Sayonara, Japan

After 2 1/2 short weeks, I'm back in Canada. Overall, my Japanese adventure was one of the most interesting travel experiences I've had, due mostly to the great people I met during the Youth Encounter on Sustainability course, the intensity of Tokyo, and the endless parade of foods either delicious, bizarre, or both.

The last 3 days of the course were an exhausting mix of non-stop work (on a social business plan case study thing), partying (I somehow managed to squeeze two birthday parties in), and exploring Tokyo. Lots of fun, little sleep.

Here's a picture of most of my case study team. The team consisted of (from left) Georgina (South Africa), Yasu (Japan), Ashik (Nepal), Annelore (Belgium), Kaspar (Switzerland, not pictured) and me (Canada, behind camera). Believe it or not, this picture was not staged. They were actually working like that.


Here's that Mt. Fuji picture I promised.


Now, I'll wrap up the travel writing with some quick observations.

For starters - most people know about Japan's shinkansen, or "bullet trains". Fewer people know about its impressive road-based counterpart, the gun bus.


To my unsophisticated western palate, the Japanese cuisine I was exposed to was either supremely delicious, or barely recognizable as food. One thing it always was, however, was tiny. Most of our meals consisted of no fewer than 7 or 8 separate dishes, each just a bite or two big.


Side note: I ate horse. I only found out it was horse after trying it, but my initial reaction was "delicious". I'm not sure how this reaction would have changed had I known what I was eating beforehand.

I got pretty good with chopsticks.


We spent the last night in a ryokan, a traditional Japanese inn with paper walls, giant wood columns, and enough sake to drown a horse (insert horse-for-dinner joke here).




Eventually, we hit the road and went our respective ways, which for me meant a 14 hour plane ride, and a 38-hour long Sunday, before arriving safe and sound back in Kingston.


I'm now back home, which means it's time to stop procrastinating by writing long travel blog posts, and get back to work!

Regular procrastinating blog posts will resume shortly.

Mount Fuji and Japanese Baths

Yesterday, we left Hosei University's Tama Campus (Tama being Japanese for "we want to expand our university, but land in downtown Tokyo costs 3 billion dollars per square metre, so we'll just build some new buildings out in the 'burbs"), and got in a bus to head to a seminar house in rural Japan, also owned by the university. Rural Japan is a lot like urban Canada. The seminar house is pretty sweet. There's hot green tea on tap, and the house itself is located near the base of Mount Fuji. We couldn't see it when we drove in yesterday. It was cloudy, and 80% of the mountain wasn't visible. We were told this is usually the case, and that Fuji is a "very shy mountain" that doesn't like to reveal itself to visitors. Luckily, we got about an hour of totally clear weather today, so we all climbed up to the roof of the seminar house to check out the view. Mount Fuji is a kickass mountain. It's almost perfectly symmetrical, and there aren't any foothills or anything, it just explodes out of the ground. Which I guess makes sense, since it's a volcano, so it actually did explode out of the ground. In any case, it looks awesome. I took a ton of pictures, but forgot my camera cable in Tokyo, so I'll have to wait until Wednesday to upload some of them.

Before we got to the seminar house, we stopped off to do some non-Fuji hill climbing, and hiked up to 1300m. It was a pretty cold climb, and a few of the course delegates got to see snow for the first time. They freaked out, which was pretty cool. Snow is awesome, but it's easy to forget that when you're digging a car out from yet another 50cm blizzard, or trying not to die on the 401.

After the climb, we went to an onsen to warm up. Onsens are traditional Japanese hot spring baths, where the locals go to relax and engage in hadaka no tsukiai which, it turns out, stands for "naked communion". Basically, you get naked, soap up and rinse yourself off in a kind of staging area, and then hang out in an outdoor rock pool with a bunch of old Japanese men (the onsens have separate male and female pools). Once I got over the initial strangeness, it was actually a lot of fun, and super relaxing. They play laid back music over a speaker, and this particular bath was surrounded by mountains, and released huge billowing clouds of steam. It's a good thing I got an introduction to it yesterday, because it turns out the seminar house only has one big onsen-style bath (per gender). Communal bathing for everyone!

Tonight's activities will consist of ping pong (which I've been playing pretty frequently since getting here), and a discussion about "holistic thinking" with Klaus the artist. He has also started referring to his music-beer-and-painting sessions as a "holistic disco", which I think is just about the best phrase ever.

I head back to Canada in 6 days, and while I'm having a great time, there are a few things I'm starting to miss about Canada. For example, not having squid at every single meal. I have eaten more tentacle in the last week than I have in the rest of my life, probably by an order of magnitude. I am all tentacled out.

Self-promotion, part 2

I just found out you can vote on that Mazda Muzik Tour (seriously Mazda? "Muzik"?) web site once per email address per day, so if you want to help out, feel free to hit it up a few more times between now and April 4, when voting closes.

Natto, and Art with Klaus

I've eaten some weird things since I got here (see previous entry, re: fish noodles), but I think I have found the undisputed king of weird, why-the-hell-would-you-eat-that Japanese food. It's called "natto", and it is made of fermented soybeans. The fermentation process turns them from regular, inoffensive beans into a sticky, stringy, bubbling mass of nastiness that smells like something between a ripe fish and old gym socks. Of course, I tried some.


It doesn't taste nearly as bad as it looks, which is good, because if it did taste that bad, I probably wouldn't have survived. I'd place it somewhere between a really stinky blue cheese and Kraft Singles slices. It's a strange taste experience. Especially since when you stir it up, it starts bubbling. Weird.

Interesting side note - does anyone else remember Orbitz? It was this ridiculous novelty drink from the '90's that consisted of super-sweet sugary juice with little globules of corn starch or gelatin or something suspended in it. They had the same density as the liquid, so they kind of just sat there in suspension. I don't think it lasted too long in Canada, but it's still going strong here in Japan as "Capsela".


If a weird novelty product has ever existed anywhere, it's probably still wildly popular here. I think I saw some Tamagotchi a few days ago.

The cherry trees blossomed this week, which means the whole city now looks exactly like I pictured Tokyo in my mind, minus the giant monsters.



Another side note - here's a picture of Kaspar, my Swiss roommate who hasn't been in any of my previously posted pictures. He is a very cool dude.


We went to a recycling plant yesterday that processes like 1000 fridges a day. It was pretty cool. We also got to wear the dorkiest hard hats ever made.


Well, everyone looked dorky except me. I was pretty stylish.


Last night, as part of the creative portion of the course, I spent about an hour and a half painting part of a giant (wood) canvas with a German artist named Klaus Elle. He is a super cool dude. He supplied beer and music, which he considers "essential supplies for creativity", and his musical taste was amazing. The first song on his playlist was "Only Time" by Enya, followed by System of a Down. It was at that point that I knew Klaus and I would get along just fine. Here's the canvas so far. My contribution is the abstract-ish looking factory, turning into a bunch of green swirls. It symbolizes both recycling, and my inability to draw real things.

Living Planet

Oh yeah, just because I'm in Japan doesn't mean I'm above some self-promotion. My band is a Canadian finalist for this Mazda Music Tour thing. Basically, if we win, we get some studio time, and we get to open for Sam Roberts, who will come to Kingston and play a free show. It's a pretty sweet deal. If you want to help us out, just go here and vote for us. You have to enter an email address, but you'll only ever get a single email if we win. Feel free to enter with multiple email addresses if you're so inclined.

Work, work, work

The last few days have been packed full of lectures, workshops and eating. The program is turning out to be pretty intensive, but I flew half way around the world to get here, so I guess that makes sense.

Today we had two workshops. The first was a basic ecological footprint calculator, which we ran in a bit more detail. It was interesting/depressing. If you are a fan of irony, you may be interested to know that simply flying to attend this conference on sustainability has increased my energy consumption for 2007-2008 by 50%. I guess I'd better actually do some good when I get home, or something.

The second workshop was on life cycle product design. We designed a chair. It was pretty sweet.

Yesterday, we had a creative thinking exercise where we had to design a board game, which was amazing, since it turned my dorky obsession with games into useful experience. My group's game kicked ass. It involved building up your society by investing in different types of power generation, while also trying not to destroy the environment that provides you with resources. And every once in a while, a nuclear plant explodes.

Last night, a few of us went down to Lawson (the local convenience store) and picked up a few beers to relax after a 12 hour day. Over drinks, I learned a lot more about my roommate Ashik, who leads the craziest life in Nepal. He's doing his masters in development studies, and his research is focusing on conflict in Nepal between the traditional kingdom and Maoist rebels. One of his research sessions involved hiking for hours into the Nepalese wilderness to meet with the commander of the rebel forces. The commander cooked him dinner and told him about his plans to establish a "dictatorship of the proletariat" in Nepal. Apparently most rural Nepalese know that communism means "crushing the bourgeoisie", but significantly fewer of them can define the word "bourgeoisie". Also, according to my source, the commander of Nepal's Maoist rebels is a terrible cook.

Tomorrow, we're headed back into Tokyo proper for some sightseeing and a tour of some Japanese companies that deal in material reuse and recycling. Should be interesting. On Sunday, we're headed to Mount Fuji for 4 days to hike around, eat sushi, soak in hot springs and talk some more about how to save the world. Life is good.

A note on Japanese understatement

Yesterday morning, we had a presentation from one of our Japanese hosts on some of the peculiarities of Japanese culture. Specifically, he talked about the Japanese tendency to understate just about everything. If someone compliments you, it is rude to accept the compliment without downplaying it. For example: "You are very good at tennis" should be responded to with "No, I am actually quite clumsy".

Things get a little dicier when you start talking about more personal matters. Do you have a beautiful wife? If so, you'd better start referring to her as dumb and ugly, lest you appear arrogant. In fact, one of the standard Japanese appelations for one's wife is "gu sai", which literally translates to "stupid wife". Likewise, one's son is their "stupid son". Do you have a couple of kids? They are your "pig children".

This may all seem a bit one-sided in favour of the husband, but there is some balance. One of the phrases used to denote a woman's husband when he is not around literally translates to "the bloodsucker who lives in my house".

Hosei University

I wrapped up the independent travel portion of my Japan trip with a great sunny day of wandering around Asakusa (the old Tokyo downtown), spending all my money on ridiculous souveniers and games of Taiko No Tatsujin (think Guitar Hero, with giant Japanese drums... yeah, it's that awesome). The only slight misadventure came when I ordered a bowl of what I thought was udon (wheat) noodles, only to read the menu AFTER ordering...


That text at the top reads "it is made of dry fishes". And they tasted as delicious as they sound.

I'm now staying at Hosei University's Tama Campus, which is about 45 minutes outside of the Tokyo core. The campus is surrounded by hills and trees, with some snow-capped mountains just a few miles away. It's gorgeous, and pretty much the opposite of the ultra-dense Tokyo I'd been seeing over the last few days.

The other students attending the course come from a pretty diverse set of backgrounds. There are 24 nationalities and 27 disciplines among the roughly 35-ish delegates. I am one of two North American delegates, but it turns out the other one is also Canadian, from Hamilton no less! Southern Ontario is well represented on the global sustainability scene.

Classes started out pretty light today, with some ice breakers, and basic "foundations of sustainability" stuff. Still, having this many like-minded people to talk to from such a wide range of backgrounds is like an all-you-can-eat buffet for my brain. There is no lack of interesting conversation, even if some of it is a little broken (there are about 5 or 6 native english speakers among us).

Our accomodations are almost ridiculously nice, though the pillows are filled with dried beans, which takes a bit of getting used to. I'm sharing a room with three other guys - Kaspar (a Swiss neurobiology student), Masashi (a Japanese law student) and Ashik (a Nepalese development studies student). Here's a picture of Ashik and Masashi hamming it up in our new digs.


Here's the view out our window. We could see some snow-capped mountains past the trees this morning when it was clear.



More stories as they happen. For now, another great translation.


Do you want to heal, kick, or be moistened?

Izakayas

I met some more great people last night at the hostel, and we decided to head out and have a few drinks in one of the local bars. Unfortunately, all the "western-style" bars were closed. Lucky for us, one of the guys in our group (which consisted of me, an American, a New Zealander, and three Brits) knew some basic Japanese, and was able to scan the street until he found the kanji for "alcohol" on one of the shops.

We went in and found ourselves in a tiny, smoky izakaya, which is sort of the Japanese equivalent of a tapas bar. Apparently they're renowned for not being terribly hospitable of non-regulars, but this one was run by an extremely friendly old man in a leather jacket who eagerly showed us in and gave us a booth near the back. He gave us some menus (entirely in Japanese), and then we tried to communicate that we wanted to split a bottle of sake. There were a few seconds of confused silence after we ordered, but then he gave us a hesitant nod, and returned with a large bottle. Unfortunately, some wires got crossed somewhere along the way, and it turns out he brought us a bottle of shochu, not sake. Shochu is a distilled spirit made from sake, but we only found that out after filling our glasses to the brim.

Fast forward half an hour. We've now made friends with one of the regulars, a Japanese businessman who tells us that he makes counterfeit mascot costumes. Assuming we have misunderstood, we ask for clarification, but it turns out that this guy actually makes counterfeit mascot costumes. He makes them in a factory in Indonesia, then sells them in China as replicas of the mascot costumes used in the British Premier League, despite the fact that they may or may not bear any resemblance to the actual mascots.

Fast forward another hour. Our booth now has four locals crowded in with our group of 6 foreigners, and we are taking turns belting out our respective national anthems. There is an endless parade of food being brought to our table. Shochu is deceptively smooth.

Fast forward to 2am. Conversation has devolved almost entirely to singing. Food and bottles of beer keep being brought to our table, despite the fact that we haven't ordered anything in at least 2 hours. We decide to leave before things get out of control.

3:30am - sleep, with visions of counterfeit mascots dancing in my head.

Tokyo adventures

The last two days have been jam packed with adventures, so I'll just point-form some of the highlights and observations in the interests of time. Now with pictures!

-Yesterday, I spent most of the day just wandering around gawking at temples and crowds and stuff. It was raining all day, which was a bit of a downer, but it was also a great primer in Japanese umbrella etiquette. For example - when entering shops, you NEVER just bring your umbrella inside. You either leave it in an umbrella stand at the door, or you put it in a specially designed disposable "umbrella bag", which sit in dispensers at the entraces to most major stores. Beside every dispenser is a giant pile of discarded plastic umbrella bags. My inner environmentalist cried out in protest, but I'm still new here, so I figured it was probably best to not start consciously ignoring local protocol just yet. The umbrellas made for great visuals at the Shibuya crosswalk though. It's apparently the busiest crosswalk in the world. I believe it.


-I got thoroughly and utterly lost in Shimokitazawa, which is the Tokyo equivalent of Toronto's Kensington Market - quirky shops, artisty-types, and all sorts of interesting sights and smells. The only difference is that Shimokitazawa is about 10 times as dense, and most storefronts were about 8 feet wide. Also, I think the public planners involved with the street layout have a personal vendetta against right angles. As far as being lost goes though, it was a pretty entertaining adventure.

-There is NO CRIME here. Like, zero. There are hundreds of thousands of bikes in this city, and not a single one is locked up. There are four or five bikes sitting outside our hostel right now, just hanging out. Also, there is no vandalism anywhere, and litter is totally unimaginable. Somehow, Japan has managed to create a society without jerks. It's incredible.

-I made some friends in the hostel last night, and we went to the 52nd floor bar in the Park Hyatt hotel, for some 235 metre views of the Tokyo skyline at night, and also to re-enact some scenes from Lost in Translation. There was lots of angsty Bill Murray-quoting. "For relaxing times, make it Suntory times." Sadly, they didn't carry Suntory Whiskey, so I had to settle for a 12 year old Hokkaido. For relaxing times, make it Hokkaido times.


-I had octopus balls today. You can't tell from the picture, but those flakes on top are fish flakes, and they have the most disturbing habit of, well... moving while you eat them. They kind of ripple and sway, curl and uncurl... weird. The octopus was actually pretty tasty though.



-Here's the best English packaging I've seen so far (though there have been lots of contenders). It's on a bear-shaped USB key.



That's it for now, next update from Hosei University!