Our first trip out of Kyoto

After five weeks, we finally managed to leave Kyoto for a day. It took Jim's cousin, Mark, coming to a nearby city on business to lure us out into the wider land of Japan. We met Mark in Kobe, another city in the Kansai region, about 90 minutes by train (approx. 50 miles) southwest from Kyoto.

Our adventure started off with a little misadventure—we biked to a subway train station downtown but could not find anywhere to park our bikes. We walked from block to block trying to find a safe place to leave our jitensha (bikes) but couldn't find a location without a “bikes will be removed” sign. We couldn't even find a collection of illegally parked bikes with which to sneak ours. (Kyoto is an incredibly bikable city and bikes far outnumber cars. Therefore, parked jitensha usually litter the sidewalks especially around convenience and grocery stores. Generally rules for bicyclists are pretty slack: riding on the sidewalk in either direction is expected and though not legal, biking with umbrellas, cell phones and head phones is seemingly overlooked. However, sometimes the police exact revenge by putting up no parking signs and impounding bikes. We have seen them in the act of impounding so it does happen. Of course, it's only 2000 yen ($20) or so to get a bike out of impoundment, but still...on our tiny budget it all matters!)

Around and around we went, stopping at several car parking places to be met by attendants rushing out, crossing their forearms vehemently against us parking there. (The forearm gesture means “dame” or “don't” and is not to be ignored. It's not often used, in fact, this is the first time I have seen it in action.) Finally, we saw a little collection of bikes and thought that might be the place to leave our bikes until we realized it was a police station! Seeing an opportunity, Jim went in to ask them where to park our bikes and promptly learned of a bike-pay-parking lot that we must have passed several times. How ironic: the very authority that caused our bike parking nightmare was also the one to end it! I must admit that after a full hour of wondering around looking for parking, I was not in the best of moods. (I pity the people who were walking in front of me as I stalked past dragging my bike along.) Jim, patient as always, was managing to see the adventure in the misadventure. Perhaps I would have to had I not been really hungry and past ready for lunch.

Anyway, the bike parking was interesting; there were individual racks and once you pushed a front tire up into one, a latch locked it in place. Thanks to a kind woman, who demonstrated how to use the machine, we deciphered that we should pay when we returned and upon payment, the bike would be released. Of course, we couldn't tell how much it would be for the day, so we just hoped that the end bill wouldn't be more than if our bikes were impounded. =P

Fortunately, Satoko (from Jim's lab) had helped him to buy the series of tickets we needed to get to Kobe and had written down lots of directions, so we were pretty okay getting there. The trains we rode (a total of about 7 throughout the day) were very clean but nothing special. The local (multistop) trains looked like subway cars while the limited (fewer stops) trains had more seats like a regular train. The most remarkable part of our trip was the never-ending image of settlement outside the window. In a trip of over an hour, I never saw open space other than rivers and the occasional park. Somehow between Kyoto and Kobe it is wall-to-wall houses, businesses, and buildings, buildings, buildings. It is clear that the population density is greater than the US just based on housing size alone. But to see such endless development for miles and miles caused me to feel a bit claustrophobic.

Once we arrived in Kobe, we headed to the city center and walked around. It was clear from the first moment we stepped onto the street that this city is quite different from Kyoto. Like most Japanese cities, it is riddled with bright lights and tall modern buildings. On the other hand, Kyoto has a height restriction on buildings and the only really tall ones you see are limited to a small area around Kyoto Station (downtown). We did see some nice parts of Kobe: there was a large landscaped clock in a small park that ran on solar power and whose background was made up of purple and green cabbages. We also saw a park where people were setting up for the Luminarie: a display for several weeks in December in which beautiful arched structures are constructed and lit along a street and in a park. The lights are in commemoration of the revival of the city after the great the Kobe earthquake of 1995 which measured 6.8 on the Richter scale and killed 5,000 people. We thought about returning later to see the lights lit, but figured that since people were already staking out their positions at 3:30p, it would be pretty uncomfortably crowded.

We had another tiny misadventure in trying to reach Mark. Mark works for Proctor and Gamble (known as P&G in Japan) and the P&G office was on a man-made island just off Kobe. We managed to get on the wrong train line in transferring (it's tough when almost everything is written in Japanese) so we had to do some walking in between train company lines. But, we did make it, albeit a little late.

We all decided to have a low key night rather than battling the crowds of the Luminarie, so Mark took us to dinner at a nice restaurant where we thoroughly enjoyed delectable beef and veggies that you grill yourself (in the Korean BBQ tradition, I think.) After that we headed to a little sports bar for beer/sake. At the bar I was mesmerized by a giant screen with American movies: Rocky and Back to the Future II!
The island where P&G has its office is apparently a foreigners' enclave. Much English is spoken and it feels quite different from the Japan we've seen so far. Mark said that some of his Japanese colleagues consider the area to be Disneyland, not because of it resemblance to an amusement park but because it seems so oddly Western. Mark also told us that P&G requires all their Japanese employees, including secretaries, etc., to speak English. Interestingly, P&G hires mostly women at the upper level because they are generally overlooked by Japanese companies and therefore P&G can pull in an extremely high caliber staff. Leave it to an American company to think of this aspect. Good for them.

It was great to see Mark and we also have to thank him, not only for a delicious dinner, but for hauling a heavy bag of American food for us. His great wife, Sue, graciously put together a care package for us including such delicacies as brownie and cookie mix, mac n' cheese, oatmeal, Cream of Wheat and cereal! (Can you tell I miss breakfast foods most?) Mark and Sue and their kids have lived several years in the UK, so they know all about missing the tastes of home and kindly offered to bring some foods we were missing. What a great early Christmas present! :)

(On this note, Jason--dad of Claudia, the little girl I am babysitting--remarked to me that everyone who visits from the US becomes a pack mule, bringing the things you most miss and/or need. Familiar food ranks very high on this list. For example, Claudia is completely enraptured with Elmo's organic graham crackers only found in the US and our friend, Jon, from Australia asked his parents to send him 15 kilos of muesli cereal as his Christmas present!) :)

Coming home from dinner with Mark we had our first brush with a stereotype we'd heard about Japan. Mark pointed out that all the lights were still on at P&G as we walked by around 9p. Later the trains at 10:30-11p were packed with people in business attire, apparently coming home on the last train from work. [Ironically, Jim has much better hours here than when he was at Stanford...so far. Trains, buses, etc. in Kyoto shut down fairly early, so maybe the work culture is a little less intense there than in bigger cities?] Anyway, perhaps because they work too hard, people commonly fall asleep on trains. For awhile on the trip home, I gazed at the train car window, simultaneously seeing the endless myriad of outside lights and the inside reflected train car full of people in suits nodding off. For the first time, I felt a little like Bill Murray in Lost in Translation, with little purpose in a fast-paced and intensely working world the likes of which I can only begin to understand.

Once we arrived back in Kyoto the subway and buses had stopped, so we had to walk about 45 min to our bikes. I love that Japan (and especially Kyoto) is so safe that you see women walking alone down the street in a city at midnight. I also love that we could walk all the way from the train station without having to worry about wandering in to the wrong neighborhood. I most love that 2 blocks away from the biggest downtown area in Kyoto, we walked past a magnificent temple tucked in the main street and that we saw lots of little bonsai and other plants lining many streets. Our first trip confirmed what I suspected: of all the cities in Japan I am so glad to live in Kyoto!