I loved Japan.

The whole time I was there I kept thinking of all the cool things I want to write about, but I have to organize my thoughts first. We were exhausted when we arrived home last night. In Kyoto, we decided to walk everywhere to see as much of the city as possible. We ducked down small alleys, stopping to enter open places just to see how Japan is different from and similar to Korea.

Mostly, I felt totally comfortable. Japan is so much more like home than Korea is. I don’t know if it’s the modernity, the aesthetic, or what, but the spotless streets, the neat arrangement of all things inside and out, and all the cool gadgets really appealed to me. I kept asking Dave, "Why can’t we live here?"

I’m still reconciling all that we spent. Japan is ridiculously expensive; I knew that beforehand, but it’s so bad I just had to say it out loud.

The day before we left Korea there were huge violent riots downtown. Students and laborers were bombarded with tear gas lobbed from armored police vehicles; in turn they all threw stuff at the boys dressed in grey, the ones with Darth Vadar helmets and clear plexi-glass shields. The government says a group of leftist students started the violence and things got out of hand. I don’t know, I didn’t hear about it until we returned last night. Basically, these kinds of things are business-as-usual in Korea during the Springtime. It’s like some kind of ritual/rite of passage for students. This year though, everybody’s a little more worked up over the economic situation (and a lot more folks are jobless which means they have nothing better to do than show up to demonstrate). Anyway, I’m mentioning all this because the new President, Kim Daejung, says he thinks the violent protests are scaring off foreign investors who will think there is labor/political instability, so he’s going to crack down on these demonstrations. Then tonight we heard on the news that anyone participating in a demonstration who is seen holding a pipe or other things that could be thrown or that which could cause harm, etc., will be arrested on the spot, no questions asked, and considered a criminal.

So what makes this interesting is that this new President has a long history of participation in civil demonstrations. He was criminalized for his views opposing ruling regimes in the past and now here he is doing the same damn thing.

Did I mention I got blisters? Today I hung around the house in my new yukata, trying to stay off my feet, which is not a difficult task for me. Like I said: We walked everywhere. I took comfortable street shoes, but I didn’t anticipate walking from 9:30am until 9pm with only a few breaks in between. It was so fun and interesting though. I mean, it was like I just kept wanting to go and go and never stop and so I ignored my body’s need for periodic rest and just wore off the bottoms of my feet. I was a mess. You should’ve seen me yesterday wandering around Kyoto station - hobbling is more like it - looking madly for a place to sit among all the crowds of people who had descended on Kyoto for the four-day weekend.

See, when I made plans long ago to visit Japan during this Korean four-day weekend, I didn’t know it was also one in Japan and that Kyoto is everybody’s favorite four-day-weekend destination. Aw man. We discovered two bad things about the country: The first is that when things are built for form rather than function, things like benches for sitting are often neglected. Thus, when hoards of people flocked to Kyoto station to return home Tuesday afternoon, and when the rain began to fall so that the stairs which could be used for sitting started getting drenched, thousands of people had nowhere to go. And there were so many people moving and moving that it was not possible to stop. Weirdest thing. And me, with my blistered feet desperately needing to sit. Finally we sat partially in the rain on a small "curb" supporting a glass railing, in an area where the station guards didn’t want us to sit but allowed us to stay anyway because it would be more of a hassle to confront us than to just leave us alone. The second thing is that Japan is like Korea in the way that it controls the public’s access to money. We found not a single cash machine in Kyoto that was open during the weekend: they close with the banks. And credit is not accepted by most vendors. By Tuesday afternoon, we were out of yen and had no way of getting any more. Geez, we were almost desperate and I seriously thought of approaching other foreigners and asking if they wanted to buy some dollars so we could eat lunch. We stretched our remaining coins and managed to buy a half of a Subway sandwich and a couple of Cokes, which tied us over until we got to the airport where we whipped out the Gold Card and ate a seriously huge tenzarusoba dinner. But, man. You know Japan is like seriously First World and it’s got all this futuristic stuff and this feel like it’s some kind of utopia, but it doesn’t take long to figure out that it’s not.

So I bought this yukata, because we had them in the ryokan and I totally loved walking around in my slippers and this cool robe. Those ryokan are the best thing; it’s like going to a place and being invited to immerse yourself even in the hotel. I wore my robe everywhere and enjoyed the greatness of brushing my teeth while another hotel guest, in yukata also, groomed a few sinks down. I saw a bunch at the handicraft market, which is the Itaewon of Kyoto (read: tourist black hole). At first I really wanted to get an antique silk kimono, which can be really reasonable price-wise. I thought I would use one of those as a bathrobe. But then the store I wanted to visit that sold new and antique ones was closed for the holiday and the only place I saw them was at the handicraft market and that just seemed too hokey. Anyway, the silk ones are really long and the selection wasn’t that great - everyone’s old, ugly, and out of style ones, I guess. So, I bought a cheap (as if!) cotton yukata, which is for bathing anyway, making it more suitable for what I want and a helluva lot easier to care for. But I still had buyer’s remorse because I just hate buying the touristy crap. I mean those things are probably shipped all over the world and sold in Japanese groceries. Probably, every tourist to Japan goes home with one of those things. But later I thought about it and I realized that that’s what visitors do. When you only visit you only have access to that stuff and the novelty of being in the country for only a short time inspires some kind of crazy buying decisions. I did that in Taiwan too. I became enamored by all the cool and different things representing Chinese culture and I wanted to take a bunch of cheap pieces of it home with me. So I did.

Well, this entry was all over the place. I really do have so much more to write about the trip. Today I’ve just been kind of numb, thinking back on hurricane April and how exhausted it left me. Maybe tomorrow I can be a little more organized.