Catch-up part 1

3:53 pm, 7/20/08, Tokyo
Okay, y’all, mea culpa for the several day hiatus; I’ve been doing so much that I haven’t had enough time left after studying to write anything; I just pass out at 10:30 for my daily 6:30 rise. Now, however, is the middle of a three day weekend, and today I am just vegetating in the apartment; Monday is Uminohi (海の日), or “Marine Day,” and Daisuke, Mika, Weiyu, Miu, and I are all going, fittingly, to the beach for the occasion. What follows below will be my attempt to describe the last week.
On Wednesday after class, I headed over to Yasukuni Shrine; if the name sounds familiar, it is because the place has sat at the center of international political controversy for years; the shrine has housed the spirits of all of Japan’s war dead since the Meiji Period; as such, it also contains the spirits of over a dozen Class-A War Criminals from the Second World War. Whenever Japanese heads of state like Junichiro Koizumi visit the place they are, whether justifiably or not, accused by neighboring nations in Asia of officially sanctioning the actions of those men. Perhaps because of Yasukuni’s infamy, or because it was only five minutes by foot from the school, I decided to take a look for myself.
The shrine is impressive, like all the shrine’s I had visited thus far, in the sheer length of time it took from the entrance to get to the shrine itself; perhaps this was an architectural commonality that promoted a sense of journey, of pilgrimage, of endurance in the blistering one o’clock sunlight. The wide entrance walkway was barren save for the gray bricks that lay to form it. There were no overhanging trees to provide shade, and the food stands I saw lining the walkway were only for the festival taking place there for several days; by the time of posting, those stands would have long packed up and moved elsewhere, leaving the path even wider than before. The only permanent adornments on the road were the walls of yellow lanterns with names of people and organizations who had paid for a spot in the shrine’s good graces.
The path was punctuated by several plain gates, finally ending at the gate-entrance to the shrine-park proper. Passing through, the sense of hardship melts away as trees spring up to provide protection from the blinding light above. The main shrine was, vsomewhat to my surprise, quite ordinary in size; I had quite naively assumed that the souls of countless thousands of soldiers needed physical room to house them. It was draped in dark blue and was flanked at both ends by purple flags with intricate white patterning. To the left and somewhat further down from this structure sat a white concrete building, I do not know what for, but it was at this spot I saw a Japanese flag for the first time in Japan. Growing up in the United States, I have always deeply identified with the stars and stripes, and instinctively cannot imagine other people holding theirs’ any less dear. How strange, though, that as Americans we get scared when other peoples show any hint of nationalism when we think of ours as perfectly acceptable. Perhaps this discrepancy is one of the many reasons that Japanese prefer to keep their flag far out of the way.
On Thursday, the seven week students went to the Studio Ghibli Museum. The Kudan school is divided into a number of programs: “speaking”, “conversation” and “intensive” courses for adults and long term students, and the “holiday” courses, with class in the morning and school activities several afternoons a week. There are currently four-week students and seven-week students who started class the same day, with the shorter study outnumbering the longer studiers three to one. The great split will happen on Mt. Fuji; as one boy put it, four buses will go to the mountain, but only one will make it back. Anyway, often times it too difficult to send the entire school on trips together, so the school will have us split into the seven and four-week groups.
I am a huge fan of Studio Ghibli; “My Neighbor Totoro” and “Pompoko” are among my favorite movies of all time. The opportunity to see the Ghibli museum (Jiburi Hakubutsukan, ジブリ博物館), got me very excited, and I was not disappointed. The highlights of the fancifully designed building were the huge Totoro figure outside the entrance for picture taking, the roof garden with the doom-bot from “Nausica and the Valley of the Wind,” the children’s Cat-Bus (Neko-Bus) exhibit from “Totoro,” and the reconstructed work room of Hayao Miyazaki, complete with sketches and story boards from all the movies. Most impressive, though, was the twenty minute film produced and played only for museum visitors at the museum; It involved a water-spider and a water-walking insect, and it was, without me getting into too many details, very heartwarming and something anyone should see while visiting Japan.
More to come: Ikebukuro and Karaoke; and Kamakura and the enormous Buddha.
Oh, and I finally made those oatmeal cookies today! I feel useful!