Japan, part I: Kansai Airport to Hokkaidō

I arrived in Japan on the afternoon of Wednesday, May 23, and made my way up to Hokkaidō in a day and a half. The first evening, I took the train from Kansai Airport (Ōsaka Prefecture) to Ōsaka, where I changed to the Shinkansen (bullet train) to Tōkyō, and then on to Saitama (about half an hour north of Tōkyō), where my friend Samejima-san lives. I was exhausted when I got in around nine thirty. His parents cooked a large dinner, and after talking for an hour or two, I went to bed, and woke up ridiculously early the next morning.

The following day I took a nine-hour train journey to Ebetsu, near Sapporo in Hokkaidō. Starting at nine am, I took a three-hour shinkansen to Hachinohe (Aomori Prefecture) at the northern end of the island of Honshū, a three-hour express train from Hachinohe to Hokodate (on the southern tip of Hokkaidō), and another three-hour express train from Hakodate to Ebetsu. Things started to get interesting about two hours into this trip. I had never been to Tōhoku (northern Honshū) but out the window of the train there were a number of spectacular snow-capped cinder cone volcanoes, and after we got into Aomori Prefecture (one of the most rural areas of Japan), the scenery became very rural and idyllic, and we were able to see the ocean. Aomori Prefecture was one of the candidate locations for the international fusion reactor that is now being built in France, and out the window of the train, I was able to see the peninsula in the distance that would have been home to the reactor. The train then passed through the Seikan Tunnel linking Honshū and Hokkaidō under the Tsugaru Straits. 45 minutes later we reemerged on the surface of Hokkaidō.

After changing trains at Hakodate, it was another three hours of creeping through rural Hokkaidō. Japanese trains are world-class, but the further north I got the more Amtrak-like the trains became. The English became odder and odder too: I really want to know if the Korean and Chinese on this sign are as screwed-up as the English.
I spent the next two days in Ebetsu at the home of an emeritus professor who is a world expert in the group of moths that I work on. I had originally intended to stay at a youth hostel in Sapporo and just try to meet him for an hour or so, but he replied to my letter generously inviting me to stay with him. I also got to meet a graduate student at Hokkaidō University with whom I hope to collaborate in the future. After these relaxing two days, on the afternoon of Saturday the 26th, I went to Sapporo to attend Nakamura-san's wedding. In the hotel lobby I met up with my friends Miki-san, Yoneya-san, Kobayashi-san, Kondoh-san, and Tsuji-san, for the first time in two years. I also got to meet Kondoh-san and Tsuji-san's new baby, Nagito-kun, for the first time.

The wedding ceremony itself was a Shintō ceremony, held in Hokkaidō Shrine in Sapporo. This was followed by a more modern banquet (hirōen) in the evening afterwards at a hotel.
The ceremony itself was completely opaque to me, involving a half-dozen kannushi (Shintō priests) and another half dozen female assistants, the banging of a large drum, the playing of gagaku (eerie-sounding traditional music), chanting in archaic Japanese, and the sipping of sake three times by the bride and groom. Hokkaidō Shrine looks traditional, but was actually only built in 1869 concurrent with the settlement of Hokkaidō by ethnic Japanese. (The equivalent Shintō shrines from the same colonial period in Taipei and Seoul have since been razed.) According to the Japanese Wikipedia article on the shrine, the main gate was built to face northeast facing Russia, and four deities are celebrated there: Ōkunitama-no-kami, Ōnamura-no-kami, Sukunahikona-no-kami, and the Emperor Meiji (who ruled from 1868-1912).After the ceremony and a number of group photos we piled into the bus and went back to our hotel in downtown Sapporo for the banquet. It was a complicated affair, with many courses of food, and Nakamura-san and his wife Yumiko-san going out and coming back in with different clothes, and a narration given by the hotel staff. My toast was listed in the program, which only made me more nervous, but when the time came I was able to give a sufficiently coherent speech in Japanese (I have photos of this, but will spare you them). At the end of the evening, and the next morning, I met many relatives of the bride and groom who complimented me for being able to give a speech in Japanese (but none of them said whether anything I said was actually interesting, or appropriate for the occasion). Kondoh-san told me afterwards the toast I gave at his and Tsuji-san's wedding two years ago was better. In any case, after it was all over I was too tired from residual jetlag to join anybody at the various nijikai (afterparties) that were going on, and hit the sack around eleven.