November | 2021 | Addams in Kyoto

Hi everyone – here I am back at the keyboard again, reviewing the month that was. So, Halloween has been and gone and now we are heading towards Winter Solstice and year’s end. Wow, time really is moving along, and still we await a significant easing of The Virus situation. The new case numbers here have dropped very significantly, and are currently as low as they have been since the end of June last year. Fingers crossed that it stays that way, however, preparations for the sixth wave continue. Better to be prepared…

We keep looking to the government to ease foreign entry quarantine restrictions, but there is no definite news on that front yet. So, we continue to bide our time, although we are tentatively making more outside forays. Craig has returned to his bi-weekly gym visits and I will be doing the same come December. Interestingly, I feel a lot stronger in my ballet barre work now than I have for a very long time. The four times a week regime I have adopted at home, and the exercises in the Dutch National Ballet videos, together have been very beneficial. I am wondering if returning to the twice a week visits to the gym and twice a week at home regimen may actually set me back a bit. The positives, however, include mixing with others and doing some centre work.

Turning to the weather; I mentioned last time that there had been a sudden change in the weather just before I wrote Episode 10, with the temperature dropping around 10C, on average. This pattern has continued, with all days being low 20s/high teens – the quilts are well and truly out and the floor heater has been in use every evening since then. I have yet to resort to the puffy jackets, but I suspect that may occur in the next month.

So, what have we been doing in the last month? We have had a few excursions (though one of those was as a result of making a mistake) and we had a visitor who we had met via the Kyoto vegan meet-up group. Isi is a young woman from Scotland who is doing a thesis about veganism in Japan, particularly in the Kansai region, for a course she is studying. We were her first guinea pigs the first people she interviewed on this topic. She is a lovely person and it was interesting to hear what specifically she was examining. I think she was very keen to test the questions she had devised and maybe explore some areas a little further as a result.

Our first excursion was a walk from our home to Fushimi Inari via the forest path. It is a really lovely walk and being cooler we decided to go all the way up the mountain to the peak. Having not been on many walks for a while, it was harder than I remembered it being, but it was good for us to stretch our legs and breath the fresh air of the forest. Once we reached the bottom of the walk, we went to a café for a very nice matcha latte (made with soy milk). Interestingly, there were many new torii along the trail, with some being painted as we walked through. I wonder if the sheer number of new gates is an indicator of how many businesses are now getting close to real difficulties, hoping for divine intervention.

Spirits of the forest?

Yum!

For Halloween we decided to try Vegan Ramen UZU, as it appeared it was open again. You may recall we went there for my birthday only to find it was temporarily closed. This time it was indeed open, and we were the first there waiting for it to open for the dinner seating. As this restaurant was recently listed in the Michelin Guide, we thought we should get there early, just in case others were also keen to try it out. Just before opening time a waiter came to check if we had a booking (which we had done earlier when we first arrived at the door, and one of the staff kindly came out and did this for us).

As we waited he asked us where we were from and we did our usual “from Australia, but we live in Kyoto” routine, which often includes us saying that we run a guest house. At this point, the waiter said he had heard about us, from a friend, and remembered we were called ‘sanbiki neko’ 😊. This is the first time anyone had actually said they had heard of our business and made us feel quite pleased.

The interior of the restaurant was amazing – very dark, almost entirely black, with one huge table which seated 16 diners, eight on each side. The artwork was across the entire wall at the head of the table, and the walls behind the diners on each side were entirely covered by mirrors. Each seat had a glass place setting (stuck to the table) and a single down light above the setting (but not too bright, just focussed on the food). The effect was like being inside the spaceship in 2001: A Space Odyssey, with the reflections in the mirrors appearing to curve up and away from the table. The food was good, but the entrée and the dessert were amazing. It was also the first time I had ever drunk gin and soda – but actually it was quite good. The gin was delicate; locally made.

Me being drawn into the artwork

The final two excursions were to the southern reaches of Kyoto prefecture, the Kizugawa area. Each year, since 2010, the Kizugawa Art event has been held, with many artists and local citizens contributing to the event. The event came about as a result of the creation of Kizugawa city in 2007, which subsumed three towns – Kizu, Kamo and Yamashiro. Apparently locals had felt the history and culture of the respective towns was disappearing, so, as the website says, “a culture that is over a millennium old is passed down as our pride” through this event.

Poems about Kizugawa and the surrounding land appear in the Nara era’s (710-784CE) Manyoshu (an anthology of Japanese poetry), and during this era, the capital was moved to Kunikyo, which later became Kamo, for a few years from 740-744CE. The event’s purpose is to “recognize anew this city that is modern, yet ancient, and beautiful at once” through the power of art.

We saw snippets of the event on tv and decided to go, so I went to the event website to find out exactly where it was. The problem was that the map and instructions were loaded onto the site as a picture, so I couldn’t translate it using Google (as I usually do). I printed the map and took that with us. Unfortunately, what I didn’t realise was that the event wasn’t near the Kizu train station, which is what the map appeared to show (I should have known better, we have been mislead by maps here before, with even locals not knowing how to read them).

As a result we spent a few hours walking around completely the wrong area, having crossed the wrong bridge over the Kizu river. It was a lovely sunny day and a very pleasant walk, however, we ended up walking in a huge circle (around 6kms) trying to work out where the installations were. I eventually gave up and asked some locals in an auto repair business, and luckily one of them knew about the event (!!!) and said we were a long (long) way from where we should be.

Two works of art, but not what we were looking for!

Not to be beaten, we decided to go back and try again the following Saturday, also a nice day (thankfully). This time we caught another train to the Kamo station from Kizu station, found the shuttlebus and made our way to the starting point. It was a very long walk making our way around the installations (well, we missed a few, but saw most of the 20 installation sites). We’re not sure how far it was, but our best guess is somewhere between 8-10 kms. Some were in open spaces, some at specific homes and some at shrines. It was very interesting seeing the different works and a lot of fun. The Kamo area was really very nice, with many old homes, and a lot of rice and vegetable fields and tea plantations. I’m very glad we went back to try again.

Harvested rice

Finally, a quick Close Encounters of the Animal Kind entry to note the man with a meerkat on a lead we saw on the way to shopping one day (I kid you not – we both did a double take), and my attempts to capture a good photo of a Hummingbird Moth, which was moving around the lantana we have in the backyard (which I keep because it draws many different flying insects into our yard). I had the ‘big’ camera set to rapid fire shooting, and managed to get around 20 shots of the moth, with two being, well, ok. It moved so fast, that I spent a lot of time just trying to keep up with its movements.