It's been eleven days since I last posted, so as I enter my final two days in the country I feel an update is in order. The fact that I am currently waiting for a delayed train to depart, a rare event in Japan, affords me the time to provide one, without the availability of distracting activities allowing further procrastination.
The previous post covered a period up to, and including, the baseball game in Fukuoka. Since then, I've visited Nagoya, Tsumago and Magome (as a daytrip) Takayama, Shirakawago (also a side trip) and Kanazawa. I will mention a few highlights and then take the opportunity to share a few general observations from the past month, about travelling, particularly solo, and indeed about life in general.
I really liked Nagoya which, like Fukuoka, was a modern city with wide streets and park areas, large and dynamic, but not quite of the scale and frenetic activity level of a Tokyo or even an Osaka. There isn't a tremendous amount to see within the city limits, but Nagoya is a great base for some half day/full day jaunts.
The Aichi Prefecture in which Nagoya is located is home to the Toyota family of corporations including, most notably from a global perspective, the Toyota Motor Corporation (though in fact the original entity of the group was named Toyoda after the founder's surname, and was a loom manufacturing concern). With advance booking one is able to take a tour of certain of the car manufacturing plants, so I arranged a visit for when I knew I would be in the region. I'm not the most technically minded, but I DO enjoy free activities, so the tour and visit to the accompanying museum were a great way to spend a few hours. Jest aside though, it's a pretty serious operation they've got going there and one can understand the pervasive fear from the 80s that the Japanese were going to dominate the world economically. The tour also hammered home how endlessly complex almost every single facet of modern life is and how densely the threads that connect us are woven - 30,000 parts are used in every car.
The other trip I took from from Nagoya, this time a full day, was to Magome, a restored former postal station on one of the historic routes to Tokyo (then named Edo), from which there is a hike to Tsumago, another restored postal town, which one can, and I did, extend to another, more ordinary, town called Nagiso. The route was classic Japan as you imagine it, the Japan of famous wandering poet Basho, with rice fields, wooden buildings and waterfalls, all nestled among and between green forested hills and hiking it was much of what I want out of travel, distilled into a daytrip. Incidentally, Basho sounds like a character from the British comics I read as a kid. Chortle.
After Nagoya, I travelled to Takayama, a calm and quite touristy mountain town, where the plan was to ease up a little on the sightseeing and once again spend a few slower-paced days re-energising. My time was mostly spent walking around the town and its rural surrounds, interspersed with copious amounts of coffee and the best in non-fiction that the Kindle store has to offer. I did make one side trip to the village of Shirakawago, a village containing a concentration of buildings in the unique 'Gasho' architectural style (the word means 'praying hands', see pictures below) that have been declared a World Heritage Site (all caps) by whomever it is that declares these things (the UN? The elders of Zion? Big Pharma?).
Finally, I visited Kanazawa, on the sea of Japan, where I enjoyed a couple of days cycling around the sites and checking some final items of the Japan to-do list (karaoke). A particular highlight was the misleadingly nicknamed ninja temple (it is a temple, but it has nothing to do with ninjas). The reason for the name is that the temple contains numerous trapdoors and hidden exits, designed to facilitate the protection of the the local feudal lord from the forces of the Shogunate.
Now for some thoughts and observations:
I tend to imagine that feelings and emotions have a certain linearity, i.e, if I feel this hungry/tired/happy/sad right now, then I'll feel all the better/worse, as applicable, in proportion to the passage of time. In reality, I err dramatically when I try to extrapolate future mental states from the sensations and experiences of a given moment, and this is all the more true when travelling, under circumstances of heightened uncertainty as to what lies over the next hill, in the next town.
The polarity involved in solo travel is dramatic, the highs are higher and the lows, while not necessarily qualitatively lower, are the harder to bear without the company of close friends and family.
There is a difficulty to just appreciating something beautiful or interesting or even funny without being able to turn to another to validate the feeling. I suspect that mastering this would be a valuable life skill across multiple contexts.
There is a certain paradox to the perception of time that links in to the distinction between the experiencing self and the remembering self (as elucidated in the work of Daniel Kahneman). While we generally say 'time flies when you're having fun' or describe the clock as stationary during a boring experience, I believe that this is true only on the level of the experiencing self. In contrast, when looked at retrospectively, the opposite is true; the sheer amount of memories from a month full of stimulating activities and peak experiences lead it to feel like a sizeable chunk of time, whereas entire years of drudgery can slide by in what seems like an instant, leaving only the barest of an impression in the memory.
Mistakes come up often in travel (a wrong turn, missing out on a site that would have been of interest, choosing a bad hostel) and this has led me to realise that, as a rule, I find it hard to let mistakes just be what they are instead of either (a) rationalising them away or (b) blowing them out of all proportion in an internal self loathing tantrum.
Well, I will leave you with that for now, as the train is finally leaving. I'm en route to Nikko (of three monkeys fame) where I plan to spend my last day or so in Japan, before I'm off to South Korea, from where I'll post next.
Alright, I'm gonna make like a Japanese banana and.... be really expensive.
Much love,
David
The previous post covered a period up to, and including, the baseball game in Fukuoka. Since then, I've visited Nagoya, Tsumago and Magome (as a daytrip) Takayama, Shirakawago (also a side trip) and Kanazawa. I will mention a few highlights and then take the opportunity to share a few general observations from the past month, about travelling, particularly solo, and indeed about life in general.
I really liked Nagoya which, like Fukuoka, was a modern city with wide streets and park areas, large and dynamic, but not quite of the scale and frenetic activity level of a Tokyo or even an Osaka. There isn't a tremendous amount to see within the city limits, but Nagoya is a great base for some half day/full day jaunts.
The Aichi Prefecture in which Nagoya is located is home to the Toyota family of corporations including, most notably from a global perspective, the Toyota Motor Corporation (though in fact the original entity of the group was named Toyoda after the founder's surname, and was a loom manufacturing concern). With advance booking one is able to take a tour of certain of the car manufacturing plants, so I arranged a visit for when I knew I would be in the region. I'm not the most technically minded, but I DO enjoy free activities, so the tour and visit to the accompanying museum were a great way to spend a few hours. Jest aside though, it's a pretty serious operation they've got going there and one can understand the pervasive fear from the 80s that the Japanese were going to dominate the world economically. The tour also hammered home how endlessly complex almost every single facet of modern life is and how densely the threads that connect us are woven - 30,000 parts are used in every car.
The other trip I took from from Nagoya, this time a full day, was to Magome, a restored former postal station on one of the historic routes to Tokyo (then named Edo), from which there is a hike to Tsumago, another restored postal town, which one can, and I did, extend to another, more ordinary, town called Nagiso. The route was classic Japan as you imagine it, the Japan of famous wandering poet Basho, with rice fields, wooden buildings and waterfalls, all nestled among and between green forested hills and hiking it was much of what I want out of travel, distilled into a daytrip. Incidentally, Basho sounds like a character from the British comics I read as a kid. Chortle.
After Nagoya, I travelled to Takayama, a calm and quite touristy mountain town, where the plan was to ease up a little on the sightseeing and once again spend a few slower-paced days re-energising. My time was mostly spent walking around the town and its rural surrounds, interspersed with copious amounts of coffee and the best in non-fiction that the Kindle store has to offer. I did make one side trip to the village of Shirakawago, a village containing a concentration of buildings in the unique 'Gasho' architectural style (the word means 'praying hands', see pictures below) that have been declared a World Heritage Site (all caps) by whomever it is that declares these things (the UN? The elders of Zion? Big Pharma?).
Finally, I visited Kanazawa, on the sea of Japan, where I enjoyed a couple of days cycling around the sites and checking some final items of the Japan to-do list (karaoke). A particular highlight was the misleadingly nicknamed ninja temple (it is a temple, but it has nothing to do with ninjas). The reason for the name is that the temple contains numerous trapdoors and hidden exits, designed to facilitate the protection of the the local feudal lord from the forces of the Shogunate.
Now for some thoughts and observations:
I tend to imagine that feelings and emotions have a certain linearity, i.e, if I feel this hungry/tired/happy/sad right now, then I'll feel all the better/worse, as applicable, in proportion to the passage of time. In reality, I err dramatically when I try to extrapolate future mental states from the sensations and experiences of a given moment, and this is all the more true when travelling, under circumstances of heightened uncertainty as to what lies over the next hill, in the next town.
The polarity involved in solo travel is dramatic, the highs are higher and the lows, while not necessarily qualitatively lower, are the harder to bear without the company of close friends and family.
There is a difficulty to just appreciating something beautiful or interesting or even funny without being able to turn to another to validate the feeling. I suspect that mastering this would be a valuable life skill across multiple contexts.
There is a certain paradox to the perception of time that links in to the distinction between the experiencing self and the remembering self (as elucidated in the work of Daniel Kahneman). While we generally say 'time flies when you're having fun' or describe the clock as stationary during a boring experience, I believe that this is true only on the level of the experiencing self. In contrast, when looked at retrospectively, the opposite is true; the sheer amount of memories from a month full of stimulating activities and peak experiences lead it to feel like a sizeable chunk of time, whereas entire years of drudgery can slide by in what seems like an instant, leaving only the barest of an impression in the memory.
Mistakes come up often in travel (a wrong turn, missing out on a site that would have been of interest, choosing a bad hostel) and this has led me to realise that, as a rule, I find it hard to let mistakes just be what they are instead of either (a) rationalising them away or (b) blowing them out of all proportion in an internal self loathing tantrum.
Well, I will leave you with that for now, as the train is finally leaving. I'm en route to Nikko (of three monkeys fame) where I plan to spend my last day or so in Japan, before I'm off to South Korea, from where I'll post next.
Alright, I'm gonna make like a Japanese banana and.... be really expensive.
Much love,
David
 |
| Trying out whatever this is at the Toyota musuem |
 |
| Rice fields forever |
 |
| Tsumago main street |
 |
| Lookout at Shirakawago |
 |
| Thatched Gasho house at Shirakawago |
No comments:
Post a Comment