Visitors!

Saturday, March 27th, 2010 in: News, Travel

All of a sudden I’m feeling very popular. A brief break from the regular group of yo-yo and other toy enthusiasts; we’ve got GIRLS in the shop! Hilary (one of my Waseda CSU BFFs and Hiro’s girlfriend) came during her spring break to visit and do a little job hunting. Kaoru, a good friend from our time in Waseda also came to hang out a little bit and enjoy some delicious meals with us. AND just the weekend before, my friend Aya (who studied in Oregon the year after I was at Waseda and visited Sacramento after her time abroad) stopped on her way back to Tokyo and I spent the day with her, walking around Nagoya Castle and Meijo Kouen. She also helped contribute to my J Alumni Video which you can see in this post.

Also, I’m coining a new term right now:

Yo-Yo Groupies (N. plural): The crowds of girls that fall hopelessly in love with yo-yo players and hang around them all the time. They don’t exist yet so I’m just patenting the term now in anticipation of the outcome of this new hyper yo-yo boom. Just wait and it’ll be a household term in no time.

Their first night in, we had a delicious feast followed by beer-steamed oysters and mussels. On an unrelated note, throughout the week 2/3rds of us fell ill. When Kaoru arrived I took her to eat Hitsumabushi (a Nagoya specialty made with grilled unagi (eel), it’s the unagi-don you eat three times: first just the grilled eel and rice, then you add a little green onion and wasabi, then you pour hot tea in the bowl and have お茶漬け. After lunch I took her to Meijou Koen and Nagoya Castle. It was my second time there in 3 days, so I was able to navigate around easily. Walking through the park we saw a lot of stray cats. It seems that the homeless who live in the park take the cats as pets; One bush had an umbrella stuck into it to form a shelter for an adorable tuxedo cat. We started to head to the castle and a light orange cat walked up to us and was very intent on getting attention. Kaoru squatted down to pet him, and he climbed right up onto her knees and laid down. I made sure to take some photos between laughing and helping her escape her fate as a cat bed.

The other day when I went to Nagoya Castle with Aya, a random guy came up to us at the gate and asked if we were going inside. We said yes and he just handed us some free tickets. “Don’t forget to check out the Camelia exhibition,” he called over his shoulder as he wandered away. No such luck with Kaoru, and we only had a half an hour before the castle closed, so we had to hoof it to climb up the main donjon. Nagoya Castle is in the “reconstructed” category of castles: castle on the outside, modern museum on the inside. Each level has a different set of artifacts or models of parts of the castle to show how it was constructed and rebuilt after it burned in the firebombings of world war II. There was a single black and white photo of the main donjon completely engulfed in flames. For the people who lived in that time, it must have been terrifying to see a 400 year old symbol of their city destroyed in such a violent way. Even now, the reconstruction is still underway for an annex building.

Nagoya is the first castle to use shachihoko (鯱) as an adornment on the roof, so inside there were models and replicas and pieces of the original in practically every level of the donjon. One model of the shachihoko even had scale humans literally falling on their butts in astonishment. Whooooa! look at that thing! There was also a big plastic replica for people to climb on for photos; for which there was a line both days I went. On the top floor , aside from a beautiful view of the city, there was a souvenir shop with all sorts of knick-knacks. Shachihoko remained an overwhelming theme. Unfortunately, the one thing we couldn’t see from the top was the shachihoko itself, because it was on the roof above us. What a gyp! When I took Kaoru there, we were the last ones up to the top floor before closing. The guard sweeping the building nodded in a friendly way, then proceeded to mean mug us around the room until we went back to the staircase.

Kaoru had to get back to Tokyo for her graduation ceremony later that week, so the next day Hilary and I decided to do a little sightseeing. We wanted to go to Meiji Mura, a “building park” where interesting architecture is gathered, including the facade for the Frank Lloyd Wright Imperial Hotel. Rather than see it torn down, the whole front of the building was carefully disassembled and moved to Nagoya to be preserved in the park. Unfortunately, we slept in a little too much and ended up going to Inuyama castle instead. I might have to wait until I come back to Japan to see Meiji Mura.

Since I had come to Inuyama castle with Kazuya a few weeks before, I was able to play tour guide, leading the ladies through the main sights of the neighborhood. The Dondenkan, a building with doors 30 feet tall to store the enormous festival floats for which the area is famous. The karakuri (traditional puppetry) museum, the cultural museum and the castle itself. It was once again a little late in the day, so we went straight to the top floor before slowly making our way back down again. There were barriers up to keep us from going around one side of the balcony surround the top level. I poked my head around the corner and was immediately blasted with a chilling river wind. It must’ve been a safety precaution.

From the castle, we walked over toNaritsa-san (成田山), the sister temple of the one in Chiba for which the airport is named. From the top of the hundreds of steps was a breathtaking view of Inuyama, and the sun had just begun to droop in the sky right behind the castle. I snapped a few photos with Hilary’s camera before the sun disappeard behind the dense cloud cover looming over the horizon.

Kaoru went back to Tokyo the next day, and Hilary would follow suit the next week. Her plans to go job hunting around the area was stunted by her illness, but it didn’t seem to make much difference, because the english schools aren’t really able to just hire someone off the street like that anyways. All she could do was hand out a resume and say よろしくお願いします。 She’ll probably have better luck in the states, especially because she needs a company to sponsor her visa. Her last day in Iwakura, we went to karaoke and had a big dinner at 小樽食堂, one of the nicest izakaya I’d ever been to. It was a going away party for both Hilary and myself, since I’d be leaving for Tokyo the next Thursday. We stuffed ourselves with all kinds of delicious.

Of course there’s more to say but this post has already spanned an entire week.

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