A Massive Let-down

We arrived in Kyoto and I was expecting to be blown off my feet by the beauty of the place, but it was just another over-developed consumerist hell. Japan is just about shopping. Kyoto seemed more like London where Tokyo had been New York. I had been expecting much more (again my expectations of Japan were too high) as Kyoto was spared bombing during the war. Oh well the beauty must all be in Gion, the old part famous for geishas.

Gion at night

We had some difficulty getting to our hostel. We were starting to suspect that Japanese people cannot give directions. Every time we'd had to follow directions they had been awful; there always seemed to be so much unsaid. It's all very well having a culture that is so precious people don't like to be explicit about things, but it's rather irritating when it comes to things like directions and closing times! We made it there, nonetheless, and the place was huge. Floor upon floor of young people. It was a bit intimidating: how on earth were we going to get on with this plague of 18 and 19 year-olds? That first night we stayed up until 5am drinking and talking to an Israeli guy and a Quebecois, who gave us this great tip about Strong Zero, a fruit cooler that comes in a half-litre can, costing about the same as a can of beer, but it's 8% alcohol by volume. Great tip. Bad hangover.

The next day we got up too late to do anything really, and I didn't feel much up to it anyway. This time our hostel had an excellent internet connection and free wifi, so I spent the whole day online, most of it blogging, while Joanne got excited about the well-equipped kitchen and the prospect of cooking again, and went shopping for provisions to cook with. I only left to get more Strong Zero. That night we stayed up quite late again, but managed to rein it in a bit that night and got to bed about 2am.

We had only been able to book that hostel for two nights, apparently because the hostels all fill up with Japanese people at the weekends, so the next day we had to change hostels. It was in a different part of town and walking distance to Gion, which was just as well because we had so far seen nothing of interest in Kyoto; just Strong Zero and a city that could be British. In fact in Kyoto I decided that Japan is more similar to Britain than the rest of Europe is. Must be that influx of Anglo-Saxonism brought by the Americans at the end of the war.

This is Japan: a shopping mall in Gion

Near the hostel we discovered a cheap Japanese fast-food place, where the food was quite good. It seems to be mostly noodles, but many dishes come with a raw egg and a device for separating the yolk from the white. I watched someone then copied them by leaving the white aside and plopping the yolk on top. I wasn't sure why you wouldn't want the white when all of the cholesterol-, fat-, and guilt-free protein is there, but I didn't want to look like I didn't know what I was doing, so I just left my egg white as well. Delicious and cheap – we now had an extra eating option after supermarkets, which was a relief. The triangles are nice, but they aren't very interesting.

Cheap fast food

A geisha running from the paparazzi

After lunch, we took a walk around Gion. Again it was a massive disappointment. Yes, there were some old wooden buildings, yes we saw a couple of Geishas, but it just wasn't very beautiful. I had expected Japan in general to be an extremely pretty place and it was ugly in general; I had expected Kyoto to be particularly pretty and it looked like London; but I had expected Gion to be the absolute centre of all beauty in the world and it was just about OK. So far Japan was without doubt the ugliest country we had visited.

Gion

We went to look at a couple of sites with a special mention in the Lonely Planet but remained totally unmoved. At that point we noticed the introduction to Kyoto says that many people are under-whelmed when they come to come to Kyoto, but there are little corners of beauty remaining if you hunt them out. I didn't come here to play hide-and-seek with beauty, I came here to be bowled over by it! After hunting out a couple of motes of slight non-ugliness, we decided not to bother any more.

The LP says this is the most beautiful street in Asia!

A very obediently posing Japanese crane

The "lovely" river in Gion

Heading back towards the hostel we passed through quite a lively area. I have to say that although so far I was not much impressed by Japan as a tourist destination, I think it would be great to live there. There seemed to be a really lively nightlife everywhere we had been and there is plenty of shopping, if you're into that sort of thing, and I'm sure the wages are great.

Fnarr fnarr

Also, I think most of the interesting stuff about Japan takes a bit more time to see, and all the difficult stuff would become much easier in time and a grasp of the language. One reason I had wanted to go to Japan in the first place was to see a radically different culture. In fact it was without doubt culturally the closest to Britain we had seen on our trip. We can see reserved and polite people in a modern environment any day of the week at home. I believe though, there is a much deeper complexity to the culture that you can really only become properly aware of if you spend more time than two weeks there. We weren't going to understand it in that time. And at those prices we weren't going to see much of the nightlife either.

Beef birth certificate, complete with pedigree and nose print!

Very expensive beef

We found a place called Sam and Dave's that everyone in the hostel had been raving about and disappearing to every night, so we went in. There was a cover charge of ¥1000 after which we got the privilege of paying extortionate prices for the drinks. We simply couldn't afford it. Instead we went downstairs where there was a bar with no cover charge and quite reasonably priced drinks. It was a Jamaican / Reggae bar and it was completely empty apart from us. How depressing that our first drink out in Japan was in a Jamaican bar!

I thought this was cool

Our new hostel was nothing like as large and did not have as lively a social area as the last one. However we soon discovered that the people staying there were quite happy to ignore the signs saying “No talking in the sleeping area after 11pm”. I couldn't read the Japanese on the same sign, but I'm sure it didn't say “No talking unless it's only foreigners trying to sleep”. The social area downstairs was empty, but the dorm next to ours, separated only by a tatami partition was full of people talking and laughing. We were exhausted by our two consecutive nights of Strong Zero, so Joanne got up and asked them to be quiet. I was too scared they wouldn't speak English and it would all be very embarrassing, but at least one of them understood and they went away with no problems. Shortly afterwards our dorm filled up with young Japanese people, who made loads of noise, before disappearing only to return later with lots of food, which they ate in their beds as if at a slumber-party while chatting and giggling. Clearly the Japanese under “No food in the sleeping areas” must have said “Japanese people can slurp their noodles loudly and keep foreigners awake”. So much for Japanese people being polite! I had heard that there was a big generational divide in Japan and that one of the dividing lines was manners; in fact the Japanese film Battle Royale is all about that subject, and that night I really feel I got the point of the film: sending the younger generation of Japanese off to an island to kill each other seems like the perfect way to cure them of their insolence!

At this point I feel I have to admit that some of our problem in Japan at this stage was self-inflicted: we had effectively wasted two days on staying up late and hangovers, and without that we probably wouldn't have been as tired in this dorm. But dorms are horrible and we couldn't afford anything else. After keeping us up so late, the little buggers got up at 7am and made even more noise than the night before. How do those young things do it?

The river promenade in Gion

We were determined to get something out of Kyoto, so we hired bicycles from the hostel and set off to see some more LP recommended sites. I had forgotten swearing never ever under any circumstances to hire one of the stupid awful Chinese bikes that infest Asia. Why a supposedly technologically advanced country such as Japan imports cheap Chinese rubbish instead of making their own high-quality bicycles I cannot understand. They are tiny. They make a really uncomfortable angle at the knee, even in people small enough to ride them; I watched some Japanese people on them. They have no gears and the one gear they have is for uphill. I reasoned this time we weren't trying to get anywhere far so it would be OK, but I'd forgotten about the knee pain caused by trying to exert a force at 120 degrees from a straight leg. We took the bikes back and tried to get a refund, explaining that it was like a child's bike to me, but instead, after one more failed swap, he said I could take his own bike. It was only slightly better, but I didn't feel I could refuse his bike when he's made such a big thing of it, and he clearly didn't want to give us a refund. I wonder if this is another Japanese cultural thing: the onsen preferred to give us something worth several times what we had paid rather than a refund; here the owner gives me his own bicycle rather than a refund. Would giving a refund mean failure? Or do they just love money so much they hate to give it back?

This was the best bicycle on offer

For luck. Probably.

We cycled to Kinkaku-ji, the “famed Golden Temple”. It makes it into the inside cover of the Lonely Planet as one of the top sights, and Joanne had read on Wikitravel that it is located in lovely gardens. I longed to see beautiful Japanese gardens so we chose to go there first. The cycle was an unpleasant uphill in the humidity and my knees were aching when we arrived. It would nice to sit down in the beauty of the garden. We paid the rather high entrance fee and went in. The temple was quite nice, but to have it as a top sight really spoke volumes about Japan to me.

Not much of an aim are they?

To put it in the same category as the Grand Palace in Bangkok is ludicrous, in fact I wouldn't rate it next to just about any temple you can see in any town in Thailand or Laos and as for the Taj Mahal, the Varanasi Ghats, or the temples of Angkor, forget it! Maybe we had already been a bit too spoiled on this trip. To make matters worse, the gardens were only for looking at, not for enjoying, and you had to stay behind ropes, shunting through a one way system until you got to the end. Near the exit I realised I hadn't taken any photos, so tried to return, but it was not allowed. Luckily we were able to get in again using the same tickets and I took some snaps then had to go all the way around the one way system again to get out.

Kinkaku-ji. OK, it's quite pretty.

At this point I more-or-less have up on Japan. This was the best Kyoto had to offer and Gion had been rubbish too. I had expected Kyoto to be the highlight of Japan, which I had expected to be one of the highlights of our trip. There was still Fujisan to look forward to at least.

Infuriating Japanese umbrella use!

The cycle back was a bit better because it was downhill, but rather annoying that we had to constantly bump up and down on the pavements. For some reason the Japanese cycle on the pavement; maybe it's because you can only go just above walking speed on the terrible bicycles everyone rides. As a pedestrian it had been annoying us since we got there; nobody had hit us yet, but there had been plenty or near misses and big frights, so it seemed only a matter of time.

Following a recommendation at the hostel, we went to a sushi restaurant for dinner. It was very confusing. You needed to get a ticket from a machine and wait in quite a long queue as it was a very busy place. Of course the machine was all in Japanese and after a couple of failed attempts at pushing random buttons I gave up and we just hovered wondering what to do. Luckily a nice Japanese girl came up to us and offered to help. She handed us our ticket and said we needed to listen out for the number. No high-tech solution: no video screen with the number; no pager for each customer; just a woman calling out your number, but at least she had a microphone! It wasn't easy to pick the number out, but we practiced listening for numbers in the stream of – to us – completely redundant syllables, and I think we would have got it, but the nice girl who had helped us tipped off the staff when their number was up and the caller came to get us when it was our turn.

Fish nigiri

Tuna nigiri

The sushi was easy: it was on a conveyor belt and we knew we would be paying according to the collection of plates left at the end. Getting beer or anything else not on the conveyor belt was another matter: each table had a touch screen menu to order things, so that was pretty high-tech, but we had the same language problem as usual. We tried pressing a few buttons after the icon with the beer on it, but nothing happened.

Mini beef burger sushi!

Eventually a waitress appeared and we waved her over and managed to get our order in that way. Some time after our beers had been delivered she re-appeared and indicated that we had to do something with our screen, pointing up to a large screen on the wall which had our table number on it. Apparently we had managed to call her before, but had not cancelled it. Anyway, the food was excellent and really cheap: only ¥105 per plate. The beer wasn't so cheap and just three beers cost nearly the same as our 21 plates of sushi. We were happy again.

That night it was very noisy in the dorm again and we remained exhausted as we had been since arriving in Japan, save for the day we went to the Atomic Bomb Museum in Nagasaki. In the morning we sat downstairs, waiting for our train to Nara, and chatted to an 18 year-old girl who had been living in Japan for nearly a year. She had been WWOOFing (www.wwoof.org) and loved Japan. Many people we had met loved Japan, but they were all either there long-term, or it was the first time they had ever been out of their home country; parents seem quite happy to send their kids to Japan, feeling it is a safe option. This girl fell into both categories, and when I said I didn't think we were really getting the country because we really needed longer to see all the social stuff that makes Japan so interesting she said that she had found it interesting for a while, but now it was actually starting to really irritate her: there are just far too many unspoken rules, she explained.

At the train station ticket office I saw three geishas who were all obediently posing for tourists to take photos. I didn't have my camera, so I ran back to Joanne, who had been waiting with the bags, and told her if she wanted to get a better geisha picture than we got in Gion, then she should take her camera there now. She rushed off but came back saying she had been too embarrassed to take photos as everyone else had stopped by then. Later she was cursing herself; in Gion they had all rushed from doorway to car, but here they had been sitting ducks!

written by

The Happy Couple on July 12, 2009 from Kyoto, Japan

from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon

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