On the morning of June 27th, 2010... June 27, 2010 08:21

....I unexpectedly became cool.

Before I came to Japan, appearing in a photograph next to real football players was something that was only going to happen to me through the wonders of Photoshop.  And the possibility of  being presented with a real jersey was about the same probability for me as winning the Giant Slalom or living in Key West with a dolphin friend that I solved mysteries with every week.

But all that has changed.

Today I got to stand on stage next to Ryuji Bando and Akihiro Ienaga.  They play football for Cerezo Osaka.  They are calm, thoughtful and soft spoken, as opposed to me, who is noisy and moves around too much.  But they don't know that and so they gave me a jersey that they had signed.  They gave one to Dean too.  Then they took a picture with us.

I really don't know how to add to that.  So I'll just stop here.

Manga Museum June 26, 2010 17:46

Did you know that the International Manga Museum is in Kyoto?  I didn't either.  Till we accidentally drove past it.

There are some exhibits in the galleries upstairs, and I saw original Range Murata drawings and some huge prints of his finished work.  There was a cast of Hayao Miyazaki's hand.  There were a lot of visitors dressed up like their favorite characters, and it made me feel at home, like I was visiting Comic Con a little early.  All these things were what I expected to see.

But what I didn't expect was that the vast majority of the space in the two-story building was lined with books.  Tall, unending shelves of them.  It starts downstairs and continues upstairs.  And every so often there is a bench with someone reading.  The core of the upstairs was a very tall gallery with Manga arranged neatly from 1945 to 2010.  You could read whatever you wanted.  People were sitting on benches and sofas, catching up on stories that began before they were born.  That's really what this place is, a massive reading room and repository for Manga culture.

No picture taking is allowed in the main room or the galleries but I'm sure they have a website you could visit to get a better image of the place.

Kyoto 3 - Bronze Creatures June 25, 2010 17:56

I've been meaning to do a little post about some of the creatures I've run across in Kyoto.  I've seen more here merely because I've had a day off to look around.  One of the things I've noticed is that there is that quite often, different materials and textures are placed together.  Like this dragon fountain.  Metal, stone and water all working with each other.  More on that later.

For now, I wanted to post these pictures of a Dragon from Kiyomizudera Temple, and two Guardian Lions from Yasaka Shrine.

Kyoto 2 - Kiyomizudera Temple June 25, 2010 10:13

In the United States, a tourist attraction might be the mummified corpse of an obscure gunslinger with a stapled-on dolphin tail, advertised as a real mermaid, lying in state behind a gas station.

In Japan its more likely to be a solid granite temple built by master artists, frequented by real spirits and demons.

In this case it is a truly amazing temple built to channel a natural spring which has been running constantly since, like, eight hundred years ago.  Otowa waterfall.  It is part of a large complex of buildings and temples at the foot of a mountain.  People stand in a short line for their turn to capture a little cup of water from one of three streams coursing above their heads.  Each stream has a specific in its properties.  Drinking the water of the three streams is said to confer wisdom, health, or longevity.  I was told that drinking from more than one was considered bad form, and may bring misfortune.

I wasn't sure if the order of the  streams went from left to right, or right to left.  So I didn't chance getting the wrong thing, and just watched from a distance and took pictures of everyone else drinking.  I'm not sure about the power of the water, but the temple seemed to bring a lot of happiness indeed.

Kyoto part one June 24, 2010 18:40

So we arrive in Kyoto last night, and wisely decided to get dinner at a really cool restaurant that was super-hard to find.  It is hard to find partially because smaller streets don't have any names.  So when you get to this level of searching you're really using landmarks as much as anything.  Like, "Turn right when you see a house with yellow curtains.  If you see a guy on a red bike you've gone too far."

This suits me because its how I navigate.  When I was a kid I rode my bicycle everywhere, but never realized I wasn't reading street signs when one day, after riding the same route for ten years, I looked around and didn't recognize anything.  I was lost.  I had to backtrack and circle for quite a while before I figured out where I was.  How did I get lost in a county I rode through thousands of times?   A guy painted his house.  When the color of the house changed, I didn't get my cue to turn and, well, just kept riding, looking for a yellow house, till I hit the foothills of the rocky mountains and realized there was a problem.