Lost in Translation: Images of Beauty

I don't want to give the impression that everywhere you look in Japan you find a tranquil Zen garden or a majestic waterfall. But, these things are all around for the finding, if you look for them. I tend of course to write about the more beautiful things I have seen, and though I try to be even-handed and cover all aspects of my experience here, I like beautiful places. So this post will be devoted to beauty.

Last weekend, we visited the city of Tajimi and visited the Eihoji Zen Temple, part of the Rinzai denomination of Buddhism. Okay that last part might have been too much information, except for all 2 of you Buddhists out there. For everyone else, it's the place where the dudes in the robes hang out.

A quick aside. It was Hong's birthday nearly a month ago, but due to some poor strategic planning my birthday dinner for her consisted of microwaved soup and Ritz crackers from a convenience store. More on that later. Anyway, I told her I'd make it up to her, so we met in Tajimi (halfway between us) and went trolling for restaurants in my car. On some random street we smelled the intoxicating aroma of...roasting beef! Oh my, we had to stop. But, since we can't read the signs on restaurants, we didn't know which one was which. We followed our noses to one and headed in. We sat down. Shit, no pictures on the menu. This is dangerous. After much verbal confusion with the waitress, she lost patience with us and transferred us to her more English-proficient colleague. Turns out all this restaurant serves is eel. Shit, that's it. Just eel. I promised Hong steak. Crap, well, can't leave, that would be too rude. So, I tell her that this is not the birthday lunch anymore, and therefore we can split the tab. Eel comes, it's not bad really. We go to pay the bill, and she asks if we want separate bills. We do. She rings up $18. Oh, there must be some mistake, we asked for separate bills. Nope. It's $18 a person. That's some motivation to learn Japanese right there. Know what you're paying for.

So anyway we drove to the Eihoji Temple and walked around and it was quite lovely. I love temples and gardens. Maybe it's my escapist side that doesn't want to deal with the outside world, but I don't think I'm happier than when I'm in a tranquil garden, isolated for a moment from modernity, responsibility, cars, politics, concrete buildings. Something about a place of beauty in the middle of a much uglier, much grittier world makes me feel good. In one sense, this makes it even harder to accept what you find when you leave its gates, but I think of it as refilling my 'bowl of goodness.' Some moments spent in quiet appreciation of beauty are never wasted, even though they must inevitably end.

This particular temple was built into the side of a mountain, and as we made our way up the trail, we could see spectacular rays of light coming through the trees (not this tree...sorry!). It was like nothing I've ever seen before. It looked as if E.T. were landing above us, it was so intense. I let my imagination run wild a little bit and wondered if maybe there were something there.

We did find something unusual. A huge Goddess of Mercy, a Buddhist goddess. Hong has a jade necklace with the some one, so it was a nice surprise. She's always saying how the Japanese Buddhism is so different from hers, so it was cool to find something familiar.

Yesterday we drove up to Tsukechi, a beautiful place up in the mountains around the city I live in. I got lost many times, and it was mildly terrifying driving on those tiny roads with ridiculous cliffs and lots of loose, scattered leaves (the better to lose traction with, my dear!). Finally, though, I found what I was looking for, a gorge with high-strung walking bridges and precarious paths hundreds of feet above crystal blue water. I can't describe how much I like it, so I'll just let the pictures speak for themselves. This place was where I went into the forest in Japan for the first time when I first arrived here, and thus it has a special feeling for me. It is a powerful, beautiful place, and one of my favorites in Japan.