September 18, 2002:
Usually I study shortly after classes end until around 5 or 6, but today I cast studying to the winds and went to Hikone Castle with Aaron. Hikone Castle is the centerpiece of Hikone, and when I saw it, I realized for the first time that I was really in a different country. Hikone itself is fairly flat and full of small buildings and houses, but the castle is on the summit of a mountain and you can see it from almost anywhere in Hikone. On a clear day you can see it extremely well, and when it’s lit up during the nighttime the effect is stunning. I’ve been down by that area on my bike, but I’ve never actually paid the 500 yen and toured the castle, and I had been looking forwards to it. Luckily, Aaron has wanted to see it as well and hadn’t done so yet, so I had company – mellow company with a digital camera, which is about the best kind of company you can get when wandering around a place like Hikone Castle. A lot of other people I know want to see it sometime, but they all ended up being busy today, so I think we’ll make plans for another trip in the fall once the leaves start changing colors. But today was easily the most beautiful day we’ve had in a long time, and I just had to go do something fun. (Rather, today still is the most beautiful day we’ve had in a long time, but after I finish this entry I’ll shut myself in a little room and study until ten so it won’t make a difference to me.)
So we biked over to Hikone Castle, which is around the halfway point from JCMU to AL Plaza, if anybody is keeping track. (I’d like to get a map of Hikone so Brian can scan it and everyone will know where I am.) We were directed to a place to put our bikes, and I discovered my bike lock was malfunctioning. The nice old man by the bikes tried fixing it for me, giving it his best shot, but eventually we just told him “daijobu, daijobu” (it’s OK, it’s OK) and left my bike unlocked. This kept me a little nervous all through our tour, as I still am a little bitter about my (perfectly well locked, obviously old and moderately cheap) bike being stolen when I lived in Ann Arbor, but my bike was still there when I was finished wandering around the castle.
Hikone Castle is surrounded by a big moat, just like a proper castle should be, and the moat is nicely populated with ducks and black swans. You cross over the moat via a thin and high bridge, and a nice-looking lady in a little booth smiles at you and tells you where to go. By this point you’ve stumbled into a wild and old place, something far removed from the rest of Hikone, which is by and large paved over and a little run-down. The ticket to the castle and the attached garden costs 500 yen, which today is about $4.00, and most visitors are also given the Japanese guide to the castle but the man at another little booth found pamphlets in English for us. Then you realize the downside to being able to see the castle from anywhere in Hikone when you walk up the rough, uneven stone stairs for about ten minutes, stop at a well-placed sign to regain your composure, and notice another large set of rough, uneven stone stairs. I guess I had inadvertently wandered off with the wrong shoes again–I seem to always remember this detail about twenty minutes after I leave JCMU on an adventure–so I was surprised when a Japanese lady stopped me and offered me some bandaids. I thought that perhaps she had thought I dropped them, but it seemed my feet still hadn’t recovered from the pain I put them through in Osaka enough to be going up all those steps in bad shoes. My friend Cat, I think, is perfectly right when she says that JCMU is more like the Hikone Zoo and we American students are the exhibits, but then sometimes being observed all of the time works in your favor and you get bandaids for your heels when you didn’t expect them.
Once you get up all those stairs, you find an open plaza area with plenty of space so you can move around and get the best view, and the best picture, of the castle. From a distance, the castle looks imposing and large, but when I got there I was surprised to find that it was much smaller than I had thought it was. The part that you see all the pictures of is, if I read my information right, the keep or the watchtower, instead of what we might think of as being a proper castle where people used to live. The most important house from the time is closer to where the gardens are, and I didn’t think to see if you could visit it, so I will next time around. In order to go inside the castle, you had to take your shoes off, which surprised me more than it should have. Now, while the outside of the castle is gleaming white with a beautifully and ornately decorated black roof, the inside is extremely plain and undecorated. There are a few exhibits of carved stone things, but I couldn’t figure out what they were for, and there was an exhibit of how the roof was constructed, as far as I could tell, but the inside of the castle was fairly empty. There were windows of various shapes marked with kanji signs and explained by another sign written mostly in kanji, and I regretted not having my kanji dictionary so I could figure out what significance the triangular windows had compared to the rectangular windows. There was a simple beauty in the way the castle was constructed, and I liked the irregular and natural shape of the beams of the roof, but the allure of Hikone Castle isn’t found in the exhibits or the way the castle is constructed.
Hikone Castle consists of three floors, and I think that if you hang around any given set of stairs for long enough, you’ll hear several different ways of expressing unhappiness or dismay in Japanese, and certainly you will know how to say “scary,” which is “kowai.” The stairs between each floor are narrow and very nearly vertical, and climbing them makes you rather nervous. The original wooden stairs had been covered with new plastic stairs and a secure metal handrail had been added, so while climbing you could imagine how it would have been to have lived in Hikone hundreds of years ago and have been stationed at the watchtower, having to go up and down without the benefit of plastic stairs and metal handrails. But it was worth it to get to the third floor, because from there you could see all of Hikone and the view was breathtaking. From the windows on the west side of the building you could see JCMU, which is luckily a big building with a garish teal roof. Out of the windows on the north side you could see AL Plaza and the section of the city I’ve explored a bit, from the east side you could see the part of the city I haven’t really been to, where Aaron lives with his host family, and from the south side you could see Lake Biwa and everything beyond it. (I think I have my directions wrong, and I don’t think it would surprise anybody if I did.) There was wire over the windows, so you couldn’t get any really gorgeous pictures, but I think Aaron tried and if his turn out well I’ll see if he’ll let me have copies so I can put them on my webpage. I also took pictures, but there’s not much of a chance of them turning out well.
Then down the awful narrow stairs, which is, of course, its own little adventure, and you’re back in the plaza. Aaron wandered off to take pictures and I bought postcards at the little souvenir store, postcards of Hikone Castle and Lake Biwa, and started writing a couple. (Between the large family on my own side, and the large family I’ll be marrying into, I have a lot of postcards I want to write!) The lady at the souvenir store, by the way, rewarded me with a “Jouzu desu” for saying “arigato gozaimasu,” or “thank you.” “Jouzu” means “skillful,” and it’s something Japanese students in Japan hear all the time, even when the best we can do is “Sumimasen, nihongo o hanishimasen,” (I’m sorry, I don’t speak Japanese). So we are used to it meaning absolutely nothing about our language skills except for when it comes from one of our teachers, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard it just for saying thank you…
After we took a couple more pictures of the castle, Aaron had to get back to his host family’s house, so I wandered around for the rest of the time on my own. We had covered the castle area pretty thoroughly, but we hadn’t seen the garden yet, so I headed that way. I think I picked the wrong direction, as a matter of fact, so I got to see some very pretty and wild areas of the castle grounds before I found the garden. The garden was behind the house that I mentioned earlier, and had some specific way of being arranged that I didn’t take notes on and completely forgot about. In practice, it was a serene and delicate area centered around a little pond, carefully crossed with bridges and perfectly placed plants. Of course, I had just taken the last picture on my camera before I entered the garden, so I didn’t get any pictures of the area, but like I’ve said before I intend to return there and I’ll take pictures then. You wander around the pond on a rough stone path and admire the swans and the impressive outfits of the high-school age girls wandering around with their boyfriends. My favorite girl wore a ruffly red skirt, a lacy white top, red patterned socks that went past her knees and truly hideous black platform shoes, and she made a very nice contrast with the atmosphere of the garden. Then again, as a foreigner, so did I.
Eventually you come to an open building where there are a few Japanese signs and one English sign advertising tea and a sweet for 500 yen. The real attraction, of course, is to sit in a traditional Japanese teahouse and have an old lady in a lovely kimono serve you authentic, frothy green tea and a funny little dessert while you sit Japanese-style on a tatami mat and enjoy the view of the garden, and so I was duly attracted and paid my 500 yen. I’m not used to green tea coming in any form besides those colorful Arizona tea bottles, but I liked sipping it from the cup it came in, which looked like a soup bowl. The sweet was a piece of green tea mochi wrapped up in a thin piece of paper and served on a simple-looking, subdued little grey dish. Mochi is a sort of little cake made from rice flour and a lot of sugar, and this was my first experience with it. I think it could be best described as having the sort of spongy texture and feel of a marshmallow and the consistency of bread dough, but with a lot more delicacy and an almost overpowering sweetness. It was coated with green tea powder and made my hands very sticky. I made some conversation with the three female college students next to me and with the lady serving the tea, but to be honest I’m not at all used to sitting in the Japanese style (with your legs folded underneath you) and was rather distracted from my linguistic efforts by how much my toes were starting to tingle. I’ve read that you can try to defeat it by crossing your toes, and Cat later recommended that you wiggle your toes so that your feet won’t fall asleep, but the former suggestion didn’t help and the latter didn’t work. So even though I kept my position admirably while I was enjoying my treat and the view, I’m afraid I didn’t walk out of that teahouse gracefully. All the same, I got included in the picture the three students had the lady serving us take of them, by virtue of being an oddity I imagine, and properly appreciated the beauty of the teahouse, the dragonfly design on the lady’s periwinkle blue kimono, and the gorgeous view of the placid garden.
I limped over to my bike, which was luckily still there, and headed back to JCMU, confident that I could get away with a few entries consisting of “today I studied for eight hours” for the next couple of days once I wrote about going to Hikone Castle for today. That’s good, because tomorrow is my day to study for the Friday test, and then I don’t know how my computer time will work this weekend. Some of us are doing a weekend homestay with families in this area, so I may not have punctual updates over the weekend, but they will be interesting! Wish me luck.
While writing this entry, I found a few interesting links about Hikone and Hikone Castle which I’m including here:
http://www.csuohio.edu/history/shiga96/pages/ecb02.html
http://hkuhist2.hku.hk/nakasendo/hikstory.htm
http://www.hikoneshi.com/photo%20album/photo%20album_aki.html
http://weather.asahi.com/city/hikone.html
I might add, by the way, that I got an interesting e-mail from my mom this morning, which I will reproduce here:
Dates very nice! In all your cooking and shopping I wonder if they use dates in Japan. Of course, I imagine Japanese kids go out on dates. I wonder if there are any other kinds of dates your Mother wants to know
about?
Well, date’s about enough of that!
To Mom’s relief, I hope, Brian has promised to secure a permanent wedding date today. At least, I think it’ll be today, for those of you who live in America. The time difference is not something I have to think about often, and it always messes me up!
I should also mention that I got a care package from Mom consisting mainly of homemade chocolate-chip peanut butter cookies. Homemade cookies are hard to come by around here, as no one has a real oven, and so I’ve recently become very popular!
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