works of wanderlust

Tag: japan

  • kiyomizu-dera

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    What adventure from 2025 will be forever etched upon your memory?

    It would be super simple sitting here less than a month after spending most of November in Japan to just write… Japan! with a huge exclamation mark and move on to the next post (heck knows these days leading in the holidays are busy and I have things I should be doing besides writing daily blog posts… whose idea was this blog-every-day thing anyway!?)

    But let me tell you how I spent my birthday. In Kyoto.

    There are almost countless shrines and temples in Japan, but one up on the side of a small mountain in Kyoto called Kiyomizu-dera was a short walk from our new hotel. We had woken up in a traditional-style hotel near the Kyoto train station but had moved to an apartment style hotel a couple klicks away (for cost and location reasons—all booked months ago).

    My birthday was on a Sunday and it just happened to be the weekend that the Kiyomizu-dera temple switched to its autumn hours—counter-intuitively open later in the autumn because their grounds happened to host a large grove of Japanese maple trees which turn a beautiful hue of red. They light them up from multiple angles so that the temple and the grove become a magic place of enchanting lights and shapes and shadows.

    We decided to go up there to have a look after dinner. 

    Every person in Kyoto was also trying to get up there, apparently. 

    There is one narrow street lined with various shops selling souvenirs and foods and often both, and the street being about three meters wide it would comfortably accommodate a good few thousand people an hour walking up to the tempe itself.  Rough guess? At least ten thousand people were up there. 

    It took us nearly an hour to walk—shuffle—the kilometre-ish distance up from our hotel street to the temple gates, and then another hour to slowly make our way through the sea of people towards the grove of trees.

    The sight was worth the effort tho.

    We amazingly found a bench and remember we just sat there in the shadow and glow of a huge maple astride a pond with the pagoda temple looming above, all of it like a fire of reds and oranges, and we just… sat there. Sat there and took it all in, kinda the pinnacle of this vacation we were taking and this quiet moment in a crowd of thousands. And somehow it had taken me exactly forty nine years and millions choices to get to this exact spot.

    And now etched permanently on my memory.

  • hiragana three

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    What was the best anything that you read in 2025?

    Japanese signage. 

    I’ve never been a great student of language. 

    In grade school, having started elementary in a town that was apparently not following the provincial French language requirements for the curriculum, we moved and my new school dropped me into learning our second national language about three years behind everyone else. I never really caught up. I lagged in junior high. I fought to catch up in high school, literally spending a summer trying to get into a groove that would allow me to join the full IB class rather than being one of those partial nerds. I have dabbled in Duolingo. I even tried my hand speaking in both Quebec and France. No dice. I’ve spent the last ten summers helping out the France pavilion at our local heritage festival (because my neighbours, from France, run it) and the best I can do is kind of keep up understanding a third of what is said.  I don’t speak French.

    When I lived in Vancouver for three years I enrolled in night school because I got it in my head that I should learn German. I bought books to study, I bought fiction to pretend like I could read it, I travelled to Germany and tried to have simple conversations. It was a lot less effort than I put into French (and a lot fewer opportunities to practice) and to this date I kind of understand the very basics, but I couldn’t talk my way out of a biergarten during Oktoberfest if my life depended on it.

    This past year I embarked on my third serious language adventure: Japanese. I’ve documented a bit of it in this blog, of course, and there are numerous references herein to my efforts and my adventures into the world of the Japanese language in 2025.

    Japanese tho has been different. The biggest reason is that it does not use the western alphabet.

    In fact, most of my efforts this past year have been devoted to just trying to memorize the hiragana and katakana (and a few kanji this past couple months) of the primary character sets that compose the basics of written Japanese. There are a lot. Nearly fifty basic hiragana symbols plus marks and variations and rules and applications that adjust how it all works. There is a similar number of katakana, and a similar twist on how they are used. There are literally fifty thousand or so kanji symbols and not even fluent speakers are expected to know more a couple thousand of the core symbols. 

    I have used apps and flashcards and books and worksheets and classes and even a poster hanging in my office.  It has been a huge slog, but a rewarding one. And particularly rewarding was being able to stroll through the streets of Tokyo, ride the train to Kyoto and explore Japan’s hot spots in November while having a thousand daily opportunities to notice that some of that effort to learn those characters (and a bit of basic vocabulary) had stuck. I couldn’t really claim that I could read it, but it wasn’t all incomprehensible. I could look at things and recognize shapes and words, especially important ones about numbers and food and such.

    I’m far from fluent, I fully admit that, but reading a bit of hiragana on the beautiful streets of Japan was probably the best thing I read all year.

  • unreal asia

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    Did you travel in 2025?

    In 1998 I went to Europe for the first time.  Until that moment of stepping off the plane and riding the train into London’s Victoria Station with my giant backpack over my shoulder, Europe was an abstraction in my head. It was this place I had heard about over and over and over but seemed more like a story that I could read about than I real place I could visit.

    Since then I’ve been back to Europe multiple times, travelled through a list of European countries so long I struggle to remember exactly when and where I’ve gone there, and have long since settled Europe itself in my head as just another option for an interesting (if expensive) vacation.

    And. Until a couple months ago my thoughts about Asia were pretty much in line with how I thought about Europe in the 1990s. That is to say, I have friends from all over Asia, I have seen it in media and read about it in books, I had been studying the Japanese language, and I’ve certainly eaten the food of nearly every Asian immigrant group who serves it in Canada… but the place itself was almost an abstract concept in my head that I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around.

    Earlier this year were contemplating our annual travel options and one of us suggested Japan.

    If you are even so much as a sporadic reader of this blog that should be no surprise to you. We ended up spending nearly three weeks on the little island in November of this year after all, and I still haven’t caught up with my recap posts about it (blame this blog every day thing, I guess!) 

    This abstraction that I am talking about is not a lack of perception. I think the world is kinda chunked up into sections of people and culture that until you spend a day wandering through their streets or trying to buy lunch from a local or sitting in a hut on the side of a mountain listening to a story or lace up you shoes and run a five klick race through one of their parks… many places on this globe can be little more than an idea in your head that is hard to get a sense of what it would be like to spend time there. What does the air smell like? What are the sounds? Is it big or small, dense or wide open? A thousand questions of the moments and how it all might become real. So much of what we see from those places is framed as news or art or otherwise showing us the shiny bits that are worth sharing. None of it is any more than a story. It is not until you arrive there that it all gels into something more.

    For example. If you had never visited my city or even come here to Canada it would be really difficult to describe to you what my day-to-day was like, say, even yesterday. We woke up and it was twenty five degrees below zero with yet another thin layer of snow… that I had to go out and shovel. I was squinting in the sunlight and bundled up in four layers to clean the sidewalk all so that we could hop in the car and drive down a highway over drifting snow and patches of ice to go for lunch with my mother-in-law for her birthday. The air hurts. The place is dirty with spatters of muddy snow all over everyones cars. We live in the suburbs and all there is around is the sound of engine noises echoing over the snow and the sky is filled with the chimney exhaust of everyone’s furnace running twenty-three and a half hours a day.  In other words… it is absolutely nothing like the vibe you’d find on the tourism sites if you searched for us. Nothing like the story we project out to the world for people who can’t or don’t come here to know about us.

    And I think that was like me and Asia. I had a story in my head but I knew it wasn’t actually real. Until we walked through the streets of Japan, until I went out and did a community run event, until we bumbled through the subway trying to find our way, until we were hungry and needed a quick lunch between touristy explorations… until all of that and a thousand other little things… all of it was a bit of an abstraction to me.

    But we’ve been to Japan now and Asia as a whole just seems that much more real in my head now… almost like I should book another trip soon.

  • the japan files

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    What excited you most in 2025?

    It turns out there are two subtly different terms for non-Asian people who find themselves with an interest in Japan: one can be a japanophile …or one can be a weeaboo (or weeb).

    Both are similar terms, but like anything we do in this crazy culture of ours one is a reference to a tastefully pursued hobby and the other is a a pejorative insult meant to look down one’s nose at someone who is oddly obsessed with a narrow aspect of the same thing. One term leans positive while the other is a gut punch.

    Like, think about it this way: if you were really into wine I could compliment you and call you an aspiring sommelier or an enthusiast, collector or someone with a refined palate. Alternatively, if you were really into wine, wink wink, we could call you a lush or an drunk.  

    It read it with that vibe. 

    Essentially people who get nerdy about Japan and try to learn about the culture, the language, the food and more lean towards the label of Japanophile. But the latter term, weeaboo, gets slapped on folks who maybe turned their karate class and Crunchyroll subscription into weird personality quirk. Get it?

    I have met many of both this year. I jumped head first into the Japanese language going so far as to take a class offered by the local Japan Society, and I had a great time honing some of the lessons I had picked up on my own through tools like books and duolingo, all of that in the months before actually hopping on an airplane and jetting off to Tokyo and beyond.

    I don’t want to imply that my Japanophilia has popped out of nowhere in 2025, tho. I have been flirting with the film and food and literature of Japan for decades. I think my first “this is different and I love it” moment was in a theatre in the early 2000s watching “Spirited Away” on the big screen. I have long since added Murikami’s translated works to my top five authors list. And you’ll  almost always find a small stack of Usagi Yojimbo comics on my nightstand (which I fully understand is an American comic written by a man with Japanese heritage about Japanese history, but… it fits the theme here, no?) I’ve been tangentially interested for years and years. 

    But then in early 2025 we booked a trip and I thought to myself that it presented an interesting opportunity to go a little deeper: and so I did. I started learning hiragana and katakana characters on my phone. I picked away at some of the language. I bought books. I watched videos about the place. I dug deep into making lists of interesting Japanese foods. I prepared for our trip to make it more than a tourist jaunt, but to open my mind to observe the culture and the world when we arrived and immersed ourselves in Japan.

    And as I write this we’ve been home for about a week, and I keep practicing my Japanese and I keep poking at my literature and I still have a lot of Japan videos recommended to me on YouTube (though now I can watch them with a kind of “we saw that” familiarity or comparison mindset.) 

    I pushed into a Japanophile vibe in 2025. And I’m glad I went so deep before we went so far. 

  • japan-oramas, one

    November has ended, and on the last weekend of the month I time travelled across sixteen timezones, arriving back home before I left Tokyo. Weird, huh? Our flight left Narita airport at 18:30 on Saturday evening and we arrived in Edmonton at 16:20 the same day.

    International travel can mess with your mind… and your circadian rhythms. It took me most of Sunday to glom back onto Mountain Standard, and then just when I thought I was doing fine I tossed and turned until 3am. Ah, jet lag, you nasty witch.

    All that is to say, our near-three week vacation in Japan is done.

    I have many thoughts, and (a) there is no possible way, still slightly jet lagged, to get them all into even a couple blog posts, and (b) I do want to break the surface tension of that reluctance and my lack of posting here for that duration and write something.

    We landed in Tokyo nearly three weeks ago. Phew! Has it been that long already? I was equally jet lagged as I am now, but going in the opposite direction. Sixteen timezones is no joke. But, we got out on foot (and train) and explored the city for five whole days.

    And you can see a lot of even a massive city like Tokyo in five days. I mean, you can’t even see enough of it or even a significant portion of it, but you can see a lot. And a city like Tokyo throw a lot at you.

    We stayed about six blocks from Shibuya Station, which if you know nothing else about Tokyo you might know it for that crazy scramble crosswalk where millions of tourists flock to simply cross a major intersection in a bustle of people.

    We did the stereotypical thing and filmed ourselves crossing it. And I think the locals hate that in their beautiful bustling and glowing city what people get kinked about is crossing an intersection whilst making a selfie. I did not selfie.

    The thing I noted most strongly about Tokyo is that it seems a lot like a lot of cities that have been mashed together into one super city. We would catch the the train, ride fifteen minutes through three or four or eight stops and then get off, only to emerge from the chaos of the rail system into a brand new place. You’d pop up by the Imperial Palace one day and stroll by some lovely gardens surrounded by a serious business district. Then we’d take the train a few stops and suddenly I’m in Akihabara and I feel like I just popped into a video game level, or another stop and boom: temple, or yes another stop and wham: fish market.

    We ascended two towers whilst we were in Tokyo: the Metropolitan Government Observatory (pictured) and walked around inside there for about an hour just looking at the endless city, and then later The Tokyo Sky Observatory, at night, and seeing endless lights stretching to the horizon made us realize that we were in a sea of millions of people and millions of stories, and there was no way we could ever see even a fraction of part of it all.

    Of course it is really the culture shock of Tokyo that caught me off guard. I feel like I try to be open minded enough that nothing truly shocks me. I am a trained scientist after all, observing the world with a rational mind of curious interest. And maybe it is only that as foreign as you expect a place to feel, it usually turns out to be foreign in ways you didn’t expect. That is to say, a lot of things feel mundanely familiar if only because we live in a great big interconnected global village and a lot of the world has been homogenized into a grey paste of sameness. But then the other bits that you didn’t expect rise up above the sameness of bank machines and traffic lights and potato chips and homelessness and starbucks and those differences are so stark against that grey backdrop that they are all the more surprising because of it.

    We went to temples and museums and markets and seven-elevens and ramen shops and kabuki theatre shows that brought us new experiences in Tokyo that will stick in my head for decades.

    And yet, here we are back home again.

    It had snowed a day before we arrived back in Edmonton. It was cold and grey, but grey in a freshly arrived winter sort of way. And lots of people were happy to see us back, asking about our adventures and to regale them with stories of what we’d seen.

    So much, I’d tell them. Where to start?

    I think it will need to dribble out as I remember it, little bits of it will poke up into future reflections or recollections as I write and remember in the coming months. And that is a good kind of travel experience, I think, the kind that worms into your brain and fills it with so much that you can’t possibly explain to anyone in any coherent way what it all meant.