Osaka Wednesday 1

Day Eight or is it Nine, maybe Ten – Thursday, May 20, 2004 or Friday May 21, 2004 – Kyoto, San Francisco and Chicago or MORE on TRAVEL IS HELL & WHERE WE GO FROM HERE. It is time to bring to a close this rambling Japanese travel journal. As I write it is 5:45am (Chicago time) and I am seated at my PC, jet-lagged. I think it was yesterday; we traveled by train back to Osaka and sequestered ourselves in a very nice hotel about a mile away from where we began our adventure. Other then a quick venture out for last minute gifts, a cheap meal and sake we were thinking of sleep and ahead to another long day of travel. So, to jet lag: I’ll have to agree with a character out of the most recent William Gibson novel, PATTERN RECOGNITION. Forgive me the following book quotation with its pseudo-spiritual tone but in it is something appropriate to the occurrence. “…Damien’s theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here… Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.” With that said, it is calming to consider my mind is still in Japan. It is an opinion limited by experience and education, but I would like to think that Japan and the United States share a great deal in common as to the general commerce and commotion of their cities. Scale and the particular architectural choices of the religious and elite classes seem to form the major divisions between the cultures. With regard to scale as division, I speculate that the reduced proportions of Japanese architecture have more too due with a primarily different sense of what needs to be in a room, as opposed to a more ethnocentric view that the Japanese are simply small people. I could be wrong; I remember reading something about the introduction of beef to the Japanese culture shortly after the end of World War Two. If pressed I won’t be able to remember the source, but there was the suggestion that the higher protein levels in beef were resulting in the birth of a taller Japanese generation. As for the architectural shapes and choices made by Americans as opposed to the Japanese, I will assume that these differences arose due to climate, available materials and random aesthetics (personal interest and choice of the early influential artists/architects). I’m intrigued enough that I might follow up with some study on the matter. In the weeks ahead I’ve tasked myself with uploading, to a web site not yet created, all the images we took and writing up some finishing thoughts. We’ll forward you an address as soon as one exists. But, until then, Japan was good. Thanks for letting us share it with you and we hope you can see it for yourself. Be Well Dan & Lynn 05/21/2004