The Profundity of a Rock Garden

Mark, Skylar, and I paid tribute to Ryoanji Temple to see the beautiful zen rock garden once again. (The last time we saw it was seven years ago. Mark remembered that Skylar sat quietly as a three year old gazing at the scene). The Ryoanji rock garden was created over five hundred years ago after the violent Onin wars which leveled this city with fire and destruction. Whoever created the rock garden remains a mystery--as does the ultimate "meaning" of the 15 rocks that are arranged in groups of five, twos, and threes across a sea of white pebbles. If you were to take away even one of the rocks, the entire composition would fall apart.

When you first confront the rock garden, it appears so much smaller than you think it will be given the gargantuan nature of its reputation. It is considered one of the great masterpieces of Japanese culture--a kind of rock garden cultural equivalent of Michaelangelo's Sistine Chapel. There are 15 rocks in all--but from any place you sit and look, only 14 rocks are visible at any one time. How the designer accomplished this will leave you mentally spinning. They say that when you reach true enlightenment, the 15th hidden rock will reveal itself to you.

When we arrived, there were relatively few people at the temple (very odd for a late summer morning). So we three sat, gazed, and contemplated the meaning of the rocks and the meaning of life. They say that every individual has his or her own interpretation and experience of the garden.

Afterwards, while sharing my experience of the rocks, I told Skylar that I had a distinct impression of rocks floating on the sea. He responded, "that's so predictable." In fact, he added, "that's what all the brochures say" and defied me to come up with something more original about the 15 rocks he claimed he could see--with perfect vision.

Bad Senryu Poems of the Day

(Elena)
At Ichiriki tea house,
I stalk and gawk at geisha.
Gion geek.




(Elena)
The fish at Kappa Zushi
go round and round and ride
the shinkansen.




(Skylar)
She has lots of gas.
As the time passed,
I sniffed the air and whoa—
a flare!

Melting into the Sun at Nijo-jo Castle

On one of the hottest, muggiest days of the summer so far, Skylar and I decided to put on our matching "grandma sun hats," stockpile the C.C. Lemon soda and iced green tea bottles, and bicycle from Doshisha University to the famous Nijo-jo Castle. The castle is one of the most popular tourist destinations for everyone who has ever traveled through Kyoto--right up there with Kinkakuji (the "Golden Pavillon") and Kiyomizu-dera Temple.

The trick to biking in the hot summer sun here--where there is simply no breeze whatsoever to cool you down--is to keep on moving. The faster you pedal, the cooler you feel. That is, until you stop, and then you melt from head to toe with heat exhaustion.

Nijo-jo Castle was built in 1603, when the shogun Ieyasu Tokugawa moved into its palatial quarters as his home sweet home. It is stunning as a piece of well fortified architecture--a double moat--with both an "inny" and and "outy" as Skylar points out. The castle is perhaps best known for its "uguisu bari"--or creaking floorboards that are engineered to sound like a bunch of singing nightingales should any assassin sneak into the castle on a secret mission to take down the warlord. Everyone who visits Nijo-jo loves walking on these squeaky wooden floorboards and seeing the "secret" compartments where the shogun's personal bodyguards would hide out ready to attack at a moment's notice.

When I told Skylar this story, he said it was the dumbest thing he ever heard of. He said he thought it was a total waste of a ninja to send one inside the castle on an assassination "hit." If it had been up to him, he would have sent a pack of ninjas across the moat by the main entrance to create a diversion. Then, he would have simply shot some flaming arrows directly into the highly combustible rice paper shoji screens in the castle's windows and burned the whole place to the ground.

I used to think that my 10 year old son might be the reincarnated soul of some wise old Buddist monk from Enrakuji Temple on Mt. Hiei. After eight weeks in Japan, I'm beginning to think he might instead be the reincarnated soul of one of Oda Nobunaga's craftiest tactical warriors--one of those guys who made mincemeat out of places like Enrakuji. When it comes to envisioning some of the dirtiest tactics for how warfare in old Kyoto might have been improved, Skylar rules.

More Kotooshu

Yesterday, Kotooshu went down for the count. Skylar says I am jinxing our favorite sumo wrestler. Whenever I watch him compete, he loses. If I miss his 3 minutes on television, he wins. I made the great mistake yesterday of lingering at home just long enough to watch him take on his arch rival, Toyonoshima. The latter twirled and tossed our favorite Bulgarian down into the dohyo in what the sumo pundits described as a "perfectly timed beltless arm throw." Is it too late for Kotooshu to turn things around? The Japanese press is mad at him and likes to remind everyone that as a little boy, Kotooshu had a powder puff predilection for baking (and eating?) too many caramel filled cakes. So what is he in 2008? A wimpy caramel cake baker? Or a powerful wannabee Yokozuna? I will shun the TV today and keep my fingers crossed for his fourth match.

Last night I had a dream: I was pinned down by a 340lb Bulgarian caramel cake and could not move. Skylar says I really need to stop watching so much television.

The Return of Kotooshu

The two best things about July in Japan (in this order):
The return of Kotooshu, our favorite 340lb Bulgarian sumo wrestler, to late afternoon television and the colorful festivities of the Gion Matsuri Festival in downtown Kyoto.

The Nagoya Grand Sumo Tournament began just two days ago and our Bulgarian boy got off to a rocky start. The gods did not favor him on Day One (Skylar thinks it's because Kotooshu did not throw enough salt into the dohyo and didn't look fiercely enough into his opponent's eyes during the "cold warrior" stare-down before they smashed into one another). At any rate, before you could blink, Kotooshu was tossed out. But yesterday, was a different story. Yesterday, he was, according to Skylar, "in the zone" and was able to use the classic sumo wrestler move "oshidashi" and pushed his hefty opponet Hokutoriki right out of the ring. If Kotooshu can remain focused, and if he can keep the evil spirits away, he has a shot at reaching the title of Yokozuna--which is a Japanese way of saying the "Big Kahuna" of Sumo. To us though, whether or not he wins in Nagoya, he is just a hunka hunka burning Bulgarian love.

Link to beautiful Kyoto photo blog

Check out this lovely blog by a Doshisha colleague who posts gorgeous daily photos taken in and around Kyoto.

http://yakumosworld.aminus3.com/

Iwatayama Monkey Park

There's a good reason why there are warning signs that say, “do not feed the monkeys," posted all over the walkway leading up to the Iwatayama Monkey Park. Those things have gigantic canine teeth—razors in fact that they do not hesitate to use on a daily basis.

Skylar and I thought that the macaques at Kyoto's monkey park were a little terrifying. (Personally, I’ve spent too much time as an undergraduate watching how macaques interact with one another to know that they can get ugly really fast). After climbing up the trail to the park, where some 200 Japanese macaques live in the open as one big happy extended monkey family, you can go into the safety of an enclosed human retreat that looks suspiciously like the primitive human cage in Episode 1 of "Planet of the Apes."

For 100 yen you can then offer the monkeys treats in the form of sliced apples, chestnuts, or sweet potatoes. They know the drill. When they see that you have purchased a plastic bag of goodies, they swarm around the caged windows with their hands thrust through, palms outstretched, in a kind of “Brother, can you spare a dime?” gesture. This is when the alpha male gets busy. The alpha monkey tries to hog all the handouts for himself. If other monkeys dare to stretch their hands towards you, he grabs them by the head--or any convenient wound--and twists, pulls, and bites until the lower ranking brethren run away screaming for their lives.

I tried to outwit the Alpha by surreptitiously bypassing him and slipping a sweet potato on the sly to some of the monkey mothers who were holding their babies while muttering under my breath, “sorry, I don’t feed alphas.”

Skylar was too nervous to feed any of the monkeys directly (probably because I had already traumatized him on the hike up the hill with tale after tale of “The World’s Worst Monkey on Human Attacks"). Or maybe, because ever since I made him sit through all five parts of the "Planet of the Apes," he just can't bring himself to trust our simian friends. After all, look where it got Charlton Heston.