So, finally an update.
A few weeks ago, Keio University had its cultural festival at Mita campus, which is the campus I go to (Keio University has five campuses throughout the city of Tokyo, Mita is where the foreign students go).
I went on two different days and it was pretty impressive. All of the clubs had different booths set up selling various things and there was an outdoor stage set up where different groups sung and danced. There were more people on campus than I had ever seen before! Many of the people there were not Keio Students. Apparently Keio University’s Mita campus festival is one of the most popular in Tokyo.
So, one of the benefits of having the festival is that we also got off from class during the week that it was going on. On one of my days off, I went with two of my fellow Middlebury students to Kamakura which is a place outside of Tokyo known for its temples and shrines. We used the normal train system to get there and it took about an hour and a half or so. After having lived in Tokyo for a couple months, it was nice to see fields and trees again. It was also nice to be able to see the sky without having to look straight up.
I was sure to take my camera to Kamakura. Here are some photos from the first temple we visited…
One of the smaller buildings off to the side.
It seems that at a lot of Buddhist temples, a lot of open space is often employed. In this photo, you can also see on the left that large structure housing jars. This is also common though I’m not completely sure what its significance is.
While we were there, we saw many Japanese people painting the various structures. Much more so than in the US, in Japan, it’s a common hobby to paint pictures.
Also, at this same site, we wandered around a bit and found these stairs with many red gates over them. This is also a common feature. The steps led up to some sort of small clearing where I suppose they perform ceremonies of some sort. That’s Azaria and Tyler on the steps!
Now that I think of it, going to Kamakura was the first time I had been outside of Tokyo in Japan. While I was there, a Japanese man came up to me, wanting to practice his English and two times, high school/middle school students shouted “Hello!” at us and then laughed and ran away when we responded. This is more like the Japan I had envisioned before coming, where people would always be staring at me and trying out their school learned English. In Tokyo, I suppose because there are so many foreigners, nobody really looks at me or pays me much attention. When I go into restaurants, the waiters speak to me in Japanese exactly the same way as they would speak to any other customer. This is why I want to go out into the country in Japan so that I will achieve that celebrity status, lol.
Actually, I remember a few years ago, I went to Taiwan with some friends after graduation since one of my good friends in high school is Taiwanese and was kind enough to invite us to his family’s home there. A lot of the places we ended up going on that trip were places that normal foreign tourists would not go and I think there are fewer foreigners in Taiwan than there are in Japan. Although when I went to Taiwan, I never considered I would be rare there, thinking back about it now, I realize that there were quite a few interesting times! For example, people would often look at us and I cannot forget the time that we visited some sort of natural park and one of the other tourists there found us so much more interesting than the birds and nature there that he started taking photographs of us!
At any rate, I’m sure this type of thing would get pretty annoying after the first couple of weeks, so I’m glad I’m in Tokyo. As for Kamakura, we walked to a different area. I think this is part of some sort of shrine. Here we can see people painting again…
One of the main attractions of Kamakura is the large Buddha. Originally it was surrounded by a temple but during a violent storm, the temple was destroyed leaving only the large Buddha standing. Since then, the Buddha has been kept outside.
Unfortunately, when we were trying to get to the large Buddha, we got horribly lost. I think that most people take the bus to get there, but we decided to walk since it was only something like two or three kilometers away. We asked some people in a coffee shop how to get there and ended up taking a wrong turn which took us way up into the hills and through many residential areas. I suppose it was nice to see the neighborhoods and the views from on top of the hills but it took us many, many hours to get back. When we finally did get back, we realized that we were only 20 minutes away or so from the Buddha when we took the turn in the completely wrong direction!
I suppose one of the good things about all this was that on the way back to getting on the right path, we stopped at a kaiten sushi restaurant. For those of you who don’t know, kaiten sushi restaurants are those places where they have sushi on conveyer belts which move around by your table. When you see something that looks good, you just take it off the conveyer belt!
One of the interesting things I learned about in one of my Japanese classes was the solution to the problem of having sushi that has been out on the conveyer belt for hours. Since the conveyer belt simply goes round and round, there’s no way of knowing which sushi has been freshly put on and which sushi has been out for four hours. So, what they developed was this system where they put bar codes on the bottom of each plate. Then when the plates pass over a bar code reader at a certain place in the rotation, the computer reads how long the plate has been on the conveyer belt. If it’s been more than an hour or so, it pushes the plate using a metal rod of some sort off the conveyer belt and into the garbage. This way, only fresh sushi is kept on the conveyer belt at all times. I was able to see this process happen quite a few times while we were at the restaurant since our table was right next to the place where the bar code reader reads the bar codes.
Also, another nice thing about the place we were at was that it had a computer screen at each table. If you wanted a certain kind of sushi and you didn’t see it on the conveyer belt, you could just touch the screen and scroll through pictures of all the different kinds of sushi and select the kind you want. Then you enter in the amount you want and a message is sent back to the kitchen with the order. Maybe 5 minutes later, a sushi plate with your table’s number on it will come by on the conveyer belt and there’s the sushi you ordered!
Each plate was 105 yen I think which is about 91 cents per plate of sushi. Pretty cheap. I took a picture of Tyler with the conveyer belt next to our table.
After the kaiten sushi restaurant, we finally made it to the Buddha!
You can see the leaves starting to change colors in these photos. Here is the Buddha again from a side shot.
In Japanese, it is called the ?? (daibutsu).
We even were allowed to go inside the Daibutsu after paying 20 yen (less than 20 cents). It was very dark, but we were able to take stairs up and look around though there wasn’t much to see.
After the Daibutsu, it was getting dark out, so we walked back to the train station and took a train back home. All in all, it was a nice trip. I think I want to go back there sometime though since we weren’t able to see a lot of the other temples and things there because we got lost for so long.
In my next entry, I’ll talk about one of the other events I did on my off days. The movies!