Assaulted by Akihabara

One of the first things you see when exiting the Akihabara metro line is an advertisement of one kind or another. At first it starts out pretty tame with only a few posters here and there across the walls. But as soon as you leave the terminal it’s a never-ending assault on your senses. The streets echo with the voices of shopkeepers shouting our their special discounts, girls dressed in pretty clothes handing out flyers, flashing neon signs displaying shop stores, and television screens plastered to the sides of buildings informing bystanders of the latest and greatest products. I imagine it’d probably be a lot like going to Times Square.

Unlike Times Square however you’re still surrounded by ads, to the point where they can literally cover the walls and ceilings. You don’t really notice it a first since most of the ads use a lot of negative space, but when you have a moment to look around you notice them. Whether you look left, right, up, or down your eyes are bond to land on some form of ad. While this can make sense form an advertisement standpoint in which you want to provide the younger consumers with as many options as they need to select their own style. Which is the main goal of most advertisement agencies in Japan, because once a consumer chooses their brand chances are they’ll continue to buy that brand for the rest of their life. So the main thing an ad wants to get across to the consumers is that their brand is a brand they can empathize with. It’s much more important for the consumer to relate to a brand then for the brand to actually be functional, and it would appear that the ad companies can be quite aggressive to get their empathic messages across.

The Ins and Outs of Tenryuji Temple

When we headed over to Tenryuji temple I was expecting another tour consisting of the inner part of some super beautiful temple and an explanation of the temples history. This was not the case however as we only took a tour of the gardens, which while quite exquisite, and I was a little saddened that we wouldn’t get to see more of the temple. Though would not have been surprised if the gardens were the most impressive part of the temple. We weren’t allowed to spend to long on the grounds as we had to head off for Tokyo at around 2:00pm, but what I did get to see was absolutely beautiful.

Like Ryoanji this temple is known for it’s garden, which is one of the oldest in the world. The main difference between the Tenryuji temple and the Ryoanji temple is while the Ryoanji temple focuses on its rock garden the Tenryuji temple focuses more on the garden as a whole instead of one specific site. The temple’s garden felt more like walking though a small park if only because of all the trees and greenery. And while the view was quite spectacular I didn’t get the chance to view the garden in its entirety due to lack of time. Of course the fact that my feet were still throbbing from our previous hikes around Kyoto didn’t help much in terms of getting around swiftly either.

Even though my time in the garden wasn’t quite what I would have liked it to be I still got a chance to witness first hand how the Japanese attempt to imitate nature. The garden as a whole definitely showcased a strong sense of shin-gyo. This is a Japanese aesthetic term used to describe where something lies between man and nature. Shin-gyo happens to be in the middle of the two but leaning slightly more towards man.

After the temple we walked through the bamboo forest, which was only about2 blocks long, and I found it quite disappointing. Personally I was expecting more of a forest and less of a smile climb up a hill and the large amounts of people crossing though didn’t help to create the atmosphere I was expecting either. The easiest way to describe it would be to say that the real forest doesn’t do the pictures justice.

But enjoy a quick sketch of the gardens at least:

Elegant simplicity.

Throughout the course of Japanese art and aesthetics, specifically the two-dimensional works, we often observe how the works are dominated by large amounts of negative space. Even within this negative space we can still find vast amounts of detail. When I was visiting the Tokugawa art museum, several of the scrolls that they had on display depicted a celebration of the Tokugawa daimyo opening up a shrine within a major city. The paintings used vast amounts of negative space, very small subject matter and other artifacts within the painting. Even though the work may be dominated by negative space, within the smaller subject matter lies an incredible amount of elegant detail. The use of patterns gives the art perfect balance between simplism and elaborate detail.

As I’ve traveled through Japan I’ve noticed that many of their logos and emblems contain this same sort of simplicity. Many of the logos contain few words or numbers and are instead dominated by simple images. This tendency ranges from the cities’ symbols to restaurant signs and company logos and so forth. While these current designs lack the elaborate detail of the earlier Tokugawa works, they form a sort of elegance through their use of other western design concepts such as unification, symmetry, and other such ideas. And even though these newer designs lack the same attention to minute detail that their ancient and more formal predecessors possessed they still attain a certain elegance that we rarely see in the western world.

Ninjas are to Uenoshi, what the Cornhuskers are to Lincoln Nebraska.

From Kyoto to Kusatsu, and from Kusatsu to Tsuge, then from Tsuge to Iga-Ueno, and finally from Iga-ueno to Uenoshi. Roughly two hours to get to the city. On the train ride there I got the chance to see some of the most beautiful mountains I’d ever witnessed, with clouds literally rolling down them. We also got a view of the ocean and it was a little unsettling to be so close to both the ocean and the mountains. We could look out one window and see the ocean spread as far as the eye can see, then turn around and right outside the other window would be the foothills rising up to mountains that pierced through the clouds.

After getting off our final train it was just a short walk through the Iga Park grounds to get to the ninja museum. The scenery was once again absolutely beautiful and I could tell that the trip was already starting to pay off. We passed by the souvenir shop filled with allsorts of ninja related trinkets, none of which were actually very impressive.

Once in the museum we were taken on a tour of all the different kinds of secret passageways and hidden chambers the ninjas would use to escape from invading samurai. One of the more common ones was a simple wall panel that had a pole down the middle and could quickly rotate around. Our guide asked for volunteers and I happily obliged her. I attempted to whizz through the hidden passage, but as the top of the door frame only went up to my shoulders there was much more crashing and stumbling involved then what I would have liked.

After the tour of the ninja house we next got to travel around the actual ninja museum and try on some Mizugumo (special shoes used to cross the swampy moats of castles) as well as chain mail armor that they used for training up their muscles and jumping ability. The museum also held a large assortment of tools that the ninja would use. These ranged from the well known items like shuriken and the Ninjato, or ninja sword, to less well known ones such as a sort of bullet proof vest and special tools used to jam sliding doors so that they might prevent their targets from escaping. You could also learn some interesting facts that popular culture tends to smudge up, like how ninja’s actually wore dark navy blue instead of black so that even on nights where it wasn’t completely dark they could still blend in to the shadows.

When we finished the Museum we got to see a weapons demonstration where our two masters showed us how different tools and weapons were used by the ninja. This ranged from how well a Ninjato can cut through objects, to using the sheath and string attached as a sort of radar for finding people in the dark so that you can have the drop on them. We also got to see how a kurasagama and shuriken worked. The Shuriken were quite impressive. Especially since when looking at the matt he threw them at the shuriken seemed to magically appear imbedded within it.

After that we headed back through the souvenirs shop and had dinner at small bar with a ninja corgi on the sign. The food was good and the barkeep gave us a menu in English, which was appreciated. I was tired at this point and didn’t feel like working out the kanji. We caught the five o’clock bus back and got to enjoy the scenery once again, but this time with a sunset backdrop. It was even more gorgeous then when we head up. All in all it was a good day and well worth the trip.