Izu and Okinawa: A Bit of R & R

What better time than September, after everyone’s summer break, to take a break myself.  Besides, it may be September but it's still in the 80’s.  I went to two resort areas:  the Izu Peninsula south of Tokyo and the Okinawa island chain.  

The Izu Peninsula is about 3½ hours southwest of Tokyo by train, so is a favorite summer weekend spot for Tokyoites who want to get away from the city’s oppressive heat and humidity.  I stayed in Shimoda at the end of the train line on the east coast, in a hotel perched high above the bay.  My huge room was on the top floor and looked directly across the lawn out to the sea.  The first night I was there, I was startled to see a rainbow at sunset.  There was no rain, just very humid air that refracted the sunlight.  What a way to start a vacation!

Historically, Shimoda is famous as being one of the places Admiral Mathew Perry stopped at when he came to open Japan to the West.  There’s a monument to him at the end of a lovely little canal lined with small shops and galleries that cater to tourists.  There’s also at least one “black ship”, a replica of the type of vessel Perry sailed.  And for reasons I’m not quite sure of, there’s also a US paddle wheeler, the Susquehanna, in the harbor that tourists can board for a ride around the bay. 

I took a day trip across the peninsula to Matsuzaki, a little town known for its buildings’ namake-ko tile walls.  They are black tiles, often laid diagonally, with thick white plaster binding them together.  The town probably has more of these tiled buildings than any place in Japan and they are quite striking.  They are still lived in, too.  In the engang (foyer) that ran the length of one house, I saw a couple of people playing a form of horseshoes.  Matsuzaki also has a lovely, long beach, a brightly painted bridge with namake-ko plastering, and an unusual clock tower that plays a tune – I forget what – on the hour.

I confess I wasn’t particularly keen on going to Okinawa because the American soldiers have not always behaved well here.  I went because several Japanese friends urged me to go, and I’m very glad I did.  The Okinawa chain of islands is different from the rest of Japan.  It has a tropical climate and is flat with sandy beaches, volcanic rock, palm trees and sugar cane.  It was very laid back and comfortable, making it a pleasure to stroll the streets and take part in whatever was happening, whether a restaurant sing-along or a J-pop group performing on the main street on a Sunday afternoon.  Not so much in Okinawa, but in the other islands I visited, I was intrigued with the buildings:  some were new or freshly painted, resort-like in appearance.  Others, interesting in their own way, were somewhat dilapidated, with faded paint.

Ryuku kasuri (ikat) weave

3-stringed sanshin

Although influenced by other Asian cultures, particularly China, Okinawa developed its own Ryukyu society and culture, with its own language, crafts, and pantheistic religion, neither Buddhist nor Shinto.   It was annexed by Japan in the early 1600’s, but it was not until the Meiji Restoration 250 years later that Japan actively assimilated the islands, requiring that Japanese be taught in the schools. Okinawa was virtually destroyed by WWII and then taken over by the Americans from 1945-72.  When the islands were returned to Japan, some Okinawans were unhappy because they preferred independence.  Today there is an effort to remember and strengthen the traditional Ryukan culture, particularly its arts, crafts, and music.

Naha, the main Okinawan city, was a fun, touristy place with people in colorful dress reminiscent of Hawaiian shirts.  I had a Benihana-style dinner at a steak house that was both a good show and tasty:  sliced onion sautéed in butter and garlic; tofu done the same way; steak cut into bite sized pieces and grilled; and chanpuru, the Okinawan mix of sautéed bitter melon (it looks like a cucumber with very bumpy skin), onions and vegetables, eggs, and Spam.  Spam and Blue Seal ice cream, two American imports, are quite popular here. 

Bingata sample design

I discovered a craft center that has workshops in various Okinawan crafts.  I decided to learn to make bingata, a stencil-design painted and dyed fabric, since I had seen a fascinating exhibit of bingata kimonos in Tokyo this spring.  In bingata, rice paste resist is put on fabric to create the outlines of a design, using a stencil.  The design is painted in, often with bright colors, steamed and then the resist washed away.  Rice paste is put on again, this time on top of the painted design, and the fabric background is dyed.  It is a highly skilled art that often has very detailed designs using many colors.  My instructor was a lovely young man who spoke some English.  He had studied in France for a year, decided he wasn’t learning any real skill, and so returned to Okinawa to enroll in a school to learn bingata.  He wants to help preserve the culture.

Little Shimoda beach

Miyako, an island in the middle of the Okinawa chain, is smaller and less touristy than Naha.  It has a number of beautiful beaches that unfortunately I couldn’t enjoy because they were best reached by car.  One night I had a fantastic fish dinner recommended by my hotel:  sashimi and grilled fish, the fish plucked from a holding tank in the restaurant.  Another night I ate at a restaurant that had nightly shows of Okinawan music:  a woman sang and played the traditional three-string sanshin while her female partner played the Okinawan drums and the guests sang and clapped along. 

I took a ferry to Irabu, a little island nearby, and tromped around for a few hours in the hot sun since I couldn’t figure out how to get to a beach easily.  There I saw sugar cane farms, the main Okinawan crop (it’s too hot to grow rice).  The growing season seems to be all year, so in various fields I saw seedlings, young plants, and stalks over six feet high ready to be cut. 

Ikat "paw print" design

KIMIE Ohama

In both Miyako and Ishigaki, in the southernmost group of islands, I went to see the weaving, suggested by my Japanese friend and weaver, Shigeko.  In addition to bingata, Okinawa is known for its kasuri (ikat) weaving, and is working to preserve and expand both.  On both Miyako and Ishigaki, there were weaving workshops that taught the craft and had professional weavers who made and sold their art.  In the Miyako workshop, everything – from spinning to dying and weaving -- was done by hand, using wooden spinners, looms, etc.  The designs are derived from nature:  paw print (like the American nine-patch), birds, flowers, the sea and wind, etc.  It was quite interesting.  In Ishigaki I met a lovely woman, KIMIE Ohama, at a weaving workshop and gallery.  Her mother wove, and before that her father’s mother, grandmother, etc. going back several generations.  It was very special to realize that Okinawa kasuri weaving was transferred from generation to generation just as in ceramics.

The other reason I went to Ishigaki was to go to Hateruma, Japan’s southernmost inhabited island.  I wanted to see it as a counterpoint to Wakkanai, the northernmost inhabited point of Japan.  Unfortunately, a typhoon intervened; when I inquired about ferry service the night I arrived, the hotel receptionist laughed.  So this picture of an Ishigaki street, taken in the wind  before I left the next day, will have to do.

By the Seaside on the Japan Sea

As the summer heat finally begins to dissipate – it’s in the mid 80’s now rather than the mid 90’s – and everyone returns from vacation, it’s a great time to relax by the sea.  Rather than the Pacific, I decided to travel along the Japan Sea, which faces Asia and is considerably less populated than Japan’s eastern shore.   Yes, there was a renowned castle in Matsue, a gorgeous garden in Yasugi, and a couple of wonderful museums, but I’d rather show you the beauty of the seacoast. 

But first, a bit on an end-of-summer ritual, namely harvesting the rice crop.  I have been watching the rice grow ever since I’ve come here, fascinated as the fields are plowed, planted, and cared for over these many months.   For the past few weeks I have watched the rice grow golden in the hot sun, and now I’ve been watching the harvest. 

Just as with the planting, there are relatively small machines that cut the rice and separate the grain from the stalks.  Afterwards I can see the empty fields, each rice plant still evident and the stalks set out to dry, sometimes in little stacks, sometimes on a series of horizontal poles hung from posts in the field.  Rice is such an important part of the way of life here.  It binds one closely to the land and the seasons.

Bridge & sand bar from my window

Now to the sea:  I spent just a day at Amanohashidate, but I wish it had been longer. I stayed in a lovely inn where my room overlooked the water and a maple tree whose leaves were beginning to turn.  I had a gourmet kaiseki dinner with nine small courses of delicious food.

My real reason for coming, though, was Amanohashidate’s pine-tree-covered sand bar, one of Japan’s three great scenic vistas.  It stretches across the town’s cove, with a path through the trees to cross it and a sandy beach facing the sea.  At the end of the day teenagers were playing and people out walking as I was, enjoying the view.  The next morning I got up early to watch the sun rise over the pine trees, then strolled along the beach from one end of the cove to the other.  I saw a flock of small birds digging in the sand for insects and a couple of 2” translucent grabs grabbing on to a dead 6” fish and eating away.  I watched a lone boat head out to sea and a crow walk the beach, seemingly on patrol.  What a wonderful way to greet the day!

I then took a train down the coast for several hours to Tottori, the capital of the prefecture by the same name.  Its claim to fame is its sand dunes, which are no ordinary dunes.  They don’t stretch for miles as the dunes do along the Hamptons on Long Island.  They’re several kilometers long and very, very tall. To get to the sea, you have to climb up the dunes, which then fall almost cliff-like to the sea below.  They reminded me a bit of Niagara Falls and the drop to the river. 

I watched people climb up one side of the dunes, go down to the sea, then trudge slowly back up again, something I decided to forego.  I also decided not to do the touristy thing and ride one of the available camels.  Instead, I spent hours mostly sitting on the top of the dunes and looking out to the sea, watching the sky with its puffy clouds.  I left smiling and refreshed.

 Last, I spent a few days in Matsue, also a prefectural capital.  It’s got a great castle and was the home of Lefcadio Hearn, a Greco-Irish English professor who fell in love with Japan, stayed, and wrote some very insightful books about Japan in the late 1800’s.  Though Matsue is not really on the sea, it’s surrounded by water:  it sits between two lakes and has a river and a maze of canals running through it.  My last day here turned out to be beautifully sunny, so I walked to the lake to watch the sun set along with many others, including a bride and groom getting their wedding pictures taken.   It was fun to sit with other people from town, some with small children, as we all watched, and took pictures of the sun, the sky, and the sea.  What a lovely way to end my mini-vacation by the sea.

Little Japanese Gems

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I have seen a lot of castles, gardens, temples and shrines in my travels here.  Most are lovely, some only nice, some quite moving in their beauty.  But this posting isn’t about the more typical sites of Japan; instead it’s about little gems I found as I wandered about the town of Takayama, tucked in the mountains, and Nagoya, a large workman-like manufacturing city.

Takayama, a Gem in Itself.   I’d heard Takayama was a lovely “traditional” town with old wooden houses lining the streets, now shops and galleries.  But the view from the train station was of somewhat tired buildings built in the ‘60’s.  Then my taxi dropped me off in front of a narrow little walkway that led to my ryokan. The inn was indeed an old wooden building, filled with antiques.  My tatami-mat room was in the back, and I had a little porch with a table and chairs that overlooked the river.  Nearby was a little waterfall, so I heard the babble of water along with the cicadas’ song.  Life was good.

Takayama was a gem for several reasons.  First was the ryokan and its innkeepers, a jolly little man and his vivacious wife.  I had a delicious breakfast at eight and a luscious multi-course dinner at six. I could sit out on the porch and listen to the river while I read, wrote emails, or did handwork.  Then there was the walk in the woods to various temples, a path modeled after Kyoto’s Philosophers’ Walk.  It was lovely to be amongst tall old cedars, especially when it was 95 degrees outside.  None of the temples were open, but it was still a serene, quiet place that invited contemplation since few tourists seemed to go up there.  Instead, they strolled down the several-block long street of shops in the old wooden houses.

Takayama is near Shirakawa-go, a village up in the mountains known for its “gassho” houses, some of which are about 200 years old.  These are tall, three-to-five-story houses with thick thatched roofs that are shaped like praying hands so the heavy snows would glide off.  The bigger houses were built for large wealthy families. The attics were used to cultivate silkworms, which liked the dry warm air.  While some have been rebuilt with fewer stories and to meet today’s living standards, there are still about 60 of the original houses left.  It’s quite striking to see so many of them together.  While the village’s business today is primarily tourism, it has worked to maintain a community with people still living and working in many of the gassho houses.  That’s a hard balance to achieve, but they seem to have done it.

The last reason Takayama is such a gem is scenery.  The bus ride up to Shirakawa-go was through increasingly narrow valleys as forested mountains rose on each side. And the train ride down to Nagoya was often along a river, often with fishermen, that had carved deep gorges in the mountains.  Where the valleys widened a bit, there were small villages and rice fields, some terraced, with a few already harvested.  All in all, it was a wonderful, relaxing few days.  If my ryokan hadn’t been booked for the weekend, I would have stayed longer.

Bamboo mouth organ

Hikone Castle Museum.  I took a day trip to Hikone, a little town near Lake Biwa, because it was said to have a lovely little castle, one of the few wooden ones still standing.  When I got there, I was politely but firmly directed to the castle museum; as only the Japanese can do, it was clear that this was the route to follow.  The museum proved to be the gem.  It includes a replica of the Noh theatre used by the Hikone clan as well as family treasures.  There were traditional musical instruments from the 13^th and 14^th centuries, together with their cases.  I’d never seen a bamboo mouth organ before nor the flutes with their many protective cases.  What were most engrossing were the Noh masks, carved of wood and painted.  They were striking in their simplicity, beautiful carving, and expressiveness.  It made me want to know more about Noh and the masks.

Designs for Today.  My guidebook mentioned Nagoya’s Design Center as a good place to see the latest in applied design, i.e., designs for use in manufactured products.  The current exhibit was of university students’ work in design.  My “guide” happened to be the students’ teacher, so she explained to me the progression students went through from their first year to graduation.  In many ways it reminded me of watching Juilliard student dance performances and how much more skilled and confident they become as they matriculated.  One of the designs I liked best was a piece of paper, rolled simply and connected by a little cut in one corner.  Two hours later I was at the LOFT, a nearby store, where I saw the latest silicone cooking products.  Here was a silicone roaster/steamer that was virtually the same design as that first-year student’s!

The LOFT, a chain of Japanese stores, is a good window into young, contemporary Japanese tastes.  There was an entire section devoted to stickies, which teenagers here seem to use everywhere.  There was another long counter of pencil cases in all colors and patterns, since the Japanese use a lot of pencils and pens of different colors. I’ve been impressed at how many times I’ve had places and routes marked for me in bold pink or chartreuse, clearly helping me find my way.

The Kaleidoscope Clock.  On my trip to Hikone, I went to the little town of Nagahama, known for its glass.  Unlike Takayama, it was a bit kitschy, though there was a lovely museum with some gorgeous 19^th-century French, German and Italian glass.  But the highlight, such as it was, was the “kaleidoscope clock”.  It was housed in the building you see on the left.  You go in and look up, while someone turns a handle, rotating a wheel of different colors of stained glass.  Voila!  A giant kaleidoscope. 

Animal Gems.  These are pictures of animals I discovered unexpectedly, so they became “gems” in themselves. Strolling along In a wooded shrine in Nagoya, I heard a rooster crowing.  Following others’ gaze, I looked up and saw not one, but three roosters, sitting in a tree. I couldn’t tell if they found themselves stuck there, or whether this was their natural habitat.  One was obviously the lead rooster, for it was he who was crowing away.

The second is a lizard, or some form of that animal.  He walked across my path at Hikone Castle.  It was his bright blue tail that caught my eye.  If anyone knows what kind of animal this is, and why his tail is blue, let me know.

And last, since humans are animals, too, here’s a picture of two at Shirakawa-go, with the latest and greatest.

Little Gems of Books.  I’ve enjoyed two books recommended by friends, so pass them along to you (you can get them both on Kindle, too).  The first is The Street of a Thousand Blossoms by Gail Tsukiyama.  It’s a novel about a Japanese family, how it survived World War II and after, and the two sons.  One became a sumo wrestler and the other a maker of Noh masks.  It’s a good read and I learned a lot about these two quintessentially Japanese arts.

The second is Zen in the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel.  It is much more philosophical, the non-fiction description by a German professor of how he came to master archery (the Japanese form, which is quite different from the Western) and its relation to Zen Buddhism.  Again, it’s a good window into two other important aspects of Japan.