The Japan Saga, Part I: Crisis at the Airport, and Kyoto

With a place as fabled as Japan, having been romanticized for years in American film and TV, always shrouded in the mystery of the orient’s  impenetrable cloak, it’s difficult not to fall into the trap of building up unrealistic expectations.  At the risk of sounding foolish, I’ll share with you the idealized image I had created in my mind of what my first night in Japan would consist of.  Since I knew I would have to kill several hours after my arrival waiting for my friend to get off work, I had pictured myself finding a charming little back alley tea house with paper partition walls and a low ceiling where I would sit on the floor and drink in the richness of an ancient culture, preferably while snow falls softly outside.  Silly, right?  Of course, I knew that realizing such a perfect picture would be unlikely, but I certainly didn’t imagine that I would spend my first 4 hours in Japan stuck in Nagoya-Chubu airport frantically making expensive international phone calls, running from one information stand to another, and generally in a state of utter panic – but that’s exactly what happened.

The very first thing I did when I passed through customs was to seek out an ATM.  I needed to book a train ticket to Toyohashi where my friend lives, and I also needed some cash to pay for my libations in the charming little tea house when I found it.  I came upon a 7-11 ATM – perfect, I thought.  I had read that these ATMs always accepted foreign cards (not all Japanese ATMs do).  When the machine rejected my card twice, I swallowed the sense of alarm that began to surge up from my stomach and moved on to a Citi-Bank ATM that was labeled “Global ATM.”  That one rejected my card too, as did every other ATM I tried (I now know that the card and account that I have with my Korean bank CANNOT be used abroad, even though I had gone to my bank earlier in the week to ask this very question and was told that it would work).  By then, there was no suppressing the dread that was quickly overtaking my brain.  What was I going to do?  I couldn’t use my American credit card to purchase a train ticket, because they can only be paid for with cash; and I had not had enough foresight to bring extra cash – I only had about 1300 yen worth, which wasn’t even enough to get me to Toyohashi.  Compounding my panic was the thought that, even if I did figure out a way to get to Toyohashi, I would still need to survive 10 days in Japan while I apparently didn’t have any access to money. 

My iphone can’t be used to make regular calls in Japan, but it didn’t take me long to realize that if I could find Wi-Fi, I could use Skype to call my American bank, which I did.  I wanted to know if I could use my American credit card to get a cash advance at an ATM.  Their answer was complicated and unhelpful.  I won’t bore you with the details;  I’ll just say the phone call got me nowhere.  I was still 300 yen short of the cost of a ticket to Toyohashi. 

Fortunately there was a young girl working for the rail company who had a good command of English, and she was my savior on this fateful night.  She showed me how to obtain a certain kind of ticket that would allow me to pay the fare upon my arrival in Toyohashi rather than beforehand.  So I took the ticket, ran back to the wireless hotspot, and used Skype to call my friend in Toyohashi.  Since he was working, it took me a few tries to get through to him, but I eventually did.  After I explained the whole situation, he agreed to meet me at the station in Toyohashi and cover the extra 300 yen I needed to be able to pay for the ticket.

And that, patient reader, is how my adventure in Japan began – with chaos and panic.  I ended up having to borrow money from my friend to pay for my expenses during the trip – to the tune of $700.  Now, THAT’S a good friend.  I don’t know what I would have done if I’d gone to Japan completely on my own with no one to bail me out.  I’d figure out later how to pay him back.  For the moment, the crisis had been averted.

The friend I was meeting up with in Toyohashi – Micah – is an old friend from my teenage years.  He and I used to hang out and play music together back when we were in high school.  I had seen him only once or twice in the last 7 years or so, but thanks to the magic of Facebook I knew that he was living and teaching in Japan.  It wasn’t long after my arrival in Korea that he and I began throwing around the idea of me visiting him there.  Traveling in Japan is expensive, but having a friend to crash with would significantly reduce costs;  plus, how often in life does one get to reunite with an old friend a world away from the place where we’d known each other before, in a country where he knows the language, the ins-and-outs of the transportation network, the meaning behind certain cultural customs and idiosyncrasies?  This needed to happen.  It would’ve been foolish not to take advantage of the opportunity.  If I was ever going to visit Japan, I would never again encounter such a perfect set of circumstances. 

My first proper Japanese sashimi:  Salmon, 

tuna, and salmon eggs.  Mmmm.

The day after my arrival was a Saturday.  Since Micah doesn’t have to work on weekends, he accompanied me to Kyoto – Japan’s ancient capital, a city renowned for being a bastion of “old Japan.”  To a greater extent than the other major Japanese cities, Kyoto has managed to retain a lot of the traditional flavor.  We arrived mid-afternoon, checked into our hostel, and set off under the assault of a steady rain to explore the city’s charms.  Micah knew this place well.  During his first trip to Japan in 2008, he’d stayed here for a month.  He took me to a tiny hole-in-the-wall eatery where we dined on some excellent sashimi.  We then proceeded to just wander around.  At one point, we veered into a narrow alley paved with flagstones that immediately brought to mind scenes from Memoirs of a Geisha.  And then, as if they were taking a cue from my thoughts, two genuine painted-up maikos (geisha in training) came waddling past us with their paper umbrellas and iconic get-ups.  The coolest thing about this chance encounter was that it was the real thing – these girls weren’t wearing a costume for the tourists; they were going to work. 

A side street in Kyoto

Later, we met up with some friends of Micah’s for dinner.  His friend Yui, her brother, and her awesome parents joined us at a curry house (one of Kyoto’s oldest) and for drinks at a nearby bar afterwards.  We whiled away several hours drinking and snacking on oysters and potato wedges.  Yui’s father is a Buddhist monk who’s skilled at playing the shakuhachi (traditional Japanese bamboo flute), and I had a very lively conversation with him about music, traveling, Japanese and American culture, and our respective personal histories.  I felt perfectly at home with these amazingly open, welcoming people.  This is the best way to travel – engaging and learning from the locals who have far more insight to share than any tourist guide book could possibly offer.  I began to relax and truly enjoy myself, the crisis of the previous night fading further into memory.

Micah and Yui on the left.  On the right, Yui's mother,brother, and father.

When we finally left the bar, the rain had abated.  Feeling too tipsy and tired to endure the long walk back to the hostel, Micah and I opted to take a taxi.  It wasn’t until we had stepped out on a dark street and the taxi had driven away that we realized that we weren’t at our hostel.  I heard Micah utter the dreaded words one hopes never to hear from a guide: “Hmm.  This doesn’t look right at all.”

We were in a residential neighborhood, a labyrinth of crooked, narrow streets and alleys.  We managed to find our way to a main road and a convenience store where we could ask directions – thank goodness Micah speaks Japanese.  Too bad the directions we received didn’t lead us to the hostel.  But we knew we were close.  After wandering around for about an hour and stopping numerous times in the glow of a streetlamp to scrutinize our map, we found ourselves in familiar territory.  It was with exhaustion and tremendous relief that we finally ascended the steps to our hostel, quietly celebrating our triumph over the maze of that Kyoto neighborhood.  I fished the key out of my pocket – a tag on the key ring displayed a numerical code that we needed to punch in to get the door to open:  #01090*.  It didn’t work.  I tried again.  It didn’t work the second time, and our premature celebration was immediately brought to a halt.

We looked at each other with incredulity.  Seriously?  After our unplanned hour-long moonlight stroll we wanted so badly to just be able to go to bed, and now there was another obstacle standing in our way.  We stood there in silence for a few moments, contemplating our next move.  Micah asked to see the key. 

Then, incredibly, he started to laugh.  Holding the key ring up for me to see, he slowly turned it upside down.  The code now read *06010#.  We knew before we even punched the numbers in that it would work, and that I was an idiot.

In the morning we checked out of the hostel and strolled down the now familiar neighborhood lanes to another hostel owned by the same folks as the one we’d just left.  We sat down for a breakfast of toast, coffee, and orange juice and hatched out our plan for the day.  We decided to head to the Fushimi Inari shrine in the south-eastern part of the city – really, it was a series of Shinto shrines spanning an entire mountainside which were connected by wandering paths that passed through colonnades of bright orange torii (a stylized Japanese gate usually found at the entrance of Shinto shrines which symbolically mark the transition from the profane to the sacred). 

A fountain for purifying one's hands

before entering the shrine

The first thing we did when we arrived at the main shrine – an impressive tiered pagoda structure of gleaming white and orange –  was to purify our hands by ladling water out of a fountain-trough.  The gateway to the shrine was guarded on either side by imposing fox statues.  The fox is believed to be the messenger of the Inari gods and is regarded as a highly spiritual animal capable of possessing humans (the preferred way of entering the body is under the fingernails).  We observed people walking up to a certain part of the shine and engaging in a prayer ritual in which they would toss in a coin, ring a bell (to get the gods’ attention, according to Micah), clap their hands twice, then bring their hands together in prayer.

The Fushimi Inari Shinto shrine

A statue of a fox -- messenger of the Inari

Before long, we continued up the mountain under the paradoxically luminescent shadow of the torii, investigating the smaller, cruder shrines along the way.  We eventually came to a point far up the hillside where we found tea houses overlooking the surrounding forests.  There were many junctions in the trail, and I had planned a specific route that would take us over the other side of the mountain, passed a Buddhist temple (Tofukuji), and deposit us near a train station.  Though my directions were carefully taken down from a guide book, following them explicitly proved to be impossible.  But by instead relying on instinctual sense of direction, we managed to find our way.

The bright orange torii of the Fushimi Inari Shrine

After lunch, we spent the rest of the day straining our already overworked leg muscles walking around the heart of Kyoto, picking up a few souvenirs.  By that evening we were back at Micah’s apartment in Toyohashi, unwinding with some tea and a card game with a few of Micah’s American friends.  All in all, it was a fun weekend and a very promising start to my trip.

So ends part 1 of the Japan saga.  Part 2 soon to come.

Tofukuji Buddhist Temple