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As seen in Tweed: Discovering Japan

Art gallery-led tour fulfills decades-old dream
web1_Matsumoto-Castle-2-Michael-Pohorecky-photo
Matsumoto Castle (Michael Pohorecky photo)

As seen in Tweed Magazine

By Joseph Blake

I’ve wanted to visit Japan since reading Gary Snyder’s Earth House Hold in the late 1960s. I named my natural food store after that book and ran it on Oak Bay Avenue for 15 years, and my wife Lynne travelled to Japan for six months in the early 1980s, but that’s as close as I got until last November when I joined the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria’s two-week tour.

I had never toured with a group, but Barry Till, who has built the Asian art collection at AGGV into one of North America’s best and who has led nine tours of Japan, proved to be a superb, knowledgeable guide. Sharing a room on-tour with another single traveller saved me $1,500 and gifted me with an art-loving, retired Canadian military Victorian who is now one of my best friends. The other 20 travellers were equally intrepid, adventurous and kind. I was worried about touring Japan with a group of seniors. That turned out to be one of the best things about visiting Japan, and after our tour of Kyoto, Tokyo, Nara, Nikko, Kurashiki, Okayama, Tamioka and other sites, I’m in love with the country and its rich art- and nature-loving culture.

After a long flight to Narita Airport and an hour bus drive to our Tokyo hotel, I joined my fellow travellers for a short visit and a couple shots of good sake before the first night’s restless sleep. By 9 the next morning we were on our 24-passenger bus headed for the Imperial Garden and Edo Tokyo Museum. The emperor is an avid botanist who grows rice, and the gardens reflected his passion for plant life.

Open to the public since 1968 but uncrowded during our early morning visit, the garden includes woodlands and bamboo groves, iris and rose gardens, a wild grass island, and many varieties of cherry and plum trees. Everything was pruned and trimmed to perfection like an over-sized bonsai exhibit.

That night our Japanese national guide, Toshi Kushiki, took us on a tour of Ginza, Tokyo’s neon-bright shopping streets, and to a restaurant where we dunked and savoured thin-sliced pork and vegetables in a communal boiling pot.

The next morning we bused from Tokyo to Nikko in the mountains to visit 17th-century Buddhist and Shinto shrines past a crowded walkway of crumbling stone lanterns, then we were off to visit Tamozawa Imperial Villa with its western and Japanese design elements and incredible manicured grounds. As a gardener, I was gob-smacked by the structure, texture and colour plan of the gardens imagined hundreds of years ago – and perfect from every viewpoint 300 years later.

We spent that night in a ryokan, a traditional Japanese inn with an onsen, a hot spring bath with a sauna and outside soaking pool under a sheltering maple. Everyone wore their post-bath kimonos to the inn’s banquet of shabu shabu beef, sashimi, broth and egg main course, and various pickle courses. After the feast, Toshi led the group in a playful, traditional miner’s dance before we retired to our tiny, tatami mat-floored rooms and futons.

The next day we visited a huge, 19th-century silk factory, now an off-the-tourist-map museum in the tiny village of Tamioka. After the silk-making tour and a stop at the gift shop we enjoyed a noodle lunch and sake with the 86-year-old chef. A long bus ride through mountain tunnels and rice fields took us to Matsumoto Castle and an insightful visit to a ukiyo-e wood block print show where I learned of the specific mulberry paper, cherry wood blocks and bamboo brushes behind traditional ukiyo-e prints.

We caught a local train then a bullet train to Okayama and my favourite hotel during the tour where we feasted on a multi-course banquet that included deep-fried blowfish and some very good sake. The hotel’s 20th-floor breakfast buffet was another sumptuous, exotic offering with a great view of the city that set me up for our visit to Korakuen Garden and its incredible, expansive, well-groomed grounds.

We left early the next morning for Kurashiki, a small arty town, and a visit to the 200-year-old house of a rice merchant that is now a tourist site used for a traditional tea ceremony by local women during our visit. After a long lunch we wandered the town’s shopping street where a canal boat singer entertained a traditionally dressed bride and groom as he poled past a large heron. Magic!

Taking another bullet train to Osaka and busing from the station to Nara, we visited the ancient capital’s eighth-century temple complex including Todaiji, the largest and most dramatic wooden structure, then the over-crowded Deer Park where we enjoyed sunset views of the old city and hills below.

Rumours of Leonard Cohen’s death cast a pall over our bus ride into Kyoto in the falling dark, but another feast, this time at a friendly Izakaya-style gastro-pub, helped salve my pain. We were all back on the bus before 9 the next morning to join the throng viewing the thousand carved, golden figures at Sanjusagngendo Hall and then on to Kiyomizu-dera hilltop temple.

After a multi-course, all-tofu lunch and some shopping, we visited Fushimi Inari-taisha’s crimson gates and spent the late afternoon walking Kyoto’s Gion District and tourist-clogged, narrow streets where we saw two, silvery, otherworldly Geishas seemingly floating down a side-street to an assignation. Dinner that night was at an Okonomiyaki-style restaurant, savoury pancake-like dishes I washed down with a new discovery, a low-alcohol, sparkling sake. I capped the delicious meal with black sesame ice cream and mochi balls. Yum!

Early the next morning we visited the famous Ryoanji rock and sand garden before the tour bus crowds descended, but by the time we reached Kinkakuji we shared the famous Golden Temple with a mob from around the world. I took a break from the group’s Kyoto underground mall tour to hang out with the locals at a city hall food festival where I made several new Japanese friends and practiced my limited language skills while eating Kyoto’s versions of French foie gras, Spanish chorizo tortillas and locally made chocolates. We visited the Imperial Palace grounds in late afternoon light, and I was again stunned at the visionary horticultural structure, texture and colour of the century-old gardens.

Our tour’s farewell dinner at Fortune Garden’s Continental Room was another multi-course feast that capped a perfect two-week excursion with Barry, Toshi, roommate Dave Sproule and my other art-loving Victoria friends.

I spent another week in Kyoto on my own, joining 50 Japanese men in the basement public bath of Kyoto Tower, eating Kobe beef and blowfish, and taking a small train through maple forests aflame with fall colours to the hill towns of Kibune and Kurama. I spent hours in the city’s Botanical Garden and Nishiki Public Market and a day in Tower Records’ listening stations learning about Japanese pop music. I spent another day at Daitkoku-ji Temple where my wife lived, gardened and taught English three decades ago, the same temple where my dearest Victoria friends were married, and Gary Snyder sat meditating before writing Earth House Hold a half century ago. I loved Japan and can’t wait to go back.