Drawn to the Unfamiliar

International Manga Museum Kyoto

On the plane from San Francisco to Tokyo I watched a documentary called The Iran Job about an American basketball player who travels to play in Iran. Debating going, he says: I don't know why I am going. Something the Lord put in me draws me from the familiar to the unfamiliar. 

When younger I actively promoted travel and foreign experience, thinking it essential for understanding the human condition. Time has tempered that notion. Today I believe simply there are those of us born to wander, drawn towards unfamiliar environments in spite of the ensuing insecurity, drawn by the opportunities of the unknown. I don't fool myself that travel is the only means of exploring the unfamiliar. For example, every time an artist faces a blank canvas they enter unknown territory, as does nearly every college graduate and every newly married couple.

I toyed with the idea of going to Japan many years ago, lured by talk of good paying jobs teaching English to businessmen. I was living in San Francisco, studying martial arts in a Japanese dojo in the basement of a Buddhist temple. I was also working for a Japanese carpenter whose skills with a saw astonished me. I moved back East. Japan's draw receded. We take some roads and others must go unexplored.

How lucky am I then to have had this brief chance to see this cool country. Its impact profound on global culture and history.

With a scant week, I had to choose. What could I do with only a few days in the country of samurai and sake and sushi? Of Kobe and Kurosawa? Kyoto it was. Roads chosen, roads neglected.

First up? Navigate the Tokyo subway.

The Japanese are clearly masters of efficiency and complexity. I could not believe the number of lines, the number of trains, the number of stations. After the BTS in Bangkok, I felt like I was running from Jack Nicholson in the tree maze in The Shining. I did ultimately make it through from the airport to the metro to the bullet trains north.

Everything advertised and more. Unbelievable smoothness and speed. Banking corners at over 170 MPH. Easily one of the best transportation experiences in my life. And leaving on the minute more than three times every hour of the day. Expensive? Yes, at some $200 round trip and yet no, experience and comfort-wise compared to my cramp-legged, always delayed flights. Smooth as 1000 stitch Egyptian cotton sheets.

Kyoto was even cleaner and more disciplined than Tokyo. A city where the ancient coexists with the future.

These are not 'costumes'. I regularly saw denizens wearing them. No one bats an eye in their presence.

Tucked behind a gate in the 'old' wooden section of town.

My hotel in Kyoto was much more spacious than that in Tokyo. Limited by time I had to choose among scores of worthy sites. I considered renting a bicycle but opted for the simplicity of walking to the temples, most of which ring the city's higher surrounding mountains. There are a wide range of sacred and personal sites. Here are two shots from one temple:

This  continues to be an active Buddhist temple. One cannot help but be put into a tranquil and meditative state.

All around the city were humble touches that evoked joy in my heart, like this small menu on a winding back lane:

And, as ordered, quirky touches of cultural strangeness:

Provided in the restaurant washroom- How thoughtful!

Space was always at a premium:

The sink in my favorite restaurant.

Parking Double-up

In addition to the Manga Museum and temples, I also went to a hilarious and thought-provoking invitational show including a wide array of artists on a particular theme. Can you guess what it was?

Need another hint?

Yep...

It was a fun and well curated show.

Speaking of such things, there were many, many stunning young women in Kyoto. Remarkable, actually. Throughout the city. Their main occupation seemed to consist in intense conversations on their iphones and gazing at their stunning selves in shop windows.

Their absorption was certainly not disturbed by this old gaijin wandering the streets in his stylish Crocs. Which, by the way, gave me enormous blisters on my toes. Not good daily walkers.
In general the reserve of the Japanese was very notable in contrast with places like Cambodia and Thailand. Very little noise or laughter in the streets, and except when engaged in a transaction, very little personal eye contact or intrusion of strangers' 'bubbles'. When at a crosswalk, no one ever set foot into the road unless the little electronic man changed from red to green. I felt positively criminal if after waiting and looking I crossed- which, come to think of it, I was. Once I did cross boundaries of personal space- either to ask for directions or to buy something, I found the locals to be terrifically generous and sweet. Yet the tenor of the streets left me feeling a little lonely and isolated.
It was less so when I returned to Tokyo on my way out, where I had a great time eating street food with two French men and their Japanese wives. I will definitely come back again to explore further, if fate allows it, since I have barely nicked the surface, and I also had the best best best sushi by approximately 100,000,000 times over anything in California or New York or Boston or ANYWHERE. A revelation.


Next up: Jakarta

He Was a Goodly King

Ten days ago the body of the King Father arrived in Cambodia.

He died in Beijing on the actual morning of Pchum Ben- the day of honoring ancestors. His body was flown in and thousands upon thousands gathered to honor his transport to the Royal Palace. This marked the beginning of an intense and emotional nationwide memorial which saw hundreds of thousands of Khmer citizens coming to the city.
I knew he had died, but I was unaware of the arriving flight until I went out into the street and saw the waves of mourners filling up the streets.

It was an odd atmosphere- somber and sad, but with a tremor of celebration too- just a certain moving unity of purpose and identity.

Initially tentative with my picture taking, I relaxed when embraced with typically welcome smiles and generous comments. I chatted with several other photographers about lenses and shooting in the bright sun. Everywhere people pinned these ribbons on each other and later, unasked, a young woman came up and pinned one on me.

Hours and hours went by, the patience of the Khmer seemingly bottomless.

I moved up to the balcony at Java Cafe, where, thanks to the fact that we were all jammed in, drinking coffee, and waiting, I had a terrific conversation with two young successful Khmer women. We talked about Sihanouk's incredible lifetime journey, gaining independence for his country from the French in the 50's, being buffeted back and forth by enormous political forces beyond his control- used by the USA, then China, then the Khmer Rouge. He did also oversee the regaining of certain territories from neighboring Thailand and Vietnam.  Certainly he made some unfortunate choices, and he was far from an ascetic or selfless- but given his choices? My new friends indicated that they found him to be a worthy representative of his time- charming, artistic and most often trying to benefit his people as best he could. God knows the Khmer deserve a benevolent figure to bring them together and allow them a measure of pride.

Finally the police cars came down the street and then this set of royal vehicles. One had a small band. It rocked a bit as it rolled, but the music was anything but rock and roll.

 Then came this dragon monk-mobile. I think it might be the coolest thing I have ever seen go down the road- and  purpose built for this rather than some tacky Macy's Day-NBC crap.

Then the casket of the King Father passed. All became somber, as if a wave of sadness came rushing with it, as if we all finally remembered why we had gathered and sat for 4 hours.

Horatio
I saw him once: he was a goodly king.

Hamlet
He was a man, take him for all in all,
I shall not look upon his like again.

I did not travel to the following days of mourning which took place in front of the Royal Palace because I left the next morning to Kampot. Even when I got back, every day the city traffic intensified, and the emotions rose day by day.

One night a rumor that the King's face could be seen in the moon went viral, and all over the city people stared up and pointed. Several foreigners crossed boundaries and raised the ire of the crowds- first a Thai reporter who stood with the King's portrait at her feet, and then two Chinese factory managers, one who tore up a photo of the King because the workers were "distracted", another who folded up a picture of the face/moon. It was lucky the former was not killed. She was ordered to prostrate herself in front of the King's photo publicly, was thrown in jail, fined and deported. Though I condemn absolutely ideologically inspired violence, I couldn't help but feel these fools' insensitivity deserved harsh measures- and with the horrible conditions of the garment factories, I found myself gloating at the story of the manager. I hope she felt a little of the fear and degradation imposed on the poor daily, though I know she herself is most likely an underpaid and simple pawn in a much larger machine. Though the Chinese government condemned her actions and actually branded her "an idiot", it is the Chinese who use and abuse Cambodia for their benefit.

And I felt lucky to be here as a witness to this historical passage, to see so many Khmer join together, even if it was in sadness.

A Certain Kind of Sadness

They say:
bad things come in threes, and the lizard-brain part of me sloshes lazily along with the notion. I don't ask who 'they' are that say these things. I don't ask why they say them. Of course, if I do, I don't have to wonder long. I can google it and read a blog post from a woman who writes: For a long time now, I’ve believed the superstition that things come in threes...I know it’s silly, and the thing is, I’m not a superstitious person. After all, I believe that God is in control, and He has a plan... 

Interesting, the intersection between numbers and beliefs. I hope sometime after I am dead the pattern of our humanity, the logic of our biology, will be revealed.
Did Jesus every say anything directly about numeracy?
No google answers.

Maybe bad things come in googolplexes. That is a number for those too young to recall.

This is the tail end of our first vacation week. I was planning on going to Vietnam, taking a train up the coast and then flying back from Hanoi.
Then I looked at my finances. Not good.

Then my right knee gave a little pop and provided some unfriendly shooting pains each time I stepped just so-  I became convinced that the constant walking that comes with travel would exacerbate the problem. I would be stranded, crippled.

Then my wholly self-indulgently purchased television went black and wouldn't turn on.

So, okay, adapt. Catch up on the blog and sift through the 2000 photos you have taken

Then I worked for five hours editing photos of student work and for my Bright Uprising blog, closed Lightroom without saving the catalogue, and all my photos went somewhere into the software void.

Then, from sitting so much in the heat, I got a rash on my lower ass. Ugh.

Stuck in PP.

I went through other old photos, transferring them to a separate hard drive so I could free up space. Way dangerous, coming across former selves, sons, and siblings while sweating alone in your apartment. And way too heavily fraught with symbolic significance.

I listened to a catchy, sad song by Gotye too many times.
 Somebody That I Used to Know

I went to Howie's Bar, wasted $30, felt even lower, with a headache to boot.

They say:
when the going gets tough, the tough get going.
Not me. Apparently when the going gets tough I revert to a mopey teen.

You can get addicted to a certain kind of sadness.  Nice line, that.

But then.

Mike, who works at the embassy, called about tennis. The knee withstood two full hours of court play- two days in a row! Tennis!

The TV guys came by in a truck and took away my TV and then brought it back fixed! Free!

My friend Richard e-mailed me with instructions how to recover my photos. So only the edits were lost, not the originals.

They say:
When you find yourself stuck deep in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging.

The streets were so quiet and calm PP was like a ghost town- and surprisingly marvelous in its desertion. I could walk up and down the normally busiest of streets without a care. In a way it felt mine.

I made a small project of sampling the coffee at every coffee shop in my neighborhood. I found the one I liked the best three doors down from my apartment. By the third visit the wonderful waitresses knew me and my order by name. I was a little bit more somebody, with a smidgeon more of a home.

I met some strangers and had inspiring conversations- First with a funny young Cambodian American who moved to PP and started a cafe and is attempting to start an import export business, then with an older woman newly arrived from LA to volunteer with the Cambodian Children's Fund, and finally with a very educated and passionate Cambodian as we waited for the King Father's casket to pass.


They say:
every cloud has a silver lining.

Had I gone perhaps I would have had a wonderful journey. Yet I wouldn't trade it for the one I took staying here. Next I will post about that historic memorial day.

And yes, thanks to a nice pharmacist my ass rash is mending!