) about my recent trip to Japan. So, if anyone else is interested, I will share. If anyone else has gone there, please feel free to join in and share your experiences, too! Japan is a wonderful place, and both times we've been there we've had new and varied experiences. So anything else anyone has to share about their trip would add to mine as well. Before I begin, let me preface this by saying as I mentioned before, we host Japanese students in our home. These are the ones that come for only a month to stay in an American home and learn English. Tip: If you want a good way to have an almost guaranteed place to stay in Japan, host a Japanese student, either for a month or a school year. We've hosted fifteen girls (a sixteenth is due in February) and they've been from almost all over Japan. About seven of them have kept up with us on a regular basis through the mail or email or both. Three have been back to visit (one just recently stayed for two months---that was heaven to me!). So we already had some contacts in Japan before we travelled there.
Our first trip was in October of 2001, almost a month after 9-11 (in fact Hiroko told me "please don't be offended but I thought you were crazy to come"). We had been invited to the wedding of the first girl we'd hosted, Sachie. We travelled first to the prefecture of Saitama, to visit a place called New Life League. They are a Christian publishing organization located in Japan. They are also the largest publisher of bibles in Chinese in the world! And they are starting to publish Christian manga. Not much, but they at least have made a beginning over there. After seeing their offices (out in the beautiful countryside on a hill) and visiting with the employees and sharing a worship service (in Japanese!) with them, we took the train and travelled to Gunma for the wedding. It was Western style, which meant the bride wore a wedding gown, but it was different enough that we didn't feel like we were at an American wedding. She didn't have bridesmaids and the reception (the whole thing was on my birthday and it felt like a big birthday party for me
) took forever and we went through several courses of food. The bride made two changes of gowns during the reception--she went from her wedding gown to a yellow dress and hat and then a blue dress. After the wedding we travelled to Tokyo and spent two days there. We visited the Emperor's Palace grounds, saw the Ginza district (in the pouring rain!!) and went to Akihabara. Tokyo is easy to get around in once you get the hang of the trains. From there we took the Shinkasen to the island of Shikoku (it's just below Honshu, the main island) to visit our student Hiroko and her family. We stayed in their home for five days, visiting the city of Takamatsu, which we like very much. In fact if the Lord ever sent us to Japan to live, we'd want to live there. 
We did some shopping in the downtown covered shopping streets (Tip: those are GREAT places to find unusual or traditional Japanese goods. Almost every city has an area like this). There's a shop that sells Miyazaki goods that I have to visit whenever I go there (Totoro!!). We went up Yashima mountain and looked at temples and the view from the top. We drove partway across the famous Seto-Ohashi bridge and visited Fisherman's Wharf and took a ride on a reconstructed clipper ship. We also vistied Ritsurin park, which is a beautiful Japanese tea garden complete with tea house, arched bridges over ponds, sculptured trees, and koi which we did feed. Then we took a bus with Hiroko and her mom, Etsuko to Kyoto and saw Kinkakuji, the golden pavilion, and Nijo Castle, a famous shogun residence. We didn't see any geisha, though 
After that we took the bullet back up to Tokyo and caught a plane home. The only time we saw Mt. Fuji was from the distance on the train and plane.
Second trip to Japan was again in October of this last year. Hiroko was getting married! We first went to Tokyo to meet Masami Hoshino, a mangaka I've become friends with over the internet. We visited the Studio Ghibli museum in Mitaka with Masami. It is a FABULOUS museum. If you ever go to Japan, GO THERE. It's a MUST for serious anime fans!!! The place is full of wondrous things. But don't expect Disneyworld! It is geared somewhat for kids, but the serious anime fan will find rooms showing how they animate their films, what they use for inspiration, etc. Even if you don't speak Japanese you can get along very well here. That night we travelled to Gunma to stay overnight at Masami's house. And here's where the rabid manga/comic fan in me took over...imagine this...the room Masami gave us to sleep in (shivers in delight as she tells this) is the very room where she CREATES HER COMICS!!! We slept on the floor in futons, although there were bunkbeds in the room (for her assistants. More on them later). The room had a large table that normally sat in the center so the assistants (she has five of them) could sit there and pass work around. Masami's assistants add the tone, backgrounds and other details to her work that she doesn't have the time for (remember, mangaka in Japan have to put out several pages of stuff that appears monthly or sometimes even twice a month in the phonebook sized manga). There was a huge bookcase with movable shelves containing tons of manga (including Masami's own) and reference books. She had drawers full of sheets of tone and watercolors (she uses watercolors for her covers). If I'd had time I would have asked her what kinds of tools she uses, etc. We didn't have enough time for that, but we did get into all sorts of wonderful conversations about other things (comics in Japan, the increased use of sex
in girl's and women's comics, how the age of a mangaka can affect her job, comics in America, etc., etc.). The next day we went into town to visit Masami's favorite art supply store. Holy Guacamole!!! You guys should have been there with me. This was your average big art/craft supply store, but right there, two AISLES worth, was supplies for manga wannabe artists (droooool 
). We spent lots of money there, including buying a program for adding tone to art on the computer (which we found later online in English, so after ordering that we mailed the first one back to Masami to use). After that Masami drove us to Maebashi, her home town, to see the festival. It was faboo! They had these big things called mikoshi that participants would carry down the streets. And the streets sometimes were full of groups of people dancing in unison to this one song, over and over again. They'd have hundreds of participants. And the food booths!!! You could go crazy eating all the stuff they had there...crepes...yakitori...fried squid...okonomiyaki....takoyaki...and these deelish little cakes, yum. There were booths for catching goldfish (yes, if you've seen it in the anime, they really *do* do that over there at festivals!). We stayed overnight with Masami's family. Our room was Masami's old room, and it was on the fourth...pant...puff...floor. Masami's parents own a barbershop, and their house was on several floors over that. We had a great view of the street and every time a mikoshi would go by with the carriers yelling "sei-YA!" (sorta like "oof!") we had primo viewing. We were just down the street from the main covered shopping area where all the festival activities were. It was great. And Masami's family fed us...and fed us...and fed us...you don't starve in Japan.
Next day we saw a bit more festival. There were school bands marching (that's all...just band after band after band marching and playing different songs...no floats, no clowns, just...bands). And there were some taiko (drum) players. I love taiko, so that was great. After a bit more festival we packed up, went to the train station and met our student Yuko and her father.
See part two for more! I can't post the whole thing in one post!!
--Kathleen
). We visited a great covered shopping plaza in Ueno and saw in a department store a display of wonderful handcrafted Japanese goods like kimono and furniture and combs and fabric and all sorts of marvellous stuff. We also took a quick trip to Akihabara and looked at all the latest tech stuff. I bought a small romanji English-Japanese/Japanese-English computer there to help me for the rest of the trip (and it came in handy!!). The Takanashis also took us out one night for a special dinner of shabu-shabu. Deeelish! After we finished our visit with them they put us on the bullet train and we travelled down to Hamamatsu which is almost halfway between Tokyo and Osaka to visit our student Akiko. She is going to college in Hamamatsu. She paid (the sweetie) for our hotel room at a fabulous tall hotel called the Okura Act City. It's right next to a concert hall--Hamamatsu is famous for music and culture. That night we visited Akiko's college and met her friends and boyfriend, Kensei, who is quite a character. He and Bill got along famously, so I was slyly hinting to Akiko that she should marry him because he already gets along with her American "father"! We went to dinner with her friends who were eager to speak English to Americans. It was fun, being crowded into two tiny booths with all these cute college kids. The next day we left Akiko and travelled by bullet train back down to Shikoku, to the town of Marugame, just on the other side of the Seto-Ohashi bridge, for Hiroko's wedding.
which made it difficult for us to understand what they meant when they first proposed it) instead. The next day we four Americans travelled back by train to Takamatsu to go SHOPPING till we dropped (almost quite literally!) in our favorite shopping district, while Hiroko and her family got ready for the wedding, which was the next day. Again, it was a Western-style wedding, the only difference being the chapel looked a little less expensive than the one Hiroko was married in, and Bill and I got included in lots more pictures than at Sachie's wedding. During the reception (again, lots of courses, unfortunately more traditional Japanese style food, including sushi and sashimi which Bill doesn't like and he got the owner all upset because he wasn't eating the food!) Hiroko made three changes of costume, one of which was into a beautiful white kimono. When she got ready to leave the room for another change, I was given the honor to escort her through the room to the door. 
while Bill just stood and laughed and got the whole thing on tape--especially the part where a buck, covered in mud, started butting me in the leg several times for crackers and getting mud all over my nice clean khaki pants 
. There are also many, many temples in the park--several pagoda and even a Shinto shrine (we saw an adorable little girl all dolled up in a beautiful kimono going to one for the Shichi-Go-San ceremony. Lemme tell you, it's not cheap to be a Buddhist or Shintoist. Whenever we've taken students to church, they've been surprised that people are not *required* to give money at the worship service. You couldn't get closer to the Shinto temple unless you *paid.* And at every temple we would visit, they'd be selling charms and fortunes. Superstition and greed are alive and well in religious Japan. The biggest temple we saw there was the one with the Daibutsu--the huge statue of Buddha in it. It's impressive from an engineering feat, but of course as a Christian it has no more meaning for me than that. Really, the crowds of people surrounding it were pretty much in the same frame of mind, except when they bought fortunes or charms. Religion in Japan appears to be a cultural thing--not a personal thing. It's just part of their cultural identity. It appears to have no real power over their lives. Superstition (good/bad luck, fear of ghosts, etc.) has more influence over them. By the time we finished with that temple, we were pretty much finished with Japan as a whole...we were tired, achy, cranky, and ready to go home. Our heads ached from constantly trying to translate signs (which you do even when you don't want to). We were tired of eating foreign food. So tired that when we got to the covered shopping plaza in Nara, we ate at a...McDonald's. Then it was the train back to Osaka and the next day, the bullet train back to Tokyo and Narita airport and home to America. Phew!!
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