelago of 6,852 islands, in the Pacific Ocean, called Japan.   My son was adamant that he wanted to visit this country and for three main reasons.  Being a sushi chef at the Trident Mumbai, he wanted to achieve his best and get the over achiever of the year award, by doing his all to do his best in the field, and so he wanted to see the authentic Japanese chefs.  The other reason was to visit Jiro Ono's sushi restaurant, Sukiyabashi Jiro at Tokyo, which has a 3 michelin star rating and has been featured in the awarding winning documentary by David Gelb.  And the final reason was to visit and witness the auctioning of Tuna at the ksukiji market.

The first visit that we completed on our own, was to visit the Ksukiji tuna auction.  We took a taxi, to the market at 2 am.   Only limited onlookers are allowed to witness the auction, on a first come basis.  So people come early and wait for the 6.00am auction.  Each person gets to don a green vest, and then we are allowed 15 minutes to observe the auction of frozen tuna.  What was the difficulty here was that from 3am, when we reached, upto the time that  our turn came to witness the auction, that is 6.30am,  we all had to sit on the floor and wait, in the room assigned, and the other negative was that, to reach the place and return, the taxi fare turned out to be exhorbitant, because in Tokyo, taxi fare starts at 730 yen.  Of course, it is an AC cab and the driver wears a blazer and uses google maps for directions.

We tasted a lot of sushi and bento box meals, and noodles and octupus balls and all sorts of fish on a stick, especially at the Nishiki market area.  This area is aka Crawford market of Mumbai, with a maze of narrow lanes, lined with shops and restaurants.  But it has a skyroof and so we were safe from the rain, while we walked along the lanes.  It is a strange phenomenon in Japan, that restauranteers post volunteers on the footpath, with large placards, displaying their menu, to pull customers into their foodplace.  The other strange phenomenon is that their restaurant windows display plastic replicas of their dishes, sushi or noodles with egg etc.

Very few people can converse in English, so maps are very important to be able to find your way back to your hotel.  And so finding the underground restraurant of Jiro Ono, which boasts of having had Barrack Obama as a guest,  was very tricky.  But my son had only that on his mind and he was even wanting to dine there, no matter the cost.  Unfortunately, when he went to the place, he was shooed off and lost face for all his endeavours to be at the sushi place of his dreams, for which he had travelled from India to this far eastern island.

But whatever was taken away from his self esteem by this rebuff, was made up by the serenity and beauty of all the shrines and temples that we visited, and of course the view of mount Fuji.  A volcano that looks mystical, with its smoothly ascending facade, tinted blue, with the virgin snow at its upper layers.