Turning Japanese

Here is a hastily scrawled account of my Visa Run in Japan. Sorry I haven't written in a while, but whenever I do, it's sure to be a good deal. I'll include pictures soon when I figure that out, as I got a camera a few days ago and took about 450 pictures in Japan. Also, my tone of voice switches occassionally between past and present tense depending on how immediate the situation may have felt while I was writing it at the airport terminal. Enjoy!

1-11-2008
I'm finishing up in Japan, resting finally at the airport now. I'm on the 4th floor observation deck where me and the Irish girl, Jennifer Long, spent so many hours together last time. I didn't waste my day today at the airport waiting, though, like I did last time. I did as much as I felt I could within the time constraints.

Although I had a hangover this morning, I awoke and cleared out of my room by 9:30am and enjoyed my complementary breakfast. There were fermented beans with an incredibly slimy sauce that I ate about half of before giving up on. There was some sort of fish in some sort of a red-orange sauce and, although it had been cooked, I don't even bother peeling back the skin to see what kind it is; I don't want it. I make do with the rice, some soy sauce, some nori in between the bites of rice and the fermented beans, and chunks of egg. Finisihing with the portion that I'll eat at around 10:00am, I go out and check facebook on the hotel lounge computer. Soon after I sit down, an asian girl enters the lobby and sits in a chair facing my left profile. A few minutes later, a white girl I've seen maybe twice that morning (once already at the computer, once in the hotel restaurant at breakfast) sits across from the asian girl, her back to me. I suspect she wants to use the computer again and without rushing myself overly much, I attempt to finish my facebook obligations and the girls start speaking in English. I'm included soon enough. The asian girl, it turns out, is Korean and not Japanese as I'd assumed. I'm immensely relieved for some reason. She's been in Japan for 5 days (today is her last) and she's been shopping in Tenjin (she said it was hard to communicate there) but today is her last day (same for me and the white girl) and she lives around Sincheon in Seoul, attending the university there. The white girl, whose last name is Villanueva or something, is teaching in Hongdae, only a stop or two away from Sincheon on the Seoul subway system (but she doesn't seem to realize this.) She's been in Korea for about a month. I mention I've been here almost 6 months and that, yes, I've visited Hongdae. A few minutes more of idle conversation between the girls and the Korean heads back up to her room. I finish up on the computer and hand it off to the white girl, who I can tell is anxious to use it, although I've been there fewer than 5 minutes.

Leaving the hotel, I go outside and walk down a sidestreet to the convenience store I visited the last time I came here. I don't know why I'm like this, but I'm sentimental and want to revisit many of the places that I saw last time without squandering my time in Japan at the airport as Jennifer and I did last time. I go into the AM/PM convenience store, buy a canned coffee, a peach juice, an orange SoyJoy bar (they don't seem to have that flavor of SoyJoy in Korea), and a vial of breath spray. When I go to check out, the two girls on duty stop stocking and come over to get me on my way. As seems to often be the case here in Japan, one of the girls is gorgeous and the other is a bit ugly. Although they're both standing there, the gorgeous one checks out my items with many "gozaimisas." I wish she were Korean so I could use a few "hamnidas."

By now, I thoroughly understand the Fukuoka subway system and am taking it everywhere. After taking several more photos while I walk down the street, I say goodbye to Hakata for the last time and head to Ohori Koen, where I've read there is a nice park, an art museum, and an ancient Japanese castle.

After disembarking at Ohori Koen, I finish up my breakfast and search for the correct subway exit to find the castle. I am kneeling to photograph a reproduced piece of art on the subway wall when an old Japanese woman with a cane approaches me speaking English, asking where I'm from. We talk about all of the states I've lived in and my current residence in Korea. She says she's just returned from a walk in the park that I'd read about before. For most of this time, because she's so short from her age, I've remained kneeling and been just below face level with her. When I stand up, the hight difference becomes more pronounced. She wonders during my time in Alaska if I've ever seen Aurora (which sounds very funny coming from an elderly Japanese woman--arlorla? alrorla? It took me a few seconds to figure out what she was saying) but I haven't, as far as I can remember. After 10 minutes or so, she has to move on and I exit the subway to explore the area. Without signs to guide me, I stumble randomly up a hill and walk for a while in a direction that intrigues me, taking photos all the while. The sky is very overcast, in contrast to the sunny and warm day of my arrival.

Eventually, I turn to my right and find myself nearing a statue before a pond (large) with an oval-shaped walkway around it. I realize that this is the park the old lady was talking about and begin walking counterclockwise to get to some bridges that continue the walking trail over three islands in the center of the large pond. It is while I'm walking this early portion of the track that it begins to rain in earnest and that I vow to attempt a teaching job in Japan when I'm done in Korea. It strikes me as I'm hiking that the Japanese give a damn, unlike the Koreans, about the aesthetics of their major urban centers and even if it wouldn't be as profitable to teach ESL in Japan, their must be many benefits and incredible things to see.

As I walk across the three islands, taking numerous pictures, I notice more varieties of birds than I've yet seen in Korea. To be sure, both countries have millions of pigeons, but on the Fukuoka pond, I also notice some sort of gulls, ducks, a goose, a heron, and some sort of small but speedy bird that I couldn't identify. The rain and wind were fierce and the only other people that I encountered on the islands were elderly Japanese out for a walk or a bike ride.

After the islands, I ducked into the refuge of an overhang from a public restroom and changed out the batter for my new camera, as it was running very low and I had a spare. Then, with the cuffs of my green pant legs beginning to feel soaked, I set out for the castle (and art gallery.)

I found the gallery first and took a few photos of some statues before I noticed one of the many signs warning against flash photography, whereupon I put the camera in my backpack. For 200 Yen, I saw some ancient art exhibits including tea sets and ancient Buddha molds from all around South-East Asia. There was also an incredible room featuring two Buddhas being protected by 24 total guardians who wore the heads of specific animals on their battle helmets and carried a variety of weapons. Each set was called something like the 12 protectors of the (Japanese word for Buddha), so there were 12 animal guardians to each Buddha. There were also two gigantic standing wooden warriors, each carved from a single piece of wood, on whom the muscular detail had been sculpted incredibly, considering that they were from about the 10th or 11th century. Although I was to see many amazing and famous pieces later in the upstairs exhibits, this Buddha room was the most singularly amazing in the whole museum.

Upstairs, there was a room with Kanji scrolls that I couldn't understand and kind of hurried through; a room with black and white nature scenes rendered in charcoal or something. At the entrance, an old Japanese man indicated a small book for signatures and some caligraphy pens next to it. "Name?" I queried. "Yes-name." he replied in two words of simple English. The spaces for signatures were vertical and not horizontal, so I wrote out J o n a t h a n F o w l e r vertically in the space provided. Then I went ahead into the aforementioned room.

The next room featured exclusively the photography by an artist in an indeterminate asian country with many small mountainous villages. I got the feeling, but could never be positive, that it wasn't somewhere very rural in Japan. Maybe somewhere in China, but who knows? Nothing in that room was in English, although one of the photos featured a white woman trying on some bright local clothing at a street market booth.

The next room had some photos, but mostly painted nature scenes and asian still-lifes. Two paintings were of seated asian women, done by the same painter in 2001 and 2007, six years apart.

Finally, I found the modern art rooms which featured mostly Japanese artists, but also numerous western names, including a respectable number of VERY famous 20th century artists including Dali, Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Miro, Lichtenstein, and others. I'll try to add more about them later, I wrote several notes down about their pieces wherever I recognized a name or when something really stood out at me. I felt guilty and wished to god mom could'a been there with me or instead of me because she knows a lot more about all that stuff and would have had a whole greater appreciation for it. It was infuriating not being able to take pictures. As I mentioned above, there was a Roy Lichtenstein print there; I've always been amazed by his art because he uses uber-dramatic-looking comic style prints to apparently high-art effect. This was the first one of his I'd ever seen in real life.

Sharing the gallery with me were several school tour groups. Some of the kids seemed surprised and stared a little bit at the white guy temporarily invading their museum. I had to wait to see a few pieces because their teachers/tour-guides were stopping to explain some of the pictures very in-depth like and they would be all bunched up around the piece. I doubted any of the public schools from America I attended would've ever taken us on a field trip to an art gallery like that even if there had been one near at hand; there was a good deal of nudity, and a small but disturbing presence of works of extreme violence.

On the way out of the museum, I bought an Egan Schiele calendar for 2008. I've been needing a calender for over a week now and it struck me when I saw that one that Egan Schiele was the favorite artist of a girl I was disasterously courting 3 or 4 years ago in November.

Outside again, it had stopped raining. I moved on in the direction that I thought would lead me to the castle. I had come prepared for Japan this time and had, earlier in the week, bought and started reading a Haruki Murakami novel, "Norwegian Wood" (I had finished reading "Wind-Up Bird Chronicles" earlier during my life in Korea.) "Norwegian Wood" was mercifully shorter and I had made it about halfway through it in two days, but like "Wind-Up Bird Chronicles" and "A Wild Sheep Chase" before that, it had lengthy melancholy sections that felt like the real life reminisces of Murakami put in faux-fictional format.

Before long I found myself at the remains of the moat of Castle Fukuoka. I took pictures thereafter throughout my whole time on the castle grounds. It was really a series of nature climbs on an ancient man-made hill, as little that could be called a castle remained.

There were tall walls of rock, sloping gently but reasonably unclimbable, numerous trees and bushes of various but aesthetically pleasant varieties, and the occassional sign or historical marker, generally in Kanji exclusively, rendering its knowledge unknowable to me. I vowed to do some online research about Castle Fukuoka when I had the time to fill in some of the gaps that were emerging as I was viewing it. Some of the larger trees on the higher levels (and lower, too, but especially on the higher) appeared so ancient that one really got a sense of how old the fort must have been, knowing that the fort was probably several hundred years older than the oldest tree now standing on its grounds (I checked; the fortress was first built around 1600 during the Edo Period.)

At the highest point of the castle's remains, the lake/park was visible; sprots fields were visible; towers and buildings with parking garages and construction cranes as far as the eye could see were also visible from up there. But there it was, an ancient ruin in the middle of an otherwise thoroughly modern asian city!

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Fukuoka shares the Japanese island of Kyushu with Nagasaki, the second of the only two cities ever to have been nuked in anger in the course of human atomic history on August 9th, 1945. It struck me as a strange afterthought that I was on an island that had been targeted in this manner by my own country 63 years before. I remembered some paintings of Tokyo done by Japanese artists during the early 1940s back at the museum. I wondered what their political stances had been at the time. How much would the American military have paid then for their small paintings of the enemy capital's skyline? Probably not that much, there were doubtlessly other paintings of Tokyo in the hands of America at that point, and almost anything would have been a better strategic representation of the city if they were looking for targets.

Still, it was eerie, as an American living in Korea, to look at placid paintings of the capital of a country from the era when Japan brought carnage and heartache to both Korea and America, standing in a museum on the island where America had ultimately unleashed half of its nuclear vengeance. The interplay of past, present, and irony were intense for this ex-history major.

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For the entire period of time that I was climbing the castle hill, and for most of the time I had been at the gallery, in the back of my mind I was always conscious of the time and of the fact that I needed to return to the Korean Consulate before 5:00pm to pick up my Passport and Visa\, or the whole trip would be wasted and prolonged and I would probably have to stay in Japan until Monday (it was Friday.) After a few short minutes at the top of the castle hill, I doubled back down, walked back past the museum, and along the now-sunny walking path around the lake. Many more Japanese were out now. Some were riding bicycles, some were walking their small dogs. The pond looked like a different place entirely now in the sun.

I eventually made it back to the subway, took the one stop trip to Tojin-Machi, left the subway and stopped off at a Lawson's convenience store wherer I bought two small prepackaged meals as well as a Skyy Blue to drink (a beverage that I haven't seen for at least six months) as well as a canned, capped fermented-grape beverage that ended up being so delicious at the first sip that I took a picture of its can. I couldn't eat yet, though; I had to keep walking for about 15 minutes to reach the Korean Embassy. In that time, I drank the Skyy Blue, which was delicious. There were a lot of Japanese kids and their parents on the streets at this point, as it was late afternoon and I suppose they were just getting out of school. I hoped my blatent alcohol use wasnt' a problem; I knew that it wouldn't have been in Korea. I arrived at the Korean Embassy and, upon showing my receipt from the day before when I had dropped the appropriate documents off, filled out the application, and paid, the shockingly attractive girl who had been behind the counter all four days of both of my two Visa Runs handed me my Passport. I must have been grinning as I stepped back outside into the orange late afternoon; I realized that my duties in Japan were at an end and that I could now relax and enjoy the buzz that the alcohol was starting to give me. I crossed the sstreet and walked to the upstairs of the mall that was there and sat down at an open air food court table to decour the convenience store meal I'd bought nearly an hour ago. I finished my grape drink with it. Somewhere nearby, previews for an American movie about the War on Terror were playing and from what I heard, I resoved to find out what it was called and, eventually, to see it.

Finishing my drink and meal, I tipsily set forth to try to find something as a gift for Won Sun-ui, who had asked me to bring her something from Japan, although I hadn't seen her in person for probably two months. I picked up a printed handkerchief and a funny woman's cat-face coin wallet. I attempted to speak small bits of Japanese at the counter, but only Korean phrases sprang to mind. I probably paused looked quizzical before I walked away saying hardly a word.

I walked back down the stairs in the mall's center and saw a strikingly-blonde Japanese woman tending a kiosk at the foot of the stairs. Knowing that I wouldn't be seeing any blonde asians back in Korea, desperate to capture one on film before leaving, and perhaps a little emboldened by the drinks, I approached and asked if she spoke English. She proved to be able to, a little bit. She seemed surprised when I asked to take her picture, but happily agreed straightaway. After the bulb flashed, I thanked her and left the mall. On the way out, I stopped into an attached 7/11 searching for more of the grape alcohol. They didn't have it there, but they did have a strawberry version of the same brand. It had a much lower alcohol content, but tasted pretty good and was described on the can as a seasonal winter variation.

I drank it while I walked back to the subway for the last time on my short trip. The Fukuoka Airport is the last stop on the subway line and most of the other passengers had exited before we made it that far. My flight's departure was delayed because, although it was warm enough in Japan, apparently there had been a snowstorm all across Korea. I talked to a middle-aged British ESL teacher who had been in Korea for about 6 months, about as long as me. We discussed Korean labor policies, English and American politics, and our experiences working for Korean bosses. When the plane did fly, there was some of the most intense turbulence I've ever experienced in my life. At times, it felt like a roller coaster in the sky. When we landed, I took the Incheon train to Gimpo Airport, where it stopped. It was midnight and the subway had stopped running so I got out and found a taxi that took me back down South to Anyang-si for 33,000 won (about $35.)