
Today we're going to visit Kyoto, the former capital of Japan. ( Read more...Collapse )
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Today we're going to go on a trip to Nikkō,* a town in the mountains quite
some distance north of Tokyo. Nikkō is famous for its imperial shrine and
temple complex, which is extremely sumptuous, and was for me the highlight
(along with the fireflies I saw in Kyoto) of my holiday in Japan;
many of these photos are worth clicking through to the high resolution versions.
( Read more...Collapse )
lethargic_man's
Japan blog posts
</p>
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On today's blog post, we're going to go on an excursion to Kamakura. We
start with a (slightly watered-down) tea ceremony in an old teahouse attached
to Jomyo-Ji temple:
( Read more...Collapse )
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Before we head off to Tokyo, one last photo from Atami, which I forgot to
put into the first trip report. In the UK, all hotel rooms come with tea,
coffee and the wherewithal to prepare them; in Germany, much to the horror of
a stereotype-fulfilling Brit such as myself, they do not. In Japan, I was
pleased to see, the situation is more like that in the UK, only, of course,
the tea on offer is green, not black.
( View piccyCollapse )
Which segues, tangentially, into something I noticed during my time in
Japan. When I went to South Africa, I was, in much of the country, in a small
minority having white skin. I felt a sense of insecurity as a result,
which might be summed up as 'my good treatment in this country is entirely
dependent upon the favourable attitude of the ethnic majority' (leaving alone
the fact I'm not sure there is an ethnic majority in South Africa).
I expected to feel something similar in Japan, where the native word for
non-Japanese, gaijin, carries, as I understand it, the same
pejorative overtones as goy or gadje. To my surprise, I
didn't feel any such insecurity (and indeed never heard the word gaijin
during my time there, or at least not knowingly). I'm at a slight loss to
explain this. Maybe it's because in the city where I grew up there were
plenty of people of oriental and Hindustani ethnic origin, but few blacks,
leaving me conditioned not to feel the former as exotic.
Although Japan, as I said beforehand, adopted western culture wholesale in
the wake of the Meiji revolution, there were a number of people in
traditional costume visible on the streets. Some of them were tourists, others,
as our tour guides pointed out, were simply not knowledgeable enough
to be wearing appropriate combinations of clothing, but some were. In
particular, anyone serving in a temple or shrine in a religious role would
invariably be wearing traditional clothing, along with servers in teahouses
traditional enough to have a tea ceremony, and in our ryokan (on
which more when I get to it).
And so, on to Tokyo. Tokyo is, as I discovered to my surprise, the largest
city in the world, numbering forty million people. (I expected this to be
somewhere in the Third World.) Maybe due to this, it didn't really seem to
have one centre, but many.
Here's a few view from halfway up the Tokyo Skytree, which is the tallest
building in the world, saving only the Burj Dubai:
( Read more...Collapse )
lethargic_man's
Japan blog posts
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Some general impressions of Japan this time, before we move on to Tokyo.
They drive on the left there; if you're not used to it, be careful to look
both ways before crossing the road:
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Also for a country with lots of high technology, we saw a surprising
number of people doing fairly menial jobs one would have expected to have
been at least partially automated, for example acting as a tram conductor, or
sweeping the street using not just a broom but indeed the old-fashioned kind
consisting of a bundle of twigs, rather than street-sweeping vehicles.
We saw a lot of people doing their jobs in a public context, for
example traffic police, wore white gloves. I suspect this owes something to
nineteenth-century England, though how, I'm not quite sure.
There are lots of people in Japan wearing surgical masks; apparently
something like one in four of the population suffer from hayfever.
There are a lot of USAn fast food chains to be found in Japan; I saw there
chains, like Denny's or Wendy's, which I hadn't seen since my last time in
the States in 1990.
And lastly, for today, the ecological niche which is filled in the UK by
seagulls (black-backed gulls and herring gulls) is filled in central Japan (I
didn't see this when we went further west), instead by black kites. It was
quite something to see these great big birds of prey swooping low over
beaches. Sadly, I didn't have a camera with me when I got to see them
really close up; and when I did later have a camera, I didn't get to see any
close enough up to get a decent photo of.
lethargic_man's
Japan blog posts
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This is Atami castle. (Again, all images are clickable through for mostly higher-resolution versions.)
( View picciesCollapse )
It's twentieth-century, but built to resemble an
Edo-period castle. (Japan has few old buildings, due to a combination of
having built in flammable materials, non-earthquake-proof construction, and
heavy bombing during the War (with the notable exception of Kyoto, the "city of
ten thousand shrines", which was spared).)
The castle contains a number of small museums.( Read more...Collapse )
lethargic_man's
Japan blog posts
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I'd like to see Love's Labour Lost at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse between the twelfth and seventeenth of September—this rather than a play at the Globe because I've never been to the former yet. I'd also like to pay £10 for a standing seat because I'm a cheapskate. ;^b Anyone want to come with me? —Originally posted on Dreamwidth, where there are comments. Please comment there using OpenID or a DreamWidth account (which you no longer need an invite code to create). Though I am leaving comments enabled on LiveJournal for a bit, please don't comment here if you can do so there instead.
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Many of the tourist sites we saw in Japan were Shinto shrines or Buddhist
temples. Japan has the, to western sensibilities, odd situation in which
most people adhere to two religions. People go to Shinto shrines
for happy events, such as births and weddings, but Buddhist temples for sad
ones such as funerals. This state of affairs seems to have come about
because Shinto worship consists entirely of venerating local deities; there's
no code of ethics around which to structure one's life, and Theraveda
Buddhism appears to have moved in to fill that gap.
This state of affairs with regard to Shintoism also means the religion
has no holy books, which made aviva_m
question where the rituals that we saw came from, then. Presumably they were
all transmitted through oral tradition.
Actually, most people in Japan today are fairly secular (this may be because
some of the great Buddhist temple complexes supported revolts against the
shogunal government a few centuries ago, and the shogun responded by breaking
their power in the land). Quite a few, seeing western-style church weddings
in films, decide they want one themselves, so join a church a few weeks
before their wedding in order to be able to achieve this—leading to the
crazy situation of their having three religions at once.
Shinto shrines are to be distinguished from Buddhist temples in two ways.
One is that before making an invocation to the enshrined deity, one claps
one's hands twice, presumably to get the deity's attention, then bows; the
other is that the approach to every Shinto shrine is marked by the presence
of at least one Torii gate, usually, though not always, of
red-painted wood, marking this as holy ground.
At the start of our holiday, Andrea and I spent a few days recovering from
the jet lag in the beach resort of Atami, less than fifty miles from Tokyo.
There we encountered our first shrine, called Kinomiya Jinja.
( Read more...Collapse )
You'll be getting to see plenty more shrines and temples here in due course.
lethargic_man's
Japan blog posts
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aviva_m and I have just come back from our honeymoon in Japan;
here's the start of my trip report on it (further instalments to come).
( Read more...Collapse )
Well, that'll do for starters. I'll talk about something different next time.
lethargic_man's
Japan blog posts
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A while ago I discovered that the Singer's Prayer Book editorship made
quite a lot of tweaks to subsequent early impressions of the first
edition. I'm intrigued to know how the earliest impressions were
different from the late first edition (from the 1950s) that my father
has, and have been keeping my eye out for a few years for early
impressions online. Unfortunately, truly early ones (pre-1895, or for
that matter even pre-1900) don't seem to be turning up. When I had
another look a few days ago and found the 1904 impression scanned and
readable online, I thought this was probably going to be as good
as I was going to get, and I had a look through this volume to see
what it offered.
(I'm aware that most of my readership to whom this would be meaningful
will be reading from Facebook, not LJ or DW; but I'm posting it here
anyway, so that I can find it again afterwards.)
The early impressions, 1904 included, made much use of
references to save page-count (to keep the price down to 1/–),
something that was eliminated in subsequent volumes but without
retypesetting the complete book; hence the joke: How can you tell
someone who uses the first edition Singer's siddur? Get them to count
to one hundred and see if they go 94, 94a, 94b, 94c etc. In the 1904
impression mincha consists of a list of references to prayers
found elsewhere, and takes up a single page, expanded in later
impressions to no fewer than fifteen pages.
Tallis and tefillin are to be donned after, rather than before, ברכת השחר.
</p>
No Kaddish deRabbanan after ברכת השחר or, later on, פִּטּוּם הַקְּטוֹרֶת.
(Even the second edition (1962) merely says some congregations recite
it there.) This kaddish is included in the 1904 impression after
Shacharis with the legend "Kaddish to be said after reading Lessons
from the Works of the Rabbis".
מזמור שיר חנוכת הבית לדוד is found after Shacharis, with the label "In
some Congregations the following Psalm is said daily before ברוך שאמר".
The subsequent Mourner's Kaddish is missing altogether.
ויברך דויד is only said standing until משתחוים.
In ובא לציון and elsewhere Aramaic is described instead as "Chaldee".
No עלינו or subsequent kaddish in mincha on Friday. (The
idea, so I've heard, is that these are both recited at the end of the
service, and when services are recited back-to-back, you're not really
ending it. We still do this between mincha
and ne`ila on Yom Kippur.)
No meditation before kindling the Shabbos lights.
No Mourner's Kaddish after במה מדליקין. (This was also the case in
the second edition.)
A little to my surprise, וְדִי בְּכָל אַרְעָת גַלְוָתָנָא "and in all the
lands of our dispersion" is already added to the first יְקוּם פָּרְקָן in
this edition. (This is one of the rare cases of an Orthodox authority
tweaking the traditional wording of a prayer; the rest of the Orthodox
world (e.g. ArtScroll) still has here "in Israel and in Babylonia"
and expects the reader to infer the rest of the world as well.)
The Prayer for the Royal Family is somewhere I was expecting
change; over the years the wording of the mediaeval prayer הַנּוֹתֵן תְּשׁוּעָה
לַמְּלָכִים. was gradually shortened. (Of course, that prayer was written
about absolute monarchs, which is why my (non-Orthodox) shul in London
replaced it with a prayer for the government, not one for the Queen
with a single short reference to the government ("her counsellors").)
The wording given here, with changes compared to the second edition in
bold, reads:
He who giveth salvation unto kings and dominion unto princes, whose
kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, who delivered his servant David
from the hurtful sword, who maketh a way in the sea and a path in the
mighty waters,—may he bless, guard, protect and help, exalt,
magnify, and highly aggrandize [in the Hebrew only,
redundantly repeating the following words: אֲדוֹנֵינוּ הַמֶּלֶךְ]
our Sovereign Lord, King
Edward, our gracious
Queen Alexandra,
George Prince of
Wales, the Princess of
Wales, and all the
Royal Family [in the
Hebrew only: יָרום הוֹדָם may their glory be exalted].
May the supreme King of kings in his mercy preserve the King in life,
guard him and deliver him from all trouble, sorrow and
hurt. May he make his enemies fall before him; and in whatsoever he
undertaketh may he prosper. May the supreme King of
Kings in his mercy put a spirit of wisdom and understanding
into his heart and into the hearts of all his counsellors, that they
may uphold the peace of the realm, advance the welfare of the nation,
and deal kindly and truly with all Israel. In his days and in ours,
may Judah be saved, and Israel dwell securely
[missing here: the text of the second edition, and probably also
later impressions of the first edition, is missing altogether: "may
our Heavenly Father spread the tabernacle of peace over all the
dwellers on earth"]; and may the redeemer come unto Zion.
O that this may be his will, and let us say, Amen.
No Prayer for the State of Israel, of course, as it didn't exist yet.
Duchaning is, surprisingly, missing.
The traditional wording for מָעוֹז צוּר is given. (Chief Rabbi Hertz
later changed לְעֵת תָּכִין מַטְבֵחַ מִצָּר הַמְּנַבֵחַ "when thou shalt have prepared a
slaughter of the blaspheming foe" to לְעֵת תַּשְׁבִּית מַטְבֵחַ וְצָר הַמְּנַבֵחַ "when
you have caused the slaughter to cease, and the barking of the enemy"
[translation by myself], but it was changed back in the second
edition.) דְּבִיר, which I would translate "shrine", and designates part
of the Temple, is translated here as "oracle".
The four verses after the psalm before bentshing on Shabbos and yomtov
are not given. (Only the first two are there in the second edition.)
Psalm 150 to be recited at the end of the wedding service. (Also in
the second edition; reduced to "Some congregations" in the third.)
At the end of the last page, the
end. :o) Total page count: 660, as against 841 in the
second edition, 903 in the third and 926 in the fourth.
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