Poetry, prose & Photography FROM A MONTH IN JAPAN

by Kirstie Pelling and Stuart Wickes

Poetry, prose & Photography FROM A MONTH IN JAPAN

by Kirstie Pelling and Stuart Wickes

Japan In Haiku

The Family Adventure ProjectThe Old Post Office 1 Eastside, The SquareBurton in KendalCumbria LA6 1LX

www.familyadventureproject.orgorders@familyadventureproject.org

JAPAN IN HAIKU - POETRY, PROSE & PHOTOGRAPHY FROM A MONTH IN JAPAN

Poetry and Prose Copyright © Kirstie PellingPhotography Copyright © Stuart Wickes

First Edition: December 2014

Kirstie Pelling and Stuart Wickes have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work within the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988 (UK).

No part of this publication may be copied, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the relevant copyright holder, author and/or publisher. For permission requests please contact us at the address above.

Ordering Information: To order copies please contact us at the above address.

Japan in HaiKU

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Japan In HaikuHow do you capture the essence of an experience? A picture may speak a thousand words but can you say something meaningful in less? That’s the challenge we set ourselves in journalling our experiences of visiting Japan for the first time.

Haiku is one of the most important forms of traditional Japanese poetry, taking the form of a 17-syllable verse consisting of three metrical units of 5, 7, and 5 syllables. Being short, sweet and Japanese it seemed the perfect choice for oriental short-form journalling; a haiku a day.

This book is the result. Japan in Haiku. A collection of 28 haiku with pictures and prose to introduce you to some of the sights, sounds, joys and baffling mysteries you will encounter if you travel in Japan.

Formal haiku are rule bound and supposed to meet certain criteria beyond metre; to include ‘seasonal references’, ‘two part cutting’ and ‘imaginative distancing’ giving ‘new insights into the everyday’. Not being Japanese or writing in Japanese we excused ourselves from such critical pursuits to focus instead on producing “travel haiku” that we hope are accessible, share something of our Japanese travel experience and will give you food for thought about life, the universe, everything or, in a Zen way, nothing at all.

Kirstie and Stuart

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We touchdown in Osaka for our first taste of Japan and drive right into the heart of town. Everything seems tidy, organised, ordered. There is no city chaos. The place seems to move in slow motion.

From the roof garden of the Umeda Sky Observatory we look out upon the megapolis and all I see is Toytown. Scalextric cars fly over model boats on fairy lit bridges. A bullet train shoots past on a giant train set. I wonder where it’s going. I wonder what lies ahead.

Midnight riverscape.Flyover transformed intonight sky scalextrics.

Toytown Osaka

Looking out over Osaka from the Umeda Sky Building Roof Garden

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We venture out into Osaka and end up in a giant mall where women in kimonos greet us at the door with clasped hands and deep bows. We wander around disoriented and find a floor virtually devoted to beauty. But there are no make-up counters here, just special photo booths known as purikara. There are dozens of them, with queues of Japanese girls outside, patiently waiting to be made younger, prettier and more wide eyed on a set of printed ‘seals’.

Of course we have a go and discover we have already acquired Hello Kitty eyes. Do you think we look cute? Or as they say here “Kawaii desu ne?”

Booths dispense good looks.Print yourself a smooth new face.Cheat time. While you wait.

Beautiful Technology

Purikara beauty, a seal print from the beauty booth in Osaka

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We come across our first shrine en route to the Japan Alps; the Shirahige Jinja Shinto Shrine near Takashima. The gate or torii is picture book Japan, a rare floating gate set out in the lake. But back at the shrine we are unsure what to do.

We try to seek advice on shrine etiquette. It’s not easy when everything is in Japanese and no-one speaks English. But we figure it out, pay our respects, make a prayer and leave our worries behind.

Wash, bow, clap twice, wish.Ring the bell and offer thanks.Watch your worries float.

Shrine Etiquette (Newly Acquired)

Tori at the Shirahige Jinja Shinto Shrine, Takashima

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Blue ripples on sundistort what I once thoughtas I swim through air.

In Kanazawa we are inspired to swim but the pool is full of contradictions. You can get in but can’t climb out. You cannot penetrate the surface but can breathe underwater. From the surface this swimming pool looks like any other. But it is not a pool, it is art.

The Swimming Pool is an installation by artist Leandro Erlich at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa. What looks like a pool is but a clever thin skin of water through which you can peer down into an ‘under water’ chamber accessed elsewhere.

Inside the chamber the sky ripples above like water. We take a deep breath and look up to a distorted sun and Japanese faces looking down at us. A distorted reality that already feels strangely familiar.

The Swimming Pool

The Swimming Pool by Leandro Erlich in 21st Century Museum Kanazawa

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It started with one man, with one lantern, in one fishing town, somewhere in Japanese history. But the spirit of human competitiveness has changed things. A simple light in the dark can now stand over ten metres tall, weigh two tons and take a hundred men to carry it.

The Issaki Hoh-toh Matsuri festival is one of many lantern festivals in the Noto Peninusula. It’s quite alarming to be a spectator when one of these giant night lights swings towards you. Six lanterns move around a small village, each carried by a hundred sweating, grunting, chanting locals, while men dressed in kimonos sit aloft playing pipes and drums. It’s no mean feat to park all these tottering towers in a village square the size of a postage stamp. But somehow they manage.

Light has never beenso heavy, companionshipnever so weightless.

Lantern Festival

Lantern Bearers at the Issaki Hoh-toh Matsuri festival in the Noto Peninusula

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Kanazawa is one of the few places in Japan where Geishas still entertain. In the past it was wealthy local businessmen who sought them out, now it’s often tourists, desperate for a glimpse into this curious dwindling world. The Geishas that still remain come out at night and the best way to spot them is in the dusk on their way to a job.

But you can visit a former Geisha tea house; Shima. On taking off your shoes and stepping inside you are plunged into a world of bamboo and fine art, topped with a tea ceremony where I swear the ghosts of Geishas past were dancing with us in spirit.

In every sip wetaste the past, smiles dancing onblood red geisha lips.

Geisha Tea Party

Child watches visitors meditate at the Shima Geisha House, Kanazawa

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Monday afternoon and the kids are tired, hot and grumpy. We spot a candy shop on the map and set off to search for neon signs, marshmallow branding and the kind of boost that can only come from artificial flavourings. But this is Japan.

We walk past the candy shop twice. It looks like an office, all bamboo blind and polished window. But then we catch sight of the little bags. We bundle in and are met by a shopkeeper with a beaming smile, holding out a stick dripping with honey.

We try pretty much the whole shop, from meringues to soya beans to little bags of pure sugar and we fail to find an unnatural flavour. As we leave the owner holds out a basket. I go to put in a tip. But it is gifts for the kids. Sometimes, folded within the hard edges of a city, you find a soft centre and you just let it melt in your mouth.

Inside a hard shell,honeyed welcome, sweet tooth grin.Favours for strangers.

The Candy Store

Lady in the Candy Store in Toyama, Japan

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Having arrived from The Philippines where just being on a road takes bottle, and expecting the madness of Asia, we instantly warm to Japanese roads. Granted, it takes ages to get anywhere as the average speed seems to be 40km per hour. But even in big cities like Osaka, the traffic is polite and orderly; no one ever crosses a road without a green man flashing, and rush hour happens in slow motion.

We don’t expect similar road discipline and rules on a mountain-side. But we get them. On a day’s hiking to Happo Ike, in the northern Alps above Hakuba, we discover a boardwalk has been erected all the way up the pass to the small lake. There are hundreds using it. Everyone sticks to their own lane. The landscape isn’t eroded in any way. And it looks and feels so orderly. English Lake District authorities take notice. Maybe the solution to eroded fells lies with your Japanese visitors.

Keeping to your laneon a cloud superhighwaysteers you clear of…rain?

Traffic Forecast

Hiking to Happo Ike in a Japanese style, near Hakuba in the Japan Alps

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Cat cafés are big business in Japan. Time and space limited workers are fond of taking an hour out at the end of the day to pet and cuddle a cat. (Rabbits are popular too.) But there are other reasons why the Japanese go mad for cats; folklore says they bring good fortune, they’re cute, and they make good cartoon figures.

We stumble across a cat café in Azumino City and can’t resist trying it out. We are given two menus - one food related and the other feline. And then, an hour of petting, playing, chasing and tickling. The kids love it.

“I didn’t imagine it would be so popular,” says Yoko Oguchi, who opened Cats and Café last month. “My husband and my sister love cats and after retirement we want to live with many cats. This is our dream.”

It’s a full time job;de-stressing humans, through play.Cuddles, but no pay.

Cat Café

Cat lounging in the Cat Café in Azumino

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The Japanese know the future is robots. You can meet androids in Tokyo, not on the streets (yet) but in the Tokyo Science Museum where you can interact with Azimo, Otonaroid and Telenoid.

Encounters with these robots are slightly freaky. They make me wonder what it is to be human and what makes us recognise something as human or human-like?

I know and love the obviously robotic Azimo. I find Otonaroid strangely beautiful, doll-like, feminine but a little too jerky in her movements to feel comfortable with. She’s not as disturbing as the allegedly therapeutic baby torso Telenoid, pictured here. Is this the future of human android love?

Cuddle an androidand you may end up makingbaby telenoid.

Android Love

You can meet and cuddle Telenoid at the Tokyo Museum of Emerging Science and Technology

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Who is in charge of turning on the neon in Tokyo? Is there a code followed by all the bars and restaurants? Is there a guy in the sky in charge of the big switch on each night, waiting to press the button like the B listers at the Blackpool Christmas lights?

Having just witnessed my first Tokyo sunset, I am surprised that it doesn’t go directly from daylight to strip light like it does in films. Instead there is quite literally a golden hour; where the pastel heat drains from the sky and a golden blush flushes along the river, through the rainbow bridge and up through the skyscrapers and towers. Pure Tokyo gold.

The brashest cityblushes with gold, till someoneturns on the neon.

Tokyo Gold

Tokyo Tower shines brightly from the shadows of the Zojoji Temple

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In the restaurants of Britain and Europe chefs compete to reinvent and re-energise food, turning it from raw ingredients into high tech concoctions. In Tokyo’s Robot Restaurant hardly anyone bothers to buy the picnic, the science is all around, eating would be a distraction from the future.

Tanks, swings, chariots, horses, floating stages, strip lights, rollerskates, angels, devils, snakes, pandas, pantomime cows, lights and glitter and dancing; it’s all here. Lit by LED, lantern and laser, dancing to the tune of a drumming, pumping Gangnam beat.

Oh, and the robots. Unbelievably huge in a tiny space, they just keep coming.

Tack and tech collide,a fusion, not of flavourbut science and myth.

Robot Dining

Girls driving and dancing on giant robots at Robot Restaurant Tokyo

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Mount Fuji is more than a mountain. It is a sacred mountain and must be addressed as such. Even the railway station is called Fuji San, a formal and respectful way of addressing this powerful, volcanic icon of Japan.

Legend is that you don’t decide to see Mount Fuji, it decides to show itself to you. For centuries, people have been going on pilgrimages up this mountain, visiting the many shrines that exist along the routes to the 3776 metre summit, the highest in Japan, often to see nothing but cloud.

Too late in the day to do the walk, we decide to swim in each of its five sacred lakes, the Fujigoko, in an attempt to pay respect and hopefully coax it out of the clouds, but our efforts are largely in vain. Although we do manage to catch a brief glimpse whilst in the car between lakes.

Fuji San chooses. Not you. Oft hidden idol.You must watch, wait, pray.

An Audience with Fuji San

Mount Fuji, Fuji San makes a rare appearance from beneath her cloud cap

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There seems to be a shrine for everything in Japan. Pay your respects, make your offering and seek blessings wisely and maybe everything will be alright. The kids were intrigued to find a shrine for geeks at the top of a multi storey car park at the Aqua City shopping centre in Tokyo. Not the kind of place you would expect any kind of shrine, let alone one where you could appeal for hi tech back up.

But having lost an i-Pod in a glacier on a former trip, the kids are taking no chances. And neither am I. We all clap and bow and wish for the safe passage of our phones and computers. Suitably Tokyo don’t you think?

Fear of data loss?Seek blessing at I.T. shrine,for Godly back-up.

Heavenly Cloud

The special shrine with IT benefits on the roof of the Aqua City Mall in Tokyo

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Maglev MLX01-1 has the star billing in a railway park filled with polished wonders. Yet it feels wrong for it to be here. Sitting motionless. Like an athlete in a cage. This gleaming white piece of science that levitates rather than rolls is the world speed record holder for railway, having reached a top speed of 581 km/hr.

This one now rests in the Shinkansen railway museum, Nagoya, but still has a magnetic field; I watch as people are drawn to it and stroke its sleek, turbulence reducing nose. It will never again rise above its coils and beat records.

But other Maglev trains are being tested, near Fuji, with the aim of running a public service in 2027 at speeds of over 500 km/hr. While this shiny bullet sits killing time. Something unheard of on Japanese Railways.

RIP bullet.The fastest one, still, I feelyour magnetic pull.

Levitating Bullet

MagLev Train at Shinkasen Museum, Nagoya, Japan

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For 32 nights a year, the town of Gujo Hajiman in central Japan dances. And their month long traditional folkdancing festival, Gujo Odori, culminates in a three day period where everyone dances all night – from 8pm until 5am. And we are lucky enough to join them. After all the festival is described as a dance to be be danced rather than a dance to be viewed.

It’s a beautiful spectacle, hundreds of kimono clad people, old and young, clacking wooden shoes (geta) on the narrow streets of a Japanese mountain town. The lines of people moving as one stretch from the town crossing in every direction. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know any of the ten dances. The philosophy is that everyone joins in. Copy and you will learn. And so we do; becoming part of the arresting, colourful swirl of a whole town moving to one beat.

This dance is onlyfor dancing, not for watching.It’s how life should be?

The Joining In Dance

A blur of kimonos on their way to Gujo Odori in Gujo Hachiman, Japan

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Across many parts of Japan for three days each year families come together to celebrate Obon. It is believed that during this annual Buddhist festival, ancestral spirits return to this world to visit their living relatives. On the last day of Obon, family members float lanterns in rivers, lakes and seas to guide the spirits back home again.

Outside the Todai-Ji Great Hall in Nara, which houses one of Japan’s most imposing bronze Buddhas, we find lanterns being prepared and inscribed. It is a beautiful and thought provoking sight, so many paper thin memorials, lined up and waiting for dusk to fall. We have no lantern for our own relatives who have passed from this life, but they are in our thoughts.

Tonight you glow bright.Secure in our thoughts,you drift downstream, to your world.

Spirit of Obon

Lanterns at the Todai-Ji Great Hall in Nara, on Obon

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Naoshima is Japan’s famous art island. A place where contemporary art, nature and island life are one and the same. The best way to get around is on hired bike, and as you pedal along the craggy coast you are rewarded for your efforts by outdoor sculpture, an underground gallery with several of Monet’s Waterlilies, houses that have been turned into art installations, a tiny 007 museum and much more.

On the south side of the island is its most iconic sculpture; a gold pumpkin by Yayoi Kusa. Nature and art. Not fairy tale. This won’t turn into a carriage with mice, no matter how long we wait. But it’s a happy ending to the day, before we catch the last ferry back to the mainland.

Pier end pumpkin.Nature, art and midnight gold.But no coach ride home.

Naoshima Pumpkin

Yayoi Kusa’s Pumpkin on Naoshima, Japan

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We have a beautiful day of cycling some of the bridges of the Shimanami Kaido cycle way. This is a cool 70km route crossing six bridges and linking six islands on the Seto Inland Sea. The bridges all have cycle paths, some alongside the carriageway, some hanging underneath and all have special cycle friendly approaches.

We manage 30km, two bridges and a swim, in between dodging sunburn and thunderstorms. We have yet to master riding with an umbrella which is a universally practiced Japanese cycling skill.

Sky bridge flies overmating jellyfish while wepedal under cars.

The Skyover

Innoshima Bridge on Shimanami Kaido Cycle Route

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It’s an eerie feeling, our first night in Hiroshima, under a darkened sky ripped open by lightning in a violent summer storm.

The anniversary of the atomic bombing was marked here just a couple of weeks ago and we are staying just half a kilometre from the epicentre, near the Peace Park.

The storm is intense but nothing compared to the events of 69 years ago. Not sure how well we will sleep tonight and what we will make of it all.

Annihilated.City reminds us of peace.At epicentre.

A Dome

The Atomic Dome, Genbaku, in Hiroshima

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One of the enduring symbols of Hiroshima is the coloured paper crane. It is now an international symbol of peace thank to a Japanese girl called Saddako Sasaki. She was two years old when the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima and ten years old when she was diagnosed with leukemia. In hospital she heard a Japanese legend that if you make 1000 paper cranes you can make a wish. She wished to live. But it wasn’t to be.

In Hiroshima’s Peace Park a permanent memorial depicts Saddako holding a gold crane. Meanwhile paper cranes still come in from all over the world, in solidarity with Saddako and calling for world peace. The cranes are counted and catalogued and then displayed in the park. A paper crane looks easy to make and we want to add our support. We try over lunch with five napkins and a Wiki page. But just like peace itself, while the goal is simple, achieving it is surprisingly difficult. The International Peace movement will have to wait for us to find a stationery shop and learn some basic origami.

Not a pure white dove.But a child’s bright paper crane.Folded bird of hope.

Peace Symbol

Paper cranes at the Children’s Peace Memorial Hiroshima

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At the end of Hiroshima’s main boulevard there’s a dazzling building that’s both technology museum and tourist attraction. And neither of these things. Curiously, this building is the city’s waste processing plant.

The Naka Waste Plant is a state of the art construction (the same architect designed New York’s MOMI) with a glass tunnel running through it that leads to the sea. From this tunnel, or ‘Ecorium’, people can watch their rubbish burn. Except there’s nothing as dirty as rubbish on view. It’s all squeaky clean (workers are rumoured to take their shoes off before going in) and silver lined.

The idea is that in an overpopulated city, with a growing problem of rubbish and how to dispose of it, if people could see the waste production for themselves, they might produce less waste. That’s the theory anyway.

Shiny temple burnsnot incense but city waste.Shrine to consumption.

Temple of Consumption

The Ecorium at Naka Incineration Plant, Hiroshima

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A popular Japanese tourist attraction is the car factory. Toyota has several car manufacture related attractions in Tokyo alone. In Hiroshima we visit the Mazda Factory where we are herded at lightning speed around museum exhibit and production line. A shame, because I could have watched the factory floor for hours.

It’s mesmerising, this ariel view of humans and robots working side by side. Everything is moving, operating at maximum capacity as workers glide with the cars on conveyors that wind around the factory floor. I wonder how many miles they literally travel each day, without taking more than a few steps?

And where do they travel to in their heads as they repetitively install 1800 dashboards each day or drill down several thousand screws? Do they go even further than we do when we get our hands on one of their shiny new cars?

You travel all night.Where do you go in your mind?Further than we drive?

Cog in the Car Factory

Visitors inspect the tech at the Mazda Museum in Hiroshima

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Oku-no-in is a temple complex surrounded by a huge cemetery; the resting place of choice for a Japanese Buddhist. It’s also one of the most atmospheric and authentic places we have visited. Mile upon mile of cedar forest, packed tight with memorials, sculptures, statues, tombs and legends about the spirits.

But one important Buddhist is not dead; only meditating. Kobo Daisha Kukai is believed to have been meditating for over a thousand years, awaiting the arrival of the future Buddha to translate his message to the rest of humanity.

We pay our respects to the meditating Kukai in his mausoleum behind a temple with lights that are said to have been lit for 900 years. And then we return through his dark, dark wood, while he continues to dream and his fellow Buddhists sleep for ever, waiting for a message that some suspect we badly need.

Thousands sleep in peacewhile one meditates, waitingfor all our futures.

Buddhist Cemetery

Oku-no-in Buddhist Cemetery in Kyosan, Japan

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Our kids love Japan’s gacha gacha balls. These plastic shells with tiny toys inside are available from vending machines at service stations and convenience stores everywhere for the small change in your pocket.

For me, Japanese cities are a bit like gacha gacha balls. Like any industrialised country, Japan is all hard surfaces and modern materials. On first appearance it’s not the fragile tea ceremony or bamboo glade that you see in the guide book inserts. Don’t get me wrong, this stuff is here, but you have to work hard to get inside the exterior shell, and even then you can’t totally predict which novelty you will be gifted.

But when you get the equivalent of the prize kitty or the rare Pokemon, you feel like a child who has spent the day in a toy shop. That’s Japan.

Inside brittle shellof urban gacha gachalies Kitty city.

Gacha City

Osaka from the Hep Five Ferris Wheel. Like looking out from inside a gacha gacha

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Some say Kyoto is the heart of Japan. Once the capital, it is now said to be the best place to get a feel for the ‘Old Japan’ - the one in the movies, the Japan of marketing brochures, the Japan of your dreams. We’ve been looking for it for a month now as we’ve travelled around the country, just catching glimpses amongst the modernity.

One of the symbols of this Old Japan is the Geisha Girl. I was told you have to be lucky to see one; even in Gion where they live. They tend to emerge at night on their way to engagements and don’t hang around as they get mobbed by cameras. I tell the kids yet within five minutes they spot four, all jumping into various modes of transport; one Geisha, one Maiko and two riding a rikshaw who I’m sure are tourists dressed up for the day.

I am transfixed by them, staring into the distance long after they have gone. Meanwhile the kids make up a song to the tune of We Three Kings Of Orient Are: ‘We three Geishas of Kyoto are. One in a taxi, one in a car. One in a rikshaw, off to get groceries, at the shop, not too far.’

Painted face of Old.Geisha girl. Gone in a flash.Taxi is waiting.

Glimpse of Geisha

Maiko on the streets of Kyoto

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Bamboo is not a tree species. It is grass. This seems illogical as we stroll through a mystical forest in Arashiyama, west of Kyoto.

Way, way above, the tall straight stalks reach up to worry the cloud. Photographs are tricky. No lens can contain their length and grace. Still, it is a pleasing activity as the lens is crammed with straight lines and slowly moving sunburst. And all the time we walk, the bamboo grows taller.

Bamboo is one of the fastest growing plants on Earth. Some species grow so fast they can be a metre taller at the end of a good day. In our walk through this grove we capture a fraction of its fast, tall, short life.

Grass stronger than steel.Grows fast, cuts cloud, slices sun.Kung Fu Panda’s meal.

Bamboo Blades

Bamboo Grove at Arashiyama near Kyoto Japan

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Sometimes tourism is more than tourism. You forget the admission charges, the vending machines, the crowds and just become part of what you have come to see. I had no idea of the scale, magnificence and spiritual significance of the Fusimi-Inari Taisha Shrine Complex. Outside a big sign tells me it’s a Trip Advisor foreign favourite and I briefly wonder why. In a city packed with shrines; Castle, Palace, Silver Pavilion, how could a few gates compare?

I wander uphill through torii gates for half an hour before I realise that maybe this lot go all the way to heaven. Simple red and black gates, bought by believers, a tunnel to enlightenment. A winding path up a hillside, a moment of contemplation in a month of full on experiences.

The children peel away. For once, I am alone, lost in this vermilion world, on a winding 4km path to peace. I am lost in Japan. At last. And then it’s time to go. Home.

Beyond the gate liessacred space. A thousand times.Shinto mountain shrine.

Torii Story

Vermillion by the million…or thousands anyway, at Fusimi-Inari Taisha Shrine

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Published by The Family Adventure Project www.familyadventureproject.org