The Ricefield-Diary: Of Deer Meat, Realism and a Not-So-Red Kyoto

(Just noticed this one got really long... sorry!)

Time for another blog! In my last one I was just about to leave for Nara with my class and the trip turned out great! They are great people and we had a lot of fun, though at a point I overreacted a bit to certain things... I think they have forgiven me until now though, but let's start from the beginning!

The main reason we went to Nara in the first place was because of the yearly Shousou-in exhibition that is held only once a year every autumn for two weeks to show some of Japans most important cultural heritage.

We set off with Hayashi-sensei and Ogawa-sensei on Tuesday morning by car, spending the first day visiting different temples and in the evening having a great dinner together with a former teacher of Takaoka Campus. We were at a really small, through and through Japanese style restaurant/bar where we occupied the room on the second floor ourselves. There I had fugu, blowfish, for the first time, though only strips of its skin. Tasted good, but nothing special. Generally though, the food was delicious, and the sake and beer went very well with it, too.

Then on Wednesday morning we made our way to the Nara National Museum and, with our tickets reserved beforehand, we only had to wait about fifteen minutes until we got into the building. Which was good, because on the way to the museum there was a designated waiting area in the form of a long, roofed over walkway which was in regular intervals furnished with signposts going something like this: 'Only 60 more minutes left to wait! Thank you for coming to visit Shouso-in!'

So, we had it good, really. Or so I thought, before one of my teachers told me that here in Japan, where people just love queues, they don't do it like on other, much visited exhibitions around the world where they usually only let a limited number of people into the museum at one time to assure that everybody can watch the exhibits in peace. No, in Japan, they just let everybody in all the time, which results in a situation where you can, in fact, simply not see the exhibits at all, because of all the people, who are, by the way, not polite at all when it comes to pushing through a throng to get to the front. Basically everbody was trapped in one, slow-moving line that you had to adhere to if you wanted to see any of the pieces at some point.

They actually had build up a seperate queue inside of the museum for being able to see the most famous exhibit of this year: a beautiful sword, the scabbard of which was lavishly decorated among others also with the supposedly first Maki-e ever used. For reminders, Maki-e is an urushi technique I also learned, wherein you create a picture by sprinkling gold or silver powder onto an urushi surface. Good thing one of my teachers came and pulled me along into that seperate queue, because seeing it I had become so annoyed that I was almost going to just let it go completely. It was a really beautiful piece though, not only the scabbard but also the blade itself.

Still, the visit left me somewhat annoyed and it showed when we went into Nara's famous deer park on our way to Toudai-ji museum and the Toudai-ji temple itself. The people of Nara and generally the Japanese (as I probably told about once already when I went to Kyoto with my roommate from Finland in May) regard the deer here as messengers of the gods. The animals are pretty much free to roam and they are tame, since they are being fed by every visitor. They are so tame in fact, that they become at times somewhat of a nuisance. They will gladly gang up on anything on two lags having a cracker (or a carrot, or salad, or cabbage...). Most women and children turn slightly nervous when a bunch of well sized deer, in spring some with equally well sized antlers (they are cut later, for the safety of everybody involved), start to crowd in on them, which means they usually start to back off or even run. And the deer happily follow. So, Oje-san, our Korean exchange student, had half of a cabbage and about five deer behind her. She wasn't quite running, but walking very, very swiftly indeed and making somewhat distressed noises. She passed me, pressed the cabbage into my hand and went off.

Uhm, thanks.

I didn't want to let myself being chased by deer, so I stood my ground, holding the cabbage up, throwing down a few pieces once in a while. The deer started crowding, nipping at my clothes, being generally obnoxious, so I started kind of like stamping toward them to startle them. That worked about two times until one lowered its head as if to bump into me, so I grabbed it by one long ear and held it away from me. It let off, but another one came and actually bit me, lightly, into the stomach. So I gave it a slap on the head. At that moment my class mates started to exclaim rather shocked that, hey, that's a messenger of the gods! You're hitting a messenger of the gods there!

I told my classmates that there are no gods and that deer meat, in fact, tastes delicious.

So, I should start to explain about my relationship to animals. I like them, they're grand. I like all of them, in fact, the dogs and cats as well as the pigs and the cattle (okok, I like spiders only as long as they don't touch me and are under 5cm in diametre). I think we should not treat animals badly. But I am also of the opinion that the interplay of life and death is one of the most basic principles of the universe, which means I don't think it's wrong to kill an animal for eating it and using the other various materials its body can provide. Still, the least we can do is try to give that animal a good life and a fast death in exchange. Knowing how little many people care about what they eat, or where that food comes from, seeing how many gladly stuff themselves with meat that comes from the worst possible sources – from pigs that cannot move one centimeter in their life, or are being buried alive in the threat of epidemia; from cows that are not killed properly, remaining alive while being skinned; from chicks that are simply shreddered, 'alive', to make nuggets – in the face of that, being admonished because of cuffing a deer. One deer of thousands, which are treated as well as possible, save and never hungry, well cared for also if sick. One deer that, without causing it much pain, could easily be killed with one well aimed bullet in close range, to provide healthy, growth hormone free, antibiotic free, delicious meat; 'happier' and healthier meat than you can ever get from the shelf of a supermarket.

So.... as you can see, I was indeed somewhat worked up that day, if because of the overfilled museum before, or because of having just a, well, a bad day, I don't know. And of course I know my classmates can't help the wrong of the world and me having eaten meat and fish pretty much freely while here in Japan, (language problems, high requirement of protein because of my weird body and lots of dance training, the generally small availability of truly vegetarian cuisine in a country region as Toyama and so on) in any case puts me in the role of being a picture-perfect hypocrite.

Maybe in the end the fact of not being able to adher to a 'happy meat' or vegetarian diet here in Japan is what irks me most. That as well as the fact that I am not good enough in Japanese, and the others aren't good enough in English as that I could explain myself properly.

Though I think that with two of my senpais I might have succeeded somewhat to express the idea of 'good concience meat' though judging from their rather thoughtful reaction they didn't seem to have thought about the problem before. But I might be wrong about that. That's another thing that seems so sad: in many cases it's not the people being 'bad' or anything, it's just that they simply don't know and aren't given a reason to care. In Germany and Finland the general population probably is the same, but in supermarkets for example more and more labels along the lines of 'fair trade', 'organic', 'sustainable' are appearing all around. And while the labels may be questionable, they can serve to make the customer think that, 'hey, this one's organic, the other's not, what's the difference anyways?'. It's a step in the right direction.

The supermarket I usually go to, Valor, does have a label for organic products, but the only product thus labeled that I found so far was macha (green tea powder). Again, I have not searched through all the products in the whole market. There might be more. Also, in Tokio there are supposedly flea markets where one can borrow eating utensils for the day, to return them, washed, in the evening. That again sounds like a great idea. Is it only Toyama? Or is it only me and my not-quite-literate-Japanese?

I don't know, and in any case I should probably get back to recounting my trip to Nara before this whole entry turns into nothing more than a ideological and psychological labyrinth.

So, my classmates were shocked and a little distant for a while, understandably. We went to another museum, to another temple and then to the Nara museum of Art. I had seen a poster of their current exhibition in our hotel and had wanted to go there, but in the end it turned out that the others were interested in it as well and we went all together. What we saw were the works of Gustavo Isoe, a Japanese representative of Spanish realism.

I'm not usually very interested in Realism, which, basically, is the exact depiction of objects, creatures, humans exactly as they are. It requires an extremely high level of skill to paint and draw things so detailed that they look exactly like a photograph, but there is more than that to the pictures of this artist than just that. In some works he leaves composition lines to be seen, others look somehow dirty, or as if one has left a coffee cup on top of them, yet in others the background simply fades into a deep, swallowing black. It's as if there's a deeper, hidden meaning behind all of them. More depth than those objects should be able to have. His portraits and figure drawings were amazing as well, but it was the obejcts that fascinated me the most. I was still completely captured by it all when we left the museum and went off into the direction of yet another temple. After that wonderful exhibition though, I wanted nothing more to muse further over those pictures and browse through the book about the artist which I had got myself, so I had to affront my Japanese yet a second time in one day when I told them I didn't want to to see another temple.

It's not as if Japanese temples and shrines aren't beautiful, they all are! But after having seen three already on the day before, two on the same day and knowing that there would be more to follow the next, I was starting to get slightly tired of them. In general, after all, the idea stays the same. So I went my own way, meeting up with everybody again later in the evening when we were going out to eat again.

On the last day in Nara we checked out, went to see two more temples there and then went to Uji to see the building that's on the 10 Yen coin, the Phoenix Hall of the Byoudou-in temple. That day was, by the way, an official holiday, Culture Day and the place was once again packed with people. Still, it was really impressive and the adjoining museum was great, too. Afterwards we stayed for a macha ice and then I was driven to Uji station from where I went off to Kyoto on my own to spend three more days there.

I had really hoped I would be able to see the city in autumn colors, but unfortunately most trees were only beginning to turn red. I still had a great time, especially because I met a friend from Finland, who is also studying in Lahti and is now on exchange in Kyoto for half a year. With him I finally got to see a more normal Kyoto of a person really living there, not only the tourist version. Ok, Friday we did the touristy tour with Gion and the Silver Pavillion, but in the night we went out with other exchange students and on Saturday we visited what I would call the 'Last Real Game Center'.

Game centers generally are entertainment places filled with gaming machines. The ones in which I was before were filled mostly with the kind of automats were you put in a coin and then have limited time trying to grab whatever's in the machine with some kind of claw. Then there's the japanese photo sticker booths, purikura(Scream!). What seems to be missing in more and more modern game centers are the games that first made them famous: for example DDR, or Dance Dance Revolution.

Not so in that one, true, original game center that looked as if it stayed over from the 80's. It was brilliant. There was a guitar game, a taito (drum) game I had seen and played before, and a lot of other, rather questionable looking appliances. The weirdest probably was a sumo game in which you were obviously supposed to get onto the platform to grapple with a plastic sumo wrestler. There was a small golf part and even several baseball machines, shooting out whatever number of balls you bought at speeds of your choosing, the lowest, if I remember right, being somewhat around 100 km/h. And, of course, we played DDR. The game where, in rhythm with the music, you have to press the arrows shown on the screen with your feet.

My flat mate has the game at home for the play station 2 together with a dance mat for two, so we've been playing it a lot. But this was the first time I got to play it on the big, original machine and it was much, much harder than on the dance mat. It felt as if I had to really jump onto the arrows to make them react. A bit annoying, but pretty cool to finally have been able to play it there. The dad news is though, it's supposed to be closed up at the end of this year. Probably so they can equip it anew with nothing else but UFO games and other boring, sit-and-stare, moving only your fingers games.

Sad, but at least I still was able to visit it (thanks, Topi!!)

Then on Sunday I said goodbye to Kyoto, and I almost fear it might have been my last time there on this exchange. I might not be able to squeeze another trip out of my fast deplenishing account, especially since I will be going to Tokyo on 2^nd of December to visit the same friends who came to visit me for the school festival here!

Looking very much forward to it, and hope that I will be able to put up another blog about my projects in school before that. Until then, some more pictures!