Nasty Conjugation

Good morning, good morning! We had a late night last night, due to the “Last Train” Phenomenon which is kind of like Heisenberg in all the wrong ways, so today is just a floppy day and well-suited to updating Internets. Everything is pretty good here, we went hiking last Tuesday, and it was beautiful. We went out with some of my co-workers and I played darts and - despite my excellent technique! - was man-handled by Ash the Briton and his sinister American teammate. We went to a going-away party for two of Holly’s co-workers last night and got in with the sun coming up. That makes the second time we’ve done that. The sun actually does come up earlier here, so accept that as my excuse?

For my own benefit more than anyone else’s, I am going to continue updating this website roughly once a week with stories and observations. Today’s post is about our first trip to Kamakura, pictures of which you have probably already seen on the Flickr account.

After being in Japan for a little over two weeks I was having problems. We’d transplanted ourselves over an ocean, the sprawling Pacific Ocean that separates East from West and today from tomorrow, but for what? A forty-hour-a-week job that demands we iron our clothes, a daily routine similar to that of any other wage slave, and a slightly more complicated routine due to the language barrier? I could be doing this in the United States minus the part about leaving behind everything I’ve ever known. Somehow, on the other side of the world, in an environment hemorrhaging new experiences, I had already managed to become stagnant.

So we decided on our day off to take a train to Kamakura, home to a dozen Buddhist temples from the Eleventh Century. I needed to justify our presence here with an experience that we couldn’t get anywhere else, and Kamakura was only half an hour away. Our guidebook informed us that one of the temples houses the second-largest bronze statue of a Buddha in the world. We didn’t actually get to see it while we were there, but it’s so close that we will surely return. They say over a dozen people can stand on his upturned palm. Oh, the waiting metaphors!

It was raining when we went, a quiet rain that was not oppressive and didn’t pose any problem to our umbrellas. We weren’t going to be stopped. If we let the rain stop us today then our path for the rest of this trip would already be set, a path where adventure and exploration and wonder stay home because, geez, it’s wet outside. No. Adventure is always wet, always ready, always shining like crazy. We were ready! We wanted to be wet and to shine like crazy!

I am so glad that we decided to accept our fate as wet adventurers. It was a short walk from the train station, through the streets lined with shops and restaurants, to the outskirts of the town center. The transformation was immediate. From one step to another we went from a bustling tourist shopping street to a quiet, tree-lined road leading to residences and temples. Cherry trees drooped over the road and dropped their flowers with the falling rain.

We followed roads wherever they went. We had no real agenda, only to find some temples, and so whenever we saw a small group of people we would turn and go where they were coming from. We stopped at a crossing while a train sped by, and when the train was gone we realized we were standing across from the entrance to a temple. It was shrouded in mist and trees, but the entrance was visible – a big red gate, just how you imagine it would look. The gate led to a canopied path towards the actual temple, the trees just now sprouting in bright green for spring and giving the scene a soft, dreamlike haze.

This particular temple was home to a very old cemetery that stretched up into mountain hills behind the grounds. We climbed a narrow path up, seeking more ancient gravestones, and were treated to a vista of the cemetery stretching out into a misty, rain-swept valley. Everything was green or grey, swaying calmly in the rain, and I couldn’t believe we were only half an hour away from the subways and Pachinko parlors and stern businessmen of modern Japan. I took some pictures. There was a can of beer perched at the foot of one gravestone, an offering, which I have since learned is not uncommon though its presence seemed incongruous at the time.

We went to two more temples, each one stunning in its serenity. I was turning to Holly every three minutes to exclaim my joy at our surroundings. I can’t seem to put it in words without sounding ultimately clichéd, but I suppose you can only describe a breathtaking view with words like, “stunning,” and, “calm beauty,” so many times before people get tired of reading it. I wouldn’t trade our day in the rain for weeks of sunshine. Visually, it made everything seem almost mythical, like at any moment history would come striding out of the fog in the trees and thank us for coming. The weather was musical, a natural and appropriate soundtrack for our day of exploring the ancient sites.

It sounds so cheesy to tell it this way, but hopefully some small part of the wonder I experienced in Kamakura made it through. Afterwards I felt recharged, like some part of me just needed to experience that. Everyone should be required to spend a day walking in the rain here, to appreciate the sound of water falling off leaves and the feeling of an incredibly old landscape speaking softly.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 22nd, 2006 at 2:25 am and is filed under Japan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.