terror in a onesie

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The English translation on signs does not necessarily tell the whole story.

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Drink Boss Coffee, or Tommy Lee Jones will cut you.

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Bubbling is preeminent.

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Hello Kitty wants you to be pretty.

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Fruits has power.

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The large towns in Japan are very blind-friendly.

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My theory of barbeque restaurant signs must be extended.

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Unborn babies are very noisy.

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Tokyo is just like New York.

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English makes everything better.

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Physicists have something to be ashamed of.

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Toilets are really complex.

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Pocari Sweat’s taste matches its name.

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A lit cigarette is carried at the height of a child’s face.

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When we talked about buying presents in Japan for our family, one gift I knew ahead of time: green tea for my dad. He’s a confirmed green tea drinker, and while he has his supply of Chinese green tea from a friend, he hadn’t had Japanese green tea.

Beyond the vague shopping list of “tea, green” and a desire to avoid the Japanese equivalent of Lipton green tea, I had no plan. I was excited when we passed a specialty tea shop while we were spiraling in to our ryokan, but since we were — not lost, exactly, but not entirely found, we decided to return later.

We weren’t able to stop until the last afternoon in Kyoto, on our way to check out of the ryokan. The store looked closed, but one of the two women chatting outside was the owner, and ushered us back in.

Our Japanese-speaking friend once again had the pleasure of translating for me as we tried to figure out what kind of tea she sold, and what the difference between the foil bags of tea and the more traditional-looking packages of tea were. It turned out she sold tea powder that you mixed straight into water and drank, and tea leaves mixed with rice that you steeped using an infuser. She could tell we were confused by the difference, so, unprompted by us, she grabbed a package of both kinds from the shelves, ripped them open, and made us tea.

While she made tea and fetched cups, I boggled that she was so willing to do that for us. The second surprise came when, as she was serving the tea-and-rice combination, she said, “I’m learning English, but I don’t know it very well yet.” She had a nearly American-neutral accent.

We ended up buying both kinds of tea for my dad and some for us as well. The owner wrapped everything up in many layers of paper. As I turned to leave, she dropped several packages of green tea cookies in the bag.

So I got my present for my dad. Even better, I got a story to go with the present.

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On Thursday we drove the kids to West Memphis, AR to meet the grandparents. After lunch, we hopped back in the car and drove to Nashville, TN and spent the night with my college roommate, Terry, and her family. We had dinner with them and got our trip off to a great start by hanging with friends we haven’t gotten to spend a lot of time with lately. Friday, Terry drove us to the Nashville airport so we could fly to New York.

Friday evening, after a fantastic dinner with Fahmida’s family, we had the brilliant idea to stay up late so that we’d sleep on the plane on Saturday. Yeah, ok, that idea was less than brilliant, but we didn’t have our children and we really wanted to go see a movie.

We got on Japan Airlines at 11ish am on Saturday. Thirteen hours later we were in Tokyo.

We landed about an hour earlier than we were scheduled. We started by going to the Japan Railways office to redeem our JR pass. That pass was the best investment of the whole trip, btw. It allowed us to ride all over Japan on the JR line as much as we wanted to for seven days. We got on a subway-like car to take us to the station where we could catch the bullet train to Osaka.

I was thinking to myself, “10 minutes on the tram thingie and then we’re on the Shinkansen.” Nope, it was more like 45. Yeah, 45 minutes of riding through Tokyo. It’s that big. Once we got on the bullet train, I wanted desperately to watch the scenery but I could hardly stay awake. I dozed and tried to keep one eye open for my only look at the country side. I missed my only chance to see Mt. Fuji on that train ride.

About two and a half hours later we were in Osaka. Then we got on the subway for 30 minutes, carted our luggage up and down about 900 stairs and then spilled out onto the street in Osaka. We were so tired we were barely standing upright.

These are some of the first sights we saw:

We found our Ryokan and gratefully fell onto our futons and passed out.

The next morning we woke up to this:

and this:

The first day, we wandered the streets and got an idea of what city life is like in Osaka. Theater is big:

and so are castles:

The whole day felt magical. I guess that’s what you get your first day in a foreign country. I spent the better part of the day refraining from the we’re-in-Japan happy dance. I’m sure the folks in Osaka appreciated my restraint.

Click on any of the pictures to see all of the photos from Osaka.

We ended the day by bullet training to Kobe to have dinner.

It was pretty Westernized but the cachet of being able to say we took the Shinkansen to Kobe to have Kobe beef was too awesome to pass up.

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Tuesday was the hardest day. I knew intellectually what had happened at Hiroshima. But there was no way to know until I stood there. I would have thought that I’d be telling you how sad the city of Hiroshima is. How there is this cloud that hangs over it, darkening the mood. But there isn’t. It feels like an upbeat place with school children and young people everywhere.

This was the most revered spot we stood on during all the time we were in Japan. Where we were there, multiple Japanese came and bowed and prayed. And I felt as an American, I had no right to be there. It was humbling. Thinking about what I saw brings tears to my eyes now. Going through the museum made that feeling both better and worse.

I’m not really sure how to describe the museum. If I spend a lot of time talking about it, it becomes a point-by-point walking tour, which can be supremely uninteresting. I’m much more interested in giving my impressions and the feelings I had. I was fascinated by Japan’s timeline of events for the war. Having only ever read the American descriptions of World War II, seeing it from another nation’s view point was interesting. Seeing articles pulled from the rubble was amazing: glass bottles melted together, shards of glass embedded in concrete, melted and warped steel beams. The human mementos were harder to deal with: blood-stained clothing, a child’s school books with no remains of the child, a pile of skin and fingernails a mother saved from her dying son. At the end of the museum I felt emotionally rung out, dazed and empty.

Despite it all there is hope here. A Japanese legend says 1,000 folded paper cranes make a wish come true. It that were true, millions of wishes would have already been granted to Hiroshima.

After lunch, we continued on to Miyajima.

I told Fahmida that this was the Japan I was looking for. Temples, shrines and pagodas. They are the mystery and beauty of the culture I’d been reading about and seeing all of my life.

It would have been perfect, except for the 1,000% humidity. We didn’t walk around Miyajima so much as swim. But hey, we got to see some truly amazing things that day so I’m not complaining.

Click on any of the pictures to see all of the photos from Hiroshima & Miyajima.

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Eli loves a set of nesting dolls that Stephen’s mom has. So when I saw a set of Dharma Dolls in Japan, I knew it was the right gift to bring home for Eli.

As Eli was playing with them one day, he began telling me of his adventures in Arkansas. While he was staying with my mom, she took him to my college roommate’s house for a visit. So he named his dharma dolls after the Krebs family.

Red=Mr. Brett
Brett, he so wanted the red one to be Missy and the pink one to be you! I changed his mind… You’re welcome.
Pink=Miss Missy
Orange=Grace
Yellow=Morgan
Green=Lydia

He calls them his Grace, Morgan, and Lydia dolls and carries them everywhere. Missy and I joked after he was born that maybe we should go ahead an arrange a marriage between him and one of the girls early. If the amount of time he spends talking about them is any indication, I don’t think he’s going to have a problem with that.

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The train from Narita airport to Tokyo leapt out of the tunnel and raced across the countryside. I stared out the window, my brain floating in a soup of fatigue poisons, and all I could think was how the kudzu-covered hills looked just like those back home in Alabama.

Then we zipped past a small family shrine.

–

In general, travel makes me quieter and more self-contained, something I’m sure my friends would love to see. In part that’s a reaction to experiencing a foreign country. The first time I traveled out of the US, I realized that I was seeing both England and myself reflected in the country. I take what I experience and drape it across the framework of familiar experiences.

That’s harder to do in Japan, where I am functionally illiterate. I’m a compulsive reader. Sit me down at breakfast next to a box of cereal and I’ll skim the ingredients list. Now I’m surrounded by signs I can’t read, and worse, I can’t even do rudimentary pattern matching. I can memorize words written in the Latin alphabet, allowing me to recognize signs that I can’t truly read. The kanji, hiragana and katakana slide right out of my brain as fast as I pour them in. It’s disorienting in a way far more disturbing to me than not being able to understand what people are saying.

The small differences are even more jarring. When we boarded the Shinkansen from Tokyo to Osaka that first night, we were in a smoking car. People smoked on the sidewalk and in restaurants, their numbers far greater than I’m used to now.

Whenever I travel, I spend the first part of the trip being uncomfortable with my tourist status. Years ago an Australian asked me, “Is America really like it looks like on Cagney & Lacey?” Now I’m in a country I know mainly via Gamera movies, Akira, Lost in Translation, and reviews of Yo-Yo Girl Cop.

To make matters worse, I’m the American counterpart of the nice Japanese couple I once saw excitedly taking pictures of my hometown Wal-Mart. I’m not even sticking with stores — I’m taking pictures of stair railings and adverts.

Even as I am exhausted and overwhelmed by the differences, I’m comforted by glimpses of familiar things. I blink at the Disney ads in the airport and the Coke bottles next to Pocari Sweat in the ubiquitous vending machines. We may have imported kudzu and watched in surprise at it engulfed trees and houses and slow-moving cows, but we’ve exported our pop culture and watched it spread across Japan.