I really lucked out with that, too. My stepmom’s primary wish was to see kabuki theatre while in Japan, and just my luck, the famous Kabuki-za theatre in the Ginza district of Tokyo had just closed a few weeks beforehand for major renovations. Other places have Kabuki performances, but only at certain times of the year. I just happened to see an advertisement for a performance in Nagoya in an announcement packet at work, so I was saved. The performance was impressive, especially this scene in the snow where the main actor (playing an actress) moved exactly like a puppet. The resemblance was uncanny. The split-second, onstage costume changes are also always amazing to watch. Maybe not the fastest moving style of theatre out there, but I respect the hell out of the art. Sadly, we couldn’t take pictures of the performance, so you’ll have to use your imaginations. Or search it on Youtube.
The next day I went to work and then had them meet me in Gifu, where they accompanied me on my normal Monday evening activities, tea ceremony and capoeira. Yes, for those of you who don’t know, I started taking tea ceremony lessons a few months back, and the great thing is that I teach her tea ceremony related English and proper phrasing, so she doesn’t charge me. Yay for mutually beneficial knowledge exchange! I’ll hopefully do a write-up on just tea ceremony at some point, but that would require that I at some point catch up in my blog posting (ha, right). The teacher made everyone a cup of tea and after the ceremony we just sat in her living room chatting a bit. It was a tad awkward, but it worked. At one point my dad started waxing philosophical about culture and people, yadda yadda. I’m glad the experience had that effect on him (maybe the teacher put some extra Zen in his tea), but it was a little over the top. My stepmom even gave him shit for it afterwards, so good on her.
At the tea lady's house
I went to work on Tues-Friday while they went to China for my dad’s work. They got back on Friday, and we met in Gifu and grabbed dinner at ramen place I enjoy (they actually pan sear the meat and onion, etc. right before throwing it in the bowl, the little bit of char on the onions works really well). After that we headed to capoeira practice. It’s always hard to tell if watching a capoeira practice is going to be all that enthralling for someone. They seemed to enjoy themselves enough, and there was a little kid watching with him mom, so he was also doing enough adorable stuff to keep them occupied. Sadly, only 4 people (about half the normal number) showed up, so we couldn’t really have a proper roda for them to see, but oh well. We spent Saturday in Nagoya, just chilling as far as I remember. That might have been the day we checked out Nagoya castle, and ran into a dude walking his rabbit on a leash...yeah, had to do a double take on that one.
Toss the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch!!!
I always find it interesting what quirks other people notice about Japan when they come here, and my dad and stepmom picked out a couple of new ones. They noticed a rather large number of women here have legs that bend inward toward each other at the knee (I’m sure there’s a term for that, but I forget). To be honest I had kind of noticed that as well before, but never really thought about it too much. I later had someone tell me it can result from sitting in the seiza style (knees together, bent, facing forward, and then sit your butt on your heels with your insteps flat to the ground) too much at a young age. I’m not sure how true that is, but it seems plausible. The other odd thing they caught onto, which I had never noticed, is that a ton of the ladies wear shoes that are way too large for them, by at least two sizes or so. Once they pointed it out, I couldn’t help but noticing it all over the place.
Sunday we went to Kyoto where one of dad’s old business buddies showed us around. And damn, did he show us around at a breakneck pace. I could barely breathe as we powered through 4-5 of the big sites, while also battling traffic. The dude wasn’t too talkative, and I got the feeling this guy wasn’t happy he was spending his Sunday carting our asses around to all the tourist spots. We had lunch at this classy little ryokan, which was tasty, and helped break up the day. After dinner, the guy’s boss, also an old friend of dad’s, came and picked us up and drove us to a lookout point over the city before taking us back to the hotel. This guy would be our tour guide the next day. We hit up a few more tourist spots the next day, and went to one I hadn’t been to before, the Phoenix Hall, which is actually a little outside of Kyoto proper.
Note the two attached side buildings, those are its wings. There is a "tail" building, too.
After the sightseeing, we had shabu-shabu for dinner (boiling pot of water/broth with veggies, etc in it, and you dip thin slices of meat in the broth before dunking it in sauce and consuming), and it was amazing. It must have been kobe beef or its equivalent, because that stuff was like butter. Tasty, meaty butter. It also turns out this guy likes to drink. Obviously, it’s impolite to turn down a drink, and I ended up having to drink my stepmom’s second glass of wine for her. We were real stealthy about the switcheroo. After that, this guy takes us all to an effing private Geisha club. Okay, this dude is officially a baller. His wife was along for all of this, too. I would have loved to know what was running through her head. Sadly, the geisha didn’t actually do any of the traditional arts performances, but rather just acted very coquettish while pouring drinks, making awkward small talk, and singing some karaoke. There is a certain novelty to it, but seeing as one of them was a maiko (geisha in training), and only 17 yrs old at that, it was also pretty weird. Having family members there only adds to the crazy nature of the situation
I sang some Japanese song, while our baller friend sang “(Take me home) Country Roads” by good ol’ John Denver, followed by the geisha doing a duet of “My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic (ugh, gag me please, I thought geisha were supposed to have refined taste…guess not). Finally we hopped back in a taxi to the hotel. Whew, it was quite the night. The next day I took over tour guide duties, and we hit a couple last sites before heading back to Nagoya. I headed back to Ogaki since I had to work that Wednesday, and go to a meeting in Gifu for the International Exchange Association. Thursday we just chilled in Nagoya before heading out to Tokyo on Friday.
We grabbed the train to Tokyo, and found our way to the hotel in Ginza. We chilled a bit in the hotel, wandered around the area for lunch and snapped some pictures of the under-construction Kabuki-za.
After chilling in the hotel for awhile, we headed out to Shibuya for the evening. It happened to be a Friday night, so they got the full effect of being absolutely overwhelmed by the ocean of humanity at Shibuya Crossing. I took them by the Hachiko dog statue (google it) and then we essentially walked up an down streets checking out the bright lights and “Tokyo-ness” of everything.
BananaMan!! He WILL cut you with his Wolverine banana claws. Eat Dole or Die!
Quiet, unassuming girl by day, crazy Visual-kei band fan by Tokyo night:
We stopped at a restaurant that featured okonomiyaki and monjayaki (the dirty, red-headed stepchild of okonomiyaki). I decided to try the monjayaki (Naomi had suggested I try it as well) and then later realized I’d have to make it myself. I did my best to follow the direction at the table, but I have a feeling the gloppy sludge of veggies, meat, and some slimy batter I ended up with wasn’t exactly how it was supposed to turn out. It tasted all right, but it’s probably not something I’ll run back to, especially if I have to make it myself. They also got to sample another aspect of Japanese culture, one especially prevalent in Tokyo: the high-pitch, super squealy voiced, annoying Japanese girl. There was a table of twentysomethings next to us, and although they certainly weren’t all annoying, one girl in particular had a voice that could kill a yak. And what do you know? She dominated the table’s conversation. My dad and stepmom couldn’t quite handle it, and I just wanted to get the heck out of there.
The next day we headed to Asakusa to shop the market and check out the shrine and Kaminari-mon (Lighting Gate…yeah, I need one of those for my front yard).
Lightning Gate!
The market shops are endless...
They were constructing a new building on the grounds in Asakusa and had this awesome dragon mural on the scaffold covering.
In the evening we went to Shinjuku to check out more lights and sounds. We ended up wandering into the red light district, Kabuki-cho, which should technically be more awkward with family, but in some respects it was less awkward since it was obvious I wasn’t there to procure any services. And we were all able to have a good laugh over this signboard outside one of the shops.
You don't need to know what the rest of the Japanese says to understand what's going on here. How can you say no to those baby blues?
On Sunday we took it pretty easy. We walked down to the Tsukiji fish market, only find out it is closed on Sundays. So we still wandered around near some of the stores that were still open and managed to witness some sushi chefs literally sawing apart a gigantic tuna, so that was pretty cool.
Back in the Ginza area, we found lunch at an Italian place on the map the hotel provided us. I had caprese salad (yes, slices of real tomato, in Japan!) and an Italian Sausage pizza. It was amazing. Sausage is not one of the normal toppings here (not even the Pizza Hut in Nagoya has it), and good sausage pretty much doesn’t exist. Except at this place, yumm! Now I could just really go for a sausage and onion pizza from Rocky Rococo’s…when does winter vacation roll around again? After lunch, we discovered that a few blocks of Ginza’s main drag are roped off on Sundays (or at least this Sunday) to allow pedestrians more freedom. It almost felt a bit like State Street, you know, except for the Gucci, Dior, Louis Vuitton, and Swarovski stores…not to mention a gazillion other designer name brands I had never heard of. This street is apparently like the 5th Avenue of Japan. Literally nothing but stores hawking crap I couldn’t buy with a month’s salary…or a year’s for the crap in Swarovski.
As much as I despise the whole idea of designer brands, I must admit they have some pretty cool looking stores. The Swarovski place had crushed crystal inside of transparent steps up to the second floor. Another building had a very cool animated façade with rainbows and Mary Poppins type people floating with umbrellas.
I just liked how this building seemed to glow.
At some point back in Nagoya, we had seen a poster for a deal on cheap tickets for Tokyo Disneyland. My dad and stepmom had wanted to go, but had heard it was ridiculously expensive, so they didn’t look too much into it. Having seen this poster for reasonable tickets, it was maybe a matter of 15 minutes before we had tickets for our last day in Tokyo. So on Monday we got up semi-early and took the train to Tokyo Disneyland.
It was a scaled-down version (obviously there are land area issues), but they had a lot of big names attractions there. We rode Space Mountain, and checked out the Pirates of the Carribean and Star Wars rides. Space Mountain doesn’t change a whole lot in that you’re on a roller coaster in the dark, but all the voice-overs for the Star Wars ride were in Japanese, which gave it a different feel. Especially hearing the actual droid robots while you wait in line for the ride speak Japanese was pretty surreal. And let me tell you, “robot Japanese” is not easy to comprehend. Despite being a regular ol’ Monday, not during any sort of vacation period, the place was packed. I’d hate to try to move around, let alone wait in line, during a weekend or holiday. Overall, though, a neat experience, and one of the stage performances even had two guys doing pseudo-capoeira.
Even the handles and windows on the tram were Mickey shaped...
The next and final day of their stay simply involved chilling around Nagoya. I took them to the infamous ramen joint for lunch, and we hit up a couple of their new favorites that evening. One being Yama-chan, an izakaya chain that specializes in chicken wings, and the other being Komeda Coffee, a chain that has a signature dessert that consists of a flaky, layered croissant type bread topped with soft serve ice cream and maple syrup. After engaging in said gluttony, they saw me off at the train gates, and then they flew out the next morning. So that brings us to mid-June. Only 3 months behind! My dad and stepmom left just in time for the start of the World Cup. The timing worked out nicely, as it probably would have been poor form to force them to cut sightseeing short so I could watch soccer. Oh well, the next post will involve some World Cup action and other shenanigans.
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