Things I missed

I imagine I've made it pretty clear that not only would I rather be in Japan right now, I'd rather have never left. In fact I hardly ever shut up about it, on this blog or anywhere else. But there's nothing to be gained from idle negativity, so as long as I'm here, I might as well avail myself of the Canadian experience. Here are a few things I missed while I was in Japan and am now enjoying again, in no particular order. Well, they are in a particular order. They're in the order I thought of them. It's just that the order is meaningless.

Jugs

Living abroad ain't what it used to be. Nowadays Facebook and Skype effortlessly keep us connected with the people we love. Before my time, it was a more trying affair. Ten years ago, there was the less dynamic but still reliable method of e-mail, although you had to be sitting at an actual computer in order to use it. Prior to that it was all expensive long-distance phone calls, snail mail, and desperate hopes. Go back far enough and moving to another country was a months-long journey that you might not even survive, and undertaking it meant you'd never see your friends and family ever again.

Really, I'm grateful that I was able to chat with Jugs on an almost daily basis through the Miracle of the Internet, but now I get to see her face-to-face at least weekly. I've met great people in Japan, both Japanese and non-Japanese, and I hope that never ends, but Jugs and I, and my other Canadian friends, have a long history, and we know each other back to front, and that's hard to beat. She's interested in Japan, too, so I hope to one day show her a bit of it.

Tim Horton's

Have you ever tried Tim Horton's hot chocolate? According to my page statistics, if you're reading this blog you're most likely American, so probably not, in which case you're missing out. Actually I hear there's Tim Horton'ses in like Vermont now or something, so maybe some enterprising businessperson will open a franchise in Oosaka. They also make good sandwiches. Speaking of which...

Subway

Japanese Subway is good, but it just doesn't measure up to what they've got over here, where the bread is softer and has more options, the pricing model isn't idiotic, and they have bottomless fountain drinks. And the subs are just tastier.

Real cheese

Oh my God, have you tried to buy cheese in Japan? Again, statistically, you haven't. Well it's not fun. Because there isn't any. At least none that's good. You might be able to find something at an organic grocer or a co-op but that's always a pain and what you can find still isn't that great. I guess I shouldn't be surprised though, cheese doesn't exactly figure heavily into Japanese cuisine, and me complaining about it is like a Japanese person complaining about the difficulty of finding decent seaweed in Canada. Though come to think of it, that is a very legitimate complaint. Ah, but now we're getting into a totally different post.

Christmas

This one startled me. I mean there were things I anticipated missing (Jugs), and things I didn't (cheese), but I outright hate the Christmas season and the way it's shoved down our throats for two months straight. I'm just grateful that Halloween is a thing because it forms a hard barrier against the increasingly early starting gun, but even that is starting to crumble. In the future, the entire year will be Christmas season, and that will be a glorious time because it will have finally lost all meaning and we can all stop caring about it. It's such a saccharine, stupid holiday anyway. Not the birth of Christ, that part's cool and all. But all this stupidity about “the true meaning of Christmas” and “come on, it's Christmas” and all of that can go straight to hell. Guh.

As I mentioned around this time last year, though, I kind of ended up forlorn at the complete lack of Christmas cheer in Kyouto. Setting aside that it's a completely different holiday in Japan (couples rather than families), there was just nothing. A few lights and stuff, yeah, but no music, no real sense of anticipation, no atmosphere whatsoever. Yet oddly, though I was happy to be free of it, I was sad for its absence. That whole block ended up feeling so empty, even though it was quite as exciting as any other month in Japan, just because I was used to expecting something extra. Also, for some weird reason I have a strange fondness for bad Christmas movies, so lately I've been getting my fill of those on TV.

All of that said, with December now underway I have little doubt that my seething rage will soon reassert itself.

Snow

Of course this is integral for a good Christmas atmosphere, but snow is also great just on its own terms. You can roll around in the snow and make snow angels, or roll snow around in other snow and make snowmen, or go around smashing other people's snowmen, or construct complex snow forts from which to wage snowball fights and then get pissed off when you start losing and start facewashing everybody and dumping snow down their backs and so on. Those are rites of passage for every young Canadian. Good luck doing any of that south of Hokkaidou, though. A couple centimetres may accumulate overnight, but the ensuing sun will melt it all within hours.

News

Sure, you can seek stuff out on the Internet and stay informed about what's going on wherever you came from. Thing is, I get all my news passively, by listening to the people around me. This is also generally how I find out about assignment due dates and impending exams so it is quite a useful skill. Still, having little to no idea what was going on over in Canada made me feel disconcertingly disconnected, despite the fact that I had no desire to even be connected.

Paper towels

Japanese public bathrooms often don't have anything to dry your hands with. Weird, eh?

Skateboarders

Ok, this is actually just one I remembered from my high school days, which of course is when skateboarders were an everyday sight because the hardcore kids skateboarded around during every moment, and then years later the best of them all got sponsorships and appeared in movies and made all their parents and teachers feel awfully stupid. Skate culture is very different in Japan; although you have a few who might try to emulate the Western style, those are mainly the people who are already on the fringes of polite society anyway. Instead it's a more “legitimate” kind of thing, with most of the action occurring in large indoor skate parks rather than the streets. This affects the image of skateboarding and skaters themselves, so there's not quite the same view of skaters as rebels. Consequently, there aren't so many rebels who are inspired to take up skateboarding, which then means that skateboarding doesn't take on the same rebellious overtones, and you see how this starts to loop. I don't know if that's a good thing or not (my inner child screams conformity but my inner corporate drone shrugs legitimacy), but it was always nice to just be walking down the sidewalk and spot some kid kickflipping over a cinder block.

Poutine

For the Canadian impaired, poutine is a Quebecois dish of French fries buried in a mountain of gravy and cheese curds. For some reason, it hasn't caught on in Japan yet.

Peanut butter cups

You can find almost any American candy bar in Japan, but not Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, my favourite. Why that should be, I have no idea. Maybe peanut butter is still a bit of a foreign concept to the Japanese? That wouldn't surprise me. It is a strange idea if you think about it.

Driving

I love driving. Loooooove driving. Top five favourite things to do, easy. I read about driving. I daydream in class about driving. I play video games that involve driving. I research techniques for driving. First time I got behind the wheel of a car I was like aw yeah this feels so riiiiight. I really don't know how I went without for a year. Fortunately next time I should not be under any constraints as to operating motor vehicles – which the university condescendingly claimed was for “safety” but which was obviously actually about their insurance – so I should be good to go as long as I pass the road test. Oh, I'll blog about it. Never fear.

Things being easy

This, then, is the one that ties everything else together. To be honest, I didn't even notice that this was something I missed until I was back in Canada, because everything I did having some extra layer of complication had just become my normal. Ordering at a restaurant? Better get a headstart on perusing the menu, and possibly ask what some stuff is. Filling out a simple document? We're gonna need somebody to look it over for mistakes and also maybe read it to us. Need to ask directions because we're lost? Well, are we sure we're lost? If we keep going this way just a couple more blocks do you think we might figure it out? Ok, well should we ask that guy over there? Let's ask that—ok, well, he obviously was in a rush, what about this grandmother? Oh God, what dialect is that? But it is Japanese, right? How can we end this conversation as quickly as possible? If we just thank her and walk away will she stop? How far do we have to go to keep her from realising we don't know what she said?

In Canada, everything is so damn simple. I can skim whole pages at a glance, out of the corner of my eye, from across the room. I already have a mental map detailing the location of every shop, landmark and shortcut I could ever need. In any given group I'm usually the strongest speaker of the lingua franca, not the weakest – unless, that is, I'm with my Japanese friends, in which case I'm still the most knowledgeable and am to be relied on for interpretation. But most significantly, things just make sense in a way that they don't quite do in Japan. They're set up according to a system of heuristics and algorithms I was raised on, to the point that I can navigate my day-to-day affairs mostly on reflex. An easy life isn't necessarily a good life or even a happy one, but for the moment, it's one in which I'm willing to indulge.

I have the package

Shortly before I temporarily left Japan, I shipped a big box of stuff to Canada. The postman came right to the dorm for his regular deliveries, helped me fill out the form, and departed with my stuff crooked under his arm. Five years ago, at the conclusion of my high school exchange, I sent a couple of packages as well...but it was a very emotional time, and I couldn't bring myself to open them at first, because I felt like in some way it would officially signal the end to a time I'd treasured. And then days turned into months and then it was just kind of a thing.

Today I opened all three. I barely remembered what I put in the one I shipped two months ago, never mind five years.

 Ok then, U-Pack. What have you got for me?

 Pokemon, the jinbei from English Club, some books, more Pokemon. All right, sure.

 Ah! FF for Jugs, Tales for Goku. Picked these up at Kyouto Animate. They were well-received.

 Here I have tried to arrange my Pokemon charms into the shape of Japan, their positioning corresponding to the region they represent. As you can see, I failed.

Enough of that. Time to jump into nostalgia in the worst way.

 It looks like I stuffed as many papers as possible anywhere they would fit. Right on top are the slightly crumpled lyrics to a song my class did for a contest. In Japanese high schools, you stick with your homeroom class, and the teachers come to you. Obviously this means that a Japanese high school student has nowhere near the course choice or autonomy of a Western one, but the main advantage is that the class becomes a family, and I really mean that. My class was the best part of my previous stay. It was full of wonderful, energetic, kind people who were not only quick to welcome me into the fold, but continually proved their willingness to help me survive in the school and not only endure but actively help cultivate my tottering and unsure Japanese.

Homeroom classes do a lot of activities together, one of which was a...I don't know what you'd call it. A singing contest, is what it was anyway. The more proactive students selected a few songs, we narrowed it down to two, thought up a little skit, and then competed with the other classes in our year. I gather it was a nationwide competition so the winners must have advanced to the intramurals and so on. We didn't win, but practising with everybody is one of my fondest memories from that time. This video from 1rittoru no Namida should give you an idea what it was like. As you can see we performed a half-English, half-Japanese rendition of “A Whole New World” from Disney's Aladdin. I can still recite parts of the Japanese lyrics from memory. My class also did “Oh Happy Day” but I wasn't part of that group. Remember that one pretty well too, though.

 On the first day we were required to do a test. Looking back I have no idea what the point of that was, since everybody there had already written an entrance examination, but I guess it was just to assess our abilities. Of course I was hopelessly lost, and though my teacher said I should ask if I wasn't sure what to do, I didn't want to take up time that would be better spent on my classmates, who, unlike me, were actually expected to perform somewhat acceptably.

Of course I was able to do the English section with no problems, even without being able to read the instructions, but the rest was impossible. I barely attempted the Kokugo. I was later placed in a Math class since that's pretty much the same in every language, but not only is Canadian Mathematical pedagogy woefully inadequate, I was pretty damn horrible at even that.

Hey, somebody check this and tell me if my math's correct. It probably isn't. On another page I adorably wrote “FOIL” in the margin, as if it was too abstract and complex an idea to hold in my head without having it in front of me.

 A, uh, pamphlet that's been scrawled all over with marker and shot to hell with a hole-punch. I can no longer recall its origin but it clearly must have meant a great deal to me at the time. Jesus but I'm a sentimental bastard, aren't I?

 I didn't spend every class with my class, as it happens. Some of them, like Kokugo, would have been too far beyond me, and the school's administrators thought (as did I) that it would be beneficial to experience a wide range of topics and classroom settings. So, for four blocks a week, I would trek over to some other class and sit down with them. One was Sekaishi, with a class that I always felt I would have loved to have been a part of every bit as much as I did my own, if it had shaken out that way. Hero of another story and all that. This paper was clearly from my Nihonshi class, where I first learned the word “bakufu.” There were a couple of girls in that class who sat near me that I always enjoyed talking to. They were hot.

 Whoooooakay then. No, I wasn't foisting my nationalist pride on everyone around me. These were supposed to be gifts. Obviously I didn't end up distributing them all, but they're good to have.

 Hey, I remember buying this! Seems I had halfway decent taste in high school. Still in ok condition, too. Never did know who DJ Honda was, though.

 ...yeah ok.

 Oh, right. I used to be kind of a nerd.

 Ah, Hagaren! Book-Off has always been good to me.

 They don't quite jive with the rest of the collection, though.

 An...empty plastic bag. Seriously, what the fuck was wrong with me?

 Aha! Cardcaptor Sakura was what I was using for reading practise back in the day, and it was every bit as difficult for me then as 1Q84 is now. However, I never quite completed my collection. Each volume, you see, was originally packaged with a bookmark in the form of a Clow Card. My ambition was to obtain a complete set of Clow Cards, so I always vowed to gather the rest whenever I returned to Japan. Unfortunately, since I refused to open up the box and check I had no idea which ones I was still missing, so I couldn't do it this time. Guess that just means I have to get back as quickly as possible.

 Actually, as you can see I was tantalizingly close to getting them all. Damn!

 A T-shirt, which I bought in 2008, that celebrates the Rolling Stones tour of 1981-82, which I was unable to attend because I was too busy not having been born yet.

Aaaaand here's all the Gundams I acquired over the course of a semester (along with two other still unbuilt ones that I bought in Canada). I seem to have packed them first and then jammed everything else in around them. In total, it looks like I bought twelve. I'd often arrange and rearrange them on my bed or a table, simply admiring them, glowing with pride every time another machine or two joined their ranks. Yes that's both a regular and Char Custom Zaku, and yes that's two versions of Freedom. Shut up.

I find it really rather unbelievable that I ever thought that this was a good use of money, or that I'd be able to find space in my room for them, or, most of all, that I'd ever, ever have the time to build all these fucking things. Amazing how priorities change.

There is one thing I didn't find amongst this clusterfuck. Over those five months, I kept an incredibly dense journal, filled with reams of completely unnecessary detail, that I'd hoped might turn up. The fact that it did not means that I felt it was precious enough to carry it with me in my backpack, and that it is most likely now lodged deep in some other box, in the bowels of my parents' basement, possibly on another plane of reality. If I ever come across it again, or just get the itch to reminisce, I'll share some of the stories from that period – and there are some good ones. For now, I hope you've enjoyed the snippets. Looking through this stuff has given me some perspective on my most recent ryuugaku, as in a lot of ways, they were really very similar: Joyous, painful, thrilling, and ultimately transformative. That is, everything a ryuugaku should be.

Gaijin Tales! Mother Russia saying and doing things

Australzealand: Is that in Kansai? It takes about an hour to get from Kansai to Kyouto Station.

*

Australzealand: Then here in Kansai, everyone's like “homa ni” and “nan yan...”

*

Rude Boy: Going somewhere exciting?

Lithuania: Yeah!

(beat)

Rude Boy: Don't overwhelm me with detail.

Australzealand: Do you find your sarcasm sometimes lost on people here?

*

Insufferable Dumbass: Whatever, people are gonna talk behind my back. I'm used to it, even back home.

Big Finn: Have you ever tried to think about maybe why that is?

*

Rude Boy: i think my least favourite part was when i was complaining to one of my friends about how i often feel that i'm not being afforded the deference i would be were i japanese, and how i understand why it happens, but it's not about me needing to be the big man, it's about feeling disrespected

Rude Boy: and one of the other guys with us said "well, of COURSE you're not going to be respected. you just have to accept that this is japan."

Rude Boy: and i was like

Rude Boy: um

Rude Boy: no

Rude Boy: not an acceptable answer

Rude Boy: excuse me while i unfriend you in real life

*

Nara (turtle girl from before): She's mad.

Rude Boy: What, really? I didn't even notice.

Nara: Well, she is.

Rude Boy: What the hell did I do?

Nara: Probably nothing. But she's a girl.

*

Insufferable Dumbass: Emperor system and imperial system...are those the same thing?

*

Hot girl's shirt:

Want To Do You All

*LOVE GIRLS*

*

Rude Boy: I only have three beer.

Mother Russia: That's enough for you, right?

Rude Boy: Awwwwwwwwwwwwwww.

Mother Russia: :3

*

Mother Russia: I talked with the Russian girl today.

Rude Boy: In Russian?

Mother Russia: Yeah.

Rude Boy: And was she like, “Um, your pronunciation is perfect, but you speak like a small child...”

Mother Russia: Hahaha! No...but I could see it in her face.

*

Mother Russia: Good night, broken person!

*

Rude Boy: oh and because i was drunk and had been watching too much mad men i kept taking her lighter and lighting her cigarette for her last night loooooooooool

*

Mother Russia: It's supposed to look all relaxed...

Rude Boy: She doesn't look relaxed. Look at the position of her arms, she looks like she's masturbating.

Mother Russia: Well...that's pretty relaxing, right? :3

Rude Boy: Ha! Could be. But judging by her face she looks more into it than relaxed.

Mother Russia: Why do you keep saying 'she?'

Rude Boy: Who is it?

Mother Russia: Me!

Rude Boy: O...h!

*

(halfway through Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas)

Mother Russia: Do you like it?

Rude Boy: Yes, although I have some questions.

Mother Russia: “What is this movie about?”

*

Insufferable Dumbass: In Germany, is it pretty popular with the Japanese food?

*

Rude Boy: [Name]-CHAN!!

1kkaisei: YES!!

Rude Boy: YO!!

1kkaisei: GOOD AFTERNOON!!

Rude Boy: She's really energetic...

Genmaichan: Are you trying to say “young?”

Rude Boy: Maybe I am.

*

Rude Boy: want some cheeseburger pizza

Mother Russia: a mix of both?xD

*

Lithuania: You going to have some coffee with those sandwiches?

Rude Boy: Um...no? What the fuck?

Lithuania: Oh, it's pretty popular in Lithuania. Coffee or tea with sandwiches.

Rude Boy: ...I guess I can't talk. My country's national cuisine is French fries with gravy and cheese curds.

*

The moment when you find yourself in a busy footpath, stealthily trailing after some high school girls in the hopes of stealing a glance at their socks, you begin to question your life choices.

I was trying to figure out if they went to my old high school.

*

Rude Boy: Piss...cocks...fuck...

Lithuania: I wish you could hear yourself.

*

Lithuania: I'm gonna start watching Game of Thrones.

Rude Boy: You might not like it. Apparently there's a lot of fucking.

Lithuania: Yeah, one of my friends said it was more like Game of...“P.”

Rude Boy: …“Piss?”

Lithuania: No! Other “P!”

Rude Boy: Game of...Penises?

Lithuania: No! P o...

Rude Boy: ...oh, “Porn!!”

Lithuania: Yes!!

Rude Boy: Now I'm curious about Game of Piss, though.

*

Rude Boy: I saw something horrifying today.

Lithuania: What was it?

Rude Boy: Do you know those giant spiky caterpillars? I saw one on the sidewalk on the way home, and a hornet was just stripping the fuzzy part off its body...

Lithuania: That's terrible!

Rude Boy: ...and it was thrashing around and trying to push it off like “No, stop!”

Lithuania: Oh, see! That's it, right? You have the right to defend yourself from the attacking caterpillar!

Rude Boy: Uh, yeah, I'm pretty sure the caterpillar was just minding its own business and the wasp was like “Oh hey, food!”

Lithuania: Haha.

Rude Boy: Like if I had to kill to eat, I would obviously try to do it in such a way as to inflict as little pain as possible. But it didn't even kill the caterpillar, it was just like “I'm gonna start from the back,” and just started eating it alive.

Lithuania: That's intense!

Rude Boy: And I'm like, what's my responsibility here?

Lithuania: You should never interfere with nature.

Rude Boy: Right, and even if I did, what then? The same exact thing is going on in a forest somewhere right now. I can't be there every time it happens. It's not like I can just end all suffering. It really got me thinking about how nothing we do matters and we're all fucked...it was a very depressing existential moment.

Lithuania: So what did you do?

Rude Boy: Well, I just left it there.

Lithuania: What! Probably this was a test from God, and you faaaaaailed!

Rude Boy: Doubt it. Do you understand “Deism?” The idea that God exists, but doesn't interfere with the affairs of this world. Cause it's the old argument, either God is impotent, or He is wicked, or He doesn't exist.

Lithuania: This conversation got deep fast.

Rude Boy: I'll show you deep fast. Anyway that wasn't even the worst part. When I went back to school a couple of hours later, it was there in the same spot, only now being torn apart by a small army of ants. And it was still thrashing around like “Nooooo!”

Lithuania: Oh my God! You should have just stomped them allllll!

Rude Boy: Well, maybe I should have at least stepped on the caterpillar's head. Just to be merciful.

*

When I learn a new word, I often spend the next little while trying to insert it into conversation as often as possible, frequently employing it even in instances where I would normally say something else, or stitching together extremely tenuous excuses to try it out. I assume this is normal for most people learning a second language. Partly this is for practise, partly it's to check if I'm using it correctly, and partly it's just excitement. It's like getting a new toy toy to play with.

Part of studying a language formally means memorizing long lists of vocabulary that seems 99% useless. Like “constabulary” or “positron.” When in hell am I ever going to need a word like that? Even if I do, I'm better off looking it up when these specialized situations do crop up, and instead devoting my study time to more common words and phrases.

That said, when, in the course of your day, in some conversation or on some sign, you do encounter a word or kanji that you had to memorize for a test, the feeling is downright magical.

And you know what's even better? To struggle and struggle to grasp the nuance of a grammatical pattern, to hear it but not comprehend it, to come up with a half-dozen example sentences but not be sure if they're right...and then one day, unprecedented, have the spontaneous urge to use the construction in a sentence you're already in the middle of saying. These are the days when you've got this whole language-learning thing under control, you are worldly and educated and intelligent, you really are making progress, and have not been spending hundreds of hours of your life for nothing.

Then usually the next day you can't understand when the konbini clerk asks if you want a bag or not and you feel like the densest sack of shit who's ever walked this earth, which is why you sort of learn to savour the small victories.

*

Once when I was eating an ice cream cone, Mother Russia took it from me, ate the top part, and then gave it back with a huge groove in the surface of the ice cream, because she'd tried to rake it out with her teeth to avoid eating the cone.

Rude Boy: Um.

Mother Russia: Because of my diet, remember! I can't eat carbs!

Rude Boy: Uh-huh. Did you...need some help with this? >_>

Mother Russia: Yeah!!

Aaaaand so we started swapping, with me filing down the cone for her, and her eating as much of the revealed ice cream as she could before handing it back to me to continue my work. Then I pulled out a second one...which she stole, but this time got impatient, grabbed a spoon, and, after a few minutes, gave me back the empty cone.

Rude Boy: Oh, thank you so much. I'm so super excited to eat my, fucking...hard, dry bread.

Another time, she drank four coolers, I drank four beer, and then took down another half beer before she noticed that I was slowing down and just finished it off for me, without asking. Then she took my last beer, also without asking, and drank that too.

She can drink me under the table. It's awesome.

And finally, continuing with the theme of “Mother Russia ganking all my stuff,” she also sometimes takes my meat when I get a bentou, because she knows I don't really like it.

Rude Boy: Wow, you must really like having my meat in your mouth.

Mother Russia: I do!

Rude Boy: Hehe.

Australzealand: -.-

*

Japanese language teacher: What do you know about Liberia?

Chinese student: It's a very cold place, right?

Japanese language teacher: Isn't that...Siberia?

*

On the spur of the moment, I decided to go downtown. I realised partway there that I'd just made two transfers without paying any attention to what I was doing, my mind occupied by the more pressing concerns of essay topics and homework. After taking a stroll through some of my favourite areas, I decided I was hungry and stopped at Subway, where I noted that they'd hired a new girl. I dropped in at my local Round1 for a few rounds of Wang at Midnight before remembering that I needed to pick up Part 2 of 1Q84; considering the locations of nearby bookstores, I opted for Junkudou, in a spot I rarely visit but certainly not far out of my way. Finally I checked BookOff for any desirable new stock before heading home. A year ago I couldn't have found any of these places even if you'd given me a map.

Gion, Part 5: Sono Ta

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

The time has finally come to finish up this series, boys and girls. I know it wasn't much, but I really enjoyed writing it, and I especially enjoyed having a nice little motivator to go out and get these shots, some of which I think are pretty ok. To finish off, I'd like to show you some of the pictures that were either too poor, too tangential, or too different to make it into one of the main parts, but which may still be of some interest, to somebody, somewhere.

Unlike with the other parts, which were a little more deliberate, these photos will simply be shown in the order that I took them, so there is no particular theme or logical progression.

 Imagine cresting a relatively nondescript staircase and being met with this.

 It's pretty cool-looking. I'd love to check this out more closely at some point, but the theme of this photo project is "things that don't cost Rude Boy money," so I didn't go in.

 Nighttime couple stroll, in front of Koudaiji.

 On my first night in Japan for my high school exchange, after being massed into a giant group of students and unleashed on the hotel buffet, I decided that although I hated maccha, I would have some maccha ice cream just to start getting myself used to eating things I didn't like. Eventually I grew to absolutely love it, and then I got addicted to maccha Kit-Kats, and of course I lived in Uji so it was all maccha all the time, and now I'm a staunch maccha fan. Main point, try new things.

 The aforementioned staircase, connecting to a "park."

 As I've mentioned, Kyouto Tower is visible throughout much of Gion.

 In front of Koudaiji.

 A startlingly large number of houses have trees growing out of them. Like, they're actually planted straight into the ground inside the house. I'm told this is a Kyouto thing.

 There's no glass there, it's just a wooden lattice. I could clearly hear these employees chatting while I shot them. It brought back memories of Deus Ex.

 I couldn't tell you why, but Gion is loaded with uranai. I have never seen such uranai density anywhere else in Japan.

 The multi-storey pavilion near Kiyomizudera.

 Exploratory by nature, I always have the urge to check out these little-visited nooks, corners, and sideshows when visiting a site of interest. They always seem like such lonely little spots, and looking for them almost never yields anything interesting.

 Around Gojou. Is this what you picture when you think of Gion?

 Towards Kiyomizudera.

 The water thing at Kiyomizudera.

 Near Kiyomizudera.

 The pavilion thing near Kiyomizudera, again.

 Normally I avoid showing people's faces, but this is the only clear shot I've ever managed to get of one of these rickshaws. That's quite surprising considering that the incredible numbers in which they appear, but the problem, of course, is that they're always moving. It's quite common to see them ferrying people on the narrower pedestrian-ruled roads between the major points of interest, particularly Kiyomizudera and Yasaka-san. I've never ridden one so I can't say whether it's a good transportation option, but I'm sure it would be an unusual experience if nothing else.

 These guys came out in a huge convoy one day. Judging by the iconography, this is one of the groups that supports restoring (some) power to the emperor and revitalizing Japan's once mighty military. One vehicle had a full speaker system and was blaring nonsense, but it was very hard to understand so I'm not sure if I was supposed to be expelling the foreigners or extolling the superiority of the Japanese race or supporting Sapporo Ichiban over Cup Noodle or what. The Japanese I was with at the time told me they were very embarrassed and to forget I ever saw it. Instead I posted a photo on the Internet and appended a lengthy caption.

 A small temple I found on a random walk at nighttime, back when it was still coldish and the sun went to bed early. Couldn't find any information on it, but I THINK the place was called 達仁寺、if for some reason you feel inclined to research it.

 Inoshishi!

 So yeah, immediately afterward I stumbled across another one, this a fairly substantial complex. Unfortunately, I didn't get the name. I was quite intrigued by this window visible over the wall, wondering what kind of view the inhabitant of this apartment must have.

 The entire time I was wondering if a security guard was going to come and roust me, but people seemed to be cutting through like it was no thing.

 I found what appeared to be, I guess, some kind of restaurant. The rock garden out front was immaculately maintained, but aren't they all. I could hear raucous times from within and what must have been waiters scurrying down the thin-walled hallway near me, but was too nervous to actually confirm my theory.

 Ok, so eventually I actually did go into Koudaiji. I wouldn't have done, except that it was specially lit up as like an annual event, so I picked a night and went to check it out.

 Toyotomi's widow built this place to pray for him after his death. An entire temple.

 If I'm not confusing this with someplace else, there are seven rocks in this little field, and a famous monk placed them in a very particular pattern whose meaning has never been deciphered. You could be cynical and say that there isn't one.

 The lighting made it very difficult to get anything very good, but I think this picture adequately shows how beautifully the reflection of the illuminated trees was cast against the still water.

 Onward and upward.

 A cute couple.

 Kyouto Tower.

 Sup.

 There was a little teahouse off to the side, if you wanted to sit a spell before moving on.

 Everything from here on is at or near Kiyomizudera.

As I write this, July is about to begin, which is appropriate, because it means that the month-long Gion Matsuri is about to begin. I will definitely be doing something with that, naturally, so I suppose we're not quite finished with Gion yet. Regardless, I really hope you enjoyed my little photo project, and as always, thank you very much for reading!