Japan Update

More information for the fashion concious among you, the look right now among females is to glue on giant fake lashes. But the hottest of the hot also wear giant eye glasses with no lenses. That's because your giant lashes would rub the lenses. I seem to see even more girls sporting that look in Osaka than anywhere else we've been.

Japanese cities would also seem to have "bring your disabled to the city center" weekends. During the weekends on the trains and walking around everywhere, there are far more old people bent 90 degrees, prosthetic limbs, wheelchairs, retarded people, and albinos (okay, albinos aren't disabled, but I saw one and it was the weekend).

Travel advice for anyone coming to Japan is to wear slip-on shoes. Every temple, shrine, or Imperial site requires you to take off your shoes, don slippers, and shuffle around everywhere. Often one complex will have several sites where you have to take off and put your shoes back on numerous times. Tying your laces up again over and over is a fool's (Western person's) task.

We finished Kyoto and have moved on to Osaka. Since the last update, we've visited somewhere between 12 and 6,000 temples, shrines, and Imperial sites. They blur together a little bit, but the history of the Buddhist and Shinto beliefs along with the philosophical developments of Zen sects over time have been more interesting than I thought they would be.

I was super excited to come to Japan (that's right former Gen-i colleagues: super excited) for all the ninja and samurai all over the place. I knew about the history of European peasants and it was a miserable and bleak existence for all of them. Pretty much my entire exposure to the lives of Japanese peasants was James Clavell's Shogun and that portrayed peasants as pretty much accepting, embracing, and enjoying thier position in society.

Anyway, to support a few samuraii and a very few(!) ninja, the numerous peasants of Japan had quite terrible lives. They worked hard all year to give all their rice to the samuraii (and just like all peasants, were near starving) who gave it all to the Shogun who fed his armies with. Because Japan had numerous internal conflicts and everything was made out of wood, everything burned to the ground (from accidental fire, predominately war, lightning, etc.) numerous times and each time was rebuilt as it was before according to exacting specifications. So one generally does not see the original of any of the buildings.

Even today, the gardeners of the Imperial sites must pick up each pine needle from the ground one by one, just like they did traditionally. Seems like a huge waste of man power to me. And speaking of wasted people power, I've never been anywhere that had so many traffic directors. Every single contruction site, parking lot, pedestrain crossing site has one or usually two guys, and sometime up to six, stading around directing traffic.

I suppose it works really well in places where there are tons of pedestrains and cyclists and they all have head phones on. Somebody has to pay attention to the traffic. Yesterday it snowed really hard on us and I was most impressed by a guy riding a bicycle, with an umbrella pinched between cheek and shoulder, wearing a surgical mask (down around his neck) with a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, with headphones connected to his mobile phone who was texting while he rode. That guy was the definiton of multitasker.

You can look at the pictures for information on all the Kyoto sites in the next post. I'm working on it now. I swear.