Madeleine Rosca's International Manga Award Trip: Part Quatro
Day seven of the trip, which was to be our sightseeing day, began with the usual commotion of our bodyguard/tour guides from the Japan Foundation herding us into a confined area to tell us how we were going to spend the day. Turns out we were going to take in some local Kyoto culture and visit some temples. Despite the fact that the sun wasn't out in the morning, it was incredibly hot already - I will never get used to the fact that even in this weather, Japanese businesspeople insist on wearing woolen suit jackets and long sleeves. It made me sweat just looking at them on the street.
Anyhow, first temple we stopped at was this one; a quaint little building called the Golden Pavilion.
The grounds around this area were spectacular, and featured a garden walk which wound around some lovely wooded areas. In addition, there was a shrine on the grounds which specialized in eye-health...you gave a little donation, and supposedly it went towards the spirits at the shrine blessing your vision. Obviously, all the artists in the troupe lined up to do this - can't take any chances...
We performed an extremely fast, sort of drive-by visit of the Kyoto Historical Museum which featured artifacts of old Kyoto, and...actually, we were in there for such a short amount of time, my memory fails me. We had a heck of a lot to squeeze in to the day, so being prodded urgently in a certain direction by our keepers became a common occurrence.
Our next stop was the heavily fortified Nijo Castle, with massive stone walls and several unbelievably huge carved gates designed to repel any barbarian invader who threatened the shogun.
Seriously - LOOK AT THAT GATE!! A lot of trees died for that! Actually, the castle itself had an interesting set of wooden floorboards which, not only did a lot of other trees die for (practically every surface was wood) but which contained a crafty security feature designed to foil ninja assassins who tried to creep into the castle after dark. Known as 'nightingale floors' they were impossible to walk quietly on due to a matrix of nails placed carefully under the boards that caused them to squeak and 'sing' constantly.
The castle was very dark and creepy, and it was within these confined walls that Ben started a vague attempt to convince me that I was being followed by The Grudge. He would keep this up for most of the castle tour, in between fits of maniacal laughter and sudden declarations of "faces! I can see faces in the walls!" It didn't help my mood that the place resembled the interior of something out of Project Zero, and I was glad to get back into the sunlight.
After Nijo it was a trip to the Silver Pavillion, and the impressive walkways surrounding it. This was where we began to slowly run out of time; I would have loved to have spent more time on the manicured grounds at this place, but if we wanted to get in some tourist shopping we had to keep hurrying along.
Some of you may remember the next place we visited being featured in some manga - Kiyomizu temple. It's the one with the blessed water which you can drink to bestow health, longevity or success. I can remember it cropping up in both Air Gear and Negima at some point. There are numerous fortune-tellers and vendors selling their wares throughout. I visited a fortune-telling office attached to the temple complex overlooking the waterfalls, and paid 100 yen for my fortune. Out of twenty possible fortunes, the one I drew from the barrel was - the most unlucky one! Out of twenty!! Fortunately, there's an escape clause for bad fortunes - you can tie them to a 'tree' in the monk's courtyard nearby, which effectively 'gets rid' of them. Or so my translator said…maybe she was sparing my feelings…
We returned to Kyoto late in the afternoon in the hopes of spotting some maiko (apprentice geisha) but sadly the tourists were everywhere, and the maiko were not.
Day eight was back to our regular duties as traveling manga-ka. We returned to Tokyo via the bullet train, which used up most of the morning. Then in the afternoon, we set out on a jaunt to Akihabara.
There is no other way to say it - Akihabara makes you weep with sheer bitterness that you did not bring more spending money with you. Once again, time constraints kicked in, so we were largely restricted to exploring the buildings around the train station itself. For all lovers of anime/manga shopping, this place was just heaven. I blew most of my trip money here, particularly in K-Books, a manga/otaku bookstore which occupies the whole top level of a department store. I have never seen so many art books dedicated to anime…auurrghhhlll…
And more than a third of that entire floor was the hentai section, which women shoppers never stepped foot in. Dirty, dirty otaku. Akihabara's also home to a lot of maid cafes - we were slated to go to one, but ran out of time...curses...
Other than that, day eight sort of meandered to an early close. This was good, for we had two of the largest events of the trip coming the next day - for me, at least.
Day nine started out with us catching the cat-bus from Mitaka station to the Ghibli museum. Literally, it was a bus with cats painted all over it, and the Ghibli motif everywhere. And children. Lots of children…so many children…
The Ghibli museum must surely be a mecca for the young ones everywhere in Japan. Hence it had quite a 'young' feel to it, with a lot of entertainment options for the kiddies, such as the cat-bus room - literally, that six-legged cat-bus thing from Totoro, turned into an enormous life-sized plushie that Japanese kids were leaping into and falling off with screaming abandon.
I took in the exhibit rooms upstairs, which featured loads of artwork, conceptual and production, from Ghibli's various features. Obviously, Totoro was huge, and Kiki's Delivery Service got a lot of devoted space as well. Curiously a bit absent were any displays on Princess Mononoke, and I'm surprised Spirited Away wasn't as visible in the exhibitions as Totoro and Kiki were…the museum definitely leans towards the nostalgia of the studio's early works.
The next stop on our itinerary was a biggie…it had been kept top secret for a while, but we had known for a while we'd be visiting a manga artist at their studio for a meet n' greet. It turned out to be Inoue Takehiko. You might have heard of him; he's an artist who did a little basketball manga called Slam Dunk a few years ago, and is now working on a samurai manga called Vagabond.
He turned out to be an extremely super-nice guy, although when he discovered I was Australian his face fell and his expression became agonized. For a few seconds I was wondering what I did wrong until he communicated through my translator that he was still feeling wounded about Australia knocking Japan out of the world cup last year. Drat, I never thought the Socceroos would get me off to such a bad start with one of Japan's leading manga-ka! Fortunately he didn't take it personally, and we were able to relax and have a chat. Li, being confident, asked most of the questions, and Takehiko was happy to answer. It turns out he believes pretty solidly that artists should get up and take breaks in which they go for a walk or play some sports, because spinal problems are common in this profession (tell me about it). He also talked about how different Slam Dunk was to Vagabond, and how he concentrates on the motivation of his characters in his writing. All in all, he was great, and we were all feeling pretty humbled that he'd take an hour out of his schedule (it was one of Vagabond's dreaded editorial deadline days) to speak with us.
Well - that was actually the last 'official' stop on the trip. Day ten was dedicated to getting us to the airport in one piece. I had to say goodbye to the other three the night beforehand, because they all had early flights. Me? My flight back to Melbourne was at 8…pm!! So I had a whole day to kill and no Japanese translator with me anymore…what to do? Why…return to Akihabara for a solo shopping visit, and blow more money! Woo! And amazingly, I navigated a foreign train system on my lonesome without getting lost and ending up in Nagasaki by mistake. I'm so proud.
After picking up a few extra duty free items at the airport and boarding my (looooong) flight, it was all over. Hmm…what can I say? Definitely one of the best experiences of my life, although also a huge learning curve…it was a shock to my system to see how unprepared I was for the trip, and next time will be different!