Tuesday, August 22, 2006

The Sun Also Rises

While in the last entry, still two months lasted, it now has come to the phase were only 2 weeks are there before I will be able to taste my first piece of bread with good old Dutch cheese. The reality that the year really is over and it very soon will be time to go home, where my former student life will start almost immediately from the word go, starts kicking in. My classmates Bram and Paul already left Japan some weeks ago, but today another 6 Dutchies carried their overweight suitcases in a plane in order to get them back to Schiphol. As well as a person who did the same programme as I in Kyoto. The next time I will see the airport, it will be me who is leaving. Life in Kyoto has very comfortable and it also felt like a natural home, but with the end date of your stay in mind, you also realize that there are still a lot of things you want to do before you go back. Although unfortunately I was not able to do everything I wanted to do, because there are still reports that need to be finished, I was able to do a number of things that are related with things generally seen as representative symbols of Japan.
As somebody aptly described it, it is an interesting phenomenon that in a country where such an emphasis is placed on a slim body, where diet products are as easily obtainable as normal foods, the `national` sport is one in which fat guys are worshipped. Sumo, is of course the sport I am talking about. In the weeks prior to the day I was going to see it I became knowledgeable about the names of the different sumo-wrestlers as well as the names of the myriad ways in which one could bring an opponent to defeat. Our seats were pretty good and we spend the whole day hanging around on cushions watching people, who just judging by their sheer size I would advise not to sport, throw their bodies into each other, grapping each other at the string in order to get somebody on the ground or out the ring. Although these guys weight around the 150 kilo`s or even more, it is just not only fat that they carry around but also an enormous amount of muscles. One of the things that surprises many people is that they actually eat only one meal a day, although it’s a huge portion and is accompanied with an equal amount of beer. But being the biggest does not mean that you are able to win your matches, tactic and balance seem to be equally if not more important.
Sumo tournaments are hold 6 times in a year, 3 times in Tokyo, and in Fukuoka, Osaka and Nagoya. We went to Nagoya because the Osaka tournament had passed without me realizing that I could pay it a visit. And while I and a German friend called Marc, were in Nagoya we decided to pay the ancient shrines of Ise a visit before returning to Kyoto. Riding on the train and seeing the countryside passing by, I realized that quite a long time had passed since I had seen countryside and real forest. I said we went to visit the shrines, but actually the shrines are not open to public, one can only estimated what they look like from their roofs that tower above the walls that separates visitors from the shrines. I say shrines because there are two shrines, one called the Outer shrine and one called the Inner shrine. The Inner shrine is dedicated to the sun goddess Amaterasu, from who the Imperial family according to mythology descends. Because of this link with the Imperial family, the Buddist influences on this shrine are far more limited than with any other shrine. The shrines were located in a beautiful natural setting, and for the first time in quite a while I was again astonished by the beauty Japan sometimes has.
The last icon I encountered is in a sense both the peak of my one week vacation in which I finally went to Kamakura and Nikko, as well as the peak of my year in Japan. Together with an enormous group of Japanese and foreign tourist, including my friends, 2 Indian guys and a Swiss girl, we climbed the Mount Fuji. We set out climbing around 10 P.M. and I arrived at the top around 5.30 AM just in time to see the sun peak above the clouds and producing a spectacle of yellow, orange and red colors. I was not quite sure what to aspect, but in the end I really felt like a young child again trying to conquer the mountain. It turned out that unfortunately we had taken the wrong route back and so we ended at a totally different place than from where we started. With the luck one sometimes needs, we were able to be back in Tokyo on time to catch the night bus back to Kyoto. In the bus I also noted that the protective sun cream I had used was not enough and that my face had turned almost the same color as the round circle in the flag of Japan that represents the sun. In my last two weeks I will shun the sun and concentrate in getting all my acquired stuff into boxes that can make a trip over the ocean, the remains of my essay and farewell parties, in which I have to say farewell to this sometimes beautifull land of the rising sun.