Greg Sanders

Supplemental: Hooligans and Convicts

At the end of the trip last week, I’d ask asked my companions what stood out for them in Hooligans and Convicts. Inspiring was the term they’d most often used to describe the play.

One standout was a scene describing the use of hunger strikes by imprisoned suffrage activists and the forced feedings was particularly well done. It was not presented gratuitously or graphically, but both made clear the political logic of the protest and the horror of force feeding. The latter has a special resonance with me, going back to a surgery nearly a decade and a half ago. In my case the purpose was not nutrition so there were no dubious meals to face, but believe me when I say that even in a cooperative and caring environment having a tube down one’s throat is no picnic. In her case, she judged that the British authorities would let her weaken but not die in custody, and then seek to re-arrest her once she gained sufficient strength.

My companions also raised the nature of the disagreements amongst the civil rights leaders. Their efforts were united at the Seneca Falls convention, but as depicted, Elizabeth Cady Stanton wanted Frederick Douglass to delay or oppose the 15th amendment unless women were included in the expansion of the franchise, where he naturally cited the urgency for the African American community and in this portrayal noted that while white women could at least hope to influence partners, women in Black families had no representation whatsoever. Later the 19th amendment passes without provisions against poll taxes and measures to preclude Black women and alongside President Wilson’s backsliding on race. The play addresses this by telling some of the story of Mary Church Terrell and others that fought to make sure all female citizens could vote. The messiness and partial victories are important for an honest depiction of history, and I think they do help ground the nature of progress and show the way people kept fighting even when their part of a broader coalition was neglected.

The debates and speeches excerpted also brought a fresh appreciation of the incisive and clever responses and statements made by the women as they were challenged and told to keep their place. One particular way I feel inspired is to want to engage more with the primary sources and learn more of the figures myself and to bring a similar mindset when facing the challenging problems both within our nation and abroad.

Three pieces for the 70th Anniversary of the Hiroshima Bombing

As always, speaking for myself and not my employer.

I'll start with an in-depth discussion of competing nuclear strategies for the United States.

Project Atom: A Competitive Strategies Approach to Defining U.S. Nuclear Strategy and Posture for 2025-2050

Clark Murdoch and his team are valued colleagues (though Sam has gone on to greener pastures). While I disagree with Clark on a good number of issues, I think his approach of using workshops and competing teams gets to the core of what think tanks do best, acting as a home for informed arguments. My expertise does not lie in this area, but my inclinations align with Barry Blechman and Russell Rumbaugh of the Stimson Center. The left can accurately complain that they're generally excluded from such debates in the national security sphere, but frankly I'm often relieved to find an argument at all rather than the low-end Kabuki that the Farley article describes. I'll always be grateful to Clark for stirring the pot from the audience at one of our events some years ago, providing some relief from a panel that was unexpectedly aligned rather than debating.

Do Iranian Nukes Matter?

Robert Farley of the Patterson school makes the controversial case that most of the hawkish and regional players don't care about Iran's nuclear program as much as they claim. I'm not sure I agree with the hard case of this argument, but the soft version seems quite robust to me. Those forces opposing the nuclear deal have revealed that, absent revolutionary changes to the Iranian government, they care more about maintaining an adversarial relationship than they do about minimizing the likelihood of an Iranian breakout. This is a multilateral deal, backed by Europe, Russia, and China. The alternatives opponents suggest would cause the multilateral coalition to fall apart and even military strikes would only delay Iran some small number of years. I think Farley goes too far to say various factions do not care about nuclear weapons; they just are lower on the priority list than advertised.

Magical Thinking and the Real Power of Hiroshima

I was moved by this piece by Jeffrey Lewis of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies on his visit to Hiroshima.

Over time, we’ve come to see nuclear weapons as Hersey saw them, as the ultimate expression of material and spiritual evil of total war. The bomb has come to represent the ability of our civilization to destroy itself and our nagging fear that our political and social institutions are inadequate to save us from the abyss.

This norm, really this fear, helps explain why nuclear weapons have not been used again in anger in the intervening 70 years. One might point to deterrence, but nor have we used the bomb against states with no nuclear weapons. Even Eisenhower hesitated in response to suggestions nuclear weapons night help relieve French forces trapped by the Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu.

I think the President and those directly involved deserve tremendous credit for the Iran deal. Even though the then-Senator Obama's intention to pursue such a deal was the deciding factor for me back during the 2008 primary, at best I'd figured it was a 50-50 thing. But I'll end with Lewis's closing words:

A visit to Hiroshima would be a chance for the president to get it right and to reflect on his legacy. Maybe he would be satisfied that he has done enough — he has done more than many — but Hiroshima is powerful place. Amid the meetings and motorcades, I think the reality of the place may sneak under the cordons and around the bodyguards. It might slip past that famously cool façade and tickle him under the collar. I think the place would ruffle him a bit, more than he likes to admit. And I think like anyone else who visits, he’ll wish he had done more.

Ascending Fushimi Inari 2014-06-01

Bedeviled by deadlines and anxiously seeking to persuade a Governor who seems deaf to the appeals of even the business community, travel blogging has long been on hiatus. A year ago today, we had already been in Kyoto a few days and that fact has cast our minds and hearts back. And though memory may cloud, it is fortified with over nine thousand photographs, a set of rails ever ready to take us back on a journey again.

The previous day, we had traveled to Osaka, but today our destination was much closer, a legendary shrine in the mountains surrounding Kyoto. We arose that morning, not early enough to outrace the heat, and caught a local train to Fushimi Inari, shrine to the patron Kami of rice and business. If you are not familiar with the shrine, then your first image, perhaps a series of ornate buildings in traditional Japanese architectural style and likely painted orange, is not wrong per se. It is just radically incomplete because behind those initial buildings is Mount Inari.

There is a trail up that mountain, one with smaller shrines, innumerable small memorials, twists and turns, steps, and troops of often paired fox statues, the later being the messengers of the shrine's patron. But remember, this is a lead shrine to one who blesses business in a country that for a time gave America a run for her money on commerce and that has been built up over a thousand years. Here devotion is not paid through a cavernous prosperity gospel mega-church but through thousands of torii gates surrounding pilgrims on the ascent to the summit.

Stay tuned for the hike itself, undertaken on perhaps the hottest day of 2014 we experienced in either Japan or the United States.

Osaka Nightlife Matsuri 2014-05-31

Our dinner of noodle dishes, tempura, and oyakodon refreshed us sufficiently to venture back out onto the streets of Dotonbori. The last post described the center of Dotonbori as resembling New York's Time Square, with a river, although it would be more accurate to say with river traffic instead of automotive traffic. The crowds thinned out due to nightfall and being at a slight remove from the main strip.

We meandered through more pedestrian malls and onto side streets with a variety of interesting traditional and modern architecture, including several pubs, one of which was designed to look like a train car. I doubt that the stone walkways or older buildings matched the age of similar paths in Kyoto, but nonetheless each new block and turn brought distinctive charms, from metallic wall art to sumo wrestler facades to a diorama depicting a drunken cat and two mice awaiting marriage.

As the night fell grew darker, we found ourselves drawn back to the river district, where everything from bridges to boats to billboards was lit with a variety of colors and shapes, creating a festival atmosphere that carried throughout the entire city.

The displays were more ostentatious to be sure, full of bright lights, no small number of mechanical elements, and buildings a few stories taller than those just a block or two away. Looking back, though, the levels don't quite seem to achieve the same heights as the skyscrapers in neighboring districts.

With one last visit to the district's most famous bridge and ad wall, we headed back to the station. The sites were less densely packed, with wide boulevards and highways playing a more prominent role. Even so, there were fascinating mixes of wood and stone-fronted buildings at a larger scale than in the side streets. I also don't think I'll ever forget seeing a sky scraper with a climbing wall part way up. The train station itself was calming by comparison, with classical artwork hung on the walls. A train came quickly to carry us to Shin-Osaka station, so quickly that its rush of wind startled a nearby family. The journey back to Kyoto went by quickly and despite the cramped accommodations we were glad to have a room by the station.

Hustle and Bustle in Osaka's Dotonbori District 2014-05-31

Autumn has been a continuous stream of activity and events, so perhaps it's appropriate that the travelogue was suspended in Osaka's famously busy downtown. All of the travelers united there and took a walk recommended by Moti's Lonely Planet guide through the Amerika-mura district. The wandering did not disappoint there were eclectic streetlamps, murals, a giant inflatable demon, and an Uncle Sam themed ice cream place. No connection between the last two, thankfully.

Osaka is sometimes referred to as Japan's second city, which given the size of Japan's cities means that it is even larger than Chicago. However, while it does have similarities with that mid-western industrial and commodity rail hub, the general feel of the city was different. There's a mix of various traits from America's urban centers, but the neighborhood we walked through reminded me more of Southwestern U.S. cities; there is a certain newness and intentionally quirky charm. I suspect the predominance of post-war construction plays a large role there.

We traversed the city's wide boulevards and walked through a pedestrian mall to arrive at Dotonbori, a largely pedestrian district that feels a bit like Time Square with a river running through it. However, as you get to the side streets that metaphor breaks down quickly and so I'll stop chasing similes. The main pedestrian streets and bridges were boisterous with large often kitschy displays of giant seafood that would put a beach town to shame.

Such tourist districts are fun to wander, but have a rather different reputation when it comes to the affordability and quality of dining. Happily, the Lonely Planet guide again steered us well and we went to an upper story of the building depicted on the left. The specialties of the house were broth-oriented, if memories and photos serve, and the meal left us restored to venture out into the medley of alleys and smaller roads that surround the main district and reward those exploring a bit farther.

Osaka-jo and the Moti-Francis experience 2014-05-31

When the rest of the group went off to try tracking down the Transportation and Human Rights museums, Francis and I were taking our normal leisurely pace through the rest of the Living Museum, and we decided to branch off to try our own side trip. So after we finished up the museum, we took a walk to the nearest Osaka Loop Line station, Temma, and hopped over to Osaka Castle.

We came in the back of the castle area, where the JR station is, and walked up on a large number of people waiting around outside Osaka-jo Hall for a Porno Graffiti concert to start. It took a couple of beats to remember that this is a band, but they’re actually pretty good.

We made our way up past the concert venue area, and walked up towards the castle. Like many of the castles now standing in Japan, it’s a reconstruction, as the actual castle had been destroyed decades ago. Different from many other large castles in Japan, though, this one had been destroyed and rebuilt a few times over the course of its history. As the final main castle of the Toyotomi family, who briefly ruled over Japan before the Tokugawa shogunate, it has a lot of symbolic resonance.

  It’s also just stunning, rising up in the middle of Osaka in the middle of a still-open space. You can’t really tell that it’s a reconstruction from the outside. As you walk up the slopes and around the battlements, you can get clear views of the castle, and imagine how imposing it must have been to come there when it was still a seat of power.

Once we reached the castle entrance, we found out that the interior now is devoted to a history museum, largely focusing on the period immediately before the third shogunate and Toyotomi Hideyoshi himself. While I find Hideyoshi a very interesting historical figure – he was of very low birth and infamously ugly, so you can imagine how charismatic and skilled he must have been to become the leader of Japan – Francis was not very interested in seeing the inside of the castle, and the entry fee was fairly steep, so we just watched some buskers and had ice cream before heading out a different gate.

We then walked towards Dotombori to meet up with the rest of the group, and spotted some interesting buildings a  long the way, like the NHK building above and to the right, or this Luther hotel on the left, attached to the Lutheran church. The contrast between the castle and surrounding buildings, like the NHK station, is very striking, and both were different from Dotombori, where we ended up next.

Don’t split the party! 2014-05-31

Since we only had one day in Osaka, we went our separate ways in order to better catch the things of most interest. This was complicated by the fact that our portable wifi hotspot hadn’t yet been delivered, so we were limited to the one working rental phone. Over the course of the trip we had trouble with meet ups a couple times, in part because I’d forgotten how to properly use public phones. Turns out you dial first then put in the money, which is not how pay phones in the US (used to) work. Regardless, Kate and Mom got off to go to the Modern Transportation Museum (MTM) and I went on to check out the Osaka Human Rights museum. Fun fact about the MTM: it’s moving and the current location closed on April 6th. This hasn’t merited mention on the English language website and it didn’t get planned in time to get picked up by our guidebook, although wikipedia notes it, so score one for the wiki model.  So they spent several hours hanging out on the platform at Bentencho, after attempting to check out a tea shop that was full and not accepting more customers.

On my end, I walked around a bit searching for the Human Rights Museum before realizing I was misreading the map by looking where the label text was written rather the connected dock. Fortunately once I found the place, it was actually open and will get a write-up next.

Traditional Osaka street life, eight stories up! (2014-05-31)

The Osaka Museum of Housing and Living is easy to reach off the subway. It is on the eighth floor of the Housing Information Center and well worth the price of admission. The tour starts by going up another two stories and giving you a view down on the reconstructed Edo-period 1830s village. It’s in the midst of a summer festival, so shops display their wares through fanciful displays, the streets are in their full regalia, and fireworks can be seen in the nighttime portion of the cycle of the hours. After the overview you go down a level to walk the streets yourself. The whole experience was enhanced by the people wandering in festival-appropriate yukata, but unlike the similar wanderers in Higashiyama, here you have a chance to don the outfits yourself. We sadly lacked the time to wait, but those that made the change seemed to quite enjoy themselves and enriched the experience for everyone else.

There was a mix of shops, baths, workplaces, and houses on display. The displays throughout the museum were predominantly in Japanese, only fair given that Commodore Perry hadn’t yet arrived to force the opening of Japan by 1830. I believe an audio tour was available although there was a lot you could get by just observing.

The lack of English is a bit more challenging after you return to the eighth floor, but the diorama of life in Osaka across the past two centuries by strength of the models alone.  The bustling commercial district of Kitasenba on the right could easily be mistaken for a Western city of the 1930s and that development by emulation is certainly not a coincidence.

While a far lighter visit than the Hiroshima Peace Museum, the dioramas also cover the post-war reconstruction period, with the Shirokita Bus settlement shown on the left. Each of the dioramas had both the wider overview and a more intimate scene like this one that gave more of a feel for what life was like in the period in question. After you finish seeing reconstructions and artifacts from multiple points in Osaka history there’s a rotating special exhibition to round out the visit. This time it was focused on a particular architect with Scandinavian ties if memory serves.

Afterwards, we split up to go on separate (mis)adventures, but that will have to wait until the next travel post.

Preview of coming attractions: Osaka Museum of Housing and Living

I ended up getting home late tonight and prioritizing some Purple Line logo work. To reward your patience, dear readers, here’s a picture taken at our next location.

In the meantime, I’ll put a help request to figure out why typepad keeps messing up apostrophes.

Osaka Underground and a ride on the Purple Line

Japan’s third largest city (second being Yokohama off Tokyo Bay), Osaka is a short bullet train hop from Kyoto. For train purposes, Shin-Osaka station works a bit like Chicago, one of the main meeting points for those heading west or east. Shin means new, the station itself is a bit out of town and so after arriving, and admiring a fancy new model train on a far platform, we quickly caught the train to the central Osaka station and the city’s loop line.

Our first destination was lunch and perhaps unsurprisingly, we settled on trying this vaunted Osaka-style okonomiyaki at the first available opportunity. That opportunity came via the tunnels that undergird the area around the station. Nearby department stores and a range of subway stations all are accessible without crossing a single street. The tunnels were quite well lit with waterfalls and natural light in sections. That said, navigating them can be a bit of a challenge and the distances aren’t trivial, so visitors would be well advised to keep an eye out for signs and to keep a map at hand.

Once we fed, we headed to the Osaka Housing and Living museum, which looks at what life was like at various point in the city’s past. To get there we took the subway’s Purple Line, which wouldn’t particularly resemble the planned Maryland light rail line except in color, but that didn’t stop us from taking a picture! For those readers that don’t know, that particular transit line has been in the works for a generation and I put in my volunteer time trying to get us a system with some of the easy connections between various lines that cities like Osaka have. It’s late enough, that I’ll put off the museum entry for tomorrow night, but if you’d like to know where the project stands I’d recommend Robert McCartney’s column in the Washington Post.

From rice straw mats to a station that rises to the sky 2010-05-31

Sadly for us, the next morning we had to leave the quaint and affordable Gojo Guest House Annex as it had been booked for the coming days. Since it will be at least a week until we again stay in a ryokan, I’ll take a moment to review two things that make them distinct. First, on the floor there are tatami mats. They are traditionally made of rice straw and have a combine some aspect of walking on nice wood with the softness of carpet. They aren’t made for walking on with shoes or slippers, but are quite comfortable barefoot or with socks. According to wikipedia, they originally arose as a luxury good. I’d guess that traditions of shoe removal and the relative scarcity of brick and stone construction go a long way to explaining why they worked so well for Japan. The point of note in the picture on the right is the tokonoma, an alcove that displays art or flowers or the like. The specific implementation, importance, and prevalence is the main contrast with such settings in other cultures. The big thing one remember as a visitor is not to put your bags in one nor to sit or stand in it.

We ate at our favorite local cafe and I took a few pictures back from the annex roof, but after completing checkout we were off to Kyoto Station. This remarkable building was around the last time I’d visited, though this trip I had more time to appreciate it. Designed by Hiroshi Hara, the station is a futuristic contrast to the ancient city. The exterior has a fairly uniformly glass surface, but manages to be intriguing without relying on detail work. It accomplishes this trick by significantly changing its form from section to section while still holding to an overall theme.

Critically, the interior is just as remarkable. The grand atrium in a different building might simply be a courtyard separating two skyscrapers. Instead, the buildings are are joined into a single structure and provide a indoor space that’s remarkably vast. The next day we’d return at night and see a whole different part of the station.

We dropped our bags at the Hotel Keihan Kyoto and then caught our train for our the day trip to Osaka. I will confess that we did get a bit lost navigating the station several times. It wasn’t particularly labyrinthine, it’s just that finding the efficient path from one part to another sometimes proved more complex than one might think.

Ponto-cho and dinner over the Kamo River, 2014-05-30

After crossing the Kamo River, Mina-san lead us one one Kyoto’s narrow commercial streets. This one was quite popular; it was the way to get to restaurants with decks over the river. Adding to its character was a plover theme; the birds, called chidori in Japanese, were  found on many of the paper lanterns.

We’re both quite fond of plovers, although for a while I had them mixed up with sandpipers. Chidori are energetic little birds, delightful to watch around the beach. They’ll rush into the receding tide, looking for a snack, only to flee moments later as the waves return.

Mina-san had made reservations for dinner at one of the riverside restaurants, and we were thrilled to be led out onto the dining deck after first removing our shoes.  Seating proved a bit tricky as half of the members of our party haven’t quite figured out how to manage cushions with chair backs (the chair backs make the traditional kneeling hard to do, but the smaller space made lounging difficult as well) but the view and the fresh air made any discomfort far worth dealing with. I’d trained up on that skill back in 2002 in preparation for the chance to attend a tea ceremony, but I’ll confess I still had to shift my weight every so often.

After ordering drinks, primarily be ers and plum wine, Mina-san and Moti navigated the menu, selecting a lovely variety of  dishes.  The style was reminiscent of tapas, and we tried everything from vegetables to tofu to beef to sashimi.  As night fell, we relaxed and watched the people on the decks nearby, those walking along the riverbed, and those strolling along the canal.  We’re both extremely fond of outdoor dining and this was one of the loveliest settings we’ve had the pleasure of experiencing.

Following our dinner, we took a stroll through more of the nearby neighborhoods, passing eateries and other shops that had been in business for many years. The night was cool and pleasant, a wonderful contrast to the heat of the day, and the streets of Kyoto are particularly scenic after dark. In a different sort of contrast, we also saw a handful of specially-lit motorcycles traverse the streets in a manner more typical of Neo-Tokyo than the old capital. Incongruous fun aside, we stopped only because all the day’s activities had tired out Kate and my mother, and so we walked back to the Gojo Guest House for our last night there, bidding farewell to Mina-san along the way.

Update: Typo fixed.

Stops along sloping stone streets and steps 2014-05-30

The main exit to Kiyomizu-dera deposits you on Matsubara-dori and a series of stone-lined streets and enticing storefronts. I had fond memories of this walk to Yasaka-Jinga (also known as Gion Shrine and regularly in our journey around that neighborhood). The shops were a fun place to wander and pick up some of the range of chopsticks and tchotchkes we’d promised the family. The rest of the group also stopped for snacks while waiting and kindly shared with my mother and I.

Further along the walk, the balance shifts more in the direction of restaurants, tea houses, and other higher class establishments set back a bit from the main road. If memory serves, one of my favorite gardens in my prior trip was somewhere in this district. I did not find it again this time, and doubtless the first time some of the romance was its hidden nature behind the gate. But I quite enjoyed the trip nonetheless.

We took a  short break in Maruyama Park, sitting on benches around a pigeon statue and appreciating the garden which much be stunning when the trees are in blossom. I fear on my prior visit to the park I didn’t maintain proper decorum as my stomach proved highly upset. The consequences were thankfully not long-lasting then, and I attributed the ill-affects to some combination of octopus and jetlag. Being in better state this time, we had the chance to admire the fine detail work of the shrine on the way out and back to the streets of Gion.

We were headed on to dinner on the far bank of the Kamo River, again swinging by the aforementioned statue of Kabuki founder Izumo no Okuni. We would see performers there later that night, which is fitting. The statue apparently dates only to 2002 although it was in November so I could not have seen it on my first trip in January of that year, which makes sense as otherwise our professor would likely have told us about it. I go on about this statue, as I did with Mina-san while walking, because it does get to a contradiction at the heart of my enjoyment of Kabuki. That highly stylized form of theater was easily my favorite of the several kinds I saw in 2002, even beating the Bunraku puppet theater that was my assigned research area. However, thanks to Tokugawa-era social restrictions, female parts are typically played by onnagata, male actors specializing in female roles. Some day, I shall have to find a performance that finds good ways to nod to the theater’s traditions but also lets women back in on the fun and the art.

Shrine of good matches and the temple of clear water 2014-05-30

Jishu-Jinja is a moon apart from the rest of Kiymizu-Dera. Stairs wind up to a cluster of close-packed small buildings including a number of places to buy charms. The shrine is also a satellite in that it backs onto the hill rather than being surrounded by the larger temple as was the case in Ginkaku-ji. Such joint arrangements mean that it is often a bit of a challenge to discern temples from shrines, although after having played that game in 2002 in my cultural arts class I did try to regularly train up my mother in telling the difference. The sometimes colocated places of worship and the commonality of many elements between various branches of Buddhism and Shinto reflect a larger intermixing in Japanese religious life.

The term is syncretism rather than the Christian concept of ecumenism. The majority of Japanese people don’t profess a particular faith but do engage in both Buddhist and Shinto practices at various stages of life. To try to de-exoticize that a bit, every culture has rituals and traditions particularly when it comes to birth, marriage, and death. In the U.S. context even secular weddings often have Christian wedding accouterments. I’m told that they have become popular in Japan, and indeed I saw a fair number of ads to that effect.

Also, traditions that persist are often appealing in their own right. Moti’s friend and our gracious hostess Mina-san did take the challenge of the shrine to wander between the two stones embedded in the floor of Jishu-Jinja with her eyes shut. She had ready help, as the rest of our group had all had the blessing of having found terrific matches, although with my father’s passing a few years ago we did only have two couples. The main obstacles of the walk are the other visitors, although to my surprise there weren’t very many attempting the walk on that day. The ground atop was flat, although if your quest is heedless and rushed, you could speed past your goal and face disaster on the stairs. However, there’s no restriction from being helped by a potential partner or, in this case, friends. By tradition, it means that any matches will take some help from others, but that hardly seems a terrible burden to bear.

Finally, in the picture to the left,just behind the statue of patron god Ōkuninushi, is a helpful reminder that some parts of Japanese folk practices may prove more familiar than a Western traveler might first think. The three foot tall rabbit is no Easter bunny, but instead played a role in the stories of the god’s successful match. As seems to be common in stories the world over, this hare was a fairly gentle trickster, one that got in over his head and paid dearly for it. I was born on Easter and since I’m not Australian I’m quite fond of rabbits and do like taking pictures of them where err I see them. I’ll leave to my treasured readers whether this indicates a tendency towards being a bit of a rogue although I do confess that I enjoy garden vegetables (that I pay for).

The giant building blocks of Kiyomizu-dera 2014-05-30

After finishing the Philosopher's Walk, we were ready for lunch. Fortunately, Moti’s friend Mina-san had recommended a place for us to eat. It was a prix fixe menu with ten distinct bowls per person on a tray, each having a serving of a different culinary treat. This is not an uncommon style of Japanese meal. We ate at a long thin table along a plywood wall with Venetian-inspired art hanging from it. The size of a truly small Japanese eatery may be familiar to a Manhattanite, but is fairly unfamiliar throughout the rest of the U.S., as space is rarely at that much of premium.

We then met up with Mina-san herself on the way to our next attraction, Kiyomizu-dera. My memory had tricked me on the approach to the heritage site. I was incorrectly thinking it was further out of town, but instead we climbed directly from the streets of Gion to the entrance gate. The day was quite hot, but I recall the elevation helping. The aquatic theme of the complex certainly didn’t hurt; the name Kiyomizu means pure water and refers to a cascade down the foothills on which the mountain was built. As the picture on the left shows, the giant blocks were quite real, a consequence of renovations. Which is only fair as the current wooden buildings date back to 1633 and were constructed without nails.

The main building has a vast balcony, from which you can gaze out on the hills, see a pagoda dedicated to easy childbirth, or look down at the stone building where the water flows out of the hill and into the extended cups of waiting visitors. The view I most remembered from 2002 was looking back at this balcony, but before we would get there some of the group would brave crowds to walk up to Jishu-Jinja.

That Shinto shrine to Ōkuninushi, a god of love and good matches, is accessible through the Buddhist temple in a way that is not at all unusual in Japan but represents a blending of religions that I’m used to only seeing in ecumenical collaborations often driven by necessity or seeing in pictures of the trips to the Holy Land where sites are revered by multiple religions operating in close proximity. We’ll pick up with the visit to that shrine tomorrow.

69th Anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima tonight at 7:10 p.m. Eastern time today (August 5th)

Kate’s Mother passed on a reminder to me.

I thought I would pass on the link to http://www.worldpeace.org/ in case it was of interest to anyone that’s been reading along.

[Update: Fair warning, audio quality on the stream is not the best, there’s a buzzing, hopefully that’ll get fixed.]

[Update 2: We’re guessing it’s actually cicadas in the background which does make sense for summer time in a park.]

2014-05-29 The return to Gion [Completed]

After returning from Daitoku-ji, we decided to grab something to eat.  Francis’ guidebook recommended the Karafuneya Coffee shop, which apparently not only specialized in a wondrous variety of sweets, but had incredibly detailed models of them to look over while waiting to be seated.  If you’ve ever wondered what over two hundred varieties of parfait would look like, look no further.  From individual treats to a 50000-yen variety that would likely feed an entire school class, it was here.  Kate reveled in the sheer concept and ultimately decided on a caramel apple pie parfait.

The shop didn’t just serve dessert, it also had a selection of diner classics including salads and onion rings, but the displays at the front showed you where their heart was. Our visit also showed us how attitudes on smoking were evolving. We were given a choice sitting at two tables or sitting together but within close proximity of the smoking station. We’d later dine at places that did not have a non-smoking section, but the balance did seem to be shifting both in the restaurants and on the streets. In that latter case, smokers were increasingly clustered and carrying a lit cigarette while walking was discouraged, at least in the larger cities.

After we finished we crossed the Kamo river at Sanjo Dori and made our return to Gion. Looking up the Kamo and walking the streets of Gion were disproportionately strong memories from my 2002 trip, and the actual reality did not disappoint. The west bank (the right of the picture) was backed with restaurants often with deck dining and that seemed to be open much later than those we encountered the prior night in the depths of Gion. The east bank had a linear park that helped serve as a transition between the two parts of the city.

Kyoto can be a hot city. It certainly was while we were there, with easily the highest temperatures of the trip, hitting the eighties and nineties. This made the attraction of the Kamo quite obvious and tall buildings with rooftop decks proliferated in a delightful mix of styles. However, there’s nothing new about gathering by the river for entertainment; that’s where Izumo no Okuni founded Kabuki on dry riverbeds. The Kabuki-za theater, shown on the left, and a statue of the lady both owe their proximity to those origins. Famously, though, Kabuki subsequently became entirely the domain of male performers, as a consequence of the social controls of the Tokogawa era, a subject we’ll return to in a future post.

We then proceeded to weave through the streets of Gion. The section by the Kamo seemed densely packed with any number of diversions housed in an eclectic mix of architectural styles and accouterments. Our destination for the night was the Gion-Shimbashi district, a charming historic pair of streets and canal that had quieted down for the night but still was an exciting new atmosphere for most of us. At the end of the strip was a restaurant with its own patron cat, shown at the right. If you look at the slideshow below you’ll see that it even has a shelf at the base of the hostess stand with a pillow for it to rest on. I won’t try to draw any larger observations from that, aside from noting that distinctive character proved easy to find in that part of town.

After completing our circuit, we headed back towards our guest house, along the well lit streets of Shijo Dori. We made it home more easily this time, the twisty avenues at the end of the journey were becoming more familiar. Also welcoming was the sight of the Yasaka shrine at night, which unlike the many other portions of that walk actually shows up nicely in nighttime photography.

 

2014-05-29 Exploring other temples of Kyoto: Ryōan-ji and Daitoku-ji

Kyoto was Japan’s ancient capital. It is overflowing with temples, shrines, and history. The closest equivalent for the United States may be Philadelphia if the historic core were both far older and scaled up. Amusingly though, there were more odd moments of familiar culture than even Tokyo, although part of that is that hip hop is a bit more popular in the present capital. The Omerice (Omelet + Rice) let us sample a fairly common Japanese take on a western classic, although my dish with yuba, layers of the skin of soybean milk, was tasty but particularly unfamiliar. Nonetheless the Beatles were playing on the sound system in the second story dining room.

We then finished our walk from Kinkaku-ji to Ryōan-ji temple, which apparently translates as the Temple of the Dragon at Peace. It is known for its dry garden and I read of it in 2002 although I still need to verify whether I had a chance to see it on that rainy day more than a decade ago. As is often the case, the temple grounds have far more than just the elements its most known for. There are traditional gardens, with a central pond, that all visitors first pass by. After ascending the stairs, the temple building itself is a remarkable mix of white plaster and find architectural detailing. The interior has illustrated mountain landscapes or floral depictions, the former being a favorite of mine that I tend to associate more with Chinese art.

The paragon of Zen gardens itself has more than a dozen stones, although they are arranged such that you are not likely to see them all from a single position. Several of the clusters of stones blend together when viewed from a distances but are clearly distinct when gazed at directly. I don’t know the specific theology or aesthetic behind the arrangement, but it certainly does reward study from a range of perspectives and contemplation.

After leaving, we meandered the remainder of the path around the pond, seeing both ducks and turtles.  The ducks were more common, and a favorite of Francis dating back to childhood, although I went with the turtles in this instance because it had the better broad picture of the pond and perhaps also because of my University of Maryland bias.

Our next stop was another Zen temple, Daitoku-ji. The day was coming to an end, and we proved only able to visit one of the four sub-temples. Based on the walking book we had with us, subsequently returned, that temple was strongly associated with Sen no Rikyū, a pivotal figure in the evolution of the Japanese tea ceremony. I had the opportunity to participate in a tea ceremony in 2002, at a different temple that I’d gotten confused with Daitoku-ji. However, it was still interesting to wander the moss garden grounds and read once again about the history of the ritual.

One critical thing to note about the ceremony: it is meant to be a place apart.  The entrances can be fairly small, require humbling ducking, and are not conducive to carrying a sword. The practices do promote a certain equality among the participants, which may have contributed to Hideyoshi ordering Sen to kill himself, an incident allegedly prompted by Sen placing an image of himself near the top of a gateway the leader of Japan passed through. How can such a fancy ceremony promote harmony? I think the short answer is that clear rules of interaction can be empowering to those with less prestige and social capital.

After Francis successfully rescued himself from the closing temple, we proceeded out to a bus and back to central Kyoto.

2014-05-29 Our first morning in Kyoto

Morning in Kyoto broke gently. Despite having the windows open there was not that much noise on our tiny side street. My wife and my mother’s first night on futons may have been eased by exhaustion, but they are generally notably more comfortable than the American convertible couches baring the same name. As the view down the street shows, what Gion lacks in navigability, it does make up for in charm.  There was even a small ukiyoe (Japanese woodprint) museum down the street, though lamentably we never did make it in.

After settling in to our new abode, taking advantage of the showers two flights of stairs below (Kate’s only real complaint about the place, particularly as the last set was rather steep) and doing a bit of planning, most of us went off to breakfast at Café 3032.  We would return regularly; it was just a block and a half away, the food was good, and it was one of the first places open of a morning. The breakfast was more a Western style with a Japanese twist, as was the music from a cover band with a name that translated as Adult Reggae and included songs by Nirvana and an instrumental cover of Sublime. When we asked, we discovered that apparently the Japanese female vocals were popular with the American guests, so apparently they know their audience. Regardless, if you visit, I recommend the French toast; it was delicious.

After regrouping and delivering a carryout sandwich, we walked down to one of Gion’s main thoroughfares to catch the bus to Kinkaku-ji, the golden pavilion. Just before we got to the stop, we discovered that we happened to be traveling in the midst of school trip season. Delightfully, we were one of the attractions. Several groups of students we met in Kyoto and Tokyo had assignments to interview foreigners and practice their English. The first group of schoolgirls picked me, asked their questions clearly, and handed around the assignment book so everyone got a chance to participate. The questions were fairly standard: I like baseball, sushi, and did not yet have an opinion between Kinkaku-ji and Ginkaku-ji as I had not visited the silver pavilion on my last trip. I’ll likely never forget the enthusiasm of my lead questioner and was charmed in a way that didn’t wear off when we boarded the standing room only bus to one of Kyoto’s best known landmarks.

Okayama to Kyoto 2014-05-28

The trip back to Okayama Station from the Kōraku-en gardens was much tighter than I hoped, but we made it. My favorite landmark on the remainder of the trip to Kyoto was seeing Himeji castle. Like many of the castles in Japan, it was reconstructed after World War II. However, it was rebuilt using not just the original floor plan, but also with classical building methods. I toured it with friend and co-traveler Chad back in 2002. We were considering trying for Hiroshima, but when that was rejected as too far, seeing the castle at Himeji was an appealing alternative. After touring it, in slippers that were at least two sizes too small, we went on to check out their botanical garden. It was more of the scale you see in the West, but still quite nice. So while we did not stop back in Himeji this time, it maintains a fond place in my heart.

We also passed through a train yard on the way into Kyoto Station. All of the engines pictured on the left are part of full blown shinkansen. I suspect that a good part of the system’s timeliness is that they have ample reserves. By comparison, I still didn’t have my act entirely together on hotel directions, so between the comparatively small lunch earlier, we ended up getting into Kyoto with a crew that was starting to get grumpy. Moti had some success with station wifi and I cross-referenced street names, but he did end up having to call to be guided into the place once we were within a few blocks. Not my finest hour, although I’m proud to say that for every subsequent stop on the trip, there was a copy of a map saved in the trip google doc. Our residence, the Gojo Guesthouse, proved to be a terrific experience, but we were disappointed to learn that we had yet more travel to do through intricate streets, as we were not staying in the most prominent of the ryokan (traditional Japanese inn) buildings.

So, instead, we did the only sensible thing and went for food. Gion is quite a wonderful neighborhood, but unfortunately, it also can be a tricky place to eat as it gets later in the evening. Not because it’s dangerous - not in the slightest - just because so many of the restaurants, including most everything in our Lonely Planet guide, was closed. Moti and Francis scouted about and soon enough we found our salvation, an okonomiyaki place! This was not Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki but was instead in the more common mode of nearby Osaka. The meal was quite good, although we did get rushed out the door despite having ordered a succession of dishes and drinks, so we won’t be specifically recommending the place in question.

The last stretch to our rooms was not that far, but it did seem so at the time, in part as I was carrying an extra backpack. However, from here on out the news was largely good; the guest house certainly does earn our recommendation and proved a fantastic launching point for our adventures in Kyoto. But that shall have to wait until tomorrow.

Review: Journey

Journey, by thatgamecompany, has already been well considered by adoring critics, but we wanted to briefly interrupt our travelogue to give our impressions. I played it for the first time on Saturday and had a chance to watch Kate play last year. We both loved it. One playthrough is about the length of a film and the name is quite accurate; the game is a pilgrimage through wondrous and at times frightening lands towards the glowing mountaintop on the horizon. There are challenges to unravel, secrets to find, and threats to avoid. However, they are all minimalistic to focus on the core themes of the game and make it accessible even to those often neglected by high profile video game releases.

So does it even qualify as a game? Yes, for two reasons. First, Michael Abbott argues that the mechanics serve the aesthetic and help the player achieve flow, a meditative sort of enjoyment that videogames are well-suited to deliver. In addition, on a less theoretical level as Jason Killingworth discussed the jumping is just delightful.

“Psychology has proven that the behavior of our physical body directly impacts our emotional state. Test subjects who were tricked into arranging their facial muscles in the shape of a smile were more likely to claim to find a cartoon amusing. In the same way, a game that effectively imparts a sense of physically lifting off the ground will engender in the player a sympathetic emotional response of uplift and inspiration. Journey’s leap has a frolicking grace to it. Not only do you lift into the air, but your character will occasionally even twirl playfully like a sea otter before drifting back to earth. You may even grin while doing it.”

Going into a little more detail, your character can make small jumps just by navigating the world, but with the power of their elongating scarf or the help of the various friendly fabric creatures that inhabit this stricken land, you can for a time bound into the air. Your ability to do this is limited by geography and the charge on your scarf, but in either case is readily charged by visiting with the wildlife or spending time close to your traveling companion. In this way, the leaping is moderated but unlike power pellets or a time-based recharge, the way to replenish the power ties you closer to the world and your companions.

The companions are where the real wonder of the game comes in. After the first stage, you will often be paired with another player, elsewhere on the internet, but given only the most rudimentary means of communication. Perhaps surprisingly, this results in interaction that is entirely different than the hostility that too often defines online interaction. This was entirely intentional. Jenova Chen, one of the designers, discussed his influences and motivations with Simon Parker of Eurogamer.

"I believe that there are only three ways to create valuable games for adults. You can do it intellectually, whereby the work reveals a new perspective about the world that you have not seen before. The closest thing I can see to this is Portal. The second way is emotionally: touching someone. You can touch kids emotionally very easily, but it's far harder to touch adults because they are so jaded.

"The only way you can touch an adult is by creating something especially relevant to their lives, or by creating something that is so authentic that it becomes empowering. In order to reach those heights you have to reach catharsis. So that after the strong emotion the adult can begin to reflect on his own, start to find meaning in his own life. That's how I can see I can make games for people around me. The third and final way is by creating a social environment where the intellectual or emotional stimulation could happen from other people. Those are the only three ways."

Earlier in the piece, he noted that that third piece is often challenging because most multiplayer videogames are about killing one another. It’s well worth reading the entire piece, about how they choose to take out many of the puzzles, elaborate interactions, and even collision detection while working to reinforce the loneliness of the places.

And it works. Scott Juster discussed how this changed his outlook to fellow players. So many of the discussions of Journey focus on what happened with their companions, be it Jamie Love’s and Brendan Keogh’s reviews or the collection at Medium Difficulty and the Journey Stories Tumblr.

We shall post a discussion of our own Journeys on a future night.

Image credit: Promotional screenshot from thatgamecompany.

Okayama Kōraku-en garden 2014-05-28

Japanese tourism promotions like to work in threes. Miyajima is one of the three great scenic spots in all of Japan, along with Matsushima which we would visit far later in the trip, and one more which we did not visit. The town of Okayama, meanwhile, has one of the three great landscape gardens of Japan, Okayama Kōraku-en, and conveniently was right on the way to Kyoto. We ended up scheduling things a bit tightly, although my mother helped make sure we had a bit more time than we may first have planned.

The station itself was a bit challenging, as we ended up having to split our luggage across multiple locker locations. Thankfully, Japan is saner than the U.S. on this front, so station lockers are easily available. However, they are still fairly costly and the time picking up our luggage on the way back our nearly made us miss the train. Thankfully, at least the bus ride to and from the garden was quite pleasing and we got to see some of Okayama’s trams on the way. We had to pause for a moment while negotiating lunch and figuring out which bus to take back. However, once we were inside the garden proper it was easy to see how it earned its reputation.

The crow castle on the horizon to the left of the picture is not part of the garden, and the best views of it cost a separate admission, but even for the frugal it provides an atmospheric backdrop. The proximity to the castle is not coincidental, as Kōraku-en had been the garden of the daimyo (local lord) until it was opened to the public in 1884. While the view from the castle is no doubt impressive, the garden has its own mound that we proceeded to next that offered a look down at the pond and the inaccessible island buildings.

On the way down from the mound, Moti and Francis encountered a cat. Feline wanderers were not uncommon on the trip, but I don’t think we encountered them that much more frequently than we would in the U.S. This is perhaps slightly surprising, as cats are definitely a favored animal and well represented in souvenirs and anime characters. This particular sunbather looked fairly well fed, but I wouldn’t venture to guess whether it was actually a pet or was just well-treated by gardeners and visitors.

If you want a full view of the garden, you’ll have to come back once we have the slideshow attached to it; there’s too much there to summarize even in a long post. We’re definitely fans of both Japanese and Chinese gardens. we saw three to five of each on our last trip to the Pacific Northwest, so we weren’t caught by surprise by classic elements like teahouses and zig-zag bridges. However, what did surprise me was finding a building with a stone-strewn stream running through it. It was quite a meditative place to sit with one’s shoes off and I’ve never seen the like before or since.

We split up some throughout the journey. My mother actually went at a slightly faster pace and was rewarded with a closer look at the cranes kept in a large enclosure at one end of the garden. The rest of us did more swift dawdling, taking the time to buy teahouse snacks for later consumption aboard the train later and then looping through the agrarian fields and forests of the garden.

This was actually the second time we’d seen such plantings in a garden in Japan, but they were still rather surprising based on our past experience with such gardens in the United States.The forests were arboretum worthy and showed remarkable color even in the summer. In this case, I believe the well known kaede, red maples, was the source. However, throughout the trip we saw a bit more color than we expected for the season. Classically speaking, I slightly prefer Chinese gardens to Japanese because such fancies as large rocks and elaborate courtyards appeal to me. This visit changed my mind to an extent. I still am quite in love with the Summer Palace park in Beijing, but Okayama has definitely made it into my top list of gardens. Fortunately, as an American, I can pick a top ten rather than needing to limit myself to three.

Update: Minor typological fixes.

Transit Blogging: Hyperdia: emperor of route finders

After we finished at the Hiroshima Peace Museum we explored the city a bit more while Moti and Francis finished their visit. The next step our trip was Kyoto, but during research during brief down periods, I’d discovered that our initial scenic plan along the Sea of Japan just wasn’t going to work. While the Japanese rail system is amazing and extensive, it sensibly isn’t high all speed rail, particularly when crossing from one coast of the country to the other. As a result, there were a few different points along the trip where our desire to check out interesting routes was foiled as we realized that the train trip alone would take an all day commitment.

Thankfully, there is HyperDia.com which, while not primarily a mapping tool, is far and away the best route planner I’ve had the pleasure of using. For example here’s the search we used to get to our next destination, a stopover in Okayama on the way to Kyoto.

The output format is fairly straightforward and familiar. The strength is really found in the speed and stability combined with a wisely designed interface. It isn’t without flaws - use of the back button rather than scrolling down to the bottom will result in you having to regularly re-input parameters - but I found it a stalwart companion throughout the trip and only once did it not cover all the modes of interest.

There are a few different aspects that makes the interface so convenient:

• The English interface is top notch and in no way feels like a neglected variant of the main Japanese page.
• The destination completion works well. Try it out and just type in a few Japanese cities you know and you’ll quickly see a range of options.
• The option to set up to three pass through cities makes it easy to try out scenic trips and experiment with brief stopovers. The only flaw there for tourists is that it doesn’t do loop trips; you can’t have the same destination twice on the list.
• The check boxes make it easy to customize your choices. For the average JR Pass rider, you’ll probably want to click off the Nozomi and other top-tier Shinkansen, as they aren’t covered. More fine tuning is also allowable, but in most cases for inter-city travel, the first few options will just be JR anyways so you don’t need to worry about it.

This doesn’t mean that you don’t want a companion book or the like; we certainly recommend Japan by Rail although most any reliable guide should mention station names. Hyperdia isn’t meant to be the Amtrak Interactive Rail Atlas or the like; you’ll still have to figure out where you want to go and what you want to see on your own. But once you have a couple possibilities worked out, it’s easy enough to experiment with a range of ways of running your trip. To be fair to the American sites, Hyperdia is such an amazing tool because it works with such an fantastic infrastructure backbone. The trains stick to their timetables and three-minute transfers are both achievable and not catastrophic in the event of a failure. The sprawling stations do have consistent numbering systems that are reported through the trip planner. Best of all, most anywhere you want to go, you can get there by train, possibly with a bit of help from a bus for intra-city travel or when going off the beaten path.

Hiroshima Peace Museum: Main Building 2014-05-28

Content warning: The main museum gets most directly into the consequences of the bombing of Hiroshima, beyond even what is shown in the East building.

Walking through corridors showing the damage done to Hiroshima to property and to people, I certainly felt a moral imperative that these weapons never be used again. However, how is it that nuclear weapons have only been used twice in battle? I believe deterrence and mutually assured destruction is part of the story, but a key related concept is what Thomas Schelling calls the nuclear taboo. At first the escalation to nuclear weapons was seen as more of a continuation of existing policy than a radical break during WWII, and President Eisenhower made nuclear first use a policy in the event of a conventional Soviet invasion of Europe. However, by 1964 President Johnson declared “Make no mistake, there is no such thing as a conventional nuclear weapon. For 19 peril-filled years no nation has loosed the atom against another. To do so now is a political decision of the highest order.” This reflected earlier decisions not to deploy them in Korea and subsequent avoidance by the U.S. in Vietnam, by Israel against Egypt in 1973, and by the Soviets in Afghanistan. Nina Tattenwald discusses the origin of the taboo (summary by Patrick Lam) and the main building passionately and decisively makes the case that this taboo must be maintained whether you believe in full abolition or that they’ve contributed to the decline in great power war.

The displays (excerpted online) covered the multitude of ways that nuclear weapons can visit destruction upon cities: the rays of heat, the blast itself, the conflagration of flammable materials, and of course the radiation. The picture on the left shows a portion of the facade of a bank where someone was sitting at 8:15 that morning, likely waiting for it to open. Given the location, the person died on the spot, the stone around them was blasted white while the steps underneath them left the remnant of their “shadow” in the middle of the picture.

The mangled remains of the city, stone, wood, and steel filled many of the displays showing the widespread extent of the damage from a single nuclear bomb with a small yield by today’s standards. The museum did its best to mark where each piece came from within the blast zone. The details filled out the almost incomprehensible damage shown in the photographs and the detailed model on the right. One piece I don’t have the heart to include in the display was the shredded remnants of the school uniforms of children who died in the bombing or the days thereafter (let alone the photographs of the burned bodies directly afflicted). Some had been evacuated to the country but others were conscripted to create firebreaks and in anticipation of conventional bombing.

Death and devastation can come in many forms. As I’ve earlier mentioned, more people died from a single raid in the firebombing of Tokyo; however, that raid involved 334 B-29s with 279 dropping bombs. By comparison, the Enola Gay flew with only two other planes, suggesting a terrible potential to scale that was achieved by both sides in the Cold War. This is also where the radiation comes in, as experienced by many of the hibakusha, the survivors of the atomic bombs. Sadako Sasaki, who helped inspire the Children’s War Memorial, had been two at the time of the bombing but died years later of leukemia despite having been quite healthy in the interim. The picture on the right are some of the cranes she folded; you may have read or heard of her story when you were a child.

The remainder of the museum focused on the stories of survivors, the rescue and recovery efforts, and even pictures drawn by those who were there. This was complemented by prayers and wishes for peace from around the world and a view out to the rest of the park. Based on the wikipedia page, one million people visit the museum a year. I hope, in addition to whatever else we do to make this a better world, we all work to keep this taboo from fading.

Hiroshima Peace Museum: East Building (Pt. 1) 2014-05-28

Some years ago, in my home town of Washington, D.C., the Air and Space Museum had an exhibit about the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. I believe I went through it, but I may just be conflating pictures of the plane with past trips to the museum in my ever fallible memory. Regardless, that exhibit unsuccessfully sought to avoid controversy by focusing on the technical aspects and avoiding politics and context. Worse yet are museums that actively distort the past for propagandistic purposes. By comparison, the Peace Museum takes an extremely challenging topic and addresses it in a forthright and informative matter.

The initial section gives the history of Hiroshima leading into the Second World War. Hiroshima was a garrison city a staging area for troops in various wars, one of the centers for emigrants from annexed Korea, and an industrial town with a significant reliance on mobilized students and forced labor. The panel on the right discusses the invasion of China: “Early in the War with China, the Japanese Army occupied many Chinese cities. In December 1937, it took the capital city, then called Nanking. The occupation of this important city cheered the Japanese people, who considered the war in China a holy crusade. Hiroshima’s residents celebrated with a lantern parade. In Nanking, however, Chinese people were being massacred by the Japanese army.” It goes on to briefly discuss varied estimates of the death toll. Wartime atrocities are not the subject of the museum - for that there is the Kyoto Museum for World Peace - but it squarely addresses the context of the bombing before making the hard case against it.

After reviewing the history, the museum proceeds to the actual attack. There are any number of artifacts, although the greater detail is held for the second building and a future post. On your left is a pocket watch donated by Akito Kawagoe, stopped at the exact moment of the bombing. The discussion of the decisions of the U.S. government does not rely on hyperbole. Instead it presents key memos and minutes from the debates, showing various competing views. As is somewhat widely known, the old capital Kyoto was also considered as a possible target. However, its selection was vehemently opposed by Japan experts within the U.S. government as a sacrilege which would destroy any hope of future peace with Japan. The museum did not specifically argue that there was a clear course that would have achieved peace without the use of the bomb, but did highlight that possible concessions, such as allowing the continuation of the imperial system as the occupying forces did anyways, were not deeply explored before the attack.

 

The destruction of the bombing was shown in multiple forms, including the two models above. One related point mentioned by the museum, but not an area of primary focus, was that the firebombing of Tokyo and not the bombing of Hiroshima or Nagasaki is widely cited as the source of the largest casualty count from a single air raid. The horrifying specter of nuclear war is not just the enormity of the individual bombings, but that the threat can scale up in a way that more air force-intensive operations could not. This relative continuity in death toll is perhaps one of the reasons why the specific morality of the atomic bomb was not as hotly debated. In many ways it was a continuation of existing policy by other means. However, the questions raised there require research beyond the scope of this post.

Our last morning at Peace Memorial Park 2014-05-28

The entire group wanted to spend time at the museum, but Kate, my mother, and I decided to get up earlier and attend the daily carillon ringing at Peace Memorial Park one last time. The chimes toll electronically, with a slight background buzz, but I’m still moved every time I hear it.

When approaching the carillon, we passed by a large number of students, respectfully gathered at the Children’s Peace Memorial. They presumably were there with similar intent when it came to timing. Moti was not with us, so I could not tell you what exactly was said, but the sentiment was unmistakable.

We then walked to the west side of the island, which we had not yet explored. It was perhaps the portion in which the weight of history was felt most heavily as it included the Atomic Bomb Memorial Mound which sat over a vault holding the unclaimed remains of many of the victims of the bombing.

Further south is a monument specifically to the Korean victims of the attack. It estimated their number at twenty thousand, about ten percent of the dead. [The total casualty count estimated by the memorial is higher than most other sources, but the estimate of the number of Korean dead is in line with what I’ve seen elsewhere]. Japan occupied Korea well before the U.S. had entered the second World War and the garrison city of Hiroshima had a population that were soldiers, mobilized students, and ordinary civilians. Later in the trip, at the Osaka Human Rights museum, I got to see video of other Koreans, then residing in Japan, celebrating the end of the war and as one might expect very glad to see the end of the occupation of their nation. The placement of this memorial on the main island is actually a relatively recent change, one that happened only within the past few decades. I’m very glad that it did.

Update: Fixed the date in the title and add a note on the casualties.

Transit Blogging: Hiroshima

With my family’s longstanding advocacy on behalf of Maryland’s prospective Purple Line, we check out light rail most anywhere we travel. An interesting thing about trams and streetcars, at least in cities that have had them for some time like Hiroshima, is that there is a huge variety vehicles in service. I’m sure there are multiple factors at work, but one big one is that many cities abandoned their surface rail networks in the latter half of the twentieth century. As a result of that, and the standardized gauge, many cars seem to have shuffled around the world to various cities and transit museums.

This is not to say that the city doesn’t have a range of shiny new cars. There were several varieties about, including an underground line I visited on our last day there, after finally going to the Peace Museum. The underground line thankfully had a machine to get a Paspy, the local smart card. As I believe I’ve earlier mentioned, the trick to getting these cards is to look for machines labeled IC, probably for intelligent chip or the like. The best strategy is typically to just find the card when arriving in the station, a task that has grown much easier than it once was. Just a few years back, finding cards normally involved hunting down an authorized retailer or one of a small number of valid distribution points. As you would expect, things vary greatly from city to city, but I think that smart chip cards have just gotten cheaper and more widely available, so distribution has gotten more convenient.

For me, the trams really epitomized the city’s charm and resilience. They were running again at an astonishing pace after the atomic bombing and even with a wide range of types of cars they manage to provide service with remarkable regularity. If you missed one, there always seemed to be a new car just down the line. The interiors were often crowded, but the riders were courteous and sometimes the cars themselves were full of whimsy such as the art contest winners depicted on the right. The friendly and welcoming nature ultimately comes from the city and its people; the infrastructure just reflects and reinforces it. But the enjoyment of the place’s vibe was common throughout the group. Francis was pleased to discover that one of Hiroshima’s sister cities was Montreal. I can see it.

Itsukushima Shrine and Evening in Miyajima 2014-05-27

After reaching the base of the mountain we bid a fond adieu to Toshi. Our next priority was clear: food. Fortunately, like popular tourist spots everywhere, there was a town happy to ply wares to satiate our hunger. In a precursor for the remainder of the trip, there were also vast crowds of students. This appeared to be field trip season and Moti told us that the volume was far greater than he was really used to. While the picture-taking was sometimes more challenging as a result, sharing the sights with the Japanese students was a consistently enjoyable experience and the times later in the trip where we interacted were all the more so.

My mother then took a break to sit by the coast, write postcards, and be accosted by deer as the rest of us went on to Itsukushima Shrine. I managed to make a cultural faux pas on the way in by sitting at the edge of the stone basin used for washing one’s hands on entry. That said, they still let me in and we were able to wander the orange painted halls of the complex. When the tide is up, the wooden floors would be consistently surrounded by water, but at this hour we could clearly see the flood plains.

In a touch of home, the muddy earth also was home to tiny crabs. Not the sort we normally see (and eat) in Maryland but a smaller type that reminded me of the burrowing crabs of the west coast of Florida. I wasn’t aware of such a phenomenon and may have to check out their place in Japanese myth. The rest of the shrine was a bit more familiar. There was a stage for Noh theater, miko (shrine maidens) selling incense and charms, and places to leave prayers behind or to get your fortune read.

Many of those elements can also be found at Buddhist temples, which made it challenging when I quizzed my mother later on identifying whether a place of worship was a temple or shrine. I primarily learned the difference thanks to my 2002 cultural arts class. The easiest way to tell typically is that the presence of Torii gateway, like the famous one on the left, indicates Shintoism and thus shrines. There’s any number of other signifiers, from the color orange to hanging paper, that also are good clues, but the Torii are the most reliable. That said, there are times when small shrines can be found in temples so sometimes you just have to read shrines and books to be sure.

After touring the Shrine we went on to a tasty meal, primarily consisting of the local specialty: anago (salt-water eel). I enjoyed it, although my favorite is still unagi (fresh-water eel). That said, when I was checking the wikipedia pages to get the words right, I saw that there are apparently real sustainability concerns around unagi, so I should probably make that a rarer treat.

After dinner we road the ferry back to the mainland and then took the train back to Hiroshima for our last night in the city.

Descending Mount Misen by Ropeway

Our next destination was clearly in view from the summit. That building in the middle-left of the picture is the upper terminus of a hanging cable car system. As the picture also shows, it’s a bit of a distance from the summit, with a few ups and downs in between. We could have hiked the whole way down, but we were getting hungry for something more substantial and my mother was hardly the only one that was getting rather tired.

This particular journey was not covered by our JR passes, but we were happy to pay. The trip actually came in two parts. The first in a larger car that could hold more than a dozen people. Ours reasonably had another group with us, but that didn’t prevent appreciation of a slightly closer view down to the water below.

The next stage was a transfer to smaller, more numerous cars on a steady loop. This made for easier photographs and Miyajima was no less scenic as we returned to sea level, even if the shrine itself was not necessarily on full view along the route. The legend of Itsukushima Shrine is that is that a crow led three goddesses to the site. Given the aerial views, it isn’t hard to see what that legendary guide saw in the place.

The base, as you’d expect, was not as fascinating as the peak. There was a koi pond and other adornments around, but it was actually the sign on the left that most left me charmed. I don’t make a habit of posting signs with unusual English as I’m dreadfully monolingual despite a fair number of classes in a smattering of languages. However, sometimes another’s spin on your native tongue has a special appeal.

Geo-tagging and Flickr related delays

The first trip I rigorously photoblogged was my tour of China in 2007. Back then, as now, Flickr offered a rather good deal on storage and had some helpful online tools. For reasons I do not understand, perhaps relating to the increasing size of photos or mismanagement by Yahoo, uploading to Flickr has gotten steadily harder over the years. Back in 2013, I was regularly stymied when trying to upload photos from my trip to attend Guy’s funeral. The Uploadr tool, since deprecated, would inexplicably leave out some of those photos and consulting with technical support did me little good. I’ve tried using Flickr’s new website uploading tool and found it to be slow and quirky. It simply failed to register many of my Picasa tagged photos until I’d given it ten to twenty minutes to finish processing the photos. I’m going to try a few third party apps like jUploader and slow updating for now, but at this point I’m largely sticking with Flickr for legacy reasons. If I ever get around to swapping my site to Wordpress I may find a new photo hosting solution as well.

Happily, the geo-tagging delays were playing with a new toy and not a frustrating attempt to reproduce what once was simple. On the left, you can see our first morning in Tokyo mapped out in Google Earth. Our new camera has wifi abilities and could grab geo-tags off another source, but I have not yet linked them up or worked out whether it could get these tags from my phone without draining the battery. Once I’m further along in blogging I will try to figure that out and may pick a dedicated wifi geotagger if need-be. This effort is worth it to me because I take far too many pictures (between my mother’s camera and ours we took some 9,200) and actually sorting through them and tagging them to make them usefully findable in the future is no small project. In essence, the photos regularly serve as my trip notes. Many of the more banal images are there just because of some cross-cultural or geographic detail that I wanted to remember. However, if I at least know where the photos are from, deriving many of the tags should be much easier as should jogging my memory.

The Picasa geo-tagger works with Google Earth, allowing you to do text based searching or visual scanning of the 3D map in order to find where your photo was taken.  The interface can be a little rough, you notably you cannot change the size of that tiny little window in the lower right to give you more of a photo to work with. Similarly, while you can control the number of photos being tagged on the Picasa end, you cannot shift-select once you’re in Google Earth. Tagging one or tagging all our your only option. Finally, I had a bit of false hope based on the fact that the size of the focus reticule, seen in the upper left of that picture, stays the same size at variable level of zoom. My initial naive take was that if you tagged from a greater zoom, it may somehow track that, perhaps in an error measure or just by rounding off the latitude and longitude to avoid false precision. That is not the case, so I’ll have to consult my friendly neighborhood esteemed information scientist about geo-tagging best practices.

The journey to Miyajima 2014-05-27

The trip to Miyajima from Hiroshima is quite straightforward. If you have a JR Pass, just grab the train to Ono and ride the ferry over to the island. Both are covered. There’s also a tram line that runs parallel which may well be cheaper for non pass-holders. However, it’s a good thing we took the train as it meant we met Toshi, our on-and-off companion for the day. He noticed Moti was actually reading the Japanese on the platypus-labeled signs that told tourists how many stops until they had to get off (why a platypus? short answer: Japan loves cute things; longer answer: the platypus is the mascot of JR West and also appears on their smartcards). Toshi is a civil engineer who works in Germany but was making a trip back home on vacation.

Between my leaving my pass at home and earlier trip to the park, we hadn’t made it out in time to see the Itsukushima Shrine’s fabled torii gate at the high tide, when it appears most to be floating in the water. On the day we visited, that happened around 8 am and low tide struck at 2 pm. When the tide is entirely out, the gate is fully accessible by land and the floodplain around the shrine is similarly dry. Nonetheless, even in the middle stages, the gate is a sight to see and the deer are almost as prevalent as they are at Nara. We didn’t make that site of legendarily large wooden temples and bowing deer trip, although I still have fond memories of it from my 2002 excursion.

In the morning, we did not actually stop in the shrine, although we did take our time to look at the torii gate while the water was still in. The architecture does do a beautiful job of accenting the natural beauty of the bay and the mainland and island mountains. While we did look around the town, it was primarily a waypoint on our journey to the base of Mt. Misen. That hike would take us most of the day and is the subject of the next post.

Okonomiyaki, Hiroshima-style! 2014-05-26

Hiroshima loves okonomiyaki! How can I make such a bold statement about a city? Well, it has a three-story tall building full of okonomiyaki stands, Okonomimura, in the central business district. I think that qualifies, don’t you? Happily my wife Kate also loves okonomiyaki and the last time she had it was with our friend Coby in L.A. This is in large part my fault, as my diet restrictions on mammals and cephalopods runs right up against some favored ingredients in the cuisine.

The dish is a grilled one, typically prepared in front of the customer either at a common bar like the one in the picture to the right or at grills at the table. The word basically means grill what you like, so this isn’t really a cooking gimmick so much as intrinsic to the style. Ironically, the only available local option we know about in Howard County is premade, so I can’t get it without pork. All of the chosen ingredients are combined to form a pancake-style final product, although the Hiroshima style is a particularly large one, in part due to its inclusion of cabbage and noodles.

We picked a place by going up to the third floor, walking to the pack, and then sniffing. The back right place had a pleasant odor, and though almost all of the menu items contained pork, I was able to request a special order. Our noses served us well; our range of selections were all quite good and our server was quite the charmer. She already had a smattering of relevant English questions and worked with Moti to start to master follow-ups. She’d learn from him to go for “Where in Canada?” or the like after people named their country of origin and then tested it out on the other people at the table.

I don’t have the card handy at the moment, but I intend to specifically list the name and location of the place, as we’d all recommend it to anyone visiting the city. Kate continues to love okonomiyaki in all its forms, and I should perhaps just come up with a written Japanese explanation of my preferences. That said, we consistently had a fun time with later places that served it, and it’s popular throughout Kansai; don’t miss an opportunity even if you aren’t in Hiroshima.

Arriving at Hiroshima 2014-05-26

While I loved the entire trip, Hiroshima is what I cite as my favorite part. This was partially true because I had been to Kyoto, Osaka, and Tokyo in the past, so while still spectacular they were not as packed with discovery. Also, while Japan is a treasure trove of trains, Hiroshima is flush with trams, both of the single car streetcar and the two car long trolley variety. The short length is made up by volume, a mixture of classic cars like the one on the right to smooth curves of modern models. After completing our misty ride on the Sakura line from Osaka to Hiroshima, we rode one of those classic cars into the city center and then walked down to our hotel, the Tokoyu Bizfort.

My mother called it in for the night, and the rest of us walked down a covered promenade towards the river and the Peace Park. I’d seen such plazas on my past trip; they’re a natural outgrowth of large pedestrian-friendly cities that have an extended rainy season. We stopped for a chocolate snack at the Stick Sweets Factory before walking the rest of the way to the Peace Memorial Park.

The Park was once a busy downtown commercial and residential hub. In 1945 Hiroshima was a garrison city, but still an urban space in its own right. The nominal target of the atomic bomb was the Aioi bridge at one end of the island. The building Hiroshima is perhaps most known for, the A-Bomb dome, was the Hiroshima Prefectural Commercial Exhibition Hall, the closest building to survive the blast. We walked through the park as the sun went down.

The first Shinkansen 2014-05-26

The Japanese bullet trains, literally translated as new highways, began operations in 1964, coinciding with the Tokyo Olympics. Some of that difference with the history of the United States is of course driven by geography and the fact that it’s much easier to build straight rail in country forced to redevelop itself after bombing. Nonetheless, given the decay inflicted upon our cities by the interstates, I feel confident in saying that President Eisenhower should have gone with trains, at least on the North-East corridor and the like.

Our journey south had two legs; the longer stretch was between Tokyo and Osaka. The picture on the left is of the more rural end of the spectrum of what we were seeing. Cities and towns were also regularly present at the foot of misty mountains. Prior to going to Japan we had picked up a deck-building board game called Trains with a Japanese theme. One of the features of the board was that plains were in light green and mountains were in dark green. After this section I understood why; vast hills were everywhere and from what we could see beneath the mists they seemed consistently below the tree line.

The stop in Shin-Osaka was fun for me, although we didn’t have time to leave the station. Shin-Osaka refers to the new Osaka station; the older central one couldn’t affordably be expanded to become a network hub and as a result you’ve got to catch a quick train to get between the two. General fans of technological wackiness should note that there’s an escalator that briefly turns flat in the middle. This was actually our second strange pedestrian aid of the trip. When we were transiting through Toronto they had a high speed moving walkway with foot-wide platforms moving at higher than usual speed, spreading out for most of the journey and scrunching together at the ends. I suppose the lesson there is just that inventors and designers think a lot about how to efficiently move people through hub stations.

Tsukiji fish market, Hama-Rijyu gardens, and leaving Tokyo for the first time

Our trip was skirting on Japan’s hot and wet summer, so our overall plan involved a journey from South to North with a bit of time in Tokyo at both ends. This ultimately worked out fairly well; we faced some days of persistent rain and all-encompassing fog, but the temperature was only a problem for the Kyoto stretch. However, since we were jetlagged and rising early anyways, we gave ourselves the morning off in Tokyo and went to see the Tsukiji fish market. As during my trip in 2002, we didn’t feel up for doing the 5:30 AM tuna auction. What we hadn’t realized was that under the current rules, if you don’t get one of the small number of slots for the auction then the commercial side of the market is closed to tourists until 9 a.m. No matter, we still got to see tuna being carted around, to dodge the ubiquitous mini-trucks with their conical front steering columns, and to have a lovely sushi breakfast.

The commercial district and small nearby shrine are fun, but it’s the right off the boat fish that’s the most appealing part of a morning market visit. That particular day, the chef was pushing a batch of oysters that was apparently the pick of the market not an hour before. We took that advice and were impressed; I’m not really an oyster person but trying something in top form is a great way to better understand the appeal.

After leaving breakfast (and procuring an octopus tea cup), we visited the fruit and vegetable market. There was a range of fascinating selections and it did help me understand the Japanese side of the constant trade battles regarding their restrictive agricultural  markets. Moti, who had worked with the JET program for a year in cherry-producing Yamagata, told us stories of getting vast numbers of cherries gratis because of small imperfections preventing their sale on the market. I’ve seen impressive fresh produce at U.S. farmers markets and fine grocery stories, and I’m no expert on these issues. However, the food we saw and the ate throughout the trip successfully cultivated a gourmand feel that is markedly different than the industrial agriculture portion of the U.S. market. It was also the first time I recall seeing wasabi in the raw and I was pleased to discover that the spice had a spiky covering to matched its flavor.

Wandering around the market itself was still remarkable if claustrophobic at times. The market itself may be moving before too long, a subject of some controversy, and seems to have a somewhat uneasy relationship with its status as a tourist destination.

We ended our Tokyo visit on a more relaxed and open note and visited nearby Hama-Rikyu gardens. One of many gardens once reserved for the ruling elite and now open to the general public, it has many elements you can find in Japanese gardens in North America but on a far greater scale. What could not have been anticipated by its original designers was the contrast of old and new, nature and city, of wooden plank bridges and skyscrapers. Such contrasts can certainly be found at Chicago’s Skyline Drive or New York’s Central Park, but the sheer density and continuous history of Japan makes such striking combinations the rule rather than the exceptions. After finishing that walk we returned to our hotel and caught our first Shinkansen to Hiroshima.

Recovering from Jetlag on our first night in Japan 2014-05-25

The ride into Tokyo takes an hour on the N'ex (Narita Airport Express). That fact, combined with the sexy streamlined N'ex engine you see on the right, confused me as I knew high speed rail should be able to travel the distance between even a far flung airport and its base city in a fraction of the time. The answer was quite straightforward, mere streamlining does not high speed rail make. The actual Shinkansen require far straighter track and have streamlined nose cones that are reminiscent of airplanes.

The countryside witnessed on the journey into Tokyo is not rural but does include rice paddies. As in China and Egypt there is no arable land to spare, in large part because of the widespread hills and mountains. As I understand it, the difference is that Japanese production is artisanal rather than subsistence. Japan is a net importer of rice but has particular standards when it comes to that staple and other crops.

When we arrived at Tokyo station, Moti took a moment to exploit the JR station provided free wifi and get a map for our hotel. That said, don’t necessarily rely on that trick, in part due to use of a range of bands, some of our phones often did not see or could not use any given wifi service. We did already have an address, but under the Japanese system, addresses refer to neighborhood and block numbers rather than position on the street. The numbers are sequential within the neighborhood, but there are no numerical avenues or grid-style positioning reference points. Thus, if you don’t have mobile internet access, it is best to have the closest transit stop with a map image handy for any locations not listed in a guidebook.

Fortunately, our hotel, the Mitsui Garden Hotel Shiodome Italia-ga, was labeled on the station map. The Italia-ga part of the name refers an Italian theme in the district as a whole, also reflected in the Italian restaurant in the hotel. That said, we favored cheaper fare for the night and went to one of the local convenience stores, a FamilyMart. The name convenience store does accurately describe the longer hours and range of products, but notably these stores offer a range of fresh pastries and food choices more in keeping with the prepared food section of a high-end grocery store than any counterpart in the U.S. What’s remarkable is that the prices are in line with conveniences stores in the U.S., the breakfast and snack items on the right were under ten dollars and will easily feed two. FamilyMart was Moti’s favorite variant, and indeed this one had a nice seating section and had a melon pastry (in the center top of the photo) that was a favorite of Kate throughout the trip.

We made an early night of it, to better handle the jet lag. The next morning, we would rise early to head over to Tsukiji, Tokyo’s famous fish market and the associated vegetable market. After that it was on to Hiroshima for the first leg of our trip.

Arrival in Tokyo 2014-05-25

The flight was smooth, although our plan to simultaneously watch Her on three different seat consoles didn't quite work out due to deficient headphones. My capsule review is that I thought it was effective both as a romantic film in its own right and a critique of the failure of many other AI-centric stories to incorporate the possibility of continued growth.

Upon arrival in Tokyo's Narita airport we united with our Canadian contingent, changed over some money, holding back because of a spike in the strength of the yen, and tra ded in our Japan Railways (JR) vouchers for full on JR passes. For those not familiar, the JR pass is a godsend for foreigners traveling between multiple cities in Japan. The very fastest four lines of the bullet trains, called Shinkansen, are off limits. However, a plethora of trains, including Shinkansen faster than anything in the U.S., traditional inter-city lines, and any number of local trains can be ridden for free. You'll still often wish to take the time to make a reservation for the longer hauls, but that similarly has no additional cost. The total charge is comparable to a single significant roundtrip ticket, so if you qualify and are train-savvy at all than its a can't miss deal that you've got to book ahead of time. If you're actively enthusiastic about trains, than I'd wholeheartedly endorse the Japan By Rail guide, version 3 of which has been one of our core references for this trip.

In continuing transit geekery, we then got Suica smartcards. Transit smartcards have proliferated since my first visit in 2002. The Suica belongs to JR East and is particularly fancy in that you can have your name printed on it. Different smartcards are issued by the various competing geographic divisions of the JR group, by department stores which sometimes have their own train lines, and by various regional cooperatives. As is becoming increasingly common, these smart cards can also hold money which can be used in local stores and the like. Given all the different systems, this could easily be a confusing mess. However, there is a fair amount of interoperability and cash registers and fare gates are labeled with the systems they'll accept. The biggest complicating factor is that it's tricky to have two in your wallet at once and getting a hold of one in the first place. Generally speaking, they're available at major stations if you find a machine that says 'IC.' Mercifully, a good percentage of the machines we've encountered so far have had a button for English.

With that out of the way, we were ready to ride into Tokyo on the Narita Airport Express. During my trip a dozen years ago I'd also flown in, though that time we'd then transferred to a flight to Kyoto. One of my first observations on that trip was that the escalator handrails were often blue. That had seemed like a fairly innocuous if curious distinction at the time as most every handrail I was familiar with back home was black. I later realized the reason, the flexible handrail material can easily get marked up and turn partially black with the combined residue from hands and machinery. I suspect it's easy to create an escalator with any color scheme you desire, but maintaining it will take real work. I suspect that's true of many of the modern wonders we'd see this trip; on-time trains and the like are not magic, they just require paying a lot of people to make sure it happens.

2013-03-19 Jaffa (part 1)

Technorati Tags: Jaff,Israel,Tel Aviv,history,museum

Perversely, I have been too busy writing about Israel for work to write about it for the blog. The other complicating factor is that my visit to Jaffa was my favorite tourist site on the trip. The twisty alleys of this city feel ancient. That sense is deceptive; much of it was rebuilt by the Turks after Napoleon's bombardment  and he was only of many conquerors this millennia-old port town has encountered. It resides above a hill to the south of Tel Aviv and was the historic entry port for Jerusalem.

I learned of its history on a museum tour beneath the town’s main courtyard. My timing was excellent; there were only two people on the tour and the guide had the knowledge to sate my curiosity. The second half of the museum was a multimedia-enhanced encounter with the archeological remains of prior civilizations. While Jaffa may be better known for Andromeda’s Rock and for Simon the Tanner’s hosting of Saint Peter, I was most charmed to hear a story of one of the city’s conquests. The local magistrate had broken away from the Egyptian empire when a colleague arrives to resupply him with scores of jar holding food and drink. Come night, their true contents were revealed as soldiers climbed out of their clay shelters and retook the city.

A perhaps more reliable bit of Jaffa history involved grave markers. Some of the city’s Jewish residents had been buried with a menorah carved into the grave cover. The design was what you see on right and had a tripod base.

That wasn’t the only distinctive marker I encountered; tile labels were embedded in the masonry work for many of the homes and stores. The one on the left sat above a monastery and provided some much needed softening for the hard metal door. As the cross indicates, Jaffa was the main place I encountered the other religions of the Holy Land. As previously mentioned, I passed a mosque on the way there and the city itself had a lovely cathedral, the tower of which you can see in the second photograph for this post.

After much wandering about and the tour, I was ready to take Guy’s brother’s sound advice and get lunch at Old Man and the Sea. That restaurant was a place to eat to excess - Guy would approve - and it is where I’ll pick up next post.

2013-03-18&19 Tel Aviv Beach and the Trip to Jaffa

Tel Aviv is a beach town, not merely temperate and on the water. It has ample sandy shores immediately adjacent to downtown. Perhaps surprisingly, the beach monuments were among most political ones I noticed during my trip.

Tel Aviv is a young city, barely a hundred years old, but that's long enough. There were monuments to the Aliyah Bet effort from 1934 to 1948 to evacuate Jews from Mediterranean countries in defiance of a British restriction on their then-colony. There was another monument to the Altalena affair, a clash shortly after the British left between the recently formed Israeli Defense Force and a Jewish paramilitary group. The rest of the beach seemed apolitical, so perhaps this was just a coincidence of my hotel placement, but the underlying reality is that shores are often borders.

The other time politics notably intruded from the landscape was a trip to the kibbutz cemetery that took us closer to the West Bank. Like Canada, Israel is a bilingual nation, so there is both Hebrew and Arabic on highway signs. That said, unlike the vehement bilingualism I remember from Quebec, in Tel Aviv I mostly saw Hebrew and English (which seems in keeping with the education system). Guy was generally less political on most matters than I am, although he made clear that he was rather frustrated with the current state of Israeli politics, particularly the current generation of leadership.

However, don't let the politics discussion deter you.  Both of my walks on the beach were lovely and the trip south to Jaffa was delightful. Surfers took advantage of the waves and trained on the beach. Small sailboats dotted the horizon. The buildings of Tel Aviv are a varied architectural backdrop from the skyscrapers of downtown to the mosque down by Jaffa. The last part of the walk was through parkland as the beach gave way to a rocky  shore.  

According to my walk book, the best time to do it would be sunset. That's probably right, but don't let that deter you if the timing doesn't work out. The journey is well worth it during the day, all the more so because it ends in Jaffa: the millennia-old sister to Tel Aviv, historical port to Jerusalem, Turkish-rebuilt hill city, and subject of my next post.

2013-03-18 Rothschild Boulevard

Guy's family were the consummate hosts. We had the chance to look through old photo albums, to swap stories, and to share a local favorite form of take out. Joachim and Priscilla had ended up staying at a different hotel because Kayak charged European users far more than American users in this instance, so we said our goodbyes. They had an early morning flight and I got to stay another day. Shai's family was so kind as to give them a ride and one of Guy's cousins was extremely gracious and offered a separate trip for me. From the family and friends I got advice for the remainder of my trip: see Jaffa, eat at Old Man and the Sea, check out Rothschild Boulevard and a few happening districts in southern Tel Aviv.

The city in the evening in March is quite inviting. Bicyclists and pedestrians travel the promenades depicted above and the weather lures you outside. The long stretched parks themselves are not the only pedestrian-safe places; sidewalks and crossing lights abound. In addition, every few blocks they offer a fancy like the pond above or art like the incomplete bridge to the left or hot drink stands. The latter was particularly notable to me, as I've always found D.C.'s mall in need of a few more tiny-scale park cafes, although food vendor trucks can help.

My jaunt on Rothschild started around the Habima Square (depicted on the right) and went down to Israel's first skyscraper: Midgal Shalom. According to the Wikipedia entry, it's also the only subway station in Israel. It was built under the tower in hopes of future connections that never came. I found out about this because I did find signs indicating a future light rail line which sounds as if it is still a few years away from completion.

I'd noticed one odd phenomenon on the walk that I'll have to ask some Tel Aviv natives about: eggplant graffiti. Various vegetable themes were actually fairly common in the city, but I think eggplants were the most prominent. Some googling found a blog post and flickr group that were similarly confused about the matter. Frankly, Guy could probably have told me more about the light rail than the graffiti. He's called Washington, D.C. his home for some time and probably would only keep up with such a phenomenon in Tel Aviv if it involved depictions of meat.

2013-03-18 Tel Aviv by day, walking to Rabin Square

Guy's funeral was in the early afternoon and after being stuck in the airport for three hours, starting at midnight, my friends and former colleagues sensibly pushed back our meeting time. Thus I had the morning to myself. I chose to retread some of the ground I walked the prior night in order to visit Rabin Square. The city was quite easy to traverse; hills are rare and mild and in March the weather draws tourists. Guy didn't talk about Tel Aviv that much, aside from mention of friends, family, or visits to his children, so I was setting my own agenda at this point. I don't know specifically what he thought of Rabin, but had mentioned before that he thought the current generation of leadership paled in comparison with the prior generation.

The square sits adjacent to the city government building, making it a common site for rallies, including the one where the Prime Minister had been shot. There was nothing going on the Sunday I visited, but even so there was a fair crowd around the memorial itself and the adjacent pond. If I read the wikipedia page correctly, the large monument is a memorial to Holocaust victims but there is a dedicated wall for Yitzhak Rabin specifically.

Afterwards I walked South by Mann Auditorium which had lovely outdoor gardens, including wisteria and cacti. The walk down King George Street was an interesting one, from street art to the regular reminder that Israel was a nation with many conscripts. I ended up at Carmel Market, where I got some terrific lemonade before heading back to the hotel.

Joachim, Priscilla, and I then met up and got lunch to reminisce. Appropriately enough the food proved to be massive; even the 'small' burger Joachim got was like an inch thick. I ordered shakshouka, a tomato egg dish recommended by my guidebook, which was fairly tasty and similarly voluminous. Fortunately, I have any number of places back home to visit for reminders of Guy that provide a reason to have a smaller dinner. So, for D.C. people, two of his favorites were Well Dressed Burrito (tasty hole in the wall) and Mehran (my work's preferred and notably affordable buffet spot).

2013-03-17 Walk to Dizengoff Fountain

After my airport misadventures, I took the train to Tel Aviv Center Station. I sat with a rather nice couple without much English and near a gentlemen who was fluent and piped in at the end. They ended up spotting me bus fare for fear that I wouldn't be able to change money in the station. There did end up being an ATM and I was able to make change easily enough, but I shall have to endeavor to return the favor for visiting tourists and work to pick up more than a smattering of Hebrew for my next visit. In a pinch, I think my initial instinct was right and I could have walked it, but it would have been a schlep with my luggage in tow. Tel Aviv doesn't have a subway or trolley system, but it's got a fair amount of bus support and is quite walkable and bikeable. I was also able to extend my international smart card collection, as both the rail service and the multiple bus companies do have a common card.

I arrived Sunday evening and after getting cleaned up and checking in with a few of Guy's friends and family, I tried to spend the evening in a manner he approved of. Namely, finding good local food (I also did some wandering around on foot; he may have preferred that I biked, but the local bikeshare didn't seem to cater to tourists). I was staying at the Mercure hotel, and the concierge recommended a lovely Italian restaurant near Dizengoff Fountain. My favorite part of the meal was an appetizer special with sardines and cheese in an oily herb sauce. From what I've heard, Tel Aviv is far too cosmopolitan to have a particular local cuisine, but there often seemed to be a local stamp on whatever I ate. Perhaps more important, outdoor seating was commonplace, taking full advantage of the local climate. I'd done café-style dining with Guy before, mostly at a Starbucks a few blocks away from the office and most recently at a po-boy joint, although on both occasions I remember being afflicted by ridiculous winds. Still worth it, but not nearly as common or appealing as in this coastal city.

The restaurant was near Dizengoff Fountain, which was in a small elevated square populated by a group of local musicians. The modernist appearance is fairly typical. As a city, Tel Aviv is not much over a century old, as compared to the multi-millennia history of Jaffa to the South. The relative newness of the city reminded me a bit of Hong Kong; perhaps the common British colonial heritage played a factor there. The rest of the night involved a leisurely, roundabout return to the hotel, uneventful aside from the surprise of seeing bats flying around a local park. I wasn't particularly bothered by insects this trip, so I may owe those flying mammals a debt of gratitude on that score.

 

2013-03-17 Arrival in Tel-Aviv and my experience with security screening

Ben Gurion Airport has a lovely, compact design: there's a central hub with a multistory fountain, an upper level for incoming flights, a lower level for departures, and a massive pair of ramps that flips incoming and outgoing as you enter/exit. Of course, depending on your demographics and/or stamps in your passport form such places as Egypt or Afghanistan, you'll probably be spending an hour waiting in a small partitioned off section of the customs area. As waiting rooms go, that area is pretty drab if not featureless: there's a television and few vending machines. As you'd probably expect, I was a standout and most of the people in that area likely had some sort of Arabic ancestry.

The security interview process for me was about what you'd expect. It took less than fifteen minutes, albeit with of a total wait of about an hour. The questions were varied but nothing that you wouldn't see on a U.S. security clearance plus a more detailed version of the usual customs question. I answered in my usual information dump style and my questioner seemed professional and made the connection to other people traveling for Guy's funeral. They also ended up not stamping my passport without my even requesting it, which will make my life easier should I travel to a few other countries in the future. A friend of mine wasn't so lucky and ended up wasting three hours, two interviews, and getting oddly insistent questions about Guy's cell phone number.

I hadn't actually discussed Israeli airport security much with Guy. That said, his general philosophy often involved using technology to mitigate the costs of conflict. I've got to imagine that were he designing the system, there would probably be some displays with estimated wait times and the like. He'd have made sure that travelers that get detained for an hour at least get accurate information on which baggage carrousel their luggage could be found at. Admittedly, the amount of time I wasted there was largely my fault; once I saw the length of the lost and found lines (picking the wrong one didn't help) I should have searched the rest of the terminal immediately. Lesson learned.

On the whole, I think the interview process does probably result in a greater marginal increase in security than much of the security theater in the U.S. Also, it makes a lot more sense as a first step than strip searches and the like. However, let's be straight for a minute. The idea that we need more selective security is typically a euphemism for just questioning Muslims in greater detail while leaving the rest of the population alone. I'm an international relations professional; if that gets me extra screening I've got no objection, but I'd feel differently if I had to wait an hour every time I traveled because of my ancestry. So while my interview experience (and not my friend's) might be a reasonable example and TSA security theater needs to be toned down, I wouldn't support moving the U.S. towards the Israeli model. That said, I have heard horror stories for foreign friends coming in through U.S. customs, so I don't consider our system an exemplar.

2013-03-17 From Frankfurt to Israel

I had a window seat for only one section of the trip, the journey from Frankfurt, Germany to Tel Aviv. The route traversed the Alps then went through southern central Europe before crossing into the Mediterranean at Greece. Supposedly I some of those pictures actually include Mount Olympus. I'd be able to describe more if I wasn't embarrassingly bad at geography for a international relations major. Next time I travel with a window seat, I think I may try for a small atlas so that I know what passes beneath me. Often on international flight there's a monitor on the seat in front to refer to, but that tends to be flights that are over water and not over land.

The arrival at Tel Aviv surprised me to an extent. I had talked to Guy about Tel Aviv before and Israel in general. However, in part because a lot of his time growing up was in Europe, I wasn't exactly sure what to expect. I knew Tel Aviv was an urbane modern coastal city, but I didn't have a feel for the surrounding countryside. I was surprised how green it was; perhaps that's just a legacy of my visit to Egypt and the typically sparse context of pilgrimage photographs. I shouldn't have been surprised, as the coastal plain of Israel is fertile and humid, hence "land of milk add honey." 

2013-03-17 Transiting through Frankfurt

Landing in a March snowstorm can always be a bit surprising if you aren't paying attention to the weather or the under plane video. I was in the aisle of the absolute last row, due to my last minute ticket purchase. This meant I actually felt a blast of fresh cold air when the flight attendant opened the back door of the plane a few times to consult with the ground crew.

I've been through Frankfurt airport once before that I remember, on a trip to or from Afghanistan for work. Its standout trait was the distance one had to travel to get from one terminal to another. That was true today as well as I schlepped from terminal Z to C which included a train ride that felt like it covered 20% of the distance at most. It feels like a more modern version of Midway's old layout, only more so. I suppose this is what comes of being a Lufthansa hub though the feeling of distance is likely magnified by similar looking corridors rather than grand halls. There's also always something dispiriting about the revelation that one will have to go through security a second time, but that's perhaps inevitable when one's final destination is Tel Aviv.

Cleverly, airport employees actually have Access to bicycles. I wonder if I'll ever see an airport with a bikeshare program or the like. Frankfurt could certainly use it. That said, endearingly T-Mobile does offer 30 minutes of free wifi, a fine trick for weaseling your way into my affections.

As I wait for my next bordering, I'm mostly left with regret that I didn't travel much with Guy. We did all go out to Monterey together, but via separate means. His expertise in Complexity and years in Europe would no doubt leave him with any number of insights into the design and function of a behemoth like Frankfurt terminal. There wasn't a single clear opportunity I missed, but I can't help but feel I've made a profound mistake somewhere in that I am only traveling to my friend's homeland after I can no longer enjoy his company on the journey.

2012-06-30 Journey to the Northwest

We were extraordinarily lucky in our vacation timing, as when we left the D.C. area there were temperatures above 100 degrees and thunderstorms causing widespread power outs. During the first few rainy days locals were apologizing for the weather; we gladly informed them that no apology was necessary. Our flight out to Seattle was straightforward; the only point of note is that this was my first flight where Southwest had both the technical capacity and legal authority to offer wifi on the flight. I passed on this revolutionary opportunity as I didn't feel like paying the fee, $5 if memory serves, although some future flight will no doubt dun me for my internet addiction. The airport itself was a bit more exciting as we got our Seattle transit smart cards:  One Regional Card for All (ORCA). That said, we misused our Orca cards on our maiden trip and managed to miss the validation stations. We felt chagrined about that we docked our cards on the way out rather than the way in.

We used a Budget rental car place off 4th Street; it was a great location and we were relieved that they let us immediately leave our car in their garage as parking in Seattle starts at $4 for a half hour. We walked over to the Seattle Public Library on advice of Kate's coworker. The design is quite distinctive and modern with curves on the outside and any number of observation points and views out as well as towards the often open architecture on the inside. My favorite gimmick was the book spiral, depicted on the left. The hallway gently ramps letting bibliophiles walk through the entire Dewey Decimal System without needing to use stairs or elevators.

After seeing the library we walked down to Pike Place Market, known for its fresh fish and produce and thus quite a pleasing olfactory experience. We bought groceries and flowers and walked by the shops on the lower level. Kate was excited to see the original Starbucks, although she put off her pilgrimage through the line until later in the evening when the line was shorter. After seeing the market we enjoyed a late lunch at the nearby Crepe de France, which surprised us by the ampleness of their entrees. Our lodging was a timeshare in Birch Bay, some hundred miles to the North near the border, so we did not stay too late in Seattle. The journey up was  beautifully adorned by fog which clung to the hills in a manner that I found difficult to capture on camera despite reminding me of Kurasawa films.

Apparently I'm not meant to take the Vermonter

For the second time in a year, our plans to take the Amtrak Vermonter were foiled. The first time it was my fault, a mistake revealed when Kate commented that I looked rather different in my passport picture from ten years ago. Outdated passport meant no Montreal trip, the train to Burlington being the first leg.

This time, it was probably Irene's fault. Track maintenance work meant that our direct train was cancelled and we would have been training to Springfield Massachusetts and then catching a five hour bus. Instead we'll be taking a flight to Albany and driving up to Montreal, while staying in Burlington on the way.

It still will be a fun trip, but I'd really like to get that train ride in some fall. Oh well.

Blog Hiatus: The work trip will not be live blogged

I've got my first international work trip coming up and, while less than two weeks, it's still a doozy for me. Thus, I'm putting the blog on hiatus for the next few weeks. I'm told pictures are allowed but I'm not sure about publicly posting them; regardless, still a lot to cover with Egypt.

[Update, a few grammatical fixes.]

4-19-2011 The journey to the valley of the kings and a question of legacy

Our next day began early for we were traveling to the desert. Going to the west, by bridge rather than boat this time, the journey was pleasingly augmented by views of hot air balloons. This is a popular area for ballooning as the sheer number of temples, tombs, and monuments means that you'll should have something to see whichever way the winds take you. That said, apparently the military used to get annoyed at certain balloon paths.

The desert makes quite a contrast after traveling through a mix of farms. The sudden change doesn't feel familiar to me at all, despite having spent some time in America's southwest. It may have something to do with the density of the Nile valley. In either a geographic or population sense, there's not room for settlements to slowly peter out.

I'll save a discussion of the valley of the kings itself for a future post, one that sadly will be bereft of pictures for historical preservation reasons. The sheer amount of history was fairly shocking, there hills at times seemed honeycombed with remnants of ancient Egypt.  We even saw some settlements that were displayed by the government due to the inhabitants penchant for selling artifacts they discovered under their houses. There does seem to be a great number of sites where the government merely attempts to preserve and not study. Some of that is likely a sensible approach; Egypt has millennia of legacy and when rising dam waters aren't a threat there's no great rush.

All this does raise the question of how much of Egypt's legend is a result of  its standing in the ancient world versus the preservative nature of the desert sands. I suspect it varies from era to era, but many of the sites we saw would be notable in most any era. On the other hand, perhaps the continuity between Egypt's Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom, and New Kingdom were in part a side effect of the desert.  The Roman empire might provide a way to test that hypothesis: is there a correlation between a preservative climate and the survival of Roman engineering? If so, did areas with such a climate maintain more Roman heritage during the dark ages? Under this theory, the desert did not lead to Egypt's greatness; it led to its continuity as one civilization rather than three.

Luxor temple photos up and a bit of shopping advice

I've gone back an added the slideshow of Luxor temple to an appropriate entry. I highly recommend visiting the temple in the evening so you have a chance to see it both in the light of the sun and the light of modern day. They do a rather good job illuminating the pillars and temple grounds; moreover I'm told that most temples aren't open at night.

After the temple we visited a local jewelry shop that was recommended by the tour company. Apparently under the old government there was rather a problem with certified sales that were not in fact of the quality that they claimed. Businesses would be shut down but could open up again in short order. Seeing a bit of the silversmithing process was rather neat but I sadly don't have any pictures to share.  I went on to get a cartouche for my wife but felt a bit underprepared. Transliteration into the hieroglyphics alphabet leaves a lot of discretion as to what symbols to do, so the smart thing would probably be to figure it out with the recipient before you travel. If you want something particularly authentic, maybe take a trip to the library first.