Sakura saku

Say what you will about Japan, say nothing about Kyoto.

It’s 3:00 pm JST, and we’ve just caught sight of the Japanese mainland from the plane. The teenage Japanese boy beside me motions for me to look out the window because I’ve been staring distractedly at it off and on for the past two hours, hoping for some glimpse of anything but clouds.

What I see now is decidedly not clouds. On the contrary, it’s astounding. Because of America, I’m used to seeing a checkerboard of fields separated by thin roads, mostly flat ground, and, even in the cities, only a smattering of tall buildings around the downtown areas.

Osaka, however, is absolutely different. Imagine God’s hand with a bunch of monopoly buildings in it tipping and then spilling Osaka between the mountainous Japanese mainland. Now continue this already ludicrous image by imagining that that pool of buildings, as I flew, widened and narrowed between mountains and coast until I saw a large bridge which the airplane flew over, just barely, to land us in one of the largest airports I have seen in my life. We had finally touched down in Japan.

After 20 all-too-long minutes of waiting in the cabin, the pilot let us out of the plane. After gathering my bags, I stepped out and looked about, wide-eyed, at the Kansai airport.

Now, understand that while we, the foreigners, the gaijin, may love Kyoto, the Japanese love it even more. A friend recently told me that Japanese culture as we know it is new with an old-style. In other words, it’s really not old, it just looks like it. I’m inclined to agree, and it seems that the Japanese themselves are, too.

For all their moss-gardens and Chinese-style pagodas, a precious few buildings in Japan are actually as old and legitimate as they seem. The Japanese, though, really wish that weren’t the truth, so Kyoto, the real deal, is precious to them more than nearly any other city on the Japanese mainland.

And I was headed to it for four and a half months.

At this point, I had been awake for nearly 20 hours. Everything around me seemed surreal. As I sat in the airport waiting for my shuttle, it finally dawned on me that I was in Japan. I had achieved one of my long-standing goals, and the rest of my goals came a little closer to being fulfilled.

After customs, baggage claims, and another 20 minute wait, I and six other people boarded a shuttle bound for Kyoto. It may not have seemed like it would be at first, but the shuttle was absolutely packed. Usually with this sort of transportation, one can count on a large trunk for the storage of bags, but the shuttle had nothing of the sort. In fact, it only had a small, minivan-esque storage area for six people’s large luggage bags. So, after some savvy packing, our driver started off to Kyoto.

When you think of the Japanese, you’re inclined to think of a rather polite group of people, full of respectfulness for elders, family values, and whatever wondrous and oddly wrong ascriptions you’ve come up with. In fact, Japanese people, on the road, are horrific semblances of human beings.

After passing through toll booths which clearly said 25kmph on them at around 50kmph with the rest of traffic, I soon realized this fact. So, in my dreamlike daze, I was hurtling towards Kyoto, all the while assuring myself that it would be all right and the driver knew what he was doing (I hope?).

Finally, I arrived in Kyoto. However, this did not mean that I was anywhere near my place of (future) residence. On the contrary, I was still about 40 minutes away and drifting off to the cool wintry darkness of springtime Kyoto.

The driver woke me up by stopping the shuttle suddenly and moving us from the shuttle to our respective taxis. I was to share a taxi with an older salaryman who informed me that he, too, had gone to Ritsumeikan, and we spoke back and forth in both English and Japanese until the taxi driver let him out at his house.

It was as the salaryman got out that I realized: Japanese cars have dwarfism. You’d think otherwise, but that’s absolutely untrue. Calling nearly every car on Japanese roads today (excepting the expensive foreign cars) snub-nosed and low-powered would be an understatement. They’re disturbing. The Japanese are not all about efficiency. No, no. They’re all about cramming as much as they can into as tight a space as possible. After glimpsing a carport with about two inches of overhead clearance from the car, this fact had drilled itself into my mind.

But soon after this insight, more pressing matters superseded it. The fact was, I had told Ritsumeikan, my university, that I would be arriving two hours earlier than I actually arrived at. Now, seeing as it was only seven in the evening I probably shouldn’t have been nearly as worried as I was. But with the amount of sleep I had had, I was in a state. I had arrived at the dormitory, but the door to the dormitory was locked and the taxi driver, after dropping me off, had promptly left.

So, after my mind raced (similar to a race through molasses, where everything is molasses-colored, distorted, and decidely slow), I pressed the dorm’s call button.

I heard something on the other end and a Japanese man came to the door. (to be continued)

~ by Zach on 2009.04.06.