Collin Condray’s Blog

Today started with a run with my roommate, Tim. There is a famous monument about halfway up a steep hill overlooking Kameoka and at the top of the hill is another area with many more stone monuments and an observation tower with an even greater view. It has been tradition for the students of the JSAP program to take their morning run up this hill, so Tim and I decided to run it.

The previous night, Dr. Stapp had shown us the street to get to the path up the hill, so we had not seen the actual path before. We had a pretty good run to the beginning of the path. When we got there we found a steep staircase of tiny concrete steps, almost all of them too big for our feet. So we decided to just walk up the stairs to the monument (our only safe course of action). It was overcast that day but you could still see a large portion of the city. Unfortunately, the overcast skies meant that we were going to get rained on later in the day.

Our major event today was Sanjusangendo, a Buddhist temple located in south eastern Kyoto. Its name translated means “the hall of the 33 alcoves” which comes from the architectural design of the temple. There are 35 large pillars that support the building and 33 spaces between those pillars. The original name of the temple was Rengeo-in Temple and it was built in 1164 by the orders of the emperor Goshirakawa. The temple was rebuilt as Sanjusangendo in 1266 during the Kamakura era after Rengeo-in burned down, as so many other temples in Japan have. The hall is enormous, measuring 387 feet long by 59 feet wide, and it is the largest wooden building in the world.

Sanjusangendo is built around the gilded statue of the 1,000 armed Kannon, the Buddhist goddess of mercy. According to Buddhist tradition, each of these arms is able to save one world. There are also a thousand smaller gilded statues of Kannon, but instead of having a thousand arms for each of these statues, each has only forty arms with each arm able to save 25 worlds. These statues were carved by 70 sculptors out of Japanese cypress led by the sculptor Tankai and are all slightly different from one another. One of the customs among visitors to Sanjusangendo is to try to find the likeness of friends and family members in the faces of the many statues located here.

Since 1606, Sanjusangendo has hosted a biannual archery contest on January 15 and May 2. Archers attempt to see who can fire the greatest number of arrows at a target. The archer stands outside at the one end of the lengthy hall and aims at the target located in the veranda of the other end of the hall, a 400 foot shot. The record for the greatest number of arrows shot was set by a 12-year samurai in 1686 when shot 13,056 arrows and hit 8,133 bull’s eyes all in one day.

Miamyoto Musashi, the famed 17th century Japanese swordsman, fought a duel here with members of a rival school of swordsmanship. He killed 16 of his opponents all by himself. At the end of the temple tour, there was a display about this event which included a portrait of Musashi. Needless to say, Musashi does not look at all like Toshiro Mifune.

We were not allowed to take pictures inside of Sanjusangendo so the pictures in the gallery are all from the outside. As you can see from the pictures, it rained very hard today so we canceled our other planned cultural excursion and shopped in the Kyoto train station. I’ve tried to get a few shots of Sanjusangendo to show how large the building is but none of my shots do it justice.

Below the station is a shopping center where we ate lunch. A few of us ate at an Italian restaurant. I ordered the carbonara and finally got my chance to slurp the noodles.

Later I went with Shannon (who is comically photogenic, just look at the photos and see if you can figure out who she is) shopping downstairs. I only bought one thing, green tea pudding balls that I fell in love with at Kinkakuji. When I bought it, the cashier pointed to the 20th on the calendar. I think she meant that you had to eat them by that date (like they are going to last more than a day). When I looked on the packaging, sure enough there was a curious date in Arabic numbers on it, 16.5.20 which sort of looks like its only good from the 16th to the 20th and I can’t eat it for 3 days. It turns out that the number 16 is the current emperor’s reining year, so down the hatch!

I didn’t buy anything else today, but I seriously considered spending all of my money on a foot massage after all the walking we had done in the past few days. The trip is still young.

I finally got to post today, but I had a tough time doing it. The local Internet cafe is open only for 9 hours a day, so it was hard to get back in time to use it after all our outings. It was very cheap, about $1 an hour, but they didn’t have a data port for me to plug my laptop into, so I had to do all my posting and copying from my USB hard drive. They only had one Windows XP computer where the drive would work, the rest of the computers were Windows ME (Windows ME?!? What kind of crappy OS choice is that?). XP kept letting my FTP connection die, so it took a lot longer to upload files than usual. I still haven’t uploaded all my pictures yet. Maybe I’ll get a chance after we get back from Nara.

I can’t figure out how the cafe stays in business. There are only 7 computers working for 9 hours a day for $1 an hour. That means at most, $63 an day. There were 5 people working there, and there didn’t appear to be any other form of income. It’s very strange.

Finally, for dinner we ate at a noodle shop in Kameoka. I choose Cha Shu Men for dinner, ramen noodles with pork cutlets, which were so good I forgot to take a picture of it before diving in. They were great so I think I’ll have to get them again before I leave.

I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to talk about sweet, tasty Pocari Sweat. Rest assured I will get around to it.

Today’s kanji is the character for tea, ?. It looks kind of like the katakana character ? but with a roof and a short H on it. It is on a ton of drinks and on some food. It’s a very useful character to know.

Tomorrow Nara, Sharp Corporation, and Yakitori.

Today we visited the Kyoto shrines of Kinkakuji and Ryoanji. Kinkakuji was built in the 13th century. In the 14th century, it became the home of one of the retired Ashikaga shoguns. When he died, he willed the temple to a Buddhist sect who made it a Zen temple.

The name Kinkakuji means “golden pavilion,” and if you look at the pictures, you’ll immediately see why. The house is topped dramatically by a Chinese phoenix covered in gold. Kinkaku is the only original building left in the compound, the rest of them having been burned down or suffered other ill fates.

At the end of the tour, there was a shrine with a gong you could pull after offering a small token. The gong was meant to wake up the gods with its ringing so they would hear your petition. There were several shops also at the exit, and many had free samples. The sweets samples were very good, especially the green tea candy. However, the non sweet samples were not to my liking, being overly bitter and vinegary tasting.

Ryoanji is another Buddhist temple we visited that day, interestingly enough across the street from St. Joseph’s Convent. There is a large garden complex built around the temple that is quite beautiful. The temple itself had a rock garden with 15 rocks built into it. The maximum number of rocks that you are supposed to be able to see at one time is 14; the 15th is supposed to appear in your mind’s eye. I only counted at most 13 rocks, so I’m pretty far behind. The main downside to Ryoanji was that it was swarming with gnats.

At both places, I was very intrigued by the Japanese maple trees that grew in the temples and took several close up pictures. The Japanese call them momiji, or baby’s hand, from their pronounced resemblance.

There were huge butterflies flitting about in both places that I had never seen before. One type was big and black with a large red dot on the wing. Another was black with an electric blue flame on its wing. Hopefully, I can catch a picture of one later.

My goal of eating my way across Japan is off to an excellent start. Across the street from Kinkakuji is a restaurant where we stopped for lunch. I ordered an interesting dish they call the Torisoboro set: rice topped with minced chicken and eggs and miso soup for only ¥680. It tasted great and reminded me a little of Korean food but not as spicy.

Shannon ordered noodles, apparently not knowing that it is polite to slurp your noodles. She had a little trouble adapting to this custom, so I helped her by making slurping noises as she ate to give her a little cultural camouflage. I think it helped a little.

Wednesday’s “Eat Across Japan” tour ended at Nigata-san’s restaurant. Nigata-san is a friend of Dr. Stapp and helped us move our gear from the train station to our hotel when we arrived. We had fried rice and curried rice. Both were very delicious, but of course, they were served slightly differently than in America. They had a small salad of cabbage and a small slice of meatloaf. Ahhh, meatloaf. On the side we had Chinese dumplings filled with chicken and vegetables and small sandwiches (which I did not eat because they had something on them that looked suspiciously like mayonnaise, curse my foul enemy that has tracked me here!) and tomatoes (his evil sidekick!). I’m sure they were delicious…or were they?

At Nigata-san’s restaurant we also met Dr. Stapp’s Kendo instructor, Kita-san, who is a member of the Kameoka police department. Apparently, all of the members of the police department study either kendo or judo. We were promised a demonstration later in our trip which I am looking forward to very much (unless I am the demostratee).

We were also told that in Kameoka, a city of 100,000, they only have 3 police cars for the entire city. Can someone find out how many police cars Fayetteville has? I’m sure he would get a kick out hearing how the Americans do things.

Tomorrow, Sanjusangendo, Kiyomizu-dera, Kyoto Station and sweet, tasty Pocari Sweat.

We’re finally in Japan now. It seems very late for me, but it is still relatively early locally. It is about 8 PM Japan time and 6 AM Arkansas time and my internal clock is desperately struggling to catch up.

Today started very early, around 4 AM. I didn’t get to bed until 11 PM because I was trying to pack in everything at the last minute, so I was nice and tired for the trip out. Fortunately, it made it very easy to sleep on the plane, screaming babies, turbulence and all.

We didn’t have any problems getting to XNA in Highfill, Arkansas. Everybody showed up with plenty of time to catch our flight. We were well stocked for the trip. Everybody had brought enough food to avoid the fate of those people in that movie “Alive” for a long time. The biggest hit was from Sergio who brought bread and cheese from his native Spain. He also packed wine and olive oil in his luggage. If you’re going to travel, make sure it is with someone from Spain.

Our flight plan was from XNA to Dallas to LAX to Kansai near Osaka, Japan, a 22 hour trip. I didn’t realize how busy XNA was that early. There seemed to be a lot of business traffic and probably a lot of it was from Wal-Mart and other vendors. When a couple of the other guys in the group and I were talking about our job prospects after we get back, we realized there were probably a lot of people that knew about some good jobs and we wanted to yell out, “Hey, we got some hot off the presses MBA students here. Top grade stuff! Anybody want a business card?” We stopped short from doing so. But, there is always the trip back. Maybe I’ll bribe a flight attendant to hand out my resume to everyone on the flight back.

I learned an interesting fact about one of the members of our group: Kelli can sleep anywhere any time on an airplane. She can sleep when we’re on the ground waiting, she can sleep as the plane takes off, with or without noisy babies, with or without the inflight TV on. I was very impressed.

I had a bit of a scare at Dallas. Since we have to keep this journal, I was going to break out my laptop and do a little blogging. I’ve got this neat little program called PDANet that lets me use the IP stack on my Treo to connect to the Internet. First I had trouble getting PDANet to work. It has always been a little quirky, but the new version I downloaded only worked for a few seconds, and I was only able to get a few dozen KB of data down from the Internet. I never got the program working for the entire trip out. I was pretty unhappy about that. When I tried to plug my laptop in to one of the power jacks at the airport, nothing happened. I thought that my power cord was dead, just what I needed at the start of a long trip away from home. Then I tried my cell phone recharger and it didn’t work either, so that made me think it was the power jack and not my gear, which is what it eventually turned out to be.

The trip from LA to Japan was best summarized by Nhan when he announced after we got off the plane, “My butt hurts.” Our group didn’t have assigned seating at the start of our trip, so we were split up and seated in pairs around the plane. Other than that, the trip was OK. The food was pretty good; we had a bit of sushi, naturally. I think I slept about 2/3′s of the trip when I should have gotten up and moved around, so of course, my butt hurt when I got up. We’ll see if all that sleep was a good idea in a couple of hours when it is time for bed again.

I also sat beside a young lady who was traveling to Okinawa. She told me how beautiful and lush it was there. I never really thought about Okinawa in that context. I always thought of the Okinawa as where many of Japanese martial arts come from. Now, I want to go there to see the sights as well as train.
So, now we are on our way from Osaka to Kyoto by train. I’ve traveled by train before in Europe and found it a pretty good way to travel. It’s not as hectic and confining as air travel (you don’t have to stay buckled in your seat for most of the trip), and you don’t have to do the work of driving a car so you can watch the world go by or think or read or write your blog.

Japan is different from some of the other countries I’ve traveled in, for example Germany. For one thing, the cities are huge! If you look at a map, it is mostly Osaka from Kansai Airport to Kyoto. My wife and I lived in Vienna for a year and it was a big place with a couple of million people, but Osaka seemed to go on forever. And although it was around 8 PM, things seemed relatively deserted. There were, of course, people at the various train stops, but down on the streets below the train track, there were very few people or cars. It was Tuesday night, and I don’t know if people were still at work or the various stores were closed so there was no reason to go out or everyone had turned in for the night. It seemed very strange.

Osaka also seemed uniformly modern. Most of the buildings seemed new, not too many quaint older houses or buildings like Germany.

Finally, I want to thank whoever suggested bringing your own handkerchief or tissue. It was an extremely useful suggestion since bathrooms don’t always provide paper towels. Remember that next time you’re at an American rest stop.

Tommorrow, Kinkakuji and Ryoanji and maybe, an Internet connection.

I’m trying to finish up the last bit of packing. I’ve got everything that I want to take with me, now its just a matter of jumping up and down on top of the suitcases to get everything to fit.

Hopefully, I’ll get a chance to do a little blogging on the road and maybe post a few pictures. After that I will be recovering from major jet lag and getting oriented so please be patient about seeing anything new for a day or two.

See you soon from Japan!

Its been very busy in these few days leading up to the flight out. There doesn’t seem to be enough time to do everything. I have to do the following before Monday:

• Pack

• Graduate
• Finish research for the paper
• Find a job
• Come up with 3 questions for the various companies we’re going to visit
• Figure out what I’m going to do in my free time

I have been giving some thought about what I’m going to do in Japan and have a few good ideas. In general, I’m going to try as many new foods and take as many pictures as possible. I’ll also just hop on a bus and travel around the city and see what I can see. That was a lot of fun when I lived in Vienna.

There are a few specific places in the cities we’re going to visit that I want to visit. In Kyoto I want to visit the Budo Center. I don’t think they’ll let me train there but it would be nice just to watch. In Tokyo, I definitely want to visit Akihabara, the electronics district. There is also a sword museum with several thousand swords that I’d like to visit as well.

I do have several guide books but I haven’t had time to read all of them. If any one has any suggestions about what I should go see, leave a comment.

Here are a few of the cities in Japan we’ll be visiting:

• Kameoka (west of Kyoto)

• Nara
• Toyota City (near Nagoya)
• Hiroshima
• Tamano City
• Tokyo

They are circled in the map above (click it for a larger map). I am looking for a better map of Japan, so please leave a comment if you know where to find one.

There are also few pictures up in the Japan gallery. Watch the album as the trip progresses for more pictures.

Our group will be covering a lot of ground while we’re in Japan. Here are some of the places we’re going to be going and some of the businesses we’ll be visiting:

Cultural
• Kinkakuji
• Ryoanji
• Sanjusangendo
• Kiyomize-dera
• Kasuga Shrine
• Todaiji
• Byodo-in

Companies
• Shoyeido-an incense manufacturer
• Sharp
• Sanyo
• Toyota
• Nippondenso
• Mitsui engineering and shipbuilding (MES)
• Daiwa steel and tube corporation (MANAK)
• Wal-mart / Seiyu
• Kirin Beer

We also have to cover several economic topics related to Japan:
• Kanban
• Keiretsu
• Management/labor union relationship
• Just-In-Time Management (JIT)
• Current state of the Japanese economy
• Financial Deregulation (“Big Bang”)
• ISO 14000 Certification
• Demings 14 points