February 2: Kyoto Train Station

I had grand plans for my last day in Kyoto--I was going to stop by Yoshi's office to say goodbye, then drop off my luggage at the train station and take a 3 hour walk around a temple-packed region of town, before catching a 4 o'clock train to the airport.

Instead, I woke up this morning to six inches of snow on the ground, and still falling. Just getting myself to the train station pretty much knocked the stuffing -- and all warmth -- out of me. I decided instead to just hang out in the train station all day. This is not as ridiculous as it sounds. The station is so huge that I've already lost myself almost irretrievably in it twice this trip. It is eleven stories tall, jam-packed with department stores, theaters, restaurants, bakeries, internet cafes, tourist bureaus, and just about everything else a girl could need. Except for my one excursion a block away to the ramen restaurant, I haven't braved the outdoors all day. I have however managed to check off a few Kyoyo todos. Besides simply doing some shopping--a decidedly un-Karen-like event, but practically a Japanese requirement--I finally managed to get a massage.

I couldn't decide whether to devote 20 minutes to my very sad feet, or to my thoroughly pained shoulders (carrying around a 13 pound laptop is a bitch). I opted for the feet as good feet massages are not as easily found at home. I pointed to my feet, nodded my head a lot as they talked to me in Japanese and I prayed I had asked for the right thing. Apparently so. I was navigated through a hot foot soak, an application of sweet-smelling lotion, and then was laid down in a long chair for a reflexology massage. It was wonderful.

When the masseur was done he said: "Shoulders tired?" I thought at first he was trying to upsell me to a second massage, but no. He pointed out the places on my feet that were tight so he knew how my shoulders felt. My g-d, it's better than tarot cards! He told me to drink "many water" and to take a hot shower. The shower, unfortunately, I have yet to find in this train station. . .

February 2: Japanese Food Revisited

Oh I take it all back. I love Japanese food. Love it. Between yesterday's sushi and today's ramen, I am a very happy camper. I am sitting squeezed into a diner with red padded chairs and white formica tables. The whole place is smaller than my bedroom. I stood in line outside the shop in the snow waiting for a table -- they turn people over pretty quickly--and am now at a one person table in the back corner.

There is not a word of English in the place, my plan was just to point at someone else's food and order it, but thankfully the sweet young man who came to my table simply said:"noodles ok?" and when I said yes, he struggled for a moment, found the words, and raising three fingers he said: "Only three sizes: Large, standard, small." I ordered a standard. . . and oh, yum. Perfect firm noodles in brown broth, with a layer of duck slices and a mound of scallions on top. Best of all, no fish had ever passed near it.

I better go. . .there is still a line halfwaydown the block waiting for my table.

February 1: Forks in the Road

There are a few obvious places where I could have taken a divergent path and my life might have ended up dramatically different. Some of these are still recognizable lives: for example if I had applied to graduate school (instead of pathologically ignoring the applications sitting on my desk) I might have been a physicist. Or if I'd gotten the job teaching math in California that I applied for after college, I would have still been in the sciences, and probably would have stayed with my boyfriend in San Diego a bit longer. But other forks in the road represent paths so different that I have a hard time imagining them. One such is an early plan to study Japanese culture while at Amherst.

Amherst is well-known for its Japanese studies and its connection to a Japanese university where it sends students for a year abroad. I flirted with the idea of following this route and began with a Japanese history course my freshman year. It thoroughly failed to entrance me. I have always thought this was due to the lackluster professor, but I am realizing as I write this that I have never, not once, enjoyed a history professor and I have always gotten lousy grades in the subject, so the problem may well be me. Regardless, no Japanese studies for Karen. I have rarely thought about it since.

Until today.

As I was navigating the city, I glanced at my map and saw that my subway stop was right next door to Doshisha University. The name clicked. This was the University that is associated with Amherst. The college shares students and professors, and has a serious presence on the Kyoto campus. I decided to go take a look.

I had this idea that I was going to bump into an Amherst professor or an Amherst student and be welcomed in for tea or something, but no such luck. I saw one Caucasian with a backpack and I would have called out to him, but he was apparently not in the throws of a nostalgia trip and glanced at me for nary a moment before hustling on his way. Nonetheless, I did find a map that showed the Amherst House -- something I'd heard of when in college -- as well as two Amherst guest houses, which turned out to be dormitories. The Amherst House itself, surrounded by a fence with large intertwined Ds and As on it, was a cozy two-storey building that seemed half library, half class room. I didn't actually go in, since a sign said that I shouldn't unless I'd been invited. And no rosy-faced Amherst students there either to invite a returning grad in.

So mostly I just peered in -- and forgive me 'cause I'm going to get cheesy here -- through the glass doors that conveniently showed a shimmery reflection of me overlaying my view of the interior thus enhancing the whole "shadow life" thing I was doing in my brain.

As I walked away, I thought about what I was in fact doing my junior year of college: playing rugby, writing some really fantastic papers on the Iliad, drinking too much, taking physics notes in artistic style with five different colored pens, being boy crazy, reading Tolstoy, having self-important discussions about date rape, tutoring science, begging David Hall to help me with my homework, editing a women's literary magazine, re-watching "Heathers" every single day. And I just can't make the leap to envisioning myself in Kyoto.

Perhaps some forks in the road are only in your head -- as well-suited as I am for my current life it's hard to imagine how I could possibly have ended up in a different one.

February 1: Sushi

I found it! I found the restaurant I've been looking for. A sushi restaurant just the way I imagined it. A long, oval bar where the jovial chefs cut fish and -- this is crucial -- call hello, goodbye, and thank you to every customer, while smiling and bantering the rest of the time. Between the chefs and the guests ran a conveyor belt covered in overlapping plates of sushi for a dollar apiece. Sheer heaven.

And all the food was just the perfect amount of exotic. Slightly different from what I'm used to, but still recognizable. My beloved quails eggs came atop a thoroughly unidentifiable white froth that I don't really want to think about, and there weren't, weirdly enough, any California Rolls, which are another of my favorites. But there was tender seared tuna, sweet unagi on squares of rice, cooked crab and romaine rolls, hamachi, thinly sliced beef, shrimp tempura rolls, and best of all, a whole serve-yourself vat of pickled ginger sitting on the bar. I stuffed myself silly for $10. Did I mention heaven?

February 1: The Golden Pavilion

I just love things that live up to their hype. The first time I experienced this was in the Louvre at age 16 in front of the Mona Lisa. I walked all the way to the farthest end of one of the wings, fought my way past the crowds, peered through the bullet proof case -- and the painting was simply gorgeous. I stood there with my friend Tracey and we watched and discussed and decided it deserved every bit of notoriety it had.

The Golden Pavilion, or Kinkaku-ji, is also such place. While reportedly often overwhelmed with crowds, today in the dead of winter at 9 AM, the temple grounds were empty. The pavilion is nothing short of stunning. The gold-covered walls are so shiny and so expansive, that you can only use words like brilliant and dazzling to describe them. The temple juts out over a reflecting pond that is so still and clear that it is called the mirror pond. The precise, upside-down image in the water is one of the reasons the tableau is so beautiful.

The original building was built in1397, but the reconstruction that stands today was built in 1955 after, as my Kyoto Lonely Planet puts it, "a monk consummated his obsession with the temple by burning it down." And while that destruction is nothing but a travesty, I am mostly consumed with images of how a film of melted gold must have glittered as it shimmied across the pond. I can understand his obsession.

January 31: The Identity Entry (There apparently always has to be one.)

I am sitting in a western restaurant for breakfast. CNN is on TV and I am watching a report on the Iraqi elections. People are saying things like "We've been waiting for this day for years" and "I feel like I'm being reborn." There are stories of people who made sure to vote despite insurgent threats, since family members were killed by insurgents and stories of others who died attempting to get to the polls due to suicide bombers. It's nice to see such a piece -- nice to get a simple -- "You know what? Democracy is, dammit, a good thing" story. I have a variety of emphatic and occasionally contradictory opinions on to what lengths one should go to encourage freedom in other countries, but I am not remotely ambivalent on the basic subject of whether it's a good thing. It's exciting to see it take root in a new place.

This awareness -- and indeed, the pride I feel -- upon watching the news this morning, comes on the heels of something that has been hovering in the back of my head the last few days in Japan. When did it become part of the U.S. intellectual liberal's ethos that it is unacceptable to have pride in your nation? When I was younger I saw many examples of people who weren't hesitant to criticize their government -- but who wouldn't tolerate it from a foreigner. Now there seems to be a sense in which U.S. citizens just take it, trying to distance themselves from policies they don't embrace. . . from people who would never tolerate the same. I mean just try to say something contra France to the French.

I am especially aware of this here, since Japan is, of course, a fiercely nationalistic country. And while that has led at times to everything from sealing off the islands from outside influence to world war, this is hardly the case now. There are other issues with that nationalism, of course. It's hard to be extremely proud without being exclusive. The Japanese are notorious for refusing to fully accept third and fourth generation Korean or Chinese Japanese citizens. I have been intrigued, in fact, to hear echoes of some of the prejudices found in my bible, Shogun, here. The characters in the book disparagingly refer to Koreans as "garlic eaters"; the disparaging tone has been absent, but I have nevertheless repeatedly heard Koreans referred to as "eating spicy food."

Einstein, as it happens, was adamant that nationalism was one of the main evils plaguing the world -- a fairly understandable position for a Jew who lived in Germany under the beginnings of Nazi antisemitism. But I have to believe there is a middle ground. I have to believe you can sing your national anthem with pride even as you make suggestions for reforms in government, that you can live in the Italian or Greek or Jewish part of town embracing your culture while not ostracizing another ethnicity, that you can try to encourage democracy in the world without forcing all your opinions on it, and that you can criticize your country without being accused of hating it.

The U.S. is a tough place to have opinions these days, as few people listen long before assuming you must be in some extreme camp that they then rally against in their own extreme way. I would like very much for the left-hand side to stop telling me that the only intellectual response to what's going on in our country is to disavow all association with it (I mean have you read Vanity Fair lately? It's appalling how unthinkingly one-sided it is.) And I would like the right-hand side to stop telling me that to offer any criticism at all is to be against America.

Um, I'm not sure when this entry turned into a rant. I think it probably started yesterday when I admitted that I didn't like Japanese food and had to convince myself that it was ok for me to be an unabashed Westerner. Maybe I'm just working out my own issues. I can be American and prefer American food and still love other cultures, ok? Ok??

January 30: Japanese Food

It turns out -- and I am mortified to admit this -- that I don't like Japanese food. I think I have always known this, but have been in denial. I love sushi, but nine times out of ten when I try something else at a Japanese restaurant I don't particularly like it. The problem is I just don't like cooked fish. Or seaweed. They taste, well, like bad ocean smell.

Not liking fish or seaweed is pretty much a deal killer in most traditional restaurants here. These are the flavors that permeate everything. Even when I get a plain noodle soup, or a tofu stew, it starts yummy -- up until that seaweed taste shows up in my mouth.

You don't know how hard it is to wrestle with this self-knowledge. I feel like a failed traveler. I was so proud of eating everything in India -- Look! The American eats spicy food no matter how hot! I have, apparently, bought into some traveler's code that says I have to thoroughly immerse myself in the culture I'm visiting, and to fail to completely absorb some aspect of it means I'm . . . a what? . . . a narrow-minded person, perhaps? Provincial? Rigid?

I am going to free myself from this. I accept that I am an imperfect traveler. I have looked through my Lonely Planet with new eyes, and realize that the book is actually chock full of suggested places for "foreigner hangouts" and "expat bars" and, hallelujah!, western breakfasts. Tomorrow, I'm eating eggs.

January 30: Job Choices

I spent this morning at the Kyoto Institute of Technology examining the experiments they have set up to mimic the flow of water over dolphin skin. Their "dolphin" is an erector set contraption and that feels the rush of bright pink "sea water." Going to a lab always gets me so excited about the various things that people can get immersed in -- how much fun for the graduate student who showed me around that he built this, studies it, gets to write papers about it. I felt this way until he told me that it took a full year building his erector-set creature before he could start collecting data.

G-d, I love being a writer.

January 29: Dolphins!

Today I touched a dolphin. This is not as weird as it sounds, since I am specifically here in Japan to write about dolphin skin. My host at the Kyoto Institute of Technology took me on a two-hour trip to an aquarium on the coast, where we first watched a dolphin show. Afterwards, as the audience dispersed, the two of us were invited forward to get up close and personal. Everyone else was wearing galoshes and rain gear. I was wearing Amber's black, wool, floor length, St. John's coat. But, hey, no big deal, the salt stains only show on the inside lining. (Don't tell Amber, maybe she won't notice.)

Anyway, dolphins are either as human-loving as dogs, amazingly compliant, or extremely-well-motivated by being fed fish, because they certainly didn't mind being man-handled. One did a nose dive and held his tail up in the air as we felt it. Another jumped up onto the dock for us to feel his side. Both kept their dolphin smile the entire time.

Dolphin skin, it turns out, has the consistency of rubber, though the texture is smoother than that -- slightly more like leather. (Oooh, yuck. Leather is skin, isn't it? Scratch the leather simile. Let's just go with vinyl instead.) The dolphin part was cool, but it's where it went from there that gets interesting. It turns out this was like the petting zoo aquarium. Who knew? First, I touched an octopus, a creature that was decidedly less excited about human touch than the dolphin but nonetheless fascinating to feel -- so diaphanous as to seem almost not there. I can see how it could squeeze itself into a bottle. Next I got to touch a sand shark -- kinda gritty; a seal -- like wet cow-hide; a sea slug -- not as gross as you'd expect; a sting ray -- vinyl again; and an urchin -- which was, well, spiky.

But the best thing in the aquarium -- and I didn't get to touch this, but boy did I want to -- was the "leafy sea dragon." Go google this creature right now. They're like something Dr. Seuss would have dreamed up. Yellow, and a foot long, they look like a giant sea horse that's let a jade plant grow all over it. I have never seen a creature so perfectly camouflaged as something it isn't. You'd think it was yellow seaweed if you didn't see its little nose. They're from Australia and , if anyone is listening, I want a whole aquarium of them in my home.

January 28: Everything I Know in Life I Learned from Fiction

Traveling alone -- which I seem to do a lot of, considering -- always makes me far more discomfitted than I would expect. This is pretty much the sentiment with which I've started most of my travelogues here, so if you've read any of them, you know how this entry goes. It's the one where I'm totally, unnecessarily freaked out. . . up until the point where something happens and I'm not anymore.

So let it begin.

I made the mistake of reading my Japanese Etiquette and Culture book on the plane. I.e. after it was too late to do anything about anything. I have all along been aware that the amount of help and attention I am getting from the researcher I am going to interview is far greater than I am used to -- he's organized everything from where I'm staying to a sight seeing itinerary complete with hard-to-get tickets. I am loving it. It makes all the difference to know someone is going to help you navigate a new country, especially given, well, um, cf my odd travel fears

And yet his generosity is so large that I haven't known how to show him how much I appreciate it. One friend told me I had to be careful with gifts since giving gifts requires a return gift of equal quality. My step-father also pointed out that within that framework, my host was offering a gift in "exchange" for the article I was writing about him. Now that's sticky journalist territory if ever there was any, but since he's not paying me -- or for me -- in any way, I think I am within the journalism ethics guidelines. All of this left me with the basic assumption that -- within what seems to be a fairly rigorous Japanese gift-giving order that includes services as well as goods -- we were exchanging like for like. I brought a couple of copies of Einstein A to Z along too, just so I had something physical to offer as well.

I was gratified to read in my little customs book that I was on target. With one exception. . . gifts pretty much have to be wrapped. Not only have I brought nothing with which to wrap it, but I have this awesome book at home that Catherine gave me on wrapping packages in gorgeous Japanese style with origami animals, and beautiful bows, and fancy fan folds and and and. . . . But like an idiot I left it at home.

Who forgets something of such crucial importance? I mean really! This sent me into a bit of a spiral. Why hadn't I brought any of my origami with me? Why hadn't I brought one of the Japanese books I've made by hand to use as a travel diary? Why hadn't I re-read Shogun, in anticipation of this trip? It's like I just forgot that I have spent a lifetime doing Japanese crafts and romanticizing a nation into kimonos and tea ceremonies. I was just not prepared for this trip at all.

To make it worse, my etiquette book told me that saying the equivalent of bon appetite, "itadakimasu", was de rigueur before eating. I've said the word over and over, tested myself every ten minutes, and I just can't remember it to save my life. I literally have to parse it out with mnemonic devices every time: "Judge Ito, doggy, more in Spanish."

This was just going to be a disaster. Better flip to some more useful phrase, like "I don't understand Japanese."

And, lo! there was a word I knew: "wakarimasen." It means "I don't understand," and the Caucasian hero of Shogun said it all the time while he was learning Japanese. Not for nothing have I read that book 72 times. Just then the stewardess walked down the aisle, saying "o-cha, o-cha." I know that one too -- green tea. I started reciting others in my head: wa (harmony), honto (truth), unagi (eel), maguro (tuna), soba (noodles), hamachi (yellowtail), tempura (well, tempura). . . ok, ok, as usual I'm heavy on the restaurant words, but that's still something. It means I'm not going to have problems eating -- at least not if I can remember that Judge Ito thing.

I am now on the 70 minute train ride from the Osaka airport to Kyoto. I am elated because the woman who sold me my ticket said "domo arigato goziemashta" [thank you] afterwards. And I understood it. And then I said it back.

That one I know not just from Shogun, but from three years of aikido training. The aikido experience means -- bonus! -- I can sit in seiza position for hours, which will come in mighty handy for all those traditional tea ceremonies I'm going to be attending.

But the best news of all is that my host, Yoshi, will be meeting me on the platform in Kyoto, and -- just as always happens on my travels -- all will be ok.