六甲山と有馬おんせん

ropes over a stream (photo credit to Ann Hideko)

A few weekends ago was our first day trip as a program, which was a blast! We had to get up really early on a weekend, but it was worth it. We went up into the mountains around Kobe, to Rokko-san and to Arima Onsen.

rope jungle gym (photo credit to Ann Hideko)

In Rokko-san, we all completed a 42-leg ropes course. While everyone was initially really tired from the long week, by the time we were on the 2nd or 3rd leg, everyone was really pumped up and ready to complete them all! The physical work of it was tiring, but it was a really bonding experience for everyone on our program.

forest

Rokko-san is a mountain that cascades over the Kobe and Osaka metropolitan area, and there we had lunch overlooking the vast metropolis below us. It was really beautiful (if a tad foggy).

from above

From Rokko-san, we took a cable car gondola from town to town, half way down the mountain by a 15-minute ride of forested beauty. I felt like I was a National Geographic photographer, or maybe filming for "Planet Earth." Or at least, that's what I should've been doing, because a place with that much unhampered nature deserves to be documented in that way for posterity. But it made me miss the forests at home, even though they're clearly so different.

gondola lift

We soon landed in Arima Onsen, an onsen town (meaning it has natural hotsprings that make traditional onsen, the bathhouses that I previously wrote about).

the 70% of japan that is mountain

If you've ever been to Aachen in Germany, this little town had a feel almost exactly like it. I definitely felt that, if you were to replace Arima's citizens with bulky Germans, it could convincingly stand as a replacement for Aachen.

a pro pouring batter

There was a cramped, maze-like feel to the town, with European style architecture and shops lining all the streets. They're famous for two things: the onsen and for their treats (the Arima senbei)-- (Aachen is known for its hotsprings and for its famous candies and baked goods as well). The senbei are made as shown with these pictures, and the result are thin, sweet, crunchy biscuits that are an amazingly delicious treat.

senbei roasting evenly

Lots of towns have senbei (if you remember that picture where Amber was being attacked by hungry deer in Nara, those were shika (deer) senbei that Nara is famous for), but al of them are different, and Arima's were by far the best I've tasted.

peeling the senbei off its griddle

After sampling the tasty biscuits, we moved on to the Onsen. There are two onsen in Arima: Ginsen and Kinsen. Ginsen (meaning golden onsen), a blood-colored iron bath, and the one we had been talking about going to for weeks. Alas, it was closed on the day we went. So we went to Kinsen (silver onsen), which supposedly contains radium and carbonate (or at least those were the only translations we ever found), so if I sprout an extra limb before I come back to the states, you will know why when we next meet.

tut, tut, looks like rain

I strongly considered NOT going to the onsen because I was very afraid of this "radium" bath, but everybody told me it would be alright and probably wasn't actually radium-filled anyway, since radium is such a dangerous, radioactive element. So I went, but to be honest, we didn't enjoy the bath at all. Unlike the Onsen we went to near home, there was only the main bath, and the entire bath was covered by roof, so the whole room was essentially a steam sauna. We all lasted less than 15 minutes in there before bursting out into the dressing room looking for fresh air.

the iron-rich waters of the rivers running through arima

Since there was very little left to do in Arima, we decided to make use of our day-long rail passes to explore Kobe's Chinatown by night, despite the rain drizzling down.

the gate to chinatown

I felt like a local when we got to Kobe, because it turns out I knew the city better than our Japanese counterparts from my time at the synagogue. So I got to lead the way to Chinatown, and felt really special and cool giving directions to our Japanese roommates.

a squid ink dumpling

 While the prices we experienced weren't quite as outrageously low as in San Francisco's Chinatown (if you remember that post), I ate to full stomach capacity in Kobe for 400 yen, or about 5 dollars. And it was magical walking from stand vendor to stand vendor seeing what delicious surprises they had in store.

the zodiac gazebo

The drizzling rain made it even more magical. Even though we didn't have rainboots, umbrellas, or water-proof anything, the drizzle gave a glowing quality to everything as we walked around by night.

dragon

This dragon gave stunning performances every half hour or so, to lure customers to a particular store-front down the street. Their advertising worked pretty well, as each time they ended the presentation, people would go flocking after the dragon to go eat inside.

effective advertising

We just had our street food rather than sit-down Chinese restaurant. I ended the night with this cute little donut-bite, shaped like a bunny rabbit.

donut bunny

On our way back in the general direction of home, we decided to continue to put our daily-passes to good use by stopping by Umeda on the way. And while we eventually didn't do anything in Umeda but walk around for 20 minutes before deciding to head home, had we not gone, we would never have met this old man and his wife. He was a kid who experienced the Hiroshima bombing, and whose parents were lost because of it. He then went to go live with his grandparents in Australia, so he wanted to practice his English with us, which is how we got to talking. We talked to him (mostly in Japanese) for about 20 minutes on the train, and eventually we're going to go visit him in Nara where he lives, and he'll recount more in detail.

hiroshima native

All in all, it was a very packed, fun-filled and educational day. Just reviewing the pictures makes me want to do it all again! 

Culture Shock Antidote

One reason I have sort of slacked in the blog posting department lately is that I finally hit my wall of culture shock a little bit. My culture shock specifically had to do with one unfortunate experience: I got sick. I feel lucky in that culture shock didn't hit me right away when I got here. I haven't found myself particularly homesick, for example, because I really have been out enjoying the world! But when I caught a mild cold a few weeks ago (with a non-threatening fever), I was pretty much in my room for a few days straight... which was no fun.

development

Because I got sick over a weekend, I was lucky in that I didn't have to miss too much school, but I did miss one day, then pushed myself to go to school the next day, and found myself sicker again, and then had to stay home the next day. It really took me a good week to recover.

community garden flower on bicycle path

The worst of it was the stress of having to deal with Japanese sick culture. In Japan, the expectation when your sick is that you will immediately go to the hospital and take medicine they prescribe you. I don't normally take any kind of drugs or medicines. I don't like taking tylenol, for instance, if I have a headache, but rather prefer to drink lots of water and rest. I don't like the feeling of taking medicines, but do enjoy the feeling that if I ever actually NEED medicine, the tylenol or whatever I take will actually be MORE effective because my body has not built up any sort of resistance or dependence on it. I understand that most Americans have no problem taking Nyquil or Zycam if they're sick, but it freaks me out. So I didn't want to go to the hospital.

yellow fields

But I made the mistake of telling my landlady that I was sick (as we were instructed to do during my program orientation). While Ariyama-san did bring me comfort foods and checked in every few hours as she went along her daily business, she had a different idea of what I should be doing to get better from what I consider the more American, "unless it's really serious, you should probably just sleep a lot and drink fluids" kind of idea.

almost fall

Ariyama-san started not only checking in with ME very frequently, but also started putting pressure on Haruna, my senpai, to put pressure on me to go to the hospital. A senpai, in Japanese culture, is your superior. Haruna, one year older than everyone else in our house, is automatically senpai. My roommate Ai, the 19-year old youngin' in your house, actually uses formal, respectful speech (des/mas forms) with Haruna, as is expected of a true kohai (the younger). During our program orientation, we were advised that, if we ever had problems in our houses, we should immediately get a senpai on our side, because their word is essentially law. And I can tell you now that it is not fun to have a senpai against you.

beautiful heron

In Japanese culture, the senpai knows best. In being slightly older than you, they automatically know better than you, pretty much regardless of the situation. Haruna very rarely wears her senpai hat around us, only when we have house meetings about chore duties and the like. Not to mention that she's a total sweetheart, always caring for others and making effort to converse in Japanese with us, even when she's tired after a long day of classes and work. So I was very surprised when she came to my door when I was sick and told me to get ready to go to the hospital.

I protested, saying that I did not want to go the hospital, and I really just wanted to go back to bed, as I had been sleeping when she knocked. She then gave me a list of the reasons why I should go, which included:

1. If you don't want everyone else in the house to get sick (which they eventually did), you will go to the hospital, as is socially responsible in Japanese society (a communal culture where your actions ALWAYS affect the people around you).
2. If you want to get better, you will take medicine, even if you don't want to.
3. If you don't go to the hospital and bring a receipt to class when you go back to school, your teachers might even mark it as an unexcused absence, and not believe that you were sick and suspect that you were just cutting class.

he got scared

This last one is an actual thing in Japanese culture. After you are sick, you are expected to bring in receipts from the medicine you took as physical proof that you were sick. As someone who does not take medicine (and didn't want to buy medicine for the sake of appeasing my teachers who should just trust that if I was sick, I was sick), this option did not appeal to me. Not only that, but I kept thinking about how virulent the common cold virus must be getting in Japan if it builds up essential immunity/resistance to ALL the loads of pills and tonics the Japanese people seem to stuff down their throats anytime they get the sniffles. That's a recipe for more dangerous sicknesses, in my paranoid opinion. But, on the verge of tears, I finally got dressed when Haruna was done trying to reason with me, and basically ordered me to get ready to go.

cityscape

While I was getting dressed, I formulated a game plan to fight Japanese fire with American fire. I went up to sweet, innocent Haruna, imagined her head replaced with Mitt Romney's, and told her in Japanese, "It's my body, and nobody can tell me what I should or should not do with it." Then the two of us went upstairs to talk with Amber and Ishani, and we democratically defeated the notion of going to the hospital in the great American tradition of 3 heads are better than one, even if the one has seniority over all of us. I agreed that if I was still sick the next day, Haruna could take me to the hospital, and vowed to myself that even if I was sick, I was going to force myself to act fine so I wouldn't have to go. I did feel bad that Haruna was being pressured by Ariyama-san to begin with (5 messages on her phone, 3 emails, and 2 calls that Haruna actually was able to answer), but we basically decided to tell Ariyama-san I was asleep when Haruna knocked (not untrue), so we didn't go. 

osaka bay and pacific ocean

So after that ordeal, I wanted to get out of the house as soon as possible. I think that the best way to get over culture shock is to go out and find more things you love about living where you live. So since then, I've started taking long bike rides a few times a week. These pictures are some of the ones I've taken when going half the way to Kyoto, to the Pacific Ocean, to the grounds of Osaka Castle, basically exploring anywhere my pedals take me.

safety designation zone

This picture above is of a bicycle highway, called a "safety designation zone" that I came across by chance in metropolitan Osaka. 4 lanes total, 2 pedestrian and 2 bicycle, one going each way. There were "exits" ever 100 meters or so, and this highway went along for several miles uninterrupted. It was really quite cool.

osaka skyline

This picture below reminded me of a level of Katamari Damacy. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you don't need to, but just know that I had fun going around on my bicycle like a little kid pretending to roll each one of the little statuettes up!

katamari damacy

This next picture depicts the cat on which Moon, the cat from Miyazaki's "Whisper of the Heart," must have been based. Such a city-slicking cat.

goodnight moon

I absolutely love exploring the contrasts in Japan between old and new. This is the mote and southwest guard tower for Osaka Castle, framed in the background by fancy scientific research laboratories.

osaka-jo mote

There are ferrel cats everywhere in Japan, but I think they're pretty cute. This one was pretty beaten up, and she had scabs running all along her neck, but she was so cute when she meowed back at me.

ferrel kitty

In addition to bicycle highways, this is the general setup for bicycle paths next to rivers in Japan. There's usually a high road and a low road.

recreational area at the yodogawa

Once, I made eye contact with this business man commuting home on the high road while I was on the low road, and I mentally challenged him by saying to myself, "I'll get to Scotland before ye," and we raced for quite a ways until our paths separated and we waved goodbye cheerfully. Those are the happy moments that make me remember why I love Japan.

bike lane on a tollbridge

I've come all this way for intercultural exchange, to speak the language of the people, to learn about their customs and way of life, and to see what's so different and special about Japan. But in the end, the people here are just regular people living out their lives just like our families and friends in the United States.

sunset bike path

So my antidote to the poison of culture shock is to go out and explore and slowly realize that with all the very few uncomfortable experiences I've had come millions of people just going about their daily lives, trying to do the best they can. And that all the people I interact with might be very different from me when it comes to how they treat getting sick, but their hearts are all in the right place, so I'm still happy to be here, and not at all ready to leave.

my bike after a good ride

Colorful Fishes and Fabrics

Alright... I'll admit, a month between blog posts is not ideal, especially when it comes to wanting to meet my goal of going around the world in 80 blog posts. But, I've done a lot in this past month, as you will see this week. My goal for the week is to post every day, so check back frequently, because I have some great photos lined up already! I need to get you caught up, obviously, as I've forced you to miss so much! がんばりましょう！！

My friend Sarah R. from Brandeis is also studying abroad in Japan this semester, in Kyoto. Amber (one of my American roommates) also has a good friend in the same program (small world, eh?) so quite a while back, we invited them to Osaka to join us on an adventure to the Osaka Aquarium!

The Osaka Aquarium is definitely the best aquarium I've ever been to, but that's not saying much since the only aquarium I can remember ever going to is the po-dunk "Ocean World" in the boonies of Crescent City, California. Amazing when you're little, and admittedly one of the cutest dates I ever went on with Michael, but it's really nothing special. Nevertheless, this aquarium is arguably one of the best in the world, or so my guidebook says, and so say I.

It houses animals from all over the world, from the Tasman Sea to the Ecuadorian Rainforest, to homey Monterey Bay, California, where this energetic seal used to call home! 

happy seal

The layout of the aquarium was pretty neat, too. Visitors start out at sea level, watching otters and such play above ground in the "Japan Forest" section, and as you progress through the entire aquarium, you go down deeper and deeper in waters, seeing the various elements of life present at each depth.

kissy face

It was really cool, for instance, to see the 9, count them, 9 levels of life in the largest tank. The Pacific Ocean tank is the largest aquarium tank in the world, with an 11,000 ton capacity bordered in acrylic glass panes more than a foot thick. The tank is cylindrically shaped, so that as you spiral down the different levels from surface to the deep, you see all the different kinds of living organisms along the way.

manta ray in the pacific ocean tank

The aquarium's star attraction is Yu-chan, a giant whale shark, but I found myself more mesmerized by the synchronistic movements of the more than 50,000 sardines swimming in the tank. As you can see in the picture above, the schools accommodate the other animals in the tank by giving them swimming room when they near. It was definitely a magical experience to stand there and watch them dance.

sea turtle

While there are obviously often more than a few objections to holding sea animals in captivity in aquariums (aquaria??), the sustainability-minded placards and information in the brochures I read made me feel like the aquarium was doing more social good in enhancing awareness of worldwide water-based environmental problems than any potential psychological or physical harm it might or might not be causing the animals it houses. And the animals seem happy and well cared for, so that was good to see!

red octopus

Though I didn't come to Osaka wanting to spend my time going and doing typical "touristy" things that weren't particularly culturally related, I am so glad to have gone to the aquarium here. I think it was really a world-class experience, and it was really exciting to see the Japanese sea-animals that we don't have in the states, like these spider crabs!

aliens from the deep

The ocean also has so much to do with the Japanese people, whose survival for thousands of years depended upon sea creatures as an invaluable protein source. I found it funny that I overheard several people saying, “わあ、この魚、おいしそうだね？” ("ooh, look at that fish, doesn't it look so yummy?"), but as a seafood-lover myself, I had to agree with those rather morbid thoughts.

synchronized swimmers

It made me glad to see the work that the aquarium seems to be doing towards environmental awareness, because Japanese society has problems galore with their aquatic environment. In my Japan and the Environment class, we've talked about many an important water-based issue as it relates to Japan. First, we watched a shocking documentary called, "The Cove," (not for the faint of heart), about a cove in Taiji, Japan, where dolphins are routinely, brutally slaughtered for their meat.

tiny transparent jellyfish

We've read about the case going to the International Court of Justice next year about Japanese whaling policies, and their probable abuse of their waters. Our professor told us that during his time in elementary school, the school's hot lunches consisted of whale meat every wednesday, though he now suspects that the "delicious" whale meals probably included dolphin meat as well.

mushroom-like jellyfish

And we've most recently discussed Japan's bending of international sea laws in regards to their ownership of Okinotorishima, (with a natural reef about the size of a small bedroom remaining above water, at high tide no more than a laughable few inches above the surface of the ocean). They retain the island specifically so that their EEZ (exclusive economic zone) can remain larger, meaning that Japan therefore has rights to the marine resources within a 200 sea-mile radius from this "land" they own.

chihuly-like jellyfish

Anyways, in retrospect, I think that the aquarium was not only a worthwhile experience, but a cultural one at that. I'm so happy to have gone, particularly to have seen those jellyfish! They're crazy--so cool!

kimono with obi slung over shoulder in preparation for tying

The next day, our thoughtful landlady, Ariyama-san, had another cultural event planned for us. We got to try on kimono and yukata (less formal, summer kimono) from Ariyama-san's personal collection. They were absolutely beautiful, completing an excellently aesthetic weekend.

my breath being sucked out of me little by little as more layers were added

First let me tell you: I had greatly underestimated the level of involvement dressing in a kimono takes. There were 6 of us (all the girls on our program) trying on kimono, and the event lasted 6 hours. It is a process!!

the final result

The kimono is the first step (or the part traditionally thought of as the kimono), then two small ties to define the waist, as shown above. Then, the obi bow is tied, as shown immediately above (the green thing). Another rope is added to secure the obi bow, further constricting any breathing that may have still been going on, as shown in the picture below (the pink rope).

beautiful ishani

The obi tying is the most elaborate part of the process. As you can see based on the picture below, it's quite a complicated endeavor on its own. Each of Ariyama-san's obi and kimono costs (individually), upwards of 5,000 dollars (no I did not mean yen... add a zero for about 50,000 yen). They are made of the finest silk I've ever felt, and needless to say I was terrified of getting it dirty or, God forbid, falling and ripping it. However--given the crazy wooden-platformed way-too-small flip-flop like shoe contraptions--I would not have been surprised if that had happened to one of us.

side view of tied ebi bow

The result was amazing, if time consuming. Each of us, in my opinion, looked absolutely stunning. Despite the fact that constricted breathing made each of us feel like we could afford to lose a few pounds so we could breath again, it was a real confidence-boosting exercise, because each of us looked positively radiant.

beautiful katie

We also had the opportunity to try on yukata, as shown below. This is the type of kimono that is typically worn out and about nowadays--still only on special occasions, though. When I went to Kurama-no-hi Matsuri festival (stay tuned this week for that blog post!), for example, there were people dressed in traditional yukata. They are made with cotton, rather than silk, which is the main difference, making them slightly more accessible for your average consumer, and certainly more breathable for the warm summer months (when they were traditionally worn in ancient times).

yukata

However, owning kimono is still pretty common, as they are often worn for weddings (though western-style wedding dresses are becoming more common), tea ceremonies, and the like. One of the most important such kimono-worthy occasions is the Coming of Age Day in Japan. The fact that I won't be here for the real Coming of Age Day actually deeply saddens me, because it's my year (二十歳)! In Japan, the age of majority is 20, so 20-year-olds on Coming of Age Day (celebrated in January), dress in kimono and sometimes hakama (the lower portion shown below, sans obi) for the coming of age ceremonies and festivities. Please also note the zori sandals... super painful! But just because I won't be in Japan for the day, doesn't mean it wasn't super enjoyable to play dress up with my girlfriends here in Osaka! It was definitely one of the most culturally-enriching activities I've participated in since coming here, and now I can say I've worn a kimono! Can you?

二十歳おめでとう！