Going to the mountains for a couple of days
Some more pictures from Japan in the early 60’s
Our first trip out of Tokyo was to the old Imperial Capital of Kyoto. It was an eight-hour trip by train (Japan didn’t yet have bullet trains, but they did already had very fast, air-conditioned trains, however they were expensive). We had the brilliant idea of taking the midnight train which we would sleep on, thereby getting to Kyoto at 8 AM rested and ready to go. I don’t remember when we got to the train station, but what ever time it was, it was too late. The train was standing room only.
Japan was in a heat wave and the temperature was over 35°C outside, at the Tokyo station, it was hotter inside the train. Most, or at least many, of the people on the train had stripped down to their underwear, hanging their clothes up on hangers so they would look nice and neat when we all got to Kyoto. This was before I read about the Japanese ability to compartmentalize behavior, still being in a stifling hot railroad car with a group of people in their underwear was not as weird as it sounds here. Part of it was that underwear in those days, in conservative Japan, was modest in the extreme and part of it was that we were naive in the same way that gullible people are naive, anything seemed possible and, even, normal.
Terry and I slept sitting on the floor, leaning against the closest seat. Being young and in the Army, I was more or less able to sleep anywhere, or so I thought. In this case, we didn’t get much sleep and arrived in Kyoto ready for bed. The fact that Kyoto was even hotter and muggier than Tokyo didn’t help either. Of course, checking into a place to stay at 8:00AM was out of the question (we found out when we tried). So we spent the morning of our first day wandering through some magnificent buildings, zombie-like. Kyoto was the largest city in Japan and the Imperial capital for many years and it is full of treasures like the Imperial Palace, Nijo Castle, Daitokuji Temple, Heian Shrine, and the list goes on and on, we zombied many of them.
On five dollars a day – our approximate budget was actually six bucks a day – we had to sleep in cheap hotels and cheap hotels in Japan are ryokan, a kind of Japanese inn almost like an old boardinghouse. That meant we slept on mats on the floor in rooms with sliding soji screen doors. The bathroom was a squat toilet down the hall or down some stairs and the shower was a communal hot tub in the basement that we couldn’t use until we washed off – usually – with a garden hose. They did come with breakfast which was a money saver except that breakfast was fishhead soup with some very rubbery, chewy, things we called Dunlaps (after the tire). Looking back on it, they were more charming than this sounds and, at the time, some were less charming. Never the less, they were cheap.
After our afternoon rest, we hit the town. One of the highlights that night was a strip club where the strippers were dressed in about the same fashion as the women in their underwear the night before on the train. At the strip club, the Japanese patrons went crazy. Really crazy, running at the stage crazy. It was a shock and we kept asking ourselves Why don’t they just take a night train ride.
The next day, we started sightseeing in earnest.
One of the Kyoto sights that was high on my list was a famous – even then – Zen rock garden of Ryoanji-Sekitei. My mother thought of herself as somewhat of a Japanophile, and – in addition to exposing me to Japanese food – she taught me an appreciation of Japanese art starting with the art of the Zen garden. Our hotel was near the train station and the rock garden was at a Zen temple across town, strangely near the strip joint, and it was a long walk (in the muggy, smoggy, air). But, when got there, it was worth it.
Close by is the Zen Golden Temple of Kinkaku-ji and it was even more worth it.
Kinkaku-ji was not the only temple with water a water garden, we ran into several others in other cities, but this was our first.
Just up the road from Kyoto was an even older capital of Japan, Nara. About the only thing I remember about Nara was that it had a very urban park full of tame, miniature deer.
And just down the road was Osaka and Osaka Castle. As I remember it, Osaka was a pretty dismal, industrial city, but the castle was terrific. Years later, while reading Shōgun by James Clavell, I came across a section in which a feudal lord and a samurai are standing on the parapets of Osaka Castle, pledging allegiance while thinking about how they are going to double cross each other. I said to myself, I’ve been there.
To be continued (and finished).
ADD, ADHD…whatever
I am not sure of the terminology here but I have been diagnosed with ADD (or ADHD, I am not entirely sure what the difference is or if there even is a difference). For awhile, I was more or less in denial driven by shame.
To start at the beginning, I was listening to a woman complain about her husband who, she said was ADHD and I thought, That’s me. So I went online to take a short test and I aced it. Now the problem with ADD tests is that they are like Enneagram tests in that they are about self-identified behavior making it pretty easy to influence the answer in the direction you feel is right. Typical questions are Do you have an unusually acute sense of smell and sensitivity to touch? or Do you go off on tangents easily? Michele said Those tests mean nothing, if you really think you are ADD, you should talk to an expert.
I went to a Neurologist who has ADD and is an expert and he tested me. The expert also gave me a book about ADHD to read. One of the things the book said, in the preface and then the first chapter, or so, is something like, If you are ADHD, you probably won’t finish this book but you should read Chapter 11 and take the test in Chapter 4. Humm, the not finishing the book did sound like me and the stories even more so. After not finishing the book, I went back to the expert.
He prescribed Bupropion. Now I am not entirely sure that I even believe in ADD just like I am not entirely sure I believe in the Enneagram. But, I am sure that I am a Nine on the Enneagram, that I am not sure I believe in, and I am sure that my behavior is ADDesque. But, when the expert prescribed Bupropion, I really went into denial. I have seen too many movies when somebody says Watch out, he is off his meds, and the whole thing sort of reminded me of Ann Hathaway just getting out of rehab in Rachel Getting Married or Bradley Cooper in Silver Linings Playbook. To say that there is a high level of shame involved, is an understatement.
According to the expert and the book, some of the symptoms of ADD are “zoning out” without realizing it, even in the middle of a conversation and struggling to complete tasks, even ones that seem simple. Over the years, I like to think that I have been good at covering up these symptoms, but I know they are there. Another symptom is a tendency to overlook details, leading to errors or incomplete work and I know that is the reason I had failed the so-called Louisiana literacy test. Both the expert and the book said that these symptoms could be alleviated by the Bupropion and hope and curiosity have led me to give it a try.
I figured, while I am at it, I might as well quit all intoxicants, none of which are supposed to help. So, here I am, a clean and sober, out of the closet, ADDer on Bupropion.
The jury says the guy who killed Trayvon Martin is not guilty
Surprisingly enough, I first heard about the verdict on Facebook from Gail Cousins. (I went to Google News for details and they said The jury is still out, debating into the night. I went to theguardian and they said the same thing.) Gail said Zimmerman acquitted…. YUKK!! and my first reaction was to trump that with something more violent or, at least, more profane.
But it is morning, now, there is not a cloud in the sky and I feel differently. I am not sure that this is really about race, I think my – our, the country’s – reaction is about race, but I am not so sure that the verdict is. The fact that it took the cops forty-four days to arrest the killer is about race (if Trayvon had been the killer of a white dude, it would not have taken forty-four days to arrest him, if Trayvon had been the killer of a white woman, it wouldn’t have taken forty-four minutes).
I think what this is about is having a good lawyer, this is about a justice system that I want to say is broken, but – really – has never been fair enough to be unbroken. OJ got off on murder charges and, at the time, I said that It proves the LA Police Department is so inept that they can’t even frame a guilty man. He also had a great lawyer and that also showcased the power of a good lawyer over a mediocre prosecution.
I am sorry that this guy walked because my attitude has pretty much been He is guilty until proven innocent and – I suspect – that may be about race, but while the defense didn’t prove him innocent, the prosecution didn’t prove him guilty. That this guy walked is not the travesty, the travesty is that so many people – especially people of color, poor people – do not have a defense that is anywhere near as good as this killer’s.
So, on this beautiful day, I feel sad about the verdict, but I think the jury is right.
Some pictures from Japan in the early 60’s
While I was stationed in Korea, I was accumulating vacation days at the rate of 30 days per year (as I remember). I must have some days accumulated already because, after about eight months, I had enough days accumulated to take a thirty-day vacation. Most of the guys were saving their vacation days for when they got back to The States but a fellow GI, Terry Upman, and I decided to use ours to go to Japan.
We had several reasons for this, but the over riding reason was that Japan was actually doable for a couple of neophytes like us. China was closed, Indonesia was convulsing and neither one really knew anything about it, and the same with Cambodia or Thailand (in the not knowing anything about it department). Of course Vietnam was out of the question, even then. But I had an actual travel book about Japan; Japan on Five Dollars a Day.
We found out we could hitch a ride on a MATS – Military Air Transport Service – plane from Kimpo International Airport near Seoul to Tachikawa Airbase near Tokyo for free and that it was only a four-hour, or so, flight. Another good deal was that, unlike Korea, we could wear civilian cloths in Japan, so we both wrote home and asked our parents send us some clothes. Japan on Five Dollars a Day in hand, we went on vacation. Or leave as the Army called it.
When we got off the plane in Japan, our clothes were waiting and for the first time in eight months, I was out of uniform. That lead to my first shock. Terry and I were good friends but we were from very different backgrounds and seeing each other in our civilian clothes added a level of information that left us both realizing how different our backgrounds were. And how much it didn’t matter.
(I want to make a pitch for National Service here. It is better for the country and it is better for our young people. First, it would also be much harder to send young men, and women, into the meat-grinder of – often unnecessary and even counter productive – war if the pool of citizens from which they were drawn was the whole country. Those people who didn’t pull military service, could work in hospitals, pick-up along roads, repair trails in National Parks, do something that would add to the community. Second, I never would have met Terry if we hadn’t been stationed together in Korea. I would never had met guys from Louisiana or Georgia or New York, my view of the United States – much like young privileged people today – would have been much more parochial.)
As soon as we got on the train to Tokyo, we realized that Japan was not Korea. From what I have read, we pretty much trashed Japan but it didn’t seem like it to us. Compared to Korea, Japan seemed very first world. We got into Tokyo late Friday afternoon – maybe early evening – and it was packed with young hikers going to the mountains.
In Tokyo, we stayed at a retreat center named something like Pacific Peace Foundation (the irony was not lost on us). It was a great place and it cost us about $2.50 per night – which was the top of our range – and the view from our room, of a peaceful garden, would probably make it a $500 per night room at the Hyatt today.
Our first stop was the world-famous – even then – Ginza district of Tokyo. The lights were nothing compared to now or Shanghai now, but we were very impressed after eight months in rural Korea and I probably would have been impressed in I had just flown in from San Francisco. Tokyo was in a heat wave of ten days over 35°C and we ate dinner at a German beer garden on the top of a downtown Tokyo building.
Being in Japan in the early 60’s was a little surreal. One afternoon, we just sauntered into a newspaper building and spent the afternoon figuring out how they printed the paper in characters (as I remember, they cast each page in metal rather than used movable type). I remember the keyboards being huge like 500 characters huge but I may be wrong here. Strangely, nobody questioned two American military looking guys just wandering through the building about 19 years after the end of the war.
We found the Imperial Hotel by Frank Lloyd Wright and wandered through. It loomed so large in my imagination and it was so dwarfed by the higher buildings around it. I remember the room doorknobs being really high and many years later found out that Wright did that to make the short Japanese women stand on their tiptoes to open the doors (he thought it was charming, or something).
Not my picture.
Our first trip out of Tokyo was a train ride up to Nikko in the mountains. Nikko is a very popular Japanese tourist town and it was packed. With good reason, it is a knockout. I need a disclaimer here, I was in Japan close about 50 years ago and I am not sure that all the buildings that are Nikkoesq are actually in Nikko, some may be somewhere else.
This building may not be in Nikko. The one thing that I do remember clearly is that the white things on the tree are not flowers, they are wishes that people made and then tied on the tree at this temple. I have no idea what my wish was but I do remember leaving one.
To be continued…