Meiji Shrine + Wedding Bonus

On my final Sunday morning in Tokyo at 9 am, I trekked to Meiji Shrine, which enshrines the Emperor Meiji and his consort, Empress Shoken. Like so many other buildings in Tokyo, the original shrine was destroyed in WW2 bombing, but the reconstruction looks every bit as authentic.

To get there, you have to walk through the adjacent park and gardens. This is a beautiful, serene stroll, worlds removed from the bustle of Harajuku (another center of teen fashion in Tokyo). The area is also a fantastic place to hide say, a letterbox...

As I was winding through the park's paths, I suddenly turned a corner to find a bunch of men in Shinto garments processing solemnly through the park. Policemen were clearing the path of people ahead of them, so that they could proceed uninterrupted. I tried to ask someone what was going on, but they didn't speak enough English to be able to explain what was happening.

The procession meandered its way to this pavilion, right outside of the shrine's gates. They began to conduct a ceremony with a lot of stylized bowing and the waving of some kind of tree branch above people's heads. Meanwhile, the rest of the crowd began to purify their hands, using the provided ladles and pool of water.

I went on ahead into the shrine grounds, which had the now-familiar accoutrements of a torii gate, omikuji (fortune slips), and offering tills.

After about 15 minutes or so, the clerics proceeded into the inner courtyard of the shrine...

...and a large drum began to sound. As the clerics entered the shrine, the drum was beat with greater frequency and finally ended with a bit of a roll. The clerics sat down at the front of the shrine, and other shrine staffers scurried about, wearing brightly-colored green, white and orange robes. One of the clerics began to play a flute, and someone else played koto (I think). Shinto ceremonial music is fairly austere; a Bach chorale this is not. Peering into the inner courtyard, I felt like I had been transported centuries away to a wholly foreign, mystical land.

At this point, I turned to leave the shrine when I stumbled across--a wedding! My camera battery died at this point, so I don't have more photos, but the raiments of the wedding party were gorgeous, particularly the bride's dress. It was funny to see everyone wearing the traditional flip-flop-like sandals, since I associate those with going to the beach. You can also see the variety of dress in the rest of the group, from traditional kimonos to western suits to women in black skirts with high boots (of course). The group processed into the shrine, where they disappeared to presumably undergo some sort of ceremony. There was actually a second wedding taking place on the other side of the shrine, but I didn't have the camera juice to photograph it.

After leaving the shrine grounds, I headed right outside to Jingu-Bashi, the so-called epicenter of Harajuku's cosplay scene. On warm, sunny Sundays, this is where cosplaying teens gather to strut their stuff and be photographed. On a good day, you will see an array of goths, punks, French maids, anime characters and Lolitas. At 10 am though, there was not a single cosplayer there. I wasn't sure if my timing was too early, but this post seems to suggest that homework might be taking its toll on the free time of Japanese teens these days? Anyway, here's a taste of what I missed:

Asakusa Temple and Nakamise-dori

As you step out of the Asakusa station, it's pretty hard to miss the approach to the temple as it's marked by a huge honking gate and red lantern. The temple is known as the Asakusa Kannon Temple, since it is dedicated to the bodhisattva Kannon, or Goddess of Mercy. According to legend, in 628, two fisherman were fishing and found a golden statue figurine. They threw it back in the water, but then they caught it again, twice. Recognizing godly acts for what they were, the village decided to build a temple at that site to commemorate Kannon. This is the oldest temple in Tokyo, and very popular with locals and tourists alike.
Nakamise-dori is the street leading to the temple and it is lined with street vendors, and most exciting, food stalls.

This cookie making machine was the most fascinating thing I've seen since the tortilla making machine at Uncle Julio's. The cookies are molded, pressed and packaged in a matter of seconds, then they slide down the ramp into a box, where you can purchase 3 for merely ¥100.

The 3 that I grabbed were shaped like a fish (eaten too quickly to be photographed), a bird, and the lantern at the gate above. These are soft cookies with a glutinous dough, filled with lotus or red bean paste, and they were still warm out of the conveyor belt!

I am familiar with the okonomiyaki (a sort of Japanese omelet) but this stall for osakayaki caught my eye. You take an egg, a few pieces of ham, corn kernels, dried shrimp, crunchy rice puffs, shredded lettuce and grill it in pancake-like batter.

The whole thing is flipped, then topped with pickled ginger, nori, mayo, and okonomiyaki sauce. Oishii!
Approaching the temple itself, we have another gate with a red lantern.

For ¥100, you can buy a mikuji, or a small fortune. You put your money in the till, then shake a box filled with long wooden rods. There is a hole at one end, and when one of the rods falls out, you look at the number and draw the corresponding fortune from one of the wooden boxes. After you read it, fold it up and tie it to the wire racks. I watched intently as a couple Brits tried this and then realized they couldn't read what their fortune was anyway.

This burner is filled with incense and billowing smoke, which is why everyone beelines toward it.

Breathing in the smoke is supposed to bestow good luck, so crowds gather around for some quality smoke inhalation and waft the smoke towards their faces.

This fountain includes several ladles, with which you can catch the water and sprinkle some on your hands. Well, I also saw an old lady sipping the water directly. Considering how paranoid they are about swine flu over here, I was surprised at this rather unhygienic move. Maybe Kannon will protect her.

The inside of the temple
On the outside, there is a small park with a rock garden, statues, and some other significant figures whose names I can't read. At this point, I went looking for octopus balls.

Seder

It's Passover, and though I'd always meant to check out Cornell's "Super Seder," I never quite got around to it. No matter, this year, we badgered our Jew-in-residence (Nate) to hold a Seder. He hadn't been really planning to celebrate, but armed with knowledge from Wikipedia, we successfully convinced him that he should host a Seder with a bunch of Gentiles. Besides, my undying love for Yonah Schimmel's and the rest of the Lower East Side should be plentiful proof of my faith in Jewish culture.

About half of us were non-Jewish, and this was the first Seder any of us had attended. Basically, a Seder dinner recounts the exodus of the Jews from Egypt, from their enslavement while building the pyramids, to the ten plagues that God rained down upon the Egyptian slavers, to the hasty departure of the Jews as they commenced wandering the desert. Grasping a Xeroxed-copy of the Haggadah, we each took turns reading as the Leader, and all joined in on Group parts. It was a great opportunity for me to practice my dramatic reading skills.

Like the Bible, the language in the text is beautiful. Actually, I've always been a fan of ancient religious texts, mostly for their obfuscating word choice and archaic grammar. In all seriousness though, biblical passages do have an eloquence to them that is rare in modern writing, and the words can sing off the page. In fact, sometimes they literally do.

This is the bread of affliction that our fathers ate in the land of Egypt. Whoever is hungry, let him come and eat; whoever is in need, let him come and conduct the Seder of Passover. This year we are here; next year in the land of Israel. This year we are slaves; next year we will be free people.

Ma nishtana? Why is this night different from all other nights? More than the retelling of the Exodus, Passover is a reminder of universal suffering, a plea not to forget the past injustices of history, and a message to strive for the betterment of humanity. Holiday foods usually bring to mind goodies like pumpkin pie or egg nog, but on this night, we ate in remembrance of pain and suffering. Unleavened matzah, because the Jews left so quickly their bread had no time to rise, maror (horseradish), or bitter herbs to symbolize the bitterness of slavery, charoset (a diced apple, nut and wine mixture) to represent the mortar used by Jews to construct Egyptian buildings, karpas (parsley) dipped in salt water to mirror tears.

This is not to say that the food was all terrible. The actual dinner was blessedly free of nasal-passage clearing horseradish, with matzah ball soup, couscous, eggplant parmesan and roasted chicken. Plus, the Haggadah does include instructions to drink at least four glasses of wine, and your bill for the night could be even higher if you drank more during dinner. By the fourth "official" glass of wine, we were racing to see who could chug theirs the fastest. I'm sure the prophet Elijah approved when he came to visit.

At the conclusion of Seder, we sang a few Passover songs, most notably, Chad Gadya, or "One Kid Goat." The song is structurally similar to "There was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly," in that each stanza builds upon the previous one. I can only remember the last line, which was "which my father bought for two zuzim." More difficult was the constraint that each stanza must be sung in one breath. By the time verse 10 rolled around, let's just say I wished I'd been a trumpet player.

L'shana ha'ba'ah b'yerushalayim! Next year in Jerusalem!

Road Trip to IOWA

Last weekend, Katherine and I decided to take a road trip to Iowa to visit Warren, since he took the time to visit Chicago a couple times over the summer. Besides, doesn't everyone aspire to travel to Iowa one day? Right.

As we drove to Cedar Rapids, we passed a Hummer dealership (there were actually very few non-American cars on the road) and the world's largest truck stop. Seriously, we're talking about a big mother-trucker, 2 1/2 times the size of Disneyland. I started to worry about the fact that this state has a caucus, and that it matters. Is Iowa a representative slice of the country, a swing state? I've been living in blue areas for so long that I can't remember what America's "heartland" is like.

Cedar Rapids is an industrial town in eastern Iowa, home to a number of manufacturing plants, agricultural warehouses, and a Super Walmart and a Super Target (whoa!). The town slogan is "the City of 5 Seasons," where the 5th season is the time you spend appreciating the other four. (No joke.) Outside of Cedar Rapids, the town is also popularly known as Cedar Crapids, or the City of 5 Smells. After driving past the Quaker Oats factory and through Warren's corn processing plant, I have now smelled two of the five smells, and hope to never experience the other three. Despite the questionable odor, driving around the corn processing plant was kind of neat. Have you ever wondered where high fructose corn syrup comes from? Glucose? Maltodextrin? All the ingredients in tiny print that go into every processed food you buy, well they start percolating right here.

For the most part though, the town had all the chain restaurants and shopping malls you could want, the usual assemblage of IHOPs, Applebees' and Olive Gardens. Then there were local oddities, like the Kum & Go gas stations and Culver's, which featured "frozen custard butterburgers." Ironically, the latter was located next to an emergency healthcare clinic. For dinner, I decided to veto going to Pei's Mandarin, advertising the "best oriental food in east Iowa," and opted for a Mexican place instead.

Speaking of Asians, we were browsing the Wikipedia article on Cedar Rapids and came across the demographics section. The town's population includes 0.06% people of Asian descent, so with a population of around 120,000, this comes out to...72 Asians. That would mean my presence in Cedar Rapids handily increased the Asian population by over 1%.

Since the Wikipedia article was sadly devoid of appealing attractions in Cedar Rapids (Czech & Slovak Museum, anyone?), I jokingly suggested that we go to the Planet X Fun Center. After all, how can you possibly go wrong with a place that has space bikes, bowlingo, and laser tag? The answer is: many, many ways. Perhaps this is why beer buckets were on sale, with 5 beers for $10. After surveying the turtle-slow bumper cars and the light-up alien whacking game with half of its lights burnt out, we decided to spring for a round of mini-golf. The course was actually fairly difficult, but I miraculously came away with 3 hole-in-ones and won by one point!

Later that night, we drove to Iowa City, home of the University of Iowa, to meet up with Andrew, Warren's new boyfriend. Andrew was super nice, and also super tall. At 6'9", he towered over my 5'1" self, and we bonded over how it was difficult for both of us to find clothing that fit. In the meantime, Iowa City was much cuter than Cedar Rapids, with a nice pedestrian mall, ample bars, and a Pita Pit! I never frequented Pita Pit much as an undergrad, but it was still refreshing to see one of the late night food joints (DP Dough, Wings Over) you typically see in college towns. Unfortunately, the gay bar was kind of dead on this particular night, so we dropped into another bar, packed with screaming sorostitutes, frat boys, and girls wearing ugly Christmas sweaters and mini-skirts. Even my jello shot could not stave off my irritation with this bar; this is why I never went to anything but Stella's while at Cornell. And, I don't know if I've aged that much in the last 5 months, but somehow everyone seemed to look really young. Maybe this is one more step along the road to becoming an old fogey.

Back at Andrew's house, his housemate Marta had offered to let us sleep in her bed, since she was in Madison for the weekend. I never thought I'd be sleeping in the bed of the lesbian roommate of the boyfriend of my friend's gay friend in Iowa. Also, Marta had a Moosewood cookbook on her bookshelf, which meant my respect for her automatically doubled.

The drive back was rather a bitch. Freezing rain had been coming down all weekend, and the roads were pretty icy. I stopped for gas at a BP, which had a wretched-looking church next door, with a sign that read, "No Jesus, no peace. Know Jesus, know peace." After we properly mocked the church and its sign, I pulled away and began to turn onto the highway on-ramp. Except I kept turning, and in a slow skid, the rear end of my car fishtailed 180 degrees. It was my first major skid, and I felt oddly calm during the experience, as though I were looking down on the scene from afar. Luckily, the cars around us had stopped to stare blankly at us, and no one got hit. And hey, it wouldn't be a road trip without a near-death experience to cap it off, right?