The title comes from a t-shirt I saw.  In its entirety, it said:

Walking on Sunshine
I become beautiful because of
INTELLIGENCE and
SENSITIVITY
Why do I recall youthful days?

Another gem I spotted on a middle-aged man with a limp:

I waited so long
for someone so fine
don’t want true love don’t want
brains just give me their bodies tonight

And finally, one I couldn’t quite make out because it was partially covered:

TEXAS
In Texas
Everything is bigg-
banana s-

Although intrigued, I couldn’t gather up the courage to ask to read the whole thing. 

Back to the beginning: I got up.  I hurried through the motions – shower, e-mail – and walked to the Shinjuku train station forgetting my cap, sunglasses, and suntan lotion.  Fortunately, the sun was hardly to peek out from behind the clouds.  I took the Shonan-Shinjuku line to Yokohama and waited at the View Plaza to meet with Akiko.  Now, unless you’re blessed with an exceptionally good memory, you won’t know who Akiko is.  I wrote about her in an old blog, then still called Nihon News XIV – see the thrid paragraph from the bottom.  (Note: that link is to a geocities site, and that site is limited in hourly bandwidth, so unless you’re extremely lucky you won’t be able to look at all the pictures at once.)  Unfortunately, Akiko waited at the ticket office, and I spent my time leafing through brochures advertising travel to Switzerland and once again lamenting that Basel never even makes it onto the maps of Switzerland in those brochures.  (That, in my opinion, is like a map of Japan without Osaka on it.)  In the end, I called Akiko from a public phone.  In three minutes we had met. 

We took the train to Kamakura, a former capital of Japan way back when.  We walked from the station along the designated souvenir shopping street to the Tsurugaoka Hachimangu shrine, the most well-known of the many Kamakura shrines.  The approach leads across a moat and along a wide, straight path to a square at the foot of a hill, where the first ceremonial building sits.  That construction, open to all sides, is apparently used for weddings, as evidenced by the one taking place when we arrived.  We walked around it and up the long flight of stairs climbing up the hill to the main shrine.  At the top, visitors tossed coins in the offertory and, I presume, made a wish or prayer.  We could have explored more of this building, but it looked too small to warrant the entry fee so we walked back down and over past the treasure hall to the lotus pond.  I had Amazake there, a sweet rice drink with floating bits inside.  We sat and talked and gazed out over the pond, at its greenery.  Pigeons – many of them white – did their pinheaded best to try to eat as much as possible of what the tourists fed them. 

Walking back underneath cherry trees we spotted a sword shop and dropped in.  The most expensive one went for 1’200’000 yen, a simple blade in a hinoki hilt and a hinoki scabbard above it, their gentle curves presented on a stand draped in white silk.  The cheaper ones looked cooler, but because the salesman was busy, I couldn’t ask what made the expensive one so much more expensive.  So instead I stopped at another shop and bought a bottle each of local sake and local dark beer. 

We took the train to Kita-Kamakura (North Kamakura) and had a delicious Japanese-style lunch at the Matsugaoka restaurant (leave the station on the west side and turn left on the main road, walk to the first crosswalk with a light and it’s the building just beyond the crosswalk on the opposite side).  For 3600 yen each we treated ourselves to a sequence of little delicacies, beginning with the matcha-flavored green tea (it’s a little hard to explain, but apparently the green tea leaves are first sprinkled with powdered green tea – matcha – and then dried like that).  We didn’t have to order – there wasn’t even a selection to choose from at lunch – we simply received bowl after bowl of things like turnip, fried eggplant with miso, shrimp balls, rice in a seasonally decorated bowl, clear fish soup, unidentifiable sesame-flavored veggies, rice wrapped in pickled shallots, and other bits I can’t remember.  It took us a while to eat, and because we arrived a little late we soon sat alone in the room furnished with black wood, tatami mats, white shoji paper and grey wallpaper.  The one waitress was surprised at my detailed interest in what the dessert was made of, but she probably hasn’t ever expected jam and gotten bean paste.  I don’t mind trying new food; I do like knowing what I’m getting into. 

We visited the Tokeiji temple right next door to see what about the bowl was seasonal: the picture of the iris in bloom.  In the middle of the temple grounds a square patch of three by ten meters stood crowned by purple flowers.  Farther back, toward the gravesites, a large rock face stood covered in “iwatabako,” or “rock tobacco,” botanical name conandron ramondioides.  The grave markers, called haka, stood in picturesque silence among mossy railings, tall, leafy trees, paths of hewn stone, and hollows carved into the rock face. 

We left and sat in a little restaurant overlooking a quiet pond right by the railway line, and I helped Akiko with the English directions to the Yokohama country club she works for.  Admittedly, it’s a members-only club and the only foreigners are brought by their Japanese friends, but it looks good to have an English page.  Then, after just sitting for a while in the languid quiet, we took the train back to Yokohama, where I did a little shopping before we parted and I headed back to Shinjuku, where I found that dodging people in a crowd is a lot more fun if you say “zzzzoop!” every time you successfully dodge someone.  I bought dinner at a convenience store, consisting of kara-age, a natto onigiri roll, and a sea-chicken-mayo onigiri.  I bought the latter specifically because Janet had insisted that Japanese mayo was different from mayo elsewhere.  My conclusion is that it may be a tad sweeter, but that’s all I can say.  (The Wikipedia article referenced will tell you why it tastes different.)  What I can say with certainty is that I once again was impressed at the ingenious packaging the Japanese have developed for their onigiri.  The natto onigiri roll even had the sticky rice separated from the seaweed, but once the rice was opened it rolled right into the seaweed, and all that in mid-air.  Brilliant! 

I also did laundry tonight, in the Toyoko-Inn coin laundry.  I’ll find out next week if my blue shirt shrunk in the dryer or not.  Because I needed to repeatedly leave the room, but didn’t want my laptop to switch off, I took the toothbrush the hotel supplies daily and stuck it in where the key holder goes, allowing me to leave the room without shutting down the electricity or locking myself out. 

Why do I recall youthful days?  Because I didn’t take any pictures.  Same with today: I brought my camera only to find the battery was not charged.