It's a magical world

After eight years, a long night bus ride, and a rather poky JR service to a ferry sailing beneath a bona fide double rainbow, I've made it to Naoshima, the chief of the art islands of the inland sea. After some folderol with internet service and missing the previous ferry by all of two minutes, Spike & I wound up eating out of a conbini for dinner last night, and this morning we took a late start, with the advantage that we had our hostel (a residence so recently converted it still has the former owner's nameplate on the doorpost and their family altar behind a curtain in the alcove) mostly to ourselves.

We hiked out (well actually, took the bus, since it is hot and I am attempting to not walk my knee to death, as I have done twice now this year already) to the Chichu Art Museum at the top of the hill, and I thought it was pretty cool. Like most of the major galleries on the art islands it was done by Ando Tadao, who is possibly my favorite living architect, and it uses almost entirely natural light and is also almost entirely underground--you'd hardly know it, since it's done so cleverly to let in as much natural light as possible, which also makes the entire museum itself a site-specific installation that changes with daily conditions. The weather was changeable today, though not drastically so, but enough to get something of a sense.

The museum only has works by three artists: Monet, Walter De Maria, and James Turrell. It was, as far as I can remember, my first encounter with De Maria and Turrell's stuff, of which more anon, but Monet was probably the first artist I learned to appreciate and like as an individual, and I've always loved his works; it helps that just about every one of them is a gem. The gallery has five Monets, all late period, all water lilies, one monumental, two square, two smaller and rectangular, designed to evoke the Musee de l'Orangerie of which they were a part. You have to put on slippers before you can walk into the gallery, which is floored in tumbled cubes of Italian marble (we were informed), and frankly, more art should be contemplated while wearing slippers. It was quiet, and that quiet really added to the experience.

The Walter De Maria piece was set in a two-story gallery, much like a church, with a 2.2m-diameter sphere of marble in the center between two flights of stairs and 27 wooden, gold-leafed sculptures of geometric shapes. I'm totally stealing it for a Stargate fanfic at some point--it was more than a little otherworldly, and very cool, to walk up those steps and then back down again, past the smooth, reflective marble sphere, in which you could always see the skylight. We walked past another Walter De Maria piece outside using some of the same elements, and it was also cool, but witty, in that it was tucked into the side of a staircase built into a hill. I was reminded a little of the scene at the end of the Sesame Street movie set in the Met, where the kid has to climb the stairs so that Osiris can weigh his heart in the scales.

The James Turrell pieces were, quite simply, stunning, particularly "Open Field," which played with light and space to alter viewers' perceptions, and then alter them further by allowing us to go, guided, inside the artwork, which didn't make it any less trippy or brain-bending: quite the opposite, in fact. Later in the afternoon we saw another Turrell artwork in the Minamidera art house, which also played with our perceptions, but instead of using light to do so, used darkness. Both times, walking back out into the world was like a revelation. I was reminded a little of LaMonte Young's Dream House, in all the best ways. I am an instant Turrell fan.

After that we trekked back down the hill--Yayoi Kusama's yellow pumpkin sculpture, ahoy!--and then into Honmura town, where we had a lovely vegetarian lunch in a tiny house cafe and set about seeing five of the six parts of the art house project (actually there are seven, but I failed to book the seventh in advance) in just under an hour. The aforementioned Minamidera, housed in an Ando-designed house, was the best, but I also really liked Kadoya, which has a number of counters appearing to float inside a darkened traditional house--again, I had a lot of thoughts about the sea of time and other notions. Haisha, which has a partial Statue of Liberty replica in it, was also a hoot, and the Go'o Shrine, which included an underground chamber with a glass staircase uniting heaven and earth, was also pretty cool, and very Old Kingdom, as Spike remarked. Gokaido was a bit subtle--the camellia tree element is key, but I suspect much is gained from knowing that the camellia tree has long associations as a Buddhist symbol of the transience of life. The rock garden was lovely, though. We missed Ishibashi and Kinza; next time.

Spike was generally less impressed by all of this than I was, and in fact we are now going to cut short our art island excursion and go to Takamatsu for udon on Friday, rather than hitting Teshima as I had originally planned. I wouldn't go so far as to say that the art islands are a scam--I have been very satisfied with all this so far, but I won't deny that the Benesse Foundation's orchestration of all this is a bit…not quite heavy-handed, but definitely institutional. We noticed while wandering around Honmura a series of witty yarn artworks, which turned out to be done by one Ishikawa Kazuhara, who just started doing his art here in 2006 after someone told him he should. (I suspect this isn't quite yarn-bombing; he visits to maintain the art once a year.) Despite the fact that there is now a brochure with a map of all his pieces, there is something much more charming about their extreme site specificity and spontaneity that the Benesse-brokered art simply can't match.

I would love to get out here for the Setouchi Triennale next year, when even more of the islands will be transformed into art; I would love to come back; I'm really looking forward to Inujima tomorrow. Still, the contrast between my own unconscious expectations and the reality continues to intrigue me.

I went back to Kyoto with my friends S and J last Thursday, via the Seishun 18 ticket (i.e. a 9.5-hour local train ride) for maximum nostalgia. Kyoto is lovely as usual, albeit a little cold and rainy, and kind of melancholy, because I like it so much better here than in Tokyo, but I don't live here anymore.

In an attempt to make the best of it, however, I went up the hill with J on Monday to Kiyomizu-dera, the main halls of which are under major restoration but which is of course still lovely, particularly at the tale end of sakura season when the petals are falling like spring snow. We went through a gate in the fence that was unlocked for the first time in my nearly two dozen visits to the temple and found ourselves walking through temple land, past a bamboo grove, beneath two imperial mausolea, and to a little temple in the pass called Seikan-ji, site of a famous episode form the Tale of the Heike. It was lovely and we were almost the only people there besides a toothless (literally) fellow traveler from Tokyo and the temple attendant, with whom we made conversation and who chased us down as we were on the steps to leave to give us our correct change as well as Kiyomizu-yaki sake cups. In the continuing adventures of "people in Japan give me things," tonight at Gontaro we got free matcha warabi mochi, because I don't even know why, but they were delicious.

I have a long list of random temples I want to visit and/or revisit, but instead I went to the Manga Museum today and will be going back on Friday as well, because doing research soothes my soul and my incipient panic about not doing enough research. Tomorrow we're seeing Jupiter Ascending, AT LAST.

I went to the Setagaya Boroichi both times it was held this past lunar year (i.e. December and January), and the first time round I met a lady selling huge yuzu in plastic containers for hella cheap, particularly considering the price of fruit in this country. We had a conversation about how it was actually possible for yuzu to get within striking range of the size of cultivated oranges, which I hadn't known, and what one does with them when they're that big--one of her suggestions which I regretfully couldn't take was to poke holes in it, as with a potato before microwaving, and put it in the bath. I don't have a bath. What I wound up doing was attempting to make ponzu with them, only to find that I'd let them go a bit too long and they were mostly seeds anyway, so my juice yield was rather low even though the apartment smelled delicious. (Yuzu sort of tastes like lemon and juniper, except delicious.) Being a Kyotoite at heart, I love me some yudofu, and I ate the ponzu with that. It was great.

One of my walks to my train station takes me past two trees that I have always assumed to be either yuzu (big ones) or tachibana, another variety of citrus. Last week I saw a huge fruit lying on the ground on the road side of the household wall, and without pausing too much to think about it, I scooped it off the ground and into my bag. I assumed it was a big yuzu and made the same preparations for yudofu, only to find when I cut into it tonight that it was clearly much more like an orange…except wildly bitter. Further googling has convinced me that this is probably a hassaku, which I have never heard of before, much less eaten. With soy sauce and mirin, it's not too bad, though my froofy seasonal ponzu from the fancy store in Tokyo Midtown is definitely better balanced as a sauce. Still, all in all, I think this is a win.

It's true, people in Japan give me things. I think it's a combination of a) me being a white girl b) that being unusual and/or white privilege c) the assumption that white people are kind of clueless d) people being nice in greater or lesser proportions depending on location and circumstances. Things I've been given, a short list off the top of my head: 

• Umbrellas
• A hiking pole at the top of Mt. Fuji (I left it at the trail entrance when I got down so that someone else could use it on the way up)
• Sandwiches
• Tea and tea sweets, in exchange for some English conversation (that was in Nara in June 2011 when foreigners were really scarce)
• The most recent example: on Monday we wound up in a hole-in-the-wall izakaya in suburban Tokyo after the ramen shop we'd been aiming for closed early because of the Coming of Age Day holiday. We walked in and the owner immediately gave us some of his original art and started telling us his life story--he's 78 now and he only started doing art at age 70 after he got out of the hospital, where he'd been for a illness. There were three of us, and he gave each of us a small framed print! Luckily one of the people with me, despite not speaking Japanese, did art and had some on his phone to show, and we were all able to have a conversation in two languages about various things. The owner and his wife were very nice; even the drunk guy in the corner of the bar (there's always a drunk guy in the corner of the bar), in whose line of sight I placed myself on the theory that I've dealt with plenty of them in my time, was a particularly pleasant and friendly version of that guy. He really liked that I told him to be careful on his way home in Japanese on his way out. I still find that people in Tokyo live up to the standoffish stereotype (I'll take the snobs of Kyoto over the cold Tokyoites any day; Kyoto people are very friendly in my experience, but then I can be slightly snobby myself), but there are many exceptions, particularly among the more shitamachi types. Also the food at this place was pretty tasty, which was nice.

Goodness, I'm behind on everything. I blame Festivids.

seekingferret asked about Japanese sports.

I don't actually know too much about Japanese sports! The first time I lived here I went to see American football (Kyoto University vs. Ritsumeikan University), sumo, and a Hanshin Tigers baseball game. The football game remains the only one I've seen in its entirety; the interesting thing was the composition of the cheerleading squad: they had a mixed-gender band, a group of dudes in a made-up hakama/kimono outfit combo who were in the stands leading the crowd in cheers (we were given cheer sticks and a handout with songs to sing. Our side was terrible so all we sang were the defense songs), and girls in stereotypical cheerleader outfits down on the field.

The baseball game was much more interesting--in Japan in the seventh inning stretch everyone releases the balloons they bought on the way in, and since the stadium is so small (about 30K people?) it's like being in a sea of balloons floating upwards. Of course it's bad for the environment, but it was cool. And the style of the game is very different here--it's like baseball was in the States before the 1990s, when everyone started doping. The game is much faster-paced and more dynamic because the "home run or nothing" mentality also isn't a thing here. I like that, because the strategy aspects of baseball are something that has always appealed to me.

Sumo was cool, too. I need to see about getting tickets up here in Tokyo, though in recent years the revelations about bullying and match-fixing (not very surprising, to be clear) have somewhat tarnished the sport's reputation. When I went we made a day of it and watched the entire first half of the matches from ringside seats, because it's totally okay to sit in other people's seats as long as they're not there, not to mention eat food and drink beer. And then when Asashoryu lost everyone threw their cushions (zabuton), which was pretty hilarious.

It's my highly subjective impression that figure skating and horseracing are enjoying higher profiles recently. The figure skating thing I'm pretty sure of; Yuzuru Hanyu's latest sports feats regularly make the news, and I see his face around Tokyo fairly frequently. Other than that, I've seen the Seijin-no-Hi archery at Sanjusangen-do and mounted archery and sacred kickball (okemari) at Kamigamo Shrine. Sumo evolved out of shrine festivals, after all, and a number of shrine events still have a sports component. Those are all pretty cool because whatever people are doing, they're doing it in elaborate costumes.

So as I have mentioned, I've been reading a manga about rakugo, which at least some people have called "tradtional Japanese stand-up comdey, done sitting down",  Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinjû by Kumota Haruko, but I had never really thought of going to rakugo because while my Japanese is pretty good, there's a big difference between being pretty good at modern Japanese and being able to understand spoken Late Middle Japanese i.e. Edo-ben, which is what a lot of classical rakugo monologues are in. But when I saw posters on campus for rakugo in English for free, I jumped at the chance, and I was really glad I did.

The rakugoka in question, Tatekawa Shinoharu, started off by telling us how he became familiar with rakugo at the age of 26, which is very late, but loved it so much he quit his job and became an apprentice rakugo storyteller. He's a journeyman now, and since he graduated from Yale, his English is perfect. He translates his stories himself, and did three of them--"Tenshiki," "Sakamon," and "Jugemu." It was really funny, and also really impressive how just one guy could create such a multitude of characters with only two props (a hand towel and a fan) and without moving. Shinoharu-san made some interesting points, namely that there being only one performer is what allowed them to play an infinite number of parts, and that wearing kimono means that they can be anyone in any time period. Apparently a few rakugoka like him write their own modern stuff, so that definitely comes in handy.

I didn't ask about women being rakugoka because, quite frankly, that seemed like it would be needlessly rude, particularly in a Q&A that already was getting into the heavy territory of whether rakugo has a future, given that the audiences are generally pretty old. Shinoharu-san seems to be doing a lot of things to try to bring rakugo into the modern performing arts world, including his English rakugo performances, although he's too junior to actually express an opinion about what rakugo should do. In any event, it was highly entertaining.

Well, I've been settling into living in Japan again, part of which has involved plotting a running route and going running (I've done it twice so far! Pathetic but on the right track) and part of which has involved cooking things again. Cooking! It's great. It's also interesting to me to be able to see how I've leveled up in the seven years since I first lived in Japan and was first responsible for providing my own meals 24/7. I'm much more comfortable improvising now, particularly since a) the internet is way better at food than it was seven years ago; and b) I've finally realized that the fundamentals of Japanese food are dashi, soy sauce, mirin, and sake, with salt and sugar added every so often for variation.

I'm living in ridiculous luxury and actually have a microwave…oven…thing in my apartment, but I don't trust it (I'd rather just have an actual microwave, this one is very complicated, and I don't really have any pans and I'm lazy, though I can probably improvise well enough with tin foil for most things) and anyway it's nice to work on my simmering and sauteing skills. I probably should buy an actual soup or donburi bowl with all these soups and stews I'm looking at making. I'm also weighing the merits of buying an actual nabe pot, which is one of those kitchen things that is nice enough that I would want to cart it home. We'll see. I think the pot that came with my apartment is big enough that I can just use that for half-recipes of most things. I definitely need to get a leftovers-sized tupperware, though.

Anyway, here are some recipes I've been making or am eyeing: 

• Nira Tamago - I had this once years ago and it is so fucking good, it haunted my dreams, and now the nira are all mine. Tomorrow I'm going to go hogwild and combine it with my patented agedashitofu oyakodon variation. This website also looks like it has a lot of good recipes in general.
• Chestnut Rice (Kurigohan) - Pretty tasty! Definitely needs something like simmered pumpkin (kabocha) as a side dish. I like this website a lot from what I've seen so far.
• Matsutake Clear Soup (Suimono) - Mushrooms, tofu, and whatever else in broth. Pretty tasty. I added carrots because I'm paranoid about getting enough vegetables. I also used a different kind of mushroom (shiitake) because cheaper. I'm glad this site sorts the recipes by season, though what was labeled two portions fed me for just one meal.
• Deb's Pseudo-Okonomiyaki - The beauty of okonomiyaki is that you can do just about anything to them and they will still taste good because of the sauce. I used okonomiyaki flour for the base and only two eggs the first time, then three the second; I thought three was sufficient, as two was kind of a hot mess. But they were pretty damn tasty with okonomiyaki sauce (storebought; I haven't tested Deb's recipe) and toasted sesame seeds on top.
• Chocolate Peanut Butter Avocado Pudding - It's delicious. I didn't have enough honey so I threw in some brown sugar, and I don't have beaters so it's a tad heterogeneous, and I used natural peanut butter instead of normal (thereby introducing twenty minutes' hard labor stirring the thing so that the oil blended back in), and it's delicious.
• Simple Tofu Chilaquiles - NOMMMM. I need to source the tortilla chips, tomato sauce, and (hopefully) chipotle, but once I can do that, all the chilaquiles will be mine. NOMMM.

I've been listening to a lot more music lately, because living alone in an apartment by myself fuck yeah, and I just have one question: how are Santigold so fucking good? How is it possible? Because they are.

In other news, I'm on track to finish clipping for my Festivid tonight, at least until I'm halfway through the draft vid and suddenly realize I clipped the totally wrong things. Still, it's exciting. I'm mulling the possibility of a treat vid if I finish my assignment in a reasonable time frame. It's very exciting.

I'm back in Tokyo. At the moment I am very jetlagged, but it is good. I took the NEX into town for the first time in…a long time (have I ever taken the NEX in? IDK. Maybe not) and it was pleasant. I like that on the train you can see rice fields. The trip over was also pretty pleasant, seeing as me and my seatmate had an empty seat between us. 

The program seems good so far. Riverside was pretty good, all things considered! I saw jhameia several times as well as a couple other local friends, and the trip was very productive. Down-voting: friend PK getting egged as we walked two blocks back to her apartment and then us getting street harassed on the next block. The traffic continued to be not terrible throughout. I made it to Union Station in 45 minutes flat on Saturday morning. 

I really miss the weather in Riverside, though, namely that even though it's hot it's not humid. Tokyo is a furnace. The program seems good so far, but I'm also totally brain dead, so I'm going to go to bed now. 

I'm back in Tokyo--there will be more about Con.Txt and such anon, I promise--and I hadn't counted on the way that it would feel like total deja vu from seven years ago, when I came here on my fellowship. Literally came here--I took the exact same limousine bus to the exact same hotel (although this time I didn't pass out on the bus, unlike last time; all I remember is waking up while going over the Rainbow Bridge, which we didn't do this time) and on the way to my hotel from that hotel I walked past the bank where we each cashed our checks for nearly $5000 in yen and hit each other in the face with as much cash as I will ever see in one place in my life. (We were 22.) The building with the fellowship office is on the other side of the street.

I did venture out and obtained a meal (spaghetti with pickled plum, natto, nori, shiso, and bacon) and even put money on my Pasmo, which is really all I can expect at this point. I want to go running at the Akasaka palace ASAP but I have no idea when I'll be able to do that, given that the posted schedule on the trip course page is totally inaccurate. Ah well. To be honest, I miss Kyoto more than a little already, glad as I am to be here. Tokyo is very glitzy, or at least this part of it, which I enjoy in small doses, but which will doubtless get a bit grating after long enough. My mission tomorrow: cafe it up, and find a Book-Off, or at least a Tsutaya.

Damn it, I missed posting this on the actual 27th!

inkstone asked for my top three favorite restaurants.

One of my favorite restaurants in the world is Kyoto Gogyô, the ramen restaurant in Kyoto I have raved about before. It's not especially fancy, and the food is delicious. If you go, make sure to get the tempura that's on special, and the shio ramen. It's just--really nice.

A bit closer to home, another of my favorite restaurants is the Longfellow Grill in Minneapolis, which is also the Highland Grill in St. Paul. I've been going to these restaurants (there's a third one somewhere out in the suburbs) since my freshman year of college, when my roommate and her family introduced me--they're New American, I guess, but New American diner/bar food, but really, really good. At this point I've eaten a significant chunk of the menu. The beer-battered green beans with plum sauce are amazing, and I think my favorite entree is the Peter's Burger with sweet potato fries, but the tuna melt is also really good, and they have great local beer. It's all just really good.

Believe it or not, it's actually hard to pick a number three. I could say it's the tonkatsu place in Kyoto--it's a chain of several restaurants, one in Kyoto station and two downtown--where you grind your own sesame for the tonkatsu sauce and they give you endless refills on cabbage and it's all amazingly delicious. That place is really good. I could say it's Revival in Berkeley, which has some of the best food and drinks I've had for the price anywhere; when I went to Chez Panisse on Halloween I found myself thinking that it wasn't shockingly better than Revival, which it wasn't. In New York I wind up at the Hampton Chutney Company quite a lot; they have really good dosas. There are a number of places in Philly that I like, but in the past few years I've been away so much that I'm reluctant to name any one. I have to put in a plug for Capogiro gelato in Philly--best gelato on this continent--and I do like Raw, the sushi place in the gayborhood, as it's called. (I also really like Steven Starr's Mexican place there, El Vez; not so much the one out on Chestnut.)

Anyway. I really like food.