Short Travels With Ed

Some years ago, Ed Henderson told me that we’d probably travel well together. That is, not get on each other’s nerves too much over the course of a multi-day trip. I took that as a compliment, but not anything we’d actually follow up on. And we never did.

Ed’s passing made me think about the scattering of places we did go, all day trips of one kind or another. In late ’91, for instance, two places on two separate occasions: Ishiyama-dera and Koyasan.

I wrote about Ishiyama-dera: “Warm and sunny day, flawless weather to visit the exquisite Ishiyama-dera. I went with Ed and Lynn, two former fellow teachers, and Americans as it happens, to the temple, which is in Otsu, Shiga Prefecture. It’s near the shores of unscenic Lake Biwa, the sludgepot that provides greater Osaka with its drinking water.

“No, that’s not the best way to begin to describe Ishiyama-dera, which is set in the forested hills not far from the lake. You forget about Biwa while visiting the fine old wooden structures, which manage to convey their great age through their smell, somehow, maybe redolent of centuries of incense. This time of year, the temple also has the aesthetic advantage of seasonal reds and yellow. It augments the aura of esoteric objects honoring esoteric gods on remote shores.”

As for Koyasan, I don’t ever seem to have written about it. That surprises me a little, since it was one of my favorite places in Japan, and I went there at least three times (maybe four). Whenever someone was visiting me from the States, I would take them there to marvel — as I always did, each time — at the enormous trees and the ancient shrines and the vast cemetery among the trees and the shrines. Just the way the afternoon sunbeams slipped through the towering tree canopy to touch the grass next to monuments, or dappled mossy statues, was worth the ride into the mountains to get there.

Koyasan, along with two neighboring sites, was put on UNESCO’s World Heritage list in 2004, and for good reason. “Set in the dense forests of the Kii Mountains overlooking the Pacific Ocean, three sacred sites – Yoshino and Omine, Kumano Sanzan, Koyasan – linked by pilgrimage routes to the ancient capital cities of Nara and Kyoto, reflect the fusion of Shinto, rooted in the ancient tradition of nature worship in Japan, and Buddhism, which was introduced from China and the Korean Peninsula,” the organization says.

“The sites (495.3 ha) and their surrounding forest landscape reflect a persistent and extraordinarily well-documented tradition of sacred mountains over 1,200 years. The area, with its abundance of streams, rivers and waterfalls, is still part of the living culture of Japan and is much visited for ritual purposes and hiking, with up to 15 million visitors annually. Each of the three sites contains shrines, some of which were founded as early as the 9th century.”

My college friend Steve — whom I did travel with once upon a time, in Europe — was visiting Japan that fall, and he and I and Ed went to Koyasan one day. It was there that Ed told me about his medical condition, perhaps (but I can’t remember now) in a discussion of why he, someone not even 30, needed a cane that day.

Here’s a thought: I wonder what a world map would look like with pushpins to mark the all the places all three of us have been, since Steve is fond of travel as well. A porcupine of a map.

As I mentioned yesterday, in May 1997, Ed and Lynn and Yuriko and I went to the Boyce Thompson Arboretum, about an hour east of Phoenix on 392 acres in the Sonoran Desert. It was a hot day, as you’d think, but we had an enjoyable walk on the grounds, taking a look at its large variety of desert plants. Not all of which were cacti. But many were.

Boyce Thompson Arboretum 1997Boyce Thompson Arboretum 1997Last August — only 11 months ago — while visiting Ed in Washington state, I suggested we go to Vancouver for a day. It was a city he knew well, but one that I’d bypassed in 1985 to go to Vancouver Island instead. He wanted to go, but had no energy for it. So I went by myself.

During that visit, however, we did go to Bellingham, a much shorter distance from his home, with me driving and him navigating. Among other things, we spent time at two bookstores in downtown Bellingham within walking distance of each other — the excellent and large Village Books and the excellent and small Eclipse Books. Like me, Ed owned and read a lot of books about a lot of different things, and thus spent a lot of time in bookstores.

We also ate gas station pizza. It was a favorite of Ed’s, bought at a Bellingham gas station, which actually had a fairly large shop attached to it. We got our slices to go and went to the Alaska ferry terminal, sitting on one of the benches facing the water to eat the pizza. Since no ship was due to arrive or depart that day, few other people were around. At that moment, he might have suspected he’d never return to Alaska, a place he liked so much; I wondered if I’d ever make it.

Actually, Ed did return, or will eventually. I understand that his ashes have been — or will be — scattered in the Stikine River, which empties into the Pacific just north of Wrangell, Alaska, where he lived for a time.

Otaue Shinji, 1992

On June 14, 1992, I went to Sumiyoshi Taisha (Grand Shrine), not too far from where I lived in Osaka, to see the Otaue Shinji, a rice planting festival held at that time every year.

“Although events associated with this rice planting can be found all over our country, the festival at the Sumiyoshi Taisha Shrine is unique for its reproduction of the rituals in faithful observance of ancient procedures in such a grand ceremonial style,” the Japan National Tourist Organization notes.

I understand oxen till the rice field first, but I missed that part. I did see the ceremonial rice planting, done by women in white robes in the field.
Otaue Shinji, Osaka 1992 If I remember right, those are priests and musicians on the platform next to the rice field, making the appropriate noises.

The event also involved a procession through the shrine complex. With drums.
Otaue Shinji, Osaka 1992Sometimes at such events, you find yourself behind rows of people, mostly with a view of the back of their heads.
Otaue Shinji, Osaka 1992Usually the headgear’s not as interesting as it was that day at the Otaue Shinji.

Miyajima (Itsukushima) During Cherry Blossom Season

Here in northern Illinois, the grass is greening, small buds are budding and birds are making more noise. A few new-generation insects are in view. It’s even warm and sunny on some days, such as today, which followed a miserable, dank, cold Saturday. Such is the seasonal seesaw.

As this map and chart explain, early April is peak cherry blossom season in the Kansai and a few other parts of Japan. That’s when I saw the blossoms in Kyoto — the first year I was there — plus in parts of Osaka, including the crowded National Mint grounds but also the little-known but strikingly beautiful Osaka Gogoku Shrine in Suminoe Ward (which everyone simply called Suminoe Shrine).

In early April 1993, we went to Hiroshima for a weekend, and visited Miyajima (宮島), an island in the Inland Sea near the city. Formally called Itsukushima (厳島), it’s home to a Shinto shrine complex and best known for its monumental torii out in the water, which happened to be behind scaffolding when were were there.

Fortunately, the cherry blossoms were in full, unencumbered view. Temple deer were around, too.

Miyajima - near HimoshinaMiyajima - near Hiroshima 1993I didn’t know until recently that Itsukushima is a World Heritage Site, put on the list after we were there, in 1996. UNESCO notes: “The present shrine dates from the 12th century and the harmoniously arranged buildings reveal great artistic and technical skill. The shrine plays on the contrasts in colour and form between mountains and sea and illustrates the Japanese concept of scenic beauty, which combines nature and human creativity.”

The National Museum of the Pacific War

The National Museum of the Pacific War is a complex of structures at a short distance from each other in Fredericksburg, including the restored Nimitz Hotel, which now houses a museum about Adm. Nimitz; the George H.W. Bush Gallery, which focuses on the war in the Pacific; and more: the Veterans’ Memorial Walk, the Plaza of Presidents, the Japanese Garden of Peace, the Pacific War Combat Zone, and the Center for Pacific War Studies.

The Nimitz Hotel building used to include the war exhibits, but now they’re in the much larger (32,500 square feet) Bush Gallery, open since the 1990s, and expanded in 2009. Outside its entrance is the conning tower of the USS Pintado, a submarine that conducted a number of a patrols against the Japanese.
National Museum of the Pacific WarThe museum, organized chronologically beginning before the war and ending at the USS Missouri, is incredibly detailed, and home to a large array of impressive artifacts. That includes some impressively large artifacts, such as a Ko-hyoteki-class midget submarine that participated on the attack on Pearl Harbor, which actually seems pretty large when you stand next to it.
National Museum of the Pacific WarThe pilot of this particular vessel, Ensign Kazuo Sakamaki, survived its beaching and became the war’s first Japanese POW, having failed at suicide. According to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin in 2002, “When the war ended, he returned to Japan deeply committed to pacifism. There, Sakamaki was not warmly received. He wrote an account of his experience, titled The First Prisoner in Japan and I Attacked Pearl Harbor in the United States, and thereafter refused to speak about the war.” (He died in 1999.)

Also on display were a B-25 — as part of a exhibit about the Doolittle Raid — a Japanese N1K “Rex” floatplane, an F4F Wildcat fighter, and a replica of Fat Man, just to name some of the larger items.
Fat ManThe exhibits also included a lot of smaller weapons, tools, posters, uniforms, model ships and airplanes, military equipment, and sundry gear and items associated with the fighting and the people who were behind the front. Plus a lot to read. Campaigns and incidents both well known and obscure were detailed, such as the effort to salvage the ships in Pearl Harbor in the months after the attack, which was often dangerous work. Other Allied efforts weren’t ignored, such as the Australian advance on Buna-Gona, a campaign that incurred a higher rate of casualties than for the Americans at Guadalcanal.

All in all, a splendid museum. But exhausting. If I’d had time on Sunday as I went from Austin to San Antonio, I would have gone back (the tickets are good for 48 hours). It’ll be worth a return someday.

All My Eye and Betty Martin, Thursday Edition

Sure enough, more snow yesterday. But not much more, and most of it melted today. The snowfall didn’t even mess up the roads very much. Or my driveway. If you don’t have to shovel it, you can’t say it really snowed.

Been reading more by the chattering classes than usual lately, maybe because they’re chattering a lot now. With some reason. There’s also a sizable share of hyperventilating Chicken Little-ism about the political rise the short-fingered vulgarian. He’s going to be the end of Republican party! Of movement conservatism! Of American democracy! Of truth, justice and the American way!

I have to be skeptical on all counts. Of course, I could be wrong, and I’ll be the first to admit it as soon as goons come to take me to one of the detention camps of the new order.

This is some hard candy Yuriko brought back from Japan last month. Or rather, these are images of the Gold Coin of the Meiji Era tin, front and back. We’ve almost finished the candy inside.

Gold Coin of the Meiji EraGold Coin of the Meiji EraThe candy, which is roundish and yellow, is pretty good, but I like the name best of all. The coin pictured on the tin isn’t some fanciful latter-day re-creation, but an image of an actual gold coin of the Meiji era, just like this one, dated 1870 (Meiji 3). Except that the one on the tin is a 20-yen piece, rather than two yen.

Quite a bit of money at the time, and a coin of great beauty, from the looks of the photo. I wouldn’t mind having one, but it isn’t something I want to spend big bucks for. I’ll settle for the Meiji-era copper two-sen coin that I do have, which only cost a few modern dollars.

One more thing along these lines: We cast pearls before swine. The Japanese give gold coins to cats: 猫に小判 (neko ni koban).

And one more coffee cup currently on our shelf.

Oh ShitLilly got that from a friend of hers for Christmas this year. Ha-ha. It reminds me that adults should not use that word. In fact, anyone older than about six or seven should steer clear of it. Certain words should be confined to little children, and that’s one of them. Yet I’ve seen poop used in more-or-less serious writing by people whom I assume are grown. Knock it off.

Coffee Makes Me Crap would be the slogan for short-fingered vulgarians, maybe. Funnier would be Decaf Makes Me Defecate. I don’t drink coffee anyway. Better for me would be Tea Makes Me Pee. True indeed.

Mikimoto Pearl Island 1992

Does anything interesting happen at the junction of January and February? I’m not persuaded anything does. At least it was warmish around here for the last weekend in January — in the 40s F. both Saturday and Sunday, with rain today to melt away much of the remaining snow, which isn’t too bad for the pit of winter. But the relative warmth didn’t persuade us to do much. At least I found the likes of Hugh Laurie in New Orleans on YouTube over the weekend.

Early February 1992

Recently I visited Toba, a town on the ocean in Ise Prefecture, Japan. That’s the place where cultured pearls were popularized, if not invented, in the early 20th century, and the popularization continues to this day in the form of Mikimoto Pearl Island.

The island, which is connected to the mainland by a very short bridge, includes a museum at which you can learn all sorts of pearl factoids; this I did. I had no idea pearls came in so many colors. You can also buy terrifically expensive jewelry there; this I did not.

On display are some items of gaudy fascination, such as a silver replica Liberty Bell (one-third scale) mostly covered in cultured pearls, complete with a crack represented by a zigzag of darker pearls. Supposedly it was exhibited at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Other structures include a be-pearled model of Himeji Castle, a globe that includes rubies and diamonds as well as a pearls, and a lotta pearls in the shape of large model pagoda.

At Mikimoto Pearl Island I thought of what the mother of a friend of mine told me upon hearing that I planned to move to Japan. That’s where the pearls come from, she said. Guess Mikimoto’s been successful in getting the word out.

Church, Funicular, Incinerator

Yuriko’s been back from Japan since Saturday. Among other places she visited there was the Church of the Light, which has stood in Ibaraki in Osaka Prefecture since 1989.
Church of the LightThat’s the interior, which receives light from a cross of a gap in its thick concrete walls. Architectural autodidact Tadao Ando designed the church. Most of his work until around 2000 was in Japan, but lately he’s been doing international commissions, such as the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2002).

Yuriko reports that it’s a remarkable space, considering that it’s essentially a concrete cube. Or a set of cubes; it’s a little hard to tell, even after reading about the structure. More about it — including a lot of pictures — is at Mooponto, “the only web magazine devoted to japanese minimalist architecture.”

I had a brief selfish reaction to hearing about the church. Why didn’t I visit it when I lived (relatively) nearby? I thought about that a while, and maybe I remember hearing about it, but also that the parishioners discouraged casual visitors. They still do, but you can make a reservation to visit.

Here’s another thing I’ll do if I ever visit the Osaka area again: ride the Otokoyama Cable Line funicular. Because one thing we all should do in this life is ride funiculars.
Otokoyama funicularAlso called the Cable Line of the Keihan Electric Railway, it takes visitors up to Iwashimizu Shrine in Yawata, Kyoto. Yuriko went ahead of New Year’s. Somehow or other I’ve never heard of the line or the shrine. A shrine of some sort has been on the site since the Heian period (9th century) and the funicular’s been around since 1926, so I’ve got no excuse.

Another place in the Kansai that I want to see someday is the Maishima Incineration Plant in Osaka. I missed it when I lived there because it didn’t exist until the late 1990s. A few years ago I saw a photo of it and thought, what in the world? That’s in Osaka? Yep. Some photos and a bit about the place and the Austrian architect who designed it are here.

Christmas at Glover Garden, 1993

Among the places we went on Christmas Day 1993 was Glover Garden in Nagasaki. Among the things you can find at Glover Garden — which is best known for the Glover House, though I don’t seem to have any images of it — is a bust of Thomas Blake Glover (1838-1911). Naturally I had to pose beside it.

Glover Park 1993Glover was a Scotsman of considerable talent and ambition who went East. The Japan Times noted on the centenary of his death, in something of a rambling article: “When he arrived in Nagasaki in 1859, aged 21, Glover was at first allotted accommodation in the city’s concessions area, called Dejima, where he would soon build up a mini-empire of real estate. In 1861, he founded Glover Trading Co. (Guraba-Shokei) to deal illegally… in ships and weapons with the rebellious Satsuma and Chosu clans in Kyushu and the Tosa from Shikoku, who were all bridling in those tumultuous times against the policies of the so-called bakufu government of the shogunate.”

That is, he was one of the foreign merchants that helped overthrow the Tokugawa shogunate. As you’d expect, after the Meiji Restoration, he profited mightily as a businessman in the new Japan as he helped the new rulers — his old allies — industrialize the nation.

The garden overlooks Nagasaki Harbor. This view shows how hilly the surrounding terrain is. I don’t have any idea who the man or the child are.
Glover Park 1993A closer view of Nagasaki Harbor.
Glover Park 1993Looks like a couple of liquefied natural gas tankers were in port at the time. Not something that Glover would have ever seen from that view, but he probably would have appreciated it.

Scenes of Naniwa

In July 1991 at Kinokunya Books in Osaka, which had a nice selection of English-language titles, I chanced across a large paperback called Scenes of Naniwa, which seems to be subtitled, “Osaka Time Tunnel.” I’m really glad I forked over the ¥2060 to buy it (about $15 in those days), because I’ve never seen it for sale anywhere else, not even Amazon, though admittedly I only checked the English-language version of that site.

Scenes of NaniwaThe book has 40 short chapters, each well illustrated by black-and-white images, of Meiji- and Taisho- and early Showa-era Osaka, which is to say, the latter decades of the 19th century and the early decades of the 20th. In fact, the photographs are the genesis of the book.

It seems that one Teijiro Ueda (1860-1944), who owned a sizable camera shop in Osaka in the early years of the 20th century, also had a sizable collection of photographs of old Osaka. He apparently took some of them himself, though it isn’t always clear which ones. Some of them he probably collected from other photographers.

In the 1980s, with the assistance of Ueda’s elderly daughter-in-law, who had kept track of his 1,300 or so images in a dozen albums, the Yomiuri Shimbun (a daily paper) published the photos and articles to go with them in a serial format. Later the paper put the articles together in book form. A Belgian named J.V.D. Cammen took it upon himself to translate the book into English, and in 1987, Yomiuri published that too. That’s what I have.

I’m assuming that neither Japanese nor English were Cammen’s first language, and if so, he did a remarkable job. The prose isn’t quite as smooth as it might be, but on the whole it’s high-quality writing in English. Someone unfamiliar with Osaka might find the book a chore to read, but the more you know about that city, the more interesting the descriptions will be. You find yourself thinking, “That used to be there?”

It’s a time tunnel all right. The modern urban landscape of Osaka has mostly obliterated the places and sights that Scenes of Naniwa documents. (Naniwa is an older name for the city, and possibly even a poetic one in later times.) As the text notes, “In our time, with ferro-concrete buildings lining the streets, the appearance of Osaka has become almost the same everywhere, but there are plenty of photographs in the Ueda albums of the city before it received this uniformity.”

For example, the book tells of the Osaka Hotel, which used to be on Nakanoshima, a narrow island in Yoda River, which these days is a good place for strolling in fair weather. The book says that: “The hotel [had] arched windows resembling those of palaces in the West. It [had] turrets like castles in the Middle Ages, with dormer windows in the roofs, which [were] covered with asbestos slates, and the ridgepoles too [were] decorated with fine ironwork… The front part of the hotel [was] three-storied, but at the back [was] a basement with a veranda and even an anchorage for the private use of the hotel.”

The structure dated from 1900, but didn’t last long: it burned down in 1924. On the site now is the fine Museum of Oriental Ceramics, completed in 1982.

Then there’s the Tall Lantern (Taka-doro) in Sumiyoshi. I used to live in Sumiyoshi Ward, and south of my residence, about 20 minutes on foot, was Sumiyoshi Shrine (Sumiyoshi-jinja). Not far from there was the Tall Lantern, though not in its original position, as I learned from the book.

“… the Taka-doro was originally an offering made by fishermen to the Guardian Sea-god of the Sumiyoshi Shire at the end of the Kamakura period, but has become best known now for being the oldest lighthouse ever constructed in Japan… In 1950, the Stone Lantern was destroyed by Typhoon Jane, but it was reconstructed in its original form about 200 m farther east. Restored, it stands on its former foundation, is 21 m high, and has a tiled roof like that of a temple.”

Other chapters cover the Juso Ferry (Juso’s a neighborhood; I was married in a church there); the site of the Japanese Mint and its cherry blossoms; the earlier Osaka Stations, before the current and entirely utilitarian one; the site of the Industrial Expo of 1903; a ceremonial arch (long gone) built to commemorate the victory over Russia in 1905; the evolution of the Dotomburi district, which in the age of electric lights overwhelms the eye, but which used to be a home to many kabuki theaters; the earlier iterations of Namba Station and the Nankai Electric Railway; Shitennoji and environs, the clearest memory I have of which is one of the ponds at Shitennoji temple that was infested with an absurd number of frogs; and much more, such as an account of a fire on July 31, 1909, that burned more than 122 hectares of the city and 11,300 houses. Ueda apparently went to the roof of his camera store and took a picture that morning, which shows an enormous billow of black smoke about two kilometers away.

The book also taught me about the miotsukushi. I pulled this image of one, along with a sailboat, from a Japanese web site. The image is in the book, though cropped a bit differently, and dates from about 1877, which surely puts it in the public domain.
miotsukushi1877Scenes of Naniwa tells us that “the Osaka city symbol, the miotsukushi, originates from the stakes used as water route signals which up to the middle of the Meiji period stood planted in the Kizu and Aji Rivers, both debouching into Osaka Harbor. The depth of the water was difficult to judge because of the abundant bamboo reeds growing in the rivers… the miotsukushi planted along both sides of the rivers were signs showing that within those stakes the water was deep enough to sail through safely.”

Though gone by the end of the 19th century, the miotsukushi were well regarded enough to become the city symbol in 1894, and if you spend enough time in Osaka, you start noticing depictions of them in various places, something like the Chicago municipal device.

Before I left Japan in 1994, I went to a flag shop and, after some discussion, managed to order a miotsukushi flag as a souvenir of my time in the city. (I think they had a hard time believing a gaijin would have ever heard of it.) It was a little bigger than a 3 x 5-inch flag, and I had it until 2003, when it disappeared during the move to my current house.

Thanksgiving & The Days After ’15

On the whole, Thanksgiving outside was gray and rainy, but pleasantly warm for this time of the year. The days afterward were drier but much chillier, though not quite freezing.

Pictured: an all-too-common meal snapshot, in this case most of my Thanksgiving dinner. Note the artless presentation. I did that myself. I don’t remember what the plastic fork was doing there, but I will assert that we used metal utensils.
Thanksgiving chow '15The ham came from a warehouse store, while Lilly prepared the various starches, with Ann’s assistance. She combined four or five different cheeses for the macaroni and cheese. It isn’t Thanksgiving without that, she said, and it was the star attraction of the plate. For those who fret about such things, there was a green item on the menu, too: green beans, which didn’t make into the picture, but did make it into my stomach.

Once again, Martinelli’s sparkling cider was the main drink — original and cranberry/apple — though we also opened a bottle of wine we bought at a winery near Traverse City in 2007. I’d post the name of the wine, but that would involve going out to the refrigerator in the garage, where it’s now stored, and reading the label. It was a pretty good Riesling.

Some people shop on the Friday after Thanksgiving. That’s never been my ambition. My ambition is to do as close to nothing that day as possible. Days like that are very rare. This year I almost achieved it. Almost, but not quite.

Which reminds me of this exchange in Office Space.

Michael Bolton: You were supposed to come in on Saturday. What were you doing?

Peter Gibbons: Michael, I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing, and it was everything that I thought it could be.

On Saturday, we watched Vancouver Asahi, a Japanese movie on TV about the baseball team of that name, composed of Japanese-Canadian players during its heyday in the 1930s, when there used to be a Japantown in Vancouver. Not bad on the whole, though about 30 minutes too long. It also had the virtue of being about something I’d never heard of before.

After the movie ended, at about 11:30 in the evening, I went out on the deck and could see Orion to the south, parading across a nice clear sky. Never mind the solstice. Winter’s here.