We got a car in Nikko, and Michele, who has lots of experience driving on the left from driving around Ireland, drove us to the ski resort of Yuzawa for the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale 2024. Michele thought that the drive from Nikko to Yuzawa would give us a chance to see some Fall color, which we were otherwise too early to see at lower elevations like Kyoto.
It was a beautiful drive, most of it through heavy rain.
We ran for a while in semi-farm country and stopped to admire an old apple tree with impossibly large fruit; we ended up buying four apples. And ended the day under our first Christmas Tree of the year.
Don’t say you are satisfied until you have seen Nikko “日光を見ずして結構と言うなかれ A Japanese saying.
Nikko National Park is in the mountains and is about an hour and forty-five minutes by train from Tokyo. It is probably the place I most remember from my last trip to Japan, sixty years and four months ago. I don’t think it has changed in the interim. It is staggeringly crowded; Strasbourg/Disneyland level crowded, mostly with Japanese tourists and school kids on tour.
In at least two subtle ways, Nikko is designed to bring the viewer present. Japan is a drive on the left and walk on the left country, but at Nikko, tourists and pilgrims walk on the right. The round river rock courts take a conscious presence to walk across.
I’ve been overwhelmed by Japan; it is hyper-dense and a place of almost impossible contrasts. We have had almost no downtime when I could blog. Rather than trying to keep current, my new plan is to post a picture and a comment daily and then double back for a deeper look when I have time.
The art is a good place to start: much of it is graceful and minimal – especially landscapes – and just as much is pure chaos like this Keiichi Tanaami at a show in the National Art Center, Tokyo.
Bathrooms are another example: they are almost comically small – so small that the door has to swing out because there is no room for it to swing in – yet they are super deluxe with heated seats and both front and rear washing. The washing feature includes adjustable water pressure, and the rear washing feature, which I’ve used and can recommend, somehow the squirter is able to find the exact location of my butt hole every time. The only two ways that I’ve come up with that the squirter can do this is either everybody’s butthole is in the exact same place relative to the heated seat or the toilet has a butt hole locating device. I find both options equally improbable. As an aside, I had no idea that I needed a heated toilet seat, but now I know I do.
To stay on the bathroom theme, at the Nikko UNESCO Heritage site, there is a public toilet in the Tōshō-gū Shrine. In the Shrine, the floor is lacquered with a deep red lacquer, so you have to take your shoes off to go. As I was taking my shoes off, the woman next to me said to me, “I will not take my shoes off to go to a public toilet. It must be filthy in there.” It turned out that she was Vietnamese and from LA, BTW. Anyway, the toilet floor was immaculate, unsullied by us users, with the red lacquer floor in the middle of the room and a black marble inlay under the urinals and wash basins. In the courtyard outside, paved – for lack of a better word – with loose black river rocks, a woman was picking up fallen leaves with a giant tweezer. Japan is that clean.
One of the first things I was told in Japan was, “No napkins. ” In California, at Japanese restaurants, we get a hot towel before dinner, and then we discard it for a clean napkin. Here, we are given the hot towel before dinner, and we then roll it back up and put it beside our place setting. If we need to clean our mouths or wipe our fingers, we use the wet towel.
At every hotel we’ve stayed in, as the elevator door opens, a message plays. It was made by some woman – probably more than one – with a high, tiny, but cheerful voice, and I’m sure the message is important, like what floor we are on or the door is opening, but it sounds like a child is talking just behind the opening door. I’m proud to say that, after somewhere near thirty elevator rides, I am no longer fooled.
Japan is sort of famous for its trains, but so far, we’ve only been on two: one obligatory train from the airport and a very high-tech train, the Spacia – winner of the Blue Ribbon Prize 2024, for what I do not know – that Michele found through long-distance research. But, from that sample of two, what I did find most charming is that as the conductor leaves the car, he turns 180°and bows to us, a full bow from the waist with his arms and hands at his side.
After the show and before we did our view walk, we had lunch at the museum cafe. We chose The Forest Course, and it was one of the best meals I’ve ever had, definitely in the top ten. It started with an appetizer of rabbit, mushroom, and sweetbread terrine (shown below). That was followed by another appetizer and, in my case, a main course of roasted, branded pork. My roasted pork was especially good, replacing the sous vide pork chop I had at the Yellow Brix in Carlsbad, New Mexico.
Here is Michele’s take: “While I loved the mussel cream soup, I found the fish dish to be somewhat tasteless. It was not a fish I had heard of, but it was described as a firm white fish served Meunière style, which is how Black Sole is served in Ireland. What I got was not what I expected, no noticeable lemon or butter, and the fish itself was sort of tasteless. The puree of carrots with port underneath it, however, was wonderful and so flavorful that the fish just became a delivery system for that.”
After lunch, we went for an inside city-view walk, which just emphasized how big Tokyo is. It stretched to the horizon on three sides of the tower viewing walk. The amazing thing is how well the city works; there are no homeless people, everything is clean, there are cheap taxis everywhere, and there is lots of greenery and small temples.
Speaking of temples, across the street from our hotel is a small temple complex, the Toyokawa Inari Betsuin Temple, which is a mixture of both Buddhist and Shinto traditions. What I found most striking was the number of young people, especially young, sophisticated – maybe hip might be a better descriptor – women, who were making offerings and saying prayers.
For our anniversary dinner, we went to Kikunoi, a Michlin two-star restaurant that is billed as the best Kyoto-style restaurant in Tokyo. As a sort of an aside, the idea of a Kyoto-style restaurant in Tokyo seems weird, like a San Francisco-style restaurant in Los Angeles (what does that even mean?). It was different but hardly weird. It was the first time either of us had ever been to a Michlin two-star restaurant, and I was blown away! The theme was Kyoto in autumn – or, maybe just Japan in autumn, who knows – and the food was surprisingly simple with a lavish presentation.
The meal started with what the restaurant called a Sakizuke of poached turnip with walnut miso sauce and crushed walnuts. I like turnips a lot, but this was a new level of turnip goodness. About six courses in, we had Grilled barracuda sandwiched between cedar boards, shiitake mushrooms, champignon sauce, and citrus, the presentation of which Michele memorialized on her iPhone.
Somewhere near the end of the meal, we were served a small steak with Japanese pepper flowers. It was, hands down, the best steak I’ve ever had. It was cut into small squares so it could be eaten with chopsticks and then reassembled into its original shape without losing any of the glorious juices.
Our next stop is Nikko, but we plan on finishing our trip back in Tokyo.
Yesterday, we went to a Louise Bourgeois show at the Mori Art Museum. The Mori is on the 53rd floor of the Roppongi Hills Mori Tower, a 54-floor building on a hilltop. One floor below the museum, which has only one window, is a gallery wrapping around the building that is all windows and views.
