February 28 

Nagao-san had found a train schedule for me on his cell phone, which I followed even though I’d arrive in Kyoto over half an hour before the time Naomi and I had agreed on.  I purchased another bottle of sparkling water and waited on the sunny platform for the train out of Gifu.  It would have been faster to take a less direct route, using the Shinkansen bullet train, but Nagao-san’s route was cheaper, and I quite like the slow, methodical plod of the regular trains.  They look just like the train at the end of “Spirited Away.” 

I got off at Kyoto after exactly two hours and walked toward the wicket gate, already thinking about where to go to the bathroom and where to find a coin locker in that huge train station, when one of the people rushing past me whirled around and shouted “Stephan!”  If my heart hadn’t stopped, I would have dropped my bags.  It was Naomi, who had been on the same train, it turned out, and had thought we’d agreed to meet an hour earlier than I had remembered. 

A toilet and a coin locker later we were on a bus for the Ginkakuji, a UNESCO World Heritage site.  It had started to drizzle and the drizzle intensified once we arrived.  Ginkakuji means silver-plated temple, but it isn’t silver-plated.  It’s the thought that counts, apparently.  The most striking aspect of the temple site, aside from the Ginkakuji building, is the double sand sculpture consisting of a large truncated cone with a dimple in the top and an expansive free-form with diagonal stripes reminiscent of a soccer jersey.  The free-form stood about a foot above the ground, the outer walls rising at the same steep angle as the cone.  I can’t begin to imagine how long it must have taken to make this sculpture, nor how much continual upkeep it requires.  Desite this admiration, I preferred the garden and its luscious green to the temple buildings, especially in the rainy weather with occasional slants of sun. 

As we left, the rain stopped.  We had lunch in the Cafe Bear; I had an omchiizukaree, a thin omelet wrapped around a lot of rice and a bit of cheese, with Japanese curry on the side.  In the corner stood a darts machine with a video playing J-pop; the machine would make a robotic coughing sound at random intervals.  We both had matcha ice cream for dessert – I ordered it without asking Naomi after she’d admitted to not having tried any yet. 

From there, we headed to the Ginkakuji’s cousin, the Kinkakuji.  As if on cue, the sun shone for that visit and reflected off the gold plating and the water, giving at times the impression that the temple floated in mid-air.  The visitors there differed from those at the Ginkakuji as well: instead of couples and groups of three we had a large Chinese tour group, more Westerners, and an odd couple of a Western blonde not my age and a Japanese guy with stringy hair dressed in black and leather. 

I enjoyed discussing aspects of living in Japan with Naomi, herself a dual citizen of Japan and Switzerland.  We know each other from Basel, so even though we’d often spoken, we’d never touched on Japan in the way we did now.  We shared our stories of “How do you like the Japanese men/women?” and how we felt ambivalent about living in Japan, we shared coping strategies and funny moments.  Naomi said when describing her experience of Japan and Switzerland that she felt as though there were two parallel worlds that she switched between, like our world and Narnia, both real, but with few if any intersections between the two, which makes it so hard to describe Japan to someone who hasn’t been there.  And seeing me in the “wrong” world felt weird to her – and vice versa – but we both enjoyed a good Swiss German afternoon. 

Around six I headed out to Yagi to meet Joël Kuster, my “kohai,” who had just visited the nano tech the last week, but this time we chatted away the evening in French (instead of Japanese with Japanese friends) at a Tofu restaurant.  I had Diamond Guarana, a non-alcoholic guarana champagne with what looked like a home-made label, in a glass that said “5 Jahre St. Nikolaus Weinclub.”  The waiter didn’t know where the glass came from, and the drink still tasted like fizzy dissolved gummy bears.  We shocked the waiter again when I just gave Joël my unfinished rice bowl when he asked for more. 

On the way to Joël’s we passed a house where the owner appeared not to have checked the dimensions of his car before buying it.  The carport gate, instead of closing parallel to the road, folded out like an accordeon, and instead of being locked it was tied shut with metal wire.