Railway Museum

Is it lame to write a blog post about a place you don’t recommend? I went to the Transportation Museum in Omiya, about 30 minutes north of Ueno, because several Japanese people recommended it to me. To be honest, though, I see so many trains every day in Japan that it just wasn’t very interesting. The other thing was that all the displays seemed to be about the trains themselves rather than the people they carried, the workers, or how they affected society.
There were a lot of excited-looking kids there, but unless you’re a real testu-kichi (railroad geek), I’d give this place a miss.

The museum started off  well with this jinsha, a human operated railway car. The first one was built in 1895, and they operated until 1930.

This beautiful old railway car reminds me of an experience I had a few years ago. I saw a poster for a ride on a steam locomotive and thought it might be interesting. When I got there, though, it was only the locomotive that was old-fashioned. The rest of the cars, which had conveniently been obscured by smoke in the poster, were just regular JR train cars, so I basically just rode on a regular train for an hour.

Japan’s first steam locomotive.

They blow the train’s whistle and rotate it around on an old turntable every day at noon.

The museum is really crowded, far from Tokyo, and expensive (1,000 yen for admission plus 630 yen train　fare from Ueno).

The museum’s English homepage is at: http://www.railway-museum.jp/en/index.html

Edo-Period Recycling

Edo-Tokyo Museum Diorama

I stumbled across this interesting article a while ago about how there was pretty much no garbage in Japan’s Edo Period because almost everything got recycled.
I translated it into English, but it’s a bit long, so if you’re like me and have the attention span of a three-year old from using the Internet too much, here’s the Reader’s Digest version:

Everyday life in Japan’s Edo Period would today be known as a recycling society. They didn’t just recycle to reduce garbage; they had a mentality of valuing things and completely using everything up. For those of us who live in Japan’s disposable society of today, there might be a lot of things we can learn from the Edo Period recycling mentality.
One type of recycler was the collector. Things were so valuable that people could make a living by collecting scraps and garbage. Collectors employed by public bathhouses went around looking for anything they could burn, even garbage, to save on expenses ,and paper buyers bought up used books and scrolls. Paper was so valuable that poor people were actually able to scrape out a living by going around looking for scraps of paper on the street. Scrap metal collectors would give candy to kids in exchange for old nails and other bits of scrap metal and there were even dealers who bought ashes from fires.
Even human excrement was valuable. One of the most bizarre recyclers in the Edo Period was the “night soil” collector, who bought human and animal excrement and sold it for fertilizer. (This isn’t in the article, but I’ve read it was so valuable there were even cases where criminals would steal it.)
There were thousands of used clothing shops, and Japanese clothing was ideal for recycling because kimono were cut straight in equal proportions with no waste, so even if it was old clothes or old rags, they were all standardized goods. From this point of view, they were completely different from Western clothes–if Western clothes are taken apart, they are all different sizes and have no value and cannot be recycled the way kimono were.
Repairers, the second main category of recyclers, would usually travel from house to house. You could get your knives sharpened, have someone resurface your mirror, ask them to put new teeth put in your clogs, or have your broken bowls glued, all without leaving the comfort of your own home.
The full article is after the jump.

Tatara Festival in Kawaguchi City, Saitama

Tokyo’s Samba Carnival in Asakusa and the Awaodori Festival in Koenji are amazing spectacles, but they’re also horribly crowded. If you don’t want to be straining to peer over people’s heads, you have to be there at least an hour before things start.
If you don’t mind seeing things on a slightly smaller scale, you can see pretty much the same thing  a few weeks before in a setting where the crowds are much, much thinner.
During the Nagashi Odori part of the festival, which is based on part of the Awaodori Festival, you can pretty much walk around wherever you want. The event gets a little more crowded when the samba dancers come, but it’s nothing compared to the big Tokyo festivals.

Bboy Park 2009

The Bboy park bills itself as Japan’s biggest block party and has been held in Tokyo’s Yoyogi Park since 1997. It’s a two-day event with music, dance, and Hip-hop culture.

For me, the endlessly fascinating thing about it is the way the guys transform from aggressive, fluid, Hip-hop street dancers and rappers into ultra-polite Japanese people within seconds. One minute a guy’s doing moves straight out of Harlem and the next he’s stiff and bowing up and down like a salariman.

There was a huge dance competition that went on for most of the day on Saturday that was just amazing.

The festival is held in late August every year. Check Metropolis’ event listings or the Bboy Park Homepage (Japanese only).

The Baby-naming Ceremony

I don’t want this to turn into a baby blog, but Japan does have some interesting baby customs that I’d like to write about.
A couple of weeks ago, my wife got out her old calligraphy set from junior high school to make a meimeisho (Japanese: 命名書）. When a baby is seven days old, many Japanese families have a ceremony called a shichiya (Japanese: 七夜）where the baby is officially named and they write one of these posters with the baby’s new name on it.

This is my baby’s name, Matthew. In Japanese, it’s pronounced Mashuu. It’s not a real Japanese name, but people often use “ateji,” which are characters that  phonetically represent foreign or native words. The character we chose for “ma” is “miyabi,” which means “elegance” or “refinement.” Since he was born in fall, we chose “aki” for “shuu,” which is the character for “autumn.”
I was a little worried about giving him a foreign-sounding name, but it seems that unusual or foreign-sounding names are becoming somewhat more common these days, and the characters can also be pronounced as “Masaaki,” which is a common Japanese name, if he decides he doesn’t like Mashuu.

Here’s the finished product. I’m no calligraphy expert, but I think my wife did a really nice job.

The meimeisho is usually displayed in a family shrine or over the baby’s crib, or given as a present to the person who named the child. You can buy them at a stationery store for just a few hundred yen.

At the top right is Matthew’s footprint. His name is in the center, and at the right is his date and time of birth – Sept. 8, 2009 at 1:12 AM.