Kyoto International Manga Museum

Well, I really don't have too very much to offer about the museum, and there are no photos in my possession of the inside of the museum. It was primarily a grand library of manga (comic books) from the earliest days of Japanese manga—the first children's manga was published in 1905—to the present.

The museum contains exhibits of the development of the manga art form, laid out chronologically, and the library houses about 50,000 manga, spanning a period from the 1970's to the present. The visitor can purchase a yearly membership and have daily access to the manga if he/she wishes, so it really is possible to read a whole series from the "Wall of Manga."

Here's the link to the museum's web site, however, so that anyone who's a fan might have a look.

http://www.kyotomm.jp/english/

There is actually quite a bit of information on the site, though the illustrations/photos appear to be mainly of visiting exhibits.

Whod'a thunk?

The Mei & Satsuki House, Nagoya, Japan

Come walk with me. Today I'm dropping in on the world of Hayao Miyazaki, one of Japan's most famous and best-loved animators. If you've never had the pleasure of viewing any (and all) of his films, I highly recommend taking the time to do so. I'm fairly picky about the films I choose to view, because life is short, and time is precious. Every one of his films, however, is worth the hours and minutes.

The quaint little house below is a literal re-creation of the house inhabited by the family of Mei and Satsuki Kusakabe and their parents. At least in the story it does. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Neighbor_Totoro. This one can be found in Nagoya, Japan. It was constructed based on the detailed plans and illustrations—and I mean detailed—of the house in the animated film in which the two sisters and their father move into an old house in the country. It is a sweet enough house in the film, but a sheer delight in tactile 3-D.

We were not just invited, but encouraged to look at, touch, move whatever we wanted. We couldn't drink the water or go up the attic stairs. Nor could we take photos inside. But for half an hour we had the run of the place, the eleven of us plus the other 10 or so from our group. I should note at this point that a friend of ours, Junko-san, a Nagoya resident, was the one who put us onto this entire experience. She arranged for the tickets, which were free, but which required advanced reservations. She also drove my in-laws, my youngest and me to the site, while my husband and the older girls took the train.

We slid open drawers and cabinets, pulled out 1950's era gloves and labeled tins of powders and pomades, smelled camphor (an inside reference for anyone who knows the film) in the storage chests, pumped water by hand at the outdoor well, peeked our heads into various closets and windows. It was wonderful. 

Every one in my eight-person family (six of us plus my in-laws) felt a nostalgic longing to live in this house. Never mind that the reality would likely never live up to our dreamy expectations. It was simply a fictional slice of life from a different time (and place). The thing about a real time 3-D snapshot of someone else's quiet life is that it always comes across as being so idyllic. But even in the story of Totoro, life is far from perfect. The mom is sick with a malady unknown to us in the audience and has been in hospital for some prolonged period of time. It is 1958, and the hospital is some three hours away by foot. Professor Kusakabe still has to work at the university, while his four-year-old and school-aged daughters attend school and remain under the watchful eye of a kind neighbor. Perhaps life was quieter and safer in the 1950's and in Japan specifically, but to be realistic, not to mention fair, no life is without its struggles.

Disclaimer time here: though we were not officially allowed to take photographs inside the house, the ones I took are outside looking on, with a few looking in. Honesty can be such a pain in the neck sometimes, but I guess it's worth being able to sleep well at night.

I must include a few photos of just lovely sights, as there were many, on the way from the parking lot through the park and on to the house itself . . .

Okay, I guess that's enough for now. I only wish I could figure out how to enlarge them enough for you to see better. A tutorial for another day, I suppose.

Professor Kusakabe's study at the side/back/front? of the house. True to character, he is function over form. His study looks like my house—books everywhere, papers piled and in disarray, knick-knacks and tell-tale travel souvenirs dotted throughout. I love the tiny little chair to right of the doors. I didn't even notice it when we were there because there was so much to see.

Another view into the house. This would have been an all-purpose room that could be opened up to its largest dimension or divided by the screens you  might just be able to see suspended about halfway through the room. These are called sudare. In recent decades it has become immensely popular over here in the west (U.S., at least) to use sudare as window shades. They have a very natural, calming appearance to them and we get to feel as if we are getting back to nature.

The best sudare are just gorgeous, and they are intended to provide light and privacy at the same time. A larger room such as the one above could be divided into sleeping quarters at night, but be opened up as  living space during the day. Believe me, when it comes to making the most of space there have been many times when I have thought that the Japanese are the ones who got it right and that we need to re-think our floor-plan. Can you imagine what a simple ranch/rambler, or a two-story townhouse would be like with all that space opened up during the day?

Here we have two cute and curious little girls pumping water at a real well. Yes, that is a watermelon in the barrel, and there is a sock/sack attached to the end of the pipe. The sock was put there to reduce the amount of dirt and minerals that came up with the water. We weren't allowed to drink from the wells, but the kids certainly had fun playing and pretending.

Under the back entrance (where the little Totoro would have snuck in under the house ^o^) rests Mei's little tea set and some water vessels, dwarfed, as you can see, by Dad's geta.

A peek into the kitchen—to see how the kitchen would have been used, you should really watch the movie. You can clearly see another water pump here in the kitchen.

Supply of wood for the stove just behind the kitchen, and a wooden cart used for . . . whatever.

Older roofs in Japan are just beautiful, but everything in Japan has a purpose, even the most ornate and beautiful objects. That is one of the things I really love about Japan, that there is both beauty and a purpose to everyday things. Here, it isn't difficult to see that the roof channels rainwater and makes it easier for the sun and warm air to melt snow and ice, rather than let it sit in a thick, undisturbed, and possibly dangerous, sheet of ice. It is because of this Japanese insistence on form as well as function that we decided to install rain chains from the under-deck behind our house. Why shouldn't the rain tumble down in an esthetically pleasing waterfall into a catch-basin or rain barrel beneath?

And for a few last looks at the outside of the house . . .

Don't worry. I won't leave you without real photos of the inside of the house. I just have to go through official channels and send you to the right web sites. Enjoy! (Word to the wise: if you go looking at other sites for more info, you may find some imagery from other artists and animators that you hadn't bargained for. So if you are looking at the computer with your kids, a bit of pre-screening is probably a good idea.).

The official 2005 Expo site:
http://www.expo2005.or.jp/en/venue/experience05.html

Wikimedia photos:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Satsuki_and_Mei’s_House

Another fun site:
http://www.totoro.org/

Or you can go to Google Images for Totoro-related photos and illustrations, including some of the house.

One day soon, I'll post photos of our trip to the actual Studio Ghibli Museum in Miitaka, Tokyo. 'Til then, ki o tsukete, ne? (Take care.).

Lunch a la Japonaise

Bento (lunch) prepared and waiting for a very hungry customer.

Let's see. In this lunch I see pickled vegetables, shrimp croquette, smoked salmon over shredded raw diakon radish, mini quiche, prosciutto or raw ham, tuna sashimi with a yummy-looking melange of sauce, sesame seeds, and chopped greens (probably onion), Vietnamese summer roll, and one or two other things I can no longer see well enough to identify. For the record, at the center-top square of the bento on the left is a funny herb that is very much like a shallot, but also very different, called Myoga (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myoga). I have never found it in the U.S., but I would very much like to.

Sliced pork, called char shu (as closely as I can transliterate).

Sarada (salads).

If I'm not mistaken about this one, it is a box of fish cakes. The kana on the label indicate "surimi", which is the pollock-type fish that is used in imitation seafood here, and which the Japanese have used to make their own fishcakes for far longer than we've known about it.

A variety of bento, the more expensive of which appears to be over $10.00, and the least expensive about $7.00.

Close-up of more salads, some containing meat and seafood.

For all you caviar lovers out there, I think this would be salmon. And the next photo is of a variety of caviars. Of course, the Japanese palate appreciates this item in a different context than a western appetite would. Rice, often vinegared, is the preferred medium in Japan, while in the west, of course, breads or blini would be chosen.

And last, but not least, good old sandwiches. Though you will likely find it a bit odd at first to bit into a potato salad sandwich, it is actually quite tasty. It is not uncommon to find two and three layers of filling in a sandwich, along the lines of a double or triple decker, but the fillings will be familiar and yet unfamiliar at the same time. Always good, though. I don't remember ever having had a bad sandwich.


So, that will wrap up lunch at the Sogo Department store. I'll have to look back through my photos and see what strikes me as a good post for the next go round. Sayonara for now.

I Know I Promised Furniture, but . . .

Food is pretty important. In fact, in the grand scheme of things, it's a good deal more important than furniture, I'd say. So, with that in mind, I thought I would torment all of us with just plain food photos from Japan.

Zaru soba with mountain vegetables. The sauce is a soy-based sauce to which sugar, mirin, and dashi have been added. Mirin is cooking rice wine, and dashi is a dried and smoked fish stock. There is no fishy taste to it, however. Not in my opinion, anyway.

A bit blurry, but this teishoku (lunch set) is Tonkatsu—pork cutlet breaded in Panko, then deep-fried, served, usually, with shredded cabbage, white rice, pickles, and miso soup.

For all you food lovers out there, you have never seen anything until you've shopped in the basement floor(s) of major department stores in Japan. Above is just one sliver of the offerings available in the sweets section of Sogo department ("depaato", in Japanese) store in Yokohama. I think I'll show a few more before moving on to savories.

Isu-kuremu (ice cream).

Chokoreto (chocolate).

More sweets . . .

Including a green tea torte

and a selection of green teas to go with your sweets

Unless you would prefer to have a ko-hi (coffee) instead.

I believe that rather than make this post as long as the great wall of China, I shall save the savories for another post. It is after lunchtime by now, and all these sweets should be making people look forward to teatime, which, by the way, is observed in Japan.

Back to Basics

Well, my own personal basics, anyway.

I've been meaning to get around to posting photos of our Japan trip, which seems years ago now, and I just haven't got round to it. So please bear with me while I make my first attempt.

Hmm. Not too bad. That was pretty easy, actually.

I'm taking these photos out of the chronological order of our actual trip, but the first place that come to mind when I thought about our summer trip to Japan was Takayama. A popular, though out-of-the way, tourist destination in Japan is a small mountain town called Takayama (where I snapped the above photo). The streets there are a bit like a working museum, and the town looks much like it would have a few centuries ago—think a Japanese Colonial Williamsburg. Though you can certainly find modern products to buy in the shops, there a quite a few that still sell foods and other goods that are made using the same processes that would have been in use during the time period. Unlike a museum, however, many of the shops are still owned and operated by the same families who have lived and worked there for generations.

See this? It's a cedar ball suspended above the entrance to a sake brewery. A family-style one, that is. We were told that everywhere we saw a cedar ball like this, we were looking at a sake brewery. It's basically the same thing as hanging the tradesman's shingle out front. The ball is actually made of cedar, which grows everywhere and is used everywhere as well.

The breweries look pretty much like any other type of shop on the street, and if you walk inside, you will be greeted by a family member or employee. At a small bar inside, patrons can participate in a Japanese style wine tasting (sake in lieu of wine), and I was disappointed on our trip not to have had more time there with my husband. It would have been so much fun to just belly up to the bar and hang out tasting sake for a while. But our children, unlike horses, couldn't just be hitched up to the post outside, quietly to graze on oats while we took our time in the sake saloon, so we had to move on . . .

This photo was taken from the train window on the way to Takayama, and since my poor little camera is very basic and not at all brand new, this was about the clearest shot I could get of what I guessed (correctly) were small green tea plantations. For more thorough info, you might check out http://www.obubutea.com/ . I'm not recommending this site for any particular reason other than for the photos of what a tea plantation looks like, though it does appear to be an incredibly dense site that I will be looking at more closely myself. Most of us, I'm guessing, only see the dried tea, and many only see it through the gauzy paper sachets that come in boxes of twenty, so I thought you might find it interesting.

Just enough time for one more, I think . . .

It's hard to resist including a photo of a certain familiar face surrounded by the image of "sarubobo". The sarubobo (meaning literally "monkey baby") has a long history. Of course, the origin is most likely very simple: scraps of fabric were used by mothers and grandmothers to make dolls for children. Along the way, however, greater symbolism became attached to the dolls. There are many, many charms for luck in Japan, and this is one of them. This blog has some really great photos: http://hidatakayama.blogspot.com/2010/04/sarubobo-luck-made-of-plush.html

Well, that's all the time we have for today, boys and girls. Perhaps tomorrow I'll put up photos of a wood furniture factory we visited while in Takayama. No, really, it was pretty interesting, and I won't write a book, I promise. For now, if you're interested in more information than I have included here, this is a fantastic site: http://www.hida.jp/english/index.htm

A New Day

Gosh, I seem to have fallen off the face of the planet! Best to give a quick update, I guess.

I'm

• too busy.
• finally finished reading Atlas Shrugged for the first time. Look for the movie out next year by the look of things. By the way, the protagonist in the novel is named Dagny, which means "new day."
• not looking forward to being cold this winter. Maybe I will be able to embrace my inner polar bear, but I'm not so sure about that. Maybe just a bunch of good books.

• looking forward to seeing the play my eldest has spent so much of her last two months helping to put on.
• looking for a place to sell and/or refine my old silver. I love the stuff, but it's such a pain to take care of.
• trying to decide if it is more cost effective to sell or donate clothes I just don't wear. Probably the latter.
• thinking that my life's mission really and truly, once and for all, is to make sure that the first 18+ years of each of my children's lives are well-spent and that I would be a fool to think public school can come close to accomplishing that.

• another year more advanced as a human being as of last month. Don't laugh, you know what I mean.
• drowning in the minutiae of life.
• imagining what life, full-time, in the Caribbean might be like.
• remembering that once I upon a time, not so long ago, I used to be into the whole writing thing.
• remembering that there are a great many things besides writing that I actually also enjoy doing. Hence the big gap in my writing . . . "Oh, bother," as my old friend Pooh is wont to say.

There. that feels better already. Now to go upload a few photos somewhere so someone(thing) besides my computer can view them . . .