4 January 2006, Somewhere over the Pacific

I’m writing just a bit from the plane so that I can use this byline. The 747-400 is fully loaded and every seat is full. Somehow I was seated in the screaming baby section again; sometimes I think I am probably a SB Magnet. We were an hour late leaving Boston and then three more leaving Detroit. It will be a long haul with only some lame movies to watch, though I do have a Michael Connelly book to read and some crosswords. At least half the people on the plane are Japanese returning home. No wonder people from other countries have a skewed impression of the US and its inmates with films like “The Dukes of Hazzard” to guide them. I will try to sleep, maybe the SB will too.

Thursday, 5 January, Kobe

Landed safely in the evening at Kansai International (KIX) near Osaka and saw Dola’s smiling face as we descended the stairs from Immigration, no document hassles at all. We boarded a bus just outside the baggage claim and spent about an hour cruising almost silently down the coast 50K along a completely elevated highway. Because our apartments are not available until tomorrow we checked into the Kobe Plaza Hotel on Rokko Island in Kobe Harbor about a half-mile from the University where we will be working. It had been 26 hours since we left Gloucester.

As soon as I got into my room I connected to the Internet and found that, as I had feared might happen, my mother died while we were in transit. It was not unexpected, and I have been grieving her loss since the moment several years ago when she was no longer able to recognize me or my sisters. Still, it’s a blow, and I’ve very confused feelings. I am relieved that she is no longer suffering, and is no longer imprisoned in a body that didn’t work. But I guess I also feel sorry for myself, now with both parents dead there is no generational buffer between me and my own mortality. I feel suddenly older.

Friday, 6 January

This morning, after breakfast at the hotel, we took the monorail one stop to Kobe International University, and walked to the chapel through the campus, now devoid of students during Christmas break. A large contingent of people awaited us, representing some of the many groups with interests in the organ project. Campus Life, Campus Security, Chapel Administration, the construction company tasked with preparing the building for us, and the electrical company with a similar goal. It would have been a nightmare without the invaluable translating and diplomacy skills of our colleague Katsuhiko Kawachi, or as he calls himself, Dola, (stray cat). He worked with us as one of Yamaha’s reps during the Yokohama project, now he has his own organ and piano maintenance company and will spend the next five weeks with us.

It always seems odd to me that so many people are involved with every decision here, but that’s the way it is done. For example, there was a fellow in a suit from the electrical contractor, and a supervisor in a uniform, and then the lowly guy who will actually be running the wires. It’s a relatively small and simple job, but each question and decision passes up the chain, gets translated, we have our own little meeting to come up with an answer, and then it gets translated and passed down the line again. I find it all cumbersome and need to possess myself of a little patience, which fortunately, Dola seems to have in abundance.

My first impression of the chapel is of its modest size. The organ will dominate the back of the room completely, even more so than was evident from the model. The chapel is also Spartan to the point of starkness, but that is in keeping with the rest of the campus, which is severely modern and done almost completely in white tile. Situated as it is on the edge of a large man-made island in Osaka Bay, it is wind-swept and a bit barren, at least at this time of the year. I think that when the students return on Tuesday, and when the weather moderates a bit, it may feel more welcoming.

After many meetings about wiring and unloading and floor protection and a workroom/office for us, we had lunch in the cafeteria next door. The food was good and not expensive, one chooses what one wants from the food models in a glass case and then buys a ticket from a vending machine for the proper amount, hands it to a cook and receives the hot dish moments later. The cafeteria looks out over a plaza on the busy harbor, the view only partially obscured by palm trees, incongruously tropical in the bitter wind.

We took a trip after lunch with the representative of the construction company; he’s a smart and friendly man in his mid to late thirties who drives a new Lexus SUV. I get a sense from him that he is not at all daunted or put out by our little project, and I think he will be a valuable ally. Among other things, his company will drill for and set the steel anchors that will tie the organ to the structure of the chapel, an important procedure in this earthquake zone. We drove a little further west along the harbor to an industrial area and into a lot full of cranes, lifts, and other rentable construction machinery. We picked out a scissors lift that will go up six meters with a 250 Kg capacity. I only wanted to rent it for two weeks, but a month’s rental is the same cost, so it should be around for the first week of voicing and may be handy for getting at front pipes.

After cooling our heels for a while in our “office” while the key situation was figured out, we headed out for our permanent living quarters. We have four single-bedroom apartments in a three-story stuccoed block building in a neighborhood just behind the Mikage Station on the Hanshin Railway, which is the public transport line closest to the Harbor. The front door is on a quaint unpaved alley between two streets, one residential, the other a shopping street. Some of the neighbors have plants set out, and the effect is pleasantly down home and urban at once. Each apartment in our “Weekly Mansion” has a kitchen sink, single burner stove, and a small fridge, as well as a washing machine, shower/deep tub and plenty of closet space. The beds are 97cm x 197cm and have duvets, there’s a long desk with a low hassock for a chair and a small TV.

Only two of the four rooms have DSL lines, so I have one of those. It is the one closest to the train line too, we’ll see if the noise is an issue. I am perched on the edge of the upturned hassock so as to be high enough to reach the laptop on the desk. The controls that run the heat in the bedroom and the bathroom are complex, but might not seem so bad if I didn’t have to memorize what each button does, not being able to read the Kanji characters.

After unpacking we strolled up the shopping street and chose a Korean Barbeque joint to have supper. There are all kinds of restaurants in easy walking distance, as well as a sizable grocery/department store and an Alsatian bakery; I think the location of these apartments will make it easy for us to keep ourselves fed, supplied and entertained.

Saturday, 7 January

Tried to sleep in a bit this morning to no avail, the time change had me wide-awake around 3am. I am tearing through the few paperbacks I brought because I don’t want to get up, but sleep doesn’t come. The trains run all night but are not loud enough to wake me, the heater’s constant susurration masks all other sounds from the city.

Met with the guys for breakfast at a coffee shop nearby, one of several in the neighborhood. Japanese breakfast is light by American standards; I’ll try to lay in some supplies to make it easier to eat in the morning at home. There’s next to nothing in the apartments in the way of cooking or eating utensils.

We set off north to explore on foot in a light snow and were in the foothills in less than an hour. Kobe is only about two or three miles wide in the space between the mountains and the shore, but fills that space solidly for miles in each direction. There is no visible border to the northeast where Kobe joins Osaka. The houses do get larger as one goes up the hillside, finally becoming palatial at the highest levels of habitability. Beyond them the ground rises so sharply as to make building very difficult, even so there is new, cantilevered construction going on, which seems imprudent in these seismic conditions. We walked another couple of hours along the piedmont with Jason and Dana taking lots of photos; there are so many wonderful small things that are odd or interesting, and so many beautiful details of house construction or stonework.

We finally made our way back to the northernmost of the transport lines and took a train to the center of town to find a bank machine that accepts Cirrus and to grab a coffee at Starbucks, (Tully’s is here too). The area around Sannomiya Station is a huge shopping area, something like Downtown Crossing in Boston but probably five times more extensive, and much of it underground. We found the Tokyu Hands store, the same chain we frequented on the Yokohama installation. It is justly famous for the quality and diversity of its collection of tools for woodworking, but it also has a floor for gardening, and one for sewing, another for paper, and kitchen tools, etc, etc. We spent two hours wandering around looking at hundreds of things, and in the end saw only about one third of the store. Jason bought a beautiful kitchen knife. We’ll be going back.

When Dola and his family spent some time last summer in Massachusetts he became enamored of our wholesale shopping outfits like BJ’s and Costco. Apparently there’s nothing very similar near where he lives in Tokyo but he had heard of a Costco here. We set out to find it. After several false starts, detours and U-turns, we did discover it about 45 minutes away from Kobe Center toward Osaka, but I seriously doubt I could get there again.

It was a little bizarre to be shopping in such an American institution with all the signs in Kanji, but it was just the right place to try to buy some of the things the apartments lack to make them furnished. We now all have one large plate, one small plate, one bowl and a cup. The acquisition of silverware was left for another day, but we have enough laundry detergent to last the entire installation, and microwave popcorn, fruit, and mugup supplies for a month.

We finished the day at a sushi place on Rokko Island near the Chapel. We sat at a U-shaped counter while a conveyor belt brought plates of sushi out of the kitchen and along the inside edge of the counter in front of us. One merely chooses the pieces one wishes and piles the empty plates up to one side. The plates are color-coded for more or less expensive sushi so that the staff can total up the bill when one is done. The sushi chefs work in the middle of the U, so it is easy to ask for a particular kind of sushi if the conveyor holds none. Fresh batches of ginger and wasabi move past as well, and the ever-vigilant waitresses are at one’s elbow if a beverage is needed. We ate extremely well for not much money. Dana, Dola and I gave a good accounting of ourselves, but it was Jason who bore away the prize for the tallest stack of empty plates.

Sunday, 8 January

A different coffee house this morning, this one about five blocks away, but with a Hammond B3 and a jazz series in the evenings. I had thick white toast with some maple syrup for dipping, a small cup of yogurt and jam, and coffee, 400 yen, or about $3.40. Dola suggested a drive in the mountains and we readily agreed, he has been extremely generous with the use of his car, a nice new VW Golf. The mountains are so close to the sea and to the city that we were at an elevation of more than 2000 feet inside of 45 minutes. There are some spectacular views to be had from the scenic turnouts, but a 15-minute walk through the snow brought us to a vantage point just below the summit of Rokko Mountain that had the entire coastal plain at our feet and the arms of Osaka Bay curving away to the east and west. There was a rough restaurant at this overlook, filled with hikers. We enjoyed large hot bowls of udon and ramen noodles and hiked back to the car. Even those of you who follow and who will not have the good fortune to have Dola available to chauffer you around can easily reach this point by city bus and cable car.

We descended the back side of the coastal mountains and wound our way to the town of Arima, renown for its temples and hot springs. I was put in mind of Woodstock, Vermont and other small towns whose natural gifts have created an environment to entertain the well-to-do who visit. Shops selling fancy teas, and the highest quality clothing and gifts line the busy winding streets, clearly laid out well before the advent of the automobile. We visited the Arima Shinto Shrine set at the top of a long flight of stone stairs above the town. The edifice itself is built of the materials that surround it, a granite foundation of closely fit blocks, heavy post and beam framing of cedar and infill of bamboo. It is easy to see why this architecture had such an effect on Wright and the Greenes, among others.

Eerily beautiful traditional Shinto music or gagaku played in the background as the snow filtered down through the huge cedar trees with their understory of bamboo. Great flapping crows cawed overhead to provide counterpoint to the tranquility of the building and its setting. We stayed too long in the 25 degree cold, held by the mysterious spirituality of the shrine and were all shivering as we climbed back down through the town. But there is a public bathhouse where one may enjoy the hot springs and we joined the throngs that were taking part.

Here’s how it goes: Remove shoes, place in locker, keep locker key, buy ticket from vending machine, 650 yen, trade ticket for another locker key, buy towel, 200 yen, go upstairs, men on the left (blue curtained door), women on the right (red curtained door). Remove clothing, place in locker, key goes around wrist, enter hot springs room, ignore 50 other naked men and the looks they give, pause to allow sight to acclimate to billows of steam. Step to washing area and soap body from top to toe, rinse and repeat. Step into hot spring with towel folded on crown of head, gasp at 120 degree water, slowly submerge body in dark orange mineral-laden water, allow trouble and tension to fade away.

God it was good, I felt like a new man after the anxieties of the trip and recent grief. We all emerged mellowed and lazy, sauntered back to the car and rolled back to Kobe. We found a miraculous parking space in Chinatown and had supper at a little joint that serves gyoza and only gyoza, pork dumplings made fresh in front of us as we sat at the counter. A stroll up the crowded pedestrian street past dozens of shops and food vendors and then a coffee. What a fabulous day.

It seems almost decadent to have all this time off before getting to work, but when the plane tickets were bought we thought we could unload tomorrow, now we are not allowed to begin until Tuesday because of a holiday that even Dola doesn't fathom. It is good to have some time to readjust the sleep cycles, and to search out and organize all the things we need to sustain this crew and the ones to come (Oh yes, and have some fun), but we are all anxious to get going.