THE SEA OF JAPAN — The advice I’m getting, from everyone, is to stay offline and enjoy the honeymoon. I’m doing the former for 23 hours per day; I’m doing the latter for all 24. It’s an imperfect time to be out of the country, but I learned years ago not to worry about missing news, because colleagues will have it handled.
(I learned this by briefly souring a friendship by attending a lush wedding and griping about the rally I was missing at home, the 9-12 march that wound up being the biggest in-person mobilization of the Tea Party movement. Good to hustle when you’re young, good to take assignments that your older colleagues are too busy for; not good to stay in a hotel room and mutter while watching C-Span. If you’re muttering, you’re losing.)
But it’s much easier to get around Japan than it was when I came here in 2016, and much easier to get online. I learn things through error, and stumbled over a few bookings that made me get familiar with Kanji I’d forgotten many years ago. Example: After being advised that it was easy to show up to a ball park and grab a decent ticket on the day of a game, I saw that the first game we’d planned to see here, at the Hanshin Tigers’ home field, was sold out days in advance. I entered what I call “bulldozer mode,” forging ahead until we got the backup tickets (the SoftBank Hawks versus the Orix Buffaloes), pushing ahead through every ticket site and convenience store purchase portal I could find. On reflection, this played out less like a bulldozer clearing everything in front of it, and more like one of those jeeps in an orientalist adventure movie, picking up blouses and splattered durians as it speeds recklessly down a one-way alley.
Upshot: I accidentally got three sets of tickets. Resolution: Two of the sets were refunded after we couldn’t figure out how to pick them up. The whole trip has been like this, at least one manic event each day and at least one micro-triumph.
Some highlights of the Japan trip — just a few, we’re en route to Korea and I shouldn’t be posting too much.
Ghibli Park. An experience-first celebration of the studio’s work, mostly consisting of a warehouse where scenes have been recreated, sometimes with the storyboards pasted up next to them for reference. Want a picture of yourself sitting on the train with No-Face? Want to pose on a vinyl wave next to Ponyo? I didn’t think I did until the opportunity came up. Foreign visitors have to reserve three months in advance, and it was unusual to be surrounded by so many on-the-ball people in one air-conditioned building. (We weren’t quick enough to see “How Do You Live?,” the Ghibli film that released while we were in country, and which the rest of the world won’t get to see for a while.)
Tachi-gui restaurants. Reliably the best stuff we had, a little research pointing us to places that specialized in one or two dishes and nothing else. Extra credit if they pasted big NO CAMERA signs up front, holding back the Instagram tourists — I guess they’re TikTok tourists now. Even the bad meals had their moments. When we struck out on two places near our Kyoto hotel, I made a gametime decision and entered a restaurant that served only mackerel dishes and warned, curiously, that we would only be allowed to stay at our tables for two hours. We did not need two hours, not after a dish that gave me a Proustian flash of smelt I’d once eaten by mistake in Cleveland. But we chased it with a dessert I didn’t know existed anymore, a “vampire pop” from one of the omnipresent 7-Elevens. Everything worked out.
Fushimi Inari. Probably the most photographed tourist spot in very touristy Kyoto, kept somewhat exclusive by 1) signs warning idiots not to stand around posing for photos and 2) the climb up a hill that gets steeper as the woods get quieter and the spider-webs get more menacing. But it was as spell-binding as I remembered it — more so, because I didn’t appreciate the temple cats in 2016, and I married someone who absolutely did appreciate them.
Didn’t read or watch too much, but, the highlights:
The Best Thing I Read: John McPhee’s “Silk Parachute,” a 2010 collection of (mostly) New Yorker pieces that starts with the celebrated title essay and peaks, for me, with his rumination on the fact-checking process.
The Best Thing I Watched: This is a little embarrassing, and it accidentally ties in with the last entry, but it was Ozu’s “Tokyo Story,” a Criterion download I’d put on my iPad right before the flight. Do you want to think dark and complex thoughts about your aging parents and the vanishing time you still have with them? I can accidentally program a little festival for you; I’ll throw in “Make Way for Tomorrow” if feeling sadistic.
We’re in the nearly-empty business compartment of the Fukuoka to Busan ferry, drinking the iced green tea that comes free from the fending machine, gazing at fog-wrapped bridges and hills as the motor brings them closer to us. I should probably get back to that. See you in America, next week.