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I am now in the Sanki ryokan, in a part of Kyoto quite near the last place I was staying at but with a far more "old town" atmosphere. Ryokans tend to have extremely steep stairs, often partially spiraling, and very narrow hallways with multiple sharp turns. I suppose disabled people had to be carried up and down the stairs if that's typical for old-style Japanese houses, or else mostly kept to their rooms. There's no way you could get a wheelchair up those stairs, or navigate them on crutches.
The halls are wooden but the rooms have tatami mats, and you take off your shoes at the front door and switch them for slippers, then take off your slippers before entering the rooms. My room is a six-tatami-mat room-- seriously, that's how room size is counted-- which I would call moderate-sized to smallish by American standards, but ever so much nicer than anything you'd get for 44 dollars a night in any part of the US I've ever visited. The closets are roomy, but one is entirely filled with spare bedding.
The doors are like shoji screens, but frosted sliding glass. There's a small TV and telephone, a table with cushions to sit on, a futon, a small watercolor of a waterfall, two unusual framed pictures of multicolored cranes (symbolizing happiness, someone told me) against a black background-- I think they're cloth, not painted-- and a large frame wall scroll with calligraphy I can't read. I have been asking people to read kanji for me, but unfortunately most of the time I can't understand their explanations.
Kanji are the two thousand or so pictographs borrowed from the Chinese. Correct me if I'm wrong, but each has a Chinese and a Japanese pronunciation, and you're generally supposed to know which is which from context-- there's no hard-and-fast rules. And by pronunciation, I mean that, say, the kanji for mountain can be read as "san" or "yama" and the kanji for big can be read as "dai" or "o." So if the name of a mountain or a person's name is written as "Big Mountain," you just have to know if it's pronounced Daisan or Osan or Daiyama or Oyama. There are also two fifty-symbol syllabic alphabets, katakana (mostly but not always used for words borrowed from other languages) and hiragana (mostly but not entirely for words of Japanese origin. Plus words are not separated in sentences-- you're just supposed to know where they begin and end.
This sometimes seems like a plot to drive foreigners insane and make them skulk around alleys muttering about the impossibility of ever understanding Japan or Japanese people unless you're Japanese. I think the difficulty of the written language has a lot to do with how frequently people say that-- it rubs your foreignness in your face. Whereas when foreigners experience culture clashes in India, where far more people speak English far more fluently and where the written alphabet is fairly easy to learn, foreigners don't tend to feel, as they do about Japan, that there is a secret system that the natives know but won't tell. Instead, they frequently think that there's no system and that the country and its inhabitants are inherently beyond human understanding.
Whereas I think that everything has an explanation of some sort which probably does not involve a culture-wide conspiracy, but that sometimes things don't make obvious sense because of language barriers, cultural barriers, because the person you're talking to is a prankster or a lunatic, or something like that. Today, for instance, my cold came very close to convincing an innocent Japanese lady that foreigners are insane, or at least that I was.
A ryokan is not the greatest place to lie abed all day in-- the owners want to come in and fold up your bed and put it in the closet-- so I ventured outside with the intention of drinking coffee until they were done, then returning and unfolding it. But there was no nearby coffee shop, so I wandered about very slowly, admiring the old-style wooden houses with their tiled roofs and pots of flowers put out for spring. There's a magnificent old gate near the ryokan-- it looks just like a temple gate, and I suspect is all that remains of some old temple-- so I had no fear of wandering down alleyways, figuring that all I had to do was say "Which way is the gate/the OLD gate?" to get pointed back in the right direction.
(The word for gate is mon. I know this because of Fullmetal Alchemist. If you watch the entire series subtitled, you too will know how to say gate in Japanese by the time you're through.)
(I'm pretty sure I've mentioned this before, but most of these little streets have neither names nor numbers, so you have to navigate by landmarks and ferociously detailed maps.)
Finally I located a coffee shop, and had a cup of coffee and a slice of sponge cake layered with green tea-flavored mousse and fresh whipped cream. It was an odd little shop, with gourmet pastries clearly made elsewhere, a juice bar, and three tables with chairs set into the floor with round steel plaques and supported by a single black pillar; the seats were battered squares of white plastic, and the backs were steel bars bent into half-circles. I'm probably not describing them well, but they looked quite strange, like a mutant diner set. On the juice bar was a minimalist ikebana of an orange sunflower, a green sprig taller than the flower, and a single blade of long grass that curled round to almost meet the table top. I'm certain that the elderly man puttering about the shop did it himself. Across from the tables was a baby grand piano, covered in cloth and not looking much used, and atop it was a large stuffed Winnie the Pooh and two motorcycle helmets.
I do not have an explanation for that, but I'm sure that one does exist.
Refreshed, I returned to poking through the alleys. While admiring the trio of tiny shrines set among the spring flowers and sakura trees in one, a woman hopped off and parked her bicycle right in front of me. She had an adorable teeny weeny fluffy snowball Pomeranian entirely filling a basket between the handlebars, and attached to the dog's topknot was a little blue dangle charm like people put on their cellphones.
"That's a very cute dog," I remarked to the woman.
She stared at me like I was completely nuts, then said, "It's all right! Really, it's all right."
I stared at her like she was completely nuts. Then, remembering that my cold has been tampering with my speaking voice, I enunciated more carefully, "Cuuuute!"
"Oh!" said the lady. "Yes, he's cute. Um, thank you!"
Cute: Kawaii
Scary: Kowaii
After having some ramen at a greasy spoon (I ordered off the hiragana menu on the wall and ignored the few kanji, but I don't think I missed much since what I got was what everyone was having) I got suckered into buying more randomly boxed action figures at a 7-11, since the choices on the back of the box looked so bizarre. I have now looked up the name of the show or whatever it's for "Otoko no tashinami" but only found references to the figures, so am totally unenlightened.
They're sort of like Edward Hopper meets one of those futuristic movies where everyone wears jumpsuits. In one of them, a man in an orange jumpsuit appears to be puking into a toilet, and a man in a yellow jumpsuit is bending over him from behind to either comfort or molest him. In the other, a woman in a dress is passed out on a sofa, and the yellow jumpsuit guy is holding out a glass with either a hangover remedy or more Rohypnol.
Um... what the hell... can someone enlighten me? Are these from a show? Are they supposed to be Rorshach tests? And what does the title mean?
The truth is out there. And I hope it's on LJ.
The halls are wooden but the rooms have tatami mats, and you take off your shoes at the front door and switch them for slippers, then take off your slippers before entering the rooms. My room is a six-tatami-mat room-- seriously, that's how room size is counted-- which I would call moderate-sized to smallish by American standards, but ever so much nicer than anything you'd get for 44 dollars a night in any part of the US I've ever visited. The closets are roomy, but one is entirely filled with spare bedding.
The doors are like shoji screens, but frosted sliding glass. There's a small TV and telephone, a table with cushions to sit on, a futon, a small watercolor of a waterfall, two unusual framed pictures of multicolored cranes (symbolizing happiness, someone told me) against a black background-- I think they're cloth, not painted-- and a large frame wall scroll with calligraphy I can't read. I have been asking people to read kanji for me, but unfortunately most of the time I can't understand their explanations.
Kanji are the two thousand or so pictographs borrowed from the Chinese. Correct me if I'm wrong, but each has a Chinese and a Japanese pronunciation, and you're generally supposed to know which is which from context-- there's no hard-and-fast rules. And by pronunciation, I mean that, say, the kanji for mountain can be read as "san" or "yama" and the kanji for big can be read as "dai" or "o." So if the name of a mountain or a person's name is written as "Big Mountain," you just have to know if it's pronounced Daisan or Osan or Daiyama or Oyama. There are also two fifty-symbol syllabic alphabets, katakana (mostly but not always used for words borrowed from other languages) and hiragana (mostly but not entirely for words of Japanese origin. Plus words are not separated in sentences-- you're just supposed to know where they begin and end.
This sometimes seems like a plot to drive foreigners insane and make them skulk around alleys muttering about the impossibility of ever understanding Japan or Japanese people unless you're Japanese. I think the difficulty of the written language has a lot to do with how frequently people say that-- it rubs your foreignness in your face. Whereas when foreigners experience culture clashes in India, where far more people speak English far more fluently and where the written alphabet is fairly easy to learn, foreigners don't tend to feel, as they do about Japan, that there is a secret system that the natives know but won't tell. Instead, they frequently think that there's no system and that the country and its inhabitants are inherently beyond human understanding.
Whereas I think that everything has an explanation of some sort which probably does not involve a culture-wide conspiracy, but that sometimes things don't make obvious sense because of language barriers, cultural barriers, because the person you're talking to is a prankster or a lunatic, or something like that. Today, for instance, my cold came very close to convincing an innocent Japanese lady that foreigners are insane, or at least that I was.
A ryokan is not the greatest place to lie abed all day in-- the owners want to come in and fold up your bed and put it in the closet-- so I ventured outside with the intention of drinking coffee until they were done, then returning and unfolding it. But there was no nearby coffee shop, so I wandered about very slowly, admiring the old-style wooden houses with their tiled roofs and pots of flowers put out for spring. There's a magnificent old gate near the ryokan-- it looks just like a temple gate, and I suspect is all that remains of some old temple-- so I had no fear of wandering down alleyways, figuring that all I had to do was say "Which way is the gate/the OLD gate?" to get pointed back in the right direction.
(The word for gate is mon. I know this because of Fullmetal Alchemist. If you watch the entire series subtitled, you too will know how to say gate in Japanese by the time you're through.)
(I'm pretty sure I've mentioned this before, but most of these little streets have neither names nor numbers, so you have to navigate by landmarks and ferociously detailed maps.)
Finally I located a coffee shop, and had a cup of coffee and a slice of sponge cake layered with green tea-flavored mousse and fresh whipped cream. It was an odd little shop, with gourmet pastries clearly made elsewhere, a juice bar, and three tables with chairs set into the floor with round steel plaques and supported by a single black pillar; the seats were battered squares of white plastic, and the backs were steel bars bent into half-circles. I'm probably not describing them well, but they looked quite strange, like a mutant diner set. On the juice bar was a minimalist ikebana of an orange sunflower, a green sprig taller than the flower, and a single blade of long grass that curled round to almost meet the table top. I'm certain that the elderly man puttering about the shop did it himself. Across from the tables was a baby grand piano, covered in cloth and not looking much used, and atop it was a large stuffed Winnie the Pooh and two motorcycle helmets.
I do not have an explanation for that, but I'm sure that one does exist.
Refreshed, I returned to poking through the alleys. While admiring the trio of tiny shrines set among the spring flowers and sakura trees in one, a woman hopped off and parked her bicycle right in front of me. She had an adorable teeny weeny fluffy snowball Pomeranian entirely filling a basket between the handlebars, and attached to the dog's topknot was a little blue dangle charm like people put on their cellphones.
"That's a very cute dog," I remarked to the woman.
She stared at me like I was completely nuts, then said, "It's all right! Really, it's all right."
I stared at her like she was completely nuts. Then, remembering that my cold has been tampering with my speaking voice, I enunciated more carefully, "Cuuuute!"
"Oh!" said the lady. "Yes, he's cute. Um, thank you!"
Cute: Kawaii
Scary: Kowaii
After having some ramen at a greasy spoon (I ordered off the hiragana menu on the wall and ignored the few kanji, but I don't think I missed much since what I got was what everyone was having) I got suckered into buying more randomly boxed action figures at a 7-11, since the choices on the back of the box looked so bizarre. I have now looked up the name of the show or whatever it's for "Otoko no tashinami" but only found references to the figures, so am totally unenlightened.
They're sort of like Edward Hopper meets one of those futuristic movies where everyone wears jumpsuits. In one of them, a man in an orange jumpsuit appears to be puking into a toilet, and a man in a yellow jumpsuit is bending over him from behind to either comfort or molest him. In the other, a woman in a dress is passed out on a sofa, and the yellow jumpsuit guy is holding out a glass with either a hangover remedy or more Rohypnol.
Um... what the hell... can someone enlighten me? Are these from a show? Are they supposed to be Rorshach tests? And what does the title mean?
The truth is out there. And I hope it's on LJ.
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The truth is out there. And I hope it's on LJ.
Your truth is better! ROFL!
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Now, as I look that history over, it still seems logical - not to mention a fantastic window into the Japanese culture, the way they study the world, find what they think is the best example of whatever it is they want to bring home, bring it home, then proceed to make it even better or more user friendly. But I can also see how someone just dropped into the middle of Japan for some reason would have that feeling of "there's 2 pronunciations for the same symbol?!" and "there's 3 alphabets?!" and feel like it was all a vast conspiracy to drive foreigners nuts. Given the long span of time that Japan was closed to foreigners, perhaps there's still an element there in nooks and crannys in the culture - a feeling of "we don't want you here anyway", but it never felt that way to me.
Anyway, this was a lot to say on someone else's journal so I'll shut up now. But, I also wanted to say before I go that I've been so enjoying your notes and observations - thanks for going to the trouble to post things while you're there in the midst of it.
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*runs off giggling in a scarycute way*