#11 Kamikochi

"Kamikochi is impossibly beautiful" I wrote in a letter to my family after returning from the mountains. This was where I had my most incredible and somewhat mystic experience in Japan, and rather than retype the whole story, I'm going to post the e-mail in the comments section of this page. It's long, but worth the read. Here are some of the two-hundred pictures I took. I met some wonderful people, too: pictured are Shingo-ando and I outside a mounatin hut, Mika and I, and the three other climbers (from right to left: the drunk who could speak english, the drunk who could not, and Kandou).

#10 Aikido in Japan

This is Shawn's neighborhood. It's very quiet, and I spent part of Sunday morning sitting in a park reading and eating BALANCEUP, my favorite pre-packaged Japanese breakfast snack.







Shawn and I traveled by train out to a very rural part of northeastern Tokyo. When we got off the train, Shawn started talking to this woman on the street and then next thing I knew, we got in her car and started to drive. I was kind of curious, so I asked who she was. They both laughed - she was Shawn's top student, and every week she meets him at the train station to drive him to class.



This is the building where we trained. It's a middle school by day, and we were using the gynasium. The two classes were really great - Shawn is a very good teacher and has very strong students - and I received what I felt was a very high compliment when one of the Japanese students tld me she thought my Aikido was "beautiful." Training in Aikido in Japan had been a dream of mine for some time - there's just something very powerful about that experience.



This is Shawn and his tremendously kind top student. The class took us to dinner at a restaurant where they served Sushi on a conveyor belt. I am not making this up.












This is the Aikido crew. The gentleman in the hat on the far left is a fashion designer (?!), and the girl on the far right and I hit it off smashingly despite an almost complete language barrier - whenever soemthing strange came down the conveyor belt at dinner, she would place it in front of me and say "Challenge!" I did the same to her, and it was a lot of fun. The class made me feel very welcome and I had a wonderful time - which, incidentally, is in my opnion as much a part of aikido as the classes we had had earlier in the day.

#9 - Tokyo

I have a friend in Tokyo named Dr. Sho Kanzaki, with whom I worked at Michigan. He was excited for me to visit, and on Friday afternoon I received an e-mail saying "can you get to Tokyo by 11 a.m. tomorrow? You have a ticket waiting for you for a Kabuki play." So, of course, I made it to Tokyo by 11!
This is the Kabuki theatre. People were all dressed up, and the place was packed - this, for a four hour long play in a very old form of spoken Japanese that is very hard for native speakers to understand. So why is it so popular? I would wager to say Kabuki's incredible beauty has a lot to do with it. The performance I saw was a revenge play (no surprise there) about two rival ladies-in-waiting. One frames the other, who then takes her own life and is avenged by her loyal servant. The costumes and the disciplined acting were so gorgeous! Seeing video of Kabuki is no comparison. And it turned out that Sho had bought me one of the best seats in the house, right next to the Hannamichi runway!

With Sho's ticket he and his wife had left me some directions. They instructed me to enjoy Tokyo and included a map of how to get to Akihabara, an area I had mentioned wanting to go. They said they would meet me later for dinner. I went to Akihabara, otherwise known as "Electric City."

The building pictured is a new store that has just opened in Electric City, and was very, very crowded when I went. I can really only explain it like this: take Times Square and all its people, turn it on its side, and cram it into a nine-story building. Then, to make matters even more ridiculous, they not only blare announcements and loud music at you over the store speakers, but most of the employees carry megaphones and shout at you about deals they are offering. Nothing will ever, ever be as overstimulating as this was.

Humorously enough, after escaping that store, I met with Sho and his wife for dinner, and they decided to try out the restaurants at the top of this "new shopping store that's just opened." So back I went, into the belly of the beast. We had Sukiyaki at a very nice and surprisingly quiet restaurant on the top floor of crazytown. They are wonderful people, and we talked about Japan, and theatre, and science. It was great.

Then the Kanzakis helped me be on my way to my next destination. I traveled to Funabashi, another area of Tokyo where I met up with my friend Shawn. Just for the record, Tokyo is insanely huge. Thirty-six million people live in Tokyo - that's three New Yorks, and more than thirty-six Detroits.

This is Funabashi in the rain. I met up with Shawn and his girlfriend for drinks and such at a little private room at a bar, and was witness to a rather enthusiastic (read: drunk) business party in the next room. Then it was back to Shawn's for the night in yet another part of tokyo about a 30-minute train ride away.