In the absence of a desk my preferred method of typing on a laptop keyboard is flat on my stomach, balanced on my elbows. This is hard on my shoulders and given their current state is probably not the best idea, but for the first time in my life I’m in a room where the floor is solid enough for a laptop to rest and yet comfortable enough to lie on without worrying about ventilation problems. So I’m going to take advantage of a tatami floor and write this way tonight.
Up early this morning and off to Tokyo station for the 9:36 train to Kyoto. I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t been looking forward to this part of the trip; I’ve been interested in the shinkansen for about as long as I’ve known about them. Anything that goes that fast on the ground is damn cool, and to a little kid obsessed with big, fast things, what better than a bullet train? I had planned to get to Tokyo about 40 minutes early, allowing for flex in the schedule and the inevitable screwups that come with my travels, so I could sit and watch the trains come in and out. Yeah, not so much. There wasn’t much to see, and there was nowhere to sit. Also, some genius put the designated smoking area next to the entrance to the non-smoking cars (for reasons that totally escape me), so it’s not like my time hanging around the platform was much fun. My curiosity managed to earn me a scolding from the JR platform manager, which turned out to be a good
thing in that it saved me from an inopportune encounter with a train coming from the other direction.
Anyway. Here’s everything that’s worth telling about shinkansen travel.
First off, they run on a hilariously rigorous schedule. For those of you with rail experience in Europe or eastern North America, this will come as a huge shock. The shinkansen network as a whole has an annual average lateness measured in seconds, and not that many seconds. When it says “the train will depart at 9:36,” the train leaves at 9:36 (according to the station clock; my watch is fast). When it says the train will arrive at 12:20, the train.. you know where this is going. So be on time, but not so on time you have time to kill.
Second, it’s a lot more like traveling on a plane than on any other kind of train. I’ve done scheduled rail service out east before, and this experience is more like flying than that. From the announcements, the in-seat service, and the seats themselves to the “please wait while we service your train in a high-speed manner” requests of the cleaning crew, I thought more about flying, say, WestJet than I did about riding Amtrak.
Third.. there is no third thing. It just seemed kind of pointless to write that way without having a third thing.
Helpful hints:
The experience is probably unlike any rail experience you’ve ever had before. Shinkansen travel on continuously welded tracks so the ride is very smooth compared to other trains. The first time you pass another train at speed, there is a “whatthehellwasthat” reaction — it happens fast. Remember, the closing speed pushes 600 kph. The trains shake and buffet as they approach, and as you pass each other there’s a very loud whoosh-bang sound. The same thing happens when you enter a tunnel, only to a lesser degree. As you watch the countryside fly along out your window, you think to yourself, “When are we going to
start to go faster?” Then you discover you’re traveling at 300 kph. “Oh.” (That scene from that episode of King of the Hill? It’s exactly like that.)
Leaving Tokyo engendered mixed feelings. On the one hand I was just getting the hang of moving around without fighting too much, and there were a number of things that, thanks to the typhoon, I didn’t get a chance to see. On the other hand, I was anxious to get out of that super-crowded city and away from the incessant concrete. On the gripping hand, I knew the amount of English I encountered would decrease significantly once I left Tokyo, and, sure enough, it did. My initial exposure to Kyoto was much like my initial exposure to Tokyo: “I want to go home!” It took me the better part of 90 minutes to find my hotel, notwithstanding the fact that I had a better map and asked for directions three times. There were some advantages to this. First, I established that I am indeed prepared to pack my luggage over a four kilometer distance. Second, I ran into an emergency services display in Umekoji Park for more pictures of flashy things to make R. happy; it’s nice to see your colleagues, tangental though they really are, on display in another country. I was able to get a good look at some of their firefighting apparatus, and even had a pantomime-broken-English conversation with one of the buckets about his trip to Niagra Falls. (He also wanted to tell me he thinks the loonie is a funny-looking coin. This, from a guy whose country’s currency.. well, never mind.)
The effort of finding my hotel, and the frustration it created, was startling. The goodwill I had managed to build up in Tokyo fell away pretty quickly and the sense of isolation and culture shock returned savagely. I dropped my bags in my tatami room and sat down on the floor, under the air conditioner, and tried to cool my depression away. Oh, yes, my shirt needed drying out, too. Something interesting about Japan: It is shockingly humid here. It is also, at least of this writing, ridiculously warm. I packed with the impression that Japan’s climate around this time of year would be a lot similar to Victoria’s. Yeah, not so much — the humidity is much worse, and the temperature is much higher. Where it was 15 or 16 degrees in Victoria when I left (if that), it has been at least ten degrees warmer here since I arrived. Owing to a combination of heat and humidity and stress I sweat a lot. Because of that sweat, I worry I’m running a
little on the dry side. So, note to self: Stay hydrated.
After finding the hotel and changing shirts I set off in search of Kawaramachi-dori and its similarly-named arcaded street. Kawaramachi arcade, I was to discover, is a very cool covered shopping district I would have enjoyed much more had I not been so hot and tired. An old friend of my father’s was having an art show at a gallery off Kawaramachi; today was her last day. Under threat of, well, threat, I promised dad I’d go see Toyo’s show, and I’m glad I did. She does relief painting — some fabulously interesting, beautiful stuff (I
lust after some of it, and if I had a spare $3,000 sitting around I’d have bought one piece in particular on the spot), acrylic textured with sand, and whipped with wire brushes. Very, very cool. Toyo and I sat around talking for a few hours, and she invited me for dinner tonight. Grateful beyond words, I accepted, and hung around for the rest of the afternoon, helped take down the show, and drove with her daughter, Nao, and her brother to her parents’ old house.
Nao is a radiology resident at Western, in the process of finishing up her fourth year on a part-time basis (the joys of maternity leave). As you might expect, our conversation soon turned to work, in that highly annoying way that conversations between two medical people seem to end up when they run into each other in non-work related contexts. I won’t bore you with the details of our talk, but it was very nice to be able to talk about this kind of stuff with someone for the first time in a week.. and in English, too! I enjoyed it but apologized later in the night: Two Canadians meeting in Kyoto and they end up talking shop. Yeesh.
I spent the evening with Toyo and her family. It was absolutely great. Toyo is almost as bad as my grandmother in the sense that she was very concerned about my eating habits (or lack thereof) and the fact that I was apparently still kind of sick. (I’m still coughing, sort of. Nao being both an MD and fluent in Japanese, it might have been a good time to go and demand some drugs, but I figure this is residual and we’ll let the azirthomycin work for a few more days.) We ate sukiyaki, of sorts, with chicken instead of beer — it’s much, much lighter this way, though in truth I don’t really remember sukiyaki being a particularly heavy dish in the first place. Nao’s husband Peter is an engineer and a total geek, and naturally we hit it off right away. Their three year-old, Albert, is a cutie — even if his screams do periodically break 100dB. It was one of the best evenings I’ve had in a long time.
I am so deeply greatful for Toyo’s hospitality I can’t really even put it into words. I got to see something I probably wouldn’t have seen otherwise — an actual Japanese family home, and an actual Japanese family meal, without the elaborate trappings prepared for foreign visitors — and, best of all, I got to have my first substantative conversation with anyone in almost a week. Yes, people have been phoning, but it’s not the same thing. You have no idea how good it was to be able to talk to people, face-to-face, without having to pick your words carefully to avoid idiomatic usage, or to worry about being understood. Four Canadians sitting around a kitchen table half a world away talking about anything was so comforting and so fabulous that I’m a little teary thinking about it.
I said, “You guys have no idea how much I needed this. I had reached the point where I had taken to mumbling to myself, telling myself about the things I was seeing, so I could pretend I was having a conversation with someone.” The need to connect apparently being very strong with me — who would have thought? “Being able to talk to someone directly, in person, about the experience of being here with you guys.. you really have no clue what it’s like, or how much I needed this.”
Normally I am quite reticent about imposing on other people. Even if they offer, I generally work hard to avoid invitations to dinner with families because I don’t want to be a burden. I leapt at this offer, though, and I cannot begin to express my gratitude for this degree of hospitality. It was quite possibly the most wonderful evening I’ve spent anywhere in the last couple of months. Toyo even asked me if I wanted to go with her to Osaka tomorrow (a very tempting proposition, which I will have to think over carefully tonight), and offered to take me up to Kiyomizu-dera in the morning. She and her brother are picking me up at 9:30 tomorrow, so I’m off to bed.