April 22

Thursday started out as a bit of a bummer because it was raining... again. This time it was raining quite hard, and it didn't take long for the water to seep all the way through our shoes and socks. We attempted to go to the Shitenno-ji temple, one of the oldest Buddhist temples in Japan. It seems that every time we changed cities, our lost meandering began again, and by the time we realized we were there, I was too cold to really enjoy myself, or to let Erik enjoy himself. There were also supposed to be some ceremonial dances going on that day, but I guess they must have been cancelled due to the rain. We got some snapshots and bolted.



Intensely craving something warm to eat and a place to take our soaking shoes off, we wandered into a Chinese food place at the train station. Now, we couldn't read most of the menus in Japan, but for the most part we'd gotten along ok by either the assistance of semi-English-speaking waiters, pointing at a picture menu, or gesturing at the food models outside. This had worked pretty well for us to this point... however, the unfortunate thing about Chinese food is that a lot of it is kind of chunky things in a sauce. It is difficult to determine what said chunky things are from say, a picture, because much of their physical characteristics are obscured by the yummy sauce. When the plate of food comes out, however, you may find that what you thought was beef in the picture is actually...liver. And what you thought was chicken or pork in the picture is actually... mystery meat (Oh please, oh please, don't let it have been cat...). I ate a lot of rice at that restaurant, and not much else. Erik stubbornly downed his whole plate of liver, save for the one piece he forced me to try (I really tried hard to swallow it! I really did!...), somewhat masochistically stating that he had ordered it, and now he was going to eat it.

After a very cold and wet morning and a traumatically disgusting lunch, neither of us was really up for much more than a nap. So nap we did. The people at the front desk tried to tell us that we couldn't go up to our rooms because they were cleaning, but we pretended we couldn't understand and went up there anyway. Gotta love that language barrier!

One amazingly refreshing naps and two much improved moods later, we ventured back out to see a Bunraku show. I had long wanted to see a Bunraku show, after learning about it in my college Japanese literature class. Bunraku became popular around the same time as kabuki, and is similar in that it was a performing art intended for the masses. As such, both arts are very entertaining. However, while kabuki performances center around famous kabuki actors/personalities and are somewhat improvised, bunraku is known for its very intricate storylines. Oh yeah, and it's all done with puppets. But not just any puppets. These babies are about 2/3 the size of a regular person, and it takes 3 people to man one. They are very lifelike, and though the 3 puppeteers are on stage the entire time, after a while you don't really notice them, you are so involved with the emotions/actions of the characters. All of the puppets voices are done by a single man, who is also very entertaining to watch. In one scene the chanter had to do both voices for a conversation between a) a wife who had lost her son but had to keep it a secret and b) a drunk, happy and horny husband. It was very impressive.

The show was, of course, in Japanese but we got these nifty earphones that let us know what was going on.


This was apparently a good move because the entire row of white people sitting in front of us did NOT get the headphones and they slept through most of the first act, and didn't even bother staying for the second. We, on the other hand, stayed for a full FIVE HOURS. And get this, that was only about a quarter of the full script. These things definitely used to be full day events. Afterwords, Erik and I reached the consensus that they should make some modern movies/anime/miniserieses of these old bunraku stories, because they are VERY interesting. And while you wouldn't get to see the amazing aristic mastery of the puppets and the chanter, they could maybe condense the story a little bit... in any case, if you are in Japan and are lucky enough to be there during a time when a bunraku performance is going on I HIGHLY recommend going. It is pretty amazing to watch and it is a dying art, as the new generation isn't quite as enthused about the rigorous training it takes to perform bunraku.

We couldn't take any pictures or videos of the performance, but for a taste of the art form, there are a number of short bunraku clips at this youtube channel. Also, the video below was taken at the same theater and shows the very expressive narrator:

When the performance got out at 9pm, we were hungry and our sense of culinary adventure was all but extinguished. So we ate at El Torito. Nothing like washing down some traditional Japanese performing arts with Americanized Mexican food.