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| notes from underground - societal whispers all the news that print will fit. |
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Sunday, June 12, 2005 np: bruce springsteen - nebraska Hokke Club Hotel, Kyoto - 4:00 p.m. (JT) 12th June after breakfast on saturday (the 11th) we set off for the national museum. huge buddhist statues, beautiful screen paintings and ancient caligraphy. so many amazing things in one place. something i found intriguing is the japanese (and, i would also assume, chinese) thought of handwriting/caligraphy as an art in itself. in english we might compliment someone on their handwriting, but it is certainly not an art. the art is in the choice of words, not how they are merely written on the page. but people study for years to master the art of character handwriting. and there is a beauty unique to each person's style. examples of caligraphy were given from three different emperors and letters they had written. each person's style suggested something about their personality, just as handwriting does now: hastiness, order, brevity, perfectionist. some things are very much the same across cultures and written expression is certainly one of them. but nothing in that museum really compared to the sanju-sangen-do temple. as i walked in, expecting to see just another temple, i instead saw 1,001 statues of the buddhist deity kannon. 500 on each side of a massive one in the middle. i cannot accurately describe the sight. the 28 guardian deities stand in front and the hall goes on forever at times. i really have never seen anything like it in my life. the time it must have taken to carve so many images..the passion and the spirit that went into this devotion to the buddha. it was so powerful. afterward, adam, will and i walked back to our hotel in the pouring rain. that night, adam, cynthia, will and myself went downtown. this section of kyoto is a circus. young people everywhere among neon lights, tons of small bars and side alleys that serve as 'sex alleys' for strip clubs and so forth. here is where i truly witnessed rachel's assertion that youth in japan eat up western culture. shoes (pumas, chuck taylors); t-shirts with garish images and hilariously slaughtered english grammar. even a station wagon with hydrolics bouncing higher than most i've ever seen. truly surreal. after dinner was found, we searched out one of the bars recommended by the lonely planet guide. it's a dark, smokey place called ING. great music, great beer and a hilarious waiter named hokko. he claimed (so we heard, second-hand) to be the love child of keith richards. and when the stones come to town he sits front row center yelling "you are my love father!" in a perfect world this story would be absolutely true. as it is, i choose to believe it anyway. today (the 12th) we visited the kiyomizu temple. perched atop a falls/spring ('mizu' is the japanese word for 'water' - people drink from the spring as a blessing), it features a major shrine to kannon, a pagoda and several other wonderful buildings. while walking alone, a hustle of monks came through, hurridly running toward the shrine and then chanted, en masse, a prayer. it was an amazing thing to watch. we walked down through the retail streets below and browsed wares. we also saw some genuine geisha whom wille and roy were lucky enough to have their picture taken with. i bought one of those small, rotating drumgs like at the end of karate kid part II. awesome. as we walked back to the hotel, walking down a side street i saw a boy in a boy scout uniform. i gave him the boy scout salute, having been one myself, and he returned it. it made me smile. and it really made my world just a tiny bit smaller. posted by J. Neas | 6/12/2005 09:34:00 AM
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