Our First Rail Trip in Japan: Part I

It only took us five months, but we finally took an overnight trip away from Kyoto. Why did it take us so long? First of all, we wanted to get a little bit better at Japanese before we started traveling around. Second, in the cold of winter, the last thing we wanted to do was go out. Third, it is incredibly expensive to travel within Japan and we finally figured out a cheaper way to go. Last of all, we unexpectedly had a three day weekend (my Monday students cancelled because of a national holiday in honor of the spring equinox). So, we were off!

Travel within Japan is expensive. Of course, being a highly developed country means that hotels and ryokans (Japanese inns) are pricey. But the most expensive part of travel in Japan is the rail tickets. I am extremely jealous of people who come to Japan as tourists because they can do something we, as foreign residents, can’t: buy extraordinarily discounted seven day rail passes. As a foreign tourist, one can buy passes for seven consecutive days of unlimited travel, including bullet trains, for around $300. If this sounds like a lot, consider this: for us to take the shinkansen (bullet train) from Kyoto to Tokyo costs $150 each way! I think folks back home tend to think we zoom over to Tokyo for weekends since it’s only 3 hours by shinkansen, but at those prices, for Jim and I to go to Tokyo would cost $600. That’s a pricey weekend trip.

[How about renting a car? It turns out that even if you own a car, it is incredibly expensive to drive because not only is gas very expensive, but nearly every road is a toll road incurring costs of $1 per kilometer. This is a great incentive for people to take trains since if the entire population of Japan were to travel by car, the roads would be impassably jammed. So, happily for the environment, most people in Japan travel by train, the train system is extensive and, like the Japanese, nearly always on time. I just learned from a student today that this year the Japanese govt has discounted the tolls on the weekends to encourage people to travel and therefore stimulate the economy. I wish they would stimulate the economy through trains!]

We have wanted to go to Hiroshima because of its historical significance (site of the first atomic bomb attack by the US in WWII). Also, we felt that, as Americans, it was our duty to visit. Shinkansen tickets are about $100 each way to Hiroshima which is why we were excited to learn about a pass called the seishun ju hachi kippu (18 year old ticket). This ticket, available to folks even if they’re not 18, is valid during school holidays (1 March-10 April) and allows five days of travel (not consecutive) for just over $100. The catch: these passes are only valid for slow trains. As one of my students described, they are for people with more time than money: 18 year olds and us. 

We loaded up on books and snacks and headed out at 7:30am on Saturday morning to begin our long train journey. On the way, we stopped at Himeji castle, aka the Castle of the White Egret, Japan’s most popular castle and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It was impressive and so different, with its towers and gables, from the European variety of castles. It did have a lot of stairs and we felt like we needed to get “I survived” shirts since we had to wait in throngs of people both inside and outside the castle and could only move as fast as the line did through the entire six-floor journey. Furthermore, upon reaching the top floor I managed to whack my head on one of the low clearances above the stairs and the sound was so loud that the woman behind me exclaimed, “Dijoubou?” (Are you okay?) Fortunately I am pretty hard headed but I did worry that I might have damaged the castle…

We were pretty impressed by the large numbers of older people touring the castle since it was riddled with steep steps and lacked elevators. We imagined that a similar tourist attraction in the US might have warning signs with numbers of steps and health advisories posted. Ah, so refreshing to be in a non-litigious and non-overweight country!!

It was a beautiful day and appropriately there were bento sellers all around the large park outside the castle grounds. (Bento are scrumptious Japanese boxed lunches containing fish or chicken/pork cutlet, rice and some variety of veggies and pickles.) We ate our bento lunch in the park and then headed back to the train station. I have to mention this next part because it astounds me. After eating our lunches we couldn’t find a trash can anywhere. We walked and walked, searching for a recycling container or trash bin but could find nothing. There were many other people eating bento lunches, ice cream and other foods from vendors in the park and no doubt they were accumulating trash, too. But we saw not a drop of it on the ground. In the West, there are garbage cans everywhere but still people throw their trash mere meters away from a bin because—well, I don’t really know why—maybe walking a few extra feet is too much trouble? Anyway, we had to carry our bento box trash for about 10 blocks before we reached a trash can. (This situation is common in Japan. It is often difficult to find a trash can in Kyoto, but nonetheless, very little trash finds its way to the streets.)

After lots of train changes from one local train to another, pausing at every little station along the way, we finally pulled in to Hiroshima station at about 9pm. It was a long day but we enjoyed riding the slow trains since they gave us a chance to see the countryside. (The bullet train must whip by so fast you hardly see the scenery.) Of course, I learned that my enjoyment of the train is inversely proportional to how crowded it is. When people are crammed in, I can’t wait to get off no matter how brief the trip. On the other hand, when there are few people, I can stretch out, read a book and settle in to the rhythm of the rails.

All was well until we reached Hiroshima and began to look for hotels. This trip was last minute but why in the world we hadn’t made a reservation at a hotel is something to ponder. I guess we like to be spur of moment and assume that we’ll find something, but what we didn’t take into account is that there is a huge amount of tourism within Japan (by Japanese) and when things get crowded, they get CROWDED. So, at 9p on a Saturday night of a three day weekend (and in the rain), we ventured out into downtown Hiroshima in search of a hotel. After stopping at three or four hotels in our guide book and finding them all booked, we were given a list of hotels and Jim began the daunting task of speaking on the phone in a language you barely speak. He did a commendable job, but after calling twenty hotels and finding not one room available, we were getting worried that we might be sleeping at the train station. Finally, he called a hotel a bit out of town, near the shrine we were planning to visit in the morning and, wahoo, they had a room!! It was about twice what we were planning to pay, but under the circumstances, we agreed that beggars couldn’t be choosers.

We hiked back to the station and got on yet another train, then had a 15 minute walk in very blustery conditions before we finally dragged up to the hotel at midnight. The hotel seemed pretty fancy and when the woman completed our check-in and showed us the bill we gulped. Apparently Jim had misunderstood the guy on the phone (he was speaking Japanese after all) and the price the man quoted was for one person, not two. Ahh! But what could we do? It was midnight and we had no other options.

To be honest, this was not my shining moment of the trip and Jim had to put up with a bit of a temper tantrum from me. We had endured 8 hours of local trains in order to save money only to blow it all on a ridiculously expensive hotel room. To make matters worse, we hardly got to enjoy it since we checked in after midnight! We did try to make the most of the extravagance and got up as early as we could to take a hot bath in the hotel’s sento (which was quite luxurious) followed by a Japanese breakfast. (Believe it or not, the traditional Japanese breakfast is a big meal with rice, miso soup, fish, pickled vegetables, etc.) The hotel did also have some breads, juice, and coffee, too, for the Western palate.

Fortunately, the following night we secured a room in a Comfort Hotel (the same Comfort Inn chain as in the US) for 1/3 of the price. The room was smaller and there was no communal fancy bath, but the breakfast was more suited to Western tastes and big, so next time, we’ll definitely opt for the budget hotel!

Lesson learned: when in Japan, slow trains are okay but always make hotel reservations in advance.

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!