Kyoto

I returned to Japan for the second time this fall during what should have been the leaf-watching season, when the hotels in Kyoto are booked solid for months in advance. People arrive in groups of 30 and upwards to visit the temples and admire the local maple trees, which sport tiny leaves like the one on the Canadian flag, only about the size of a postage stamp. I happen to know the typical group size because it is only over 30 that the group rate kicks in at the temples. It was unseasonably warm this year, so only a few of the trees had turned, but they were a vivid red. I can well believe that the effect of the entire woods turning this colour is worth the trip, and I only wish I had arrived a week later to see more of it.

Spirited Away
Fans of the cartoonist Hayao Miyazaki will be delighted to know of the existence of an entire shop dedicated to his work. You can buy Totoro and his friends in a dozen forms, from ash trays to pocket mirrors, back packs and key chains. Okay, I was only joking about the ash trays, because of course there is a certain element of reverence even in this crass commercialism. The range of creatures was however astonishing when you see them together all in one place. In typical Japanese fashion, the form of the building also seemed appropriate to the subject matter. After entering along a corridor lined with other shops, you come to a spot with some wooden benches and natural stone steps, where the roofs of the buildings on all sides end to make a little patch of open sky. The shop is off this tiny courtyard, quietly playing soundtracks from the various movies.

A Keen Sense of Liminality
As my colleague Susan pointed out, the fact in Miyazaki’s movies of a different world being just around the corner is based on the exquisite use of even the smallest actual spaces in Japan to transport you to a new experience. It is not uncommon, for example, to walk from a congested street to a wide open area for bus transfers, only to step aside into a rock garden where all the traffic noise is gone and you are suddenly listening to a small stream while sitting on a wooden bench beside a grove of bamboo, with old moss thick on every side. It is amazing, astonishing, and charming, and I wish everyone on Earth could adopt local forms of this way of thinking.

With Bells On
You can’t throw a stone in Kyoto, a local saying goes, without hitting a monk. There are over 1600 shrines and temples in the city, and we visited all of them, walking generally through mixed woods, often accompanied by waist-deep crowds of school children. It is not uncommon for one of them to muster enough courage to say hello, then burst into fits of shy giggles when you answer. The temples themselves vary significantly, and the grounds are typically beautiful, so that a few steps in any direction gives you another enchanting view of a bit of water, an ancient tree, and part of a roofline. What many of them also have in common are bells. Some are tiny, hanging in strings from the eaves to guide the water into a terminal small cup. Others are about the size of your head, hanging decoratively from the corners of roofs. The premium versions, however, are old green bronze and bell-shaped, except they have no clappers. Instead, they are rung with a swinging beam. I wasn’t fortunate enough to hear any of them being rung, although I was told of the biggest bell, rung only at New Years and other significant occasions, that it takes half a dozen men pulling at the ropes of the striking beam, while one of the young monks rides on the wrappings near the front, so that after each stroke he can push off from the bell with his feet. I can only imagine that the right to be that monk is highly prized.

Tanuki
With a bottle of saki in one hand, a bag of money in the other, and exaggeratedly enormous testicles (often hanging far enough to rest on the ground), these ubiquitous fat little creatures are symbols of the good life. In some cases they resemble western raccoons, while in others they are closer to red pandas. There is even on rare occasions a missus Tanuki -- a bit, as someone pointed out, like a missus pacman, distinguished by her lack of balls and the colourful bow on her head. Tanuki himself wears a straw hat pushed back, the better, one supposes, to get a good look at this pleasant world.

Clinton

I arrived in this small town in upstate NY after an instructive hour-long ride with a local driver who was roughly the age and temperament of my older brother. We talked about politics (bad), the economy (worse), and education (terrible), as well as the aptitude of the people responsible for everything (disastrously poor). Along the way, we narrowly missed hitting one of the largest does I had personally ever seen. She was standing in shadow on the other lane of a two-lane highway, and only the quick reactions of the driver saved us from a messy and complicated interaction that the deer herself seemed to be interested in producing. When I told people about it subsequently, they explained that the area is heavily populated with deer, so that you often see them in or around your yard.

Poetry Slam
I had never been to a spoken word event before, and it was a lively and somehow cathartic experience. I have sometimes wondered if poetry is a dead art form, but it is alive and well with these young people, who were full of loud music, mutual encouragement, and charming conceits. Some people read their poems, some recited them from heart, and a few sang songs. At times I felt that I had been transported to a beatnik gathering from the 1950s, I think in part because to avoid applauding so loudly as to drown out the performer, the convention is to snap your fingers to make a sound like rain. Crying out encouragement or commentary was also not uncommon. One of my favourites was the single word “preach.”

A King-Sized Bed
I know it seems a somewhat trivial reason, but I generally avoid the bed and breakfast as though it were vexed, because I have never been in one where the picturesque and antique qualities that are so admired in the genre accommodate the fact that I am six foot two and two hundred pounds. I also do like a bit of sleep when I can get it, and I enjoy eating breakfast when I do manage to get up. Both are mitigated against in their various ways in the typical B&B, the one by the charming tiny beds, no bigger than your thumb, and the other by the tendency to serve breakfast between the hours of 6:15 and 6:17, after my hosts have been up and doing for hours, usually on the other side of the paper screen that serves as my bedroom wall. All of which to say that none of these restrictions applied to the B&B I stayed at in Clinton, where there was an unprecedented king-sized bed, a separate building containing my room, and breakfast at 9:30.