You say Yama, I say Shan

Friends,

The above picture is, believe it or not, of a Starbucks. Located in Kyoto near the Kiyomizu-dera temple, the image reflects on the kind of cultural whiplash that our whirlwind tour through two Japanese cities (Kyoto and Osaka) induced. Microcosm: While we were there, it was in 30–40°F. Our winter wardrobe is severely lacking (I am so glad we invested in a pocket warmer), and our heaviest jackets are purple and red. This was sad for picture taking, but more interestingly, there were multiple moments where we would be standing somewhere like a busy intersection waiting for the light to change, with 100+ people in view, and we’d be the only people wearing a jacket not earthtone or black. I could count on one hand how many masks with unusual colors or designs I saw on the trip. But then, as soon as you got close to Universal Studios in Osaka, suddenly whole gaggles of people would be wearing Yoshi-, Hello Kitty-, or Snoopy-head hats. Like a light switch.

Japan is… difficult to perceive. Like a lot of Americans, I’ve spent my whole life hearing about it, reading about it, consuming cultural items produced there, etc. It looms large in our consciousness. So there’s the decades of that very limited and often inaccurate perspective, and then add to it the overlap between Taiwan and Japan thanks to 50 years of Japan’s imperial control and now cultural/geopolitical ties, and, yeah, it’s basically impossible for me to separate my experience of being a traveler in Japan without all the context it ricochets off of. Sometimes that’s sad! When I got to Ebisu Bridge in Osaka’s Dotonbori area , the first thing I thought was “wow, it looks exactly like Yakuza 0 !”, a game I didn’t even particularly enjoy! Sometimes it’s really great, like how Shittenoji temple in Osaka is centuries older than Buddhist temples in Taiwan, has very different architecture and overall design, and yet so much of the iconography has very familiar characteristics to what you might find inside Shandao temple in Taipei.

I know you’re very eager to hear the thorough and extensive analysis I can offer from our long ten days in the country, so here it is:

Kyoto was way more beautiful, but Osaka had much better food. One thing I grew up hearing over and over is how dense and clean Japan is, but I didn’t find that especially true of either Osaka or Kyoto: I’m told Tokyo is a whole different deal. There is litter and graffiti and the usual trappings of urbanity at a pretty similar level to Taipei. Speaking of Taipei comparisons, Taipei wins on coffee, but Osaka+Kyoto win on baked goods, especially good bread. Several coffee shops and restaurants had blankets on hand for customers to use. I want someone to explain to me why so many railway platforms still don’t have guard walls (in Taiwan every subway station I can think of has them, but many train stations don’t). One of our trains in Osaka was delayed because, and I’m quoting the loudspeaker here, “a customer and a train have collided.” Public transportation was great but way more complex/confusing than Taipei or Seoul. We were actually pretty lucky with the cold cold weather, because it meant a lot of places were very uncrowded. I went to a theme park and survived. There is SO MUCH smoking. Some restaurants still allow smoking, train stations and hotels still have smoking rooms, and one hotel we stayed at even still had a smoking floor. Suntory bought Jim Beam in 2014, so there’s Jim Beam advertisements everywhere, which was hilarious to me as a son of Kentucky. Every meal should include pickled items.

One thing that surprised and delighted me was that I could actually read a lot of things in Japan. Japanese characters fall into three categories: hiragana, katakana, and kanji. I knew before going to Japan that kanji were Chinese characters, but they don’t always have the same meaning, and they’re almost always pronounced differently. Our favorite stop on the trip, for example, Arashiyama in Kyoto, is written as 嵐山 in Japanese. 嵐, arashi, is storm in Japanese, but in Chinese it’s pronounced lán and refers to the mist around a mountain. 山 means mountains in both languages, but is pronounced yama in Japanese and shān in Chinese. Anyways, kanji was way more common and understandable than I was expecting. I wouldn’t say it was incredibly useful beyond knowing the main ingredient of a dish or what kind of business was in a building based on a sign (and the Google Translate camera function is so good that even when I felt pretty sure about something it was still fast and easy to check), but it was still fun. And, more importantly, encouraging.

Japan was great, and I’m sure we’ll go back. But there was also an undercurrent for me during the trip: travel no longer has the spark of attraction that it once did. It’s a combination of things. The pandemic making me a little more anxious about everything (and unable to turn off flare-ups of negativity at the one in fifty persons unwilling to keep their mask on in the subway, even though there is logical incongruence with sitting down in a crowded restaurant soon after to eat: less about safety and more about mindset). I’m more conscious of the environmental impact of travel, especially international travel. And I’m more content with and interested in exploring the setting of my daily life than I have been before. I’m curious how these feelings will change in the future.

Further reading:

• My favorite drink lately is any variation of mint tea. In Texas, where mint grew like a weed, I barely messed with mint outside of a few cocktails, but now that I’m in Taiwan where our balcony only gets enough light to support stunted, disappointments of mint plants, I’m craving it all the time. Favorite is probably to boil ginger and water together, then pour that over a lot of mint, a little honey, then add a lemon’s worth of juice at the end. It’s perfect, and I eat the mint with a spoon when I’m done, like a little mugged salad. Highly recommend.
• No album of the year was no surprise, sadly. I’m with Bolu, though: “ Renaissance feels like an artistic denomination that worships togetherness.”
• I got some screen watching in during the past month! I am very late to say I was really disappointed in Dr. Strange: Multiverse of Madness but loved the multiverse of Everything Everywhere All at Once . Wednesday I’m very lukewarm about, actually for similar reasons to disliking Multiverse of Madness , which is that the dialogue feels so overwritten. Seven jokes where three would be better, etc. Finally, I rewatched Amélie for the 25th time and, shockingly, it’s still amazing.
• Tressie McMillan Cottom on “The Enduring, Invisible Power of Blond” : “Most of us hate the idea that whom we are attracted to, for instance, has any political context. We hate thinking that the things we enjoy mean anything.”
• Following up from my New Year’s Resolution, I’ve been rereading a lot of stuff! This week I’m teaching Karen Russell’s “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” and Ursula K. LeGuin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” and on the plane ride home I reread James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time , which is just two stellar essays, “My Dungeon Shook” and “Letter from a Region of My Mind.” Finally, I flew through We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson and, yeah. All of them are just so, so good, and really added some enthusiasm to my “2023 is my year of rereads” goal.
• Last month I linked you INTERNET K-HOLE, a weird corner of the internet that manages to reassert its presence in the scope of my awareness every few years. Another example of this is possibly the most famous argument on the internet: bodybuilding.com’s forums discussing how many days are in a week . It’s a trainwreck I read through every 3–4 years for my health.
• Random thing from Japan — a majority of Japanese men sit down to pee when there aren’t urinals, and in both Japan as well as Taiwan I’ve noticed the occasional encouragements for men to sit down. It’s a good idea! Muscle memory is tough to overcome, but I recommend it , mostly for hygienic purposes.

I somehow acquired a couple of additional goals/resolutions for the year since last we spoke: changing my sleeping position (I’ve been a stomach sleeper all my life; I’m trying to switch to back or side [with pillow between knees] to reduce back pain because the obvious solution of not spending the majority of my waking hours in front of a computer and exercise more is too much to ask) is the difficult one. It’s not going well. The easy one is to learn to make some of the delicious Japanese pickles we had on the trip. Misozuke seems easiest, then once I find some red shiso/perilla, it’s on to shibazuke .

Do you have a pickle recipe, Japanese or otherwise, you’d like to share? My jars are in need of occupants. Or have you made anything lately? If not, go forth. The world is waiting for your splash of color/flavor.

Until next time.

-g