My Travels in Asia: Remembering Tokyo and Japan (Part 2 of 5)
December 2, 2008 by dr. lam
I will admit that I am an unabashed Japanophile, and that fact made my 6 weeks in Japan a celestial experience. Some of my fellow Chinese still harbor resentment at the atrocities leveled during the Pacific War (i.e., WWII) and cannot unshackle themselves from that prejudice. Fortunately, I did not live through that time and so I can more easily extoll how clean, timely, and for a lack of a better word, intriguing, the Japanese people and their culture are.
The surgeons with whom I trained (two actually) engaged in both body and facial cosmetic surgery. On the days that they performed non-facial work, I took the opportunity to tour Japan in the maniacally fast and precisely punctual Shinkansen, or bullet train. I really enjoyed the Kansei region, including Kyoto and Osaka. The ancient temples of Kyoto collided with the industrial urban sprawl in a bizarrely haphazard fashion. Osaka’s treasure is their Kaiyukan aquarium, purportedly the world’s largest: the multiple-storied single fish tank measures 5400 cubic meters of water and holds several whale sharks, sharks, manta-rays and other leviathan. I really loved seeing the award-winning exhibition of jellyfish glowing against a kaleidoscope of neon and the human-sized crabs culled from the Sea of Japan perambulating on elongated stilt-like legs in a moonscaped, eerie chamber.
I traveled to Hiroshima and saw their Ground Zero and shed tears at the massive loss of lives, as I did when I walked through the German concentration camps years before. I visited Nagasaki’s atomic museum as well and in that same city I was fascinated to see the meticulously recreated civilization of Deshima, the only trading port that Japan had with the outside world (in this case with the Dutch), during the 250-year Tokugawa reign in which the practice of sakoku (isolation from the world) flourished and was celebrated in Clavell’s Shogun. These travels provided true focus for my undergraduate studies as a history major at Princeton where I focused on modern European history but also relished a single semester where I studied Tokugawa Japan from the late and great Marius Jansen.
My base camp, so to speak, during my time in Japan was a cheap Gaijin house up on a hill just outside of Tokyo. Although Tokyo was not my favorite city in Asia (that status is reserved for my native Hong Kong), it was a city that shined with diversity, from the raucous nightlife of Roppongi to the ancient Asakusa district. Tokyo is a pastiche of the sacred and the profane; the technological and the traditional; and the mundane and the sublime. Dining recently at a new soba restaurant here in Dallas recalled one of my life’s passions, freshly prepared soba, which I enjoyed in Tokyo.
I also remember traveling back on train up the violaceous mist of a seacoast that echoed a painting by Turner, as I returned from the Izu Hanto peninsula where I rejuvenated my very mortal coil in the famous onsen, or natural hot baths. These remembrances of Tokyo and Japan will stay fixed indelibly in my mind as part of the rich tapestry imprinted in my Proustian vault…Tomorrow we travel to Seoul!
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