Cosima Underwater

Did you have one lately? A day that started full of promise and sunshine and as it progressed got worse by the minute?

My Dad is in hospital again. One foot is gone, now it’s the other one. Two toes got amputated on Wednesday, on Saturday my parents received the consent form to amputate the rest of the forefoot. My Dad said no.

Is life worthwhile without legs?

Yes it is, but it depends on all the other surrounding factors, like to what you grew used to the preceding 74 years, and how much pain you experience every night (screaming, terrible no sleep pain), and how much strength you have in your remaining limbs (not much), and how tired you are.

My Dad pinned his hope on this remaining leg. The leg with the black toe, blue foot, but the leg that would make it possible to learn to walk with a prosthesis on the other side. Now they want to amputate that too.

My Mum said that my Dad doesn’t care anymore, he just says no.

With the other foot I talked to him. I said that all that mattered is that we would have him, that he is needed , that he is loved. Now I don’t know anymore. My Dad has to decide.

I don’t think that life is fair. My Dad had a shitty childhood full of hunger, bombs, and beatings by his father, worked all his life, cared for his family, was stubborn, so what? Why can’t he have it easy in the end. Why?

When I was in Kyoto more than ten years ago I made a big mistake. I visited the old town and a couple of beautiful temples and marveled at the beautiful red autumn foliage, but I didn’t visit any of Kyoto’s famous gardens. It was one of those squeezed-in-a -few-days-after-a-business-meeting trip.

To make my mistake even worse I stayed at a truly terrible business hotel in Osaka, which is close to Kyoto. If you are a road warrior you know what kind of hotel I am talking about: expensive, closet-sized room, musty bathroom, smelly (stale cigarette smoke with something more awful mixed in, and the whole night you wonder what it was that died under your bed), air-conditioning either too hot or too cold, and (help!) the window can’t be opened. After that you swear to yourself that you will never, never book your hotel room at the last minute.

I don’t want you to put off to visit Japan after reading the above. Normally, hotel rooms in Japan’s urban areas are tiny but spotlessly clean, and have free internet access (woohoo!).

Where was I? Japanese gardens. They are beautiful.

I have a coffee table book with beautiful drawings and pictures, which I recommend to any Japanese garden fan: Japanese Garden Design by Marc P. Keane. I think Japanese gardens appeal to the average European because they encompass design features that seem familiar to us. They are fenced in (that archtypical paradise garden), surprising after you round the next corner, abstract, and highly symbolic. Yet in other ways they are so different to what we know, and therefore exciting.

I didn’t go to Kyoto this time, but I stopped at every public garden we came across, and sucked in on all the details of road-side private gardens we went by.

A friend of mine likened Japan to the Galapagos Islands. A seed or animal flies in and adapts to its new environment, changes, and becomes something truly unique.  The beauty of Japan is that it embraces outside influences,but every new impetus gets adapted to something truly Japanese. I think that is one of the reasons what makes Japan so interesting to visit. You recognize so many things, but see them in a completely new way.

Japanese garden design has strong Chinese influences, yet I bet you would instantly know how to tell apart a Japanese garden from a Chinese garden. A Chinese garden repaints an epic landscape in a highly artificial way, a Japanese garden distills the essence of it and does so seemingly effortless. Ok, that’s the ignorant Western short version, but you are free to dig deeper.

That’s the theory. Then you go to Japan and notice that space for gardens is limited. You walk through Tokyo. Skyscrapers, pavement, smelly cars, and endless sprawl with these gray apartment buildings. You stay in a hotel near Shinjuku Station, and discover the beauty of having your own, tiny, private space. And it has a bath tub. Japanese need bath tubs. As a Westerner (me at least) you are ok with a working shower. After I went on a pan-European business trip with a Japanese colleague I knew that a bath tub is essential for surviving, otherwise you will hear about it all through dinner.

But even in noisy, packed, central Tokyo, you round a corner and suddenly there is silence. It’s a quiet street. There are two storey homes right  next to the high-rises. They have a tiny parking space (don’t ask me how they rear-park-oh no!-bang-park-their-car) and a highly clipped pine tree.

The average American home has one-millimeter lawn, the Japanese house has a tightly clipped pine tree or two, and Germans have their garden dwarfs.

The charming feature about Japanese cities are tiny plots in the middle of town with detached private homes. It makes these cities human. Other nice features are carefully clipped hedges in between skyscrapers. It’s built up in a higglety pigglety kind of way, which makes it kind of cute, like Japanese cartoon characters and cars. You know what I mean when you visit.

Normally when I am a tourist I walk a lot, this time I had a Toyota Prius. This has nothing to do with Japanese gardens,  but why anyone would buy a Toyota Prius beats the :peeeeep: out of me. Ok, you save bucks at the gas station. It’s supposedly ecologically friendly, but if you look into what the hybrid battery is made off you know that’s not true. And then when you drive one, you know that any old Volkswagen is much better than this. For starters, they put the “hand” brake next to the gas petal down below, and when you  try to find it with your foot you snap apart some loose fitted plastic thingy (black) and something more complicated looking ( white, possibly from the air-conditioning outlet). The visibility back into your rear-view window is minimal. The overall feeling is that of driving a U-boat . Driving through a city at minimal speed is OK, but when you try to get to Hiroshima from Kagoshima on the Expressway or drive along these beautiful curving roads on Kyushu, you notice that the Toyota Prius’ handling is truly awful. It’s similar to steering a cruise ship down a mountain creek.

Have you ever stopped at a gas station in Japan at 1.30am? You will be greeted by a gas station employee with a deep bow. He looks like he is about 75 years old, and you have the urge to serve him not the other way around. He bows again and shouts a lot in Japanese that you don’t understand. You keep thinking that your generation is no good at all. There is this feisty silver-haired man filling your car’s gas tank in the middle of the night while you are thinking about a nice soft bed. It’s all going down hill from now on for sure.

Back to Japanese Gardens.

I was very late in booking our Chinese New Year vacation, during which the whole of China is on the move. Flight prices to most hang-out-beach as well as go-home destinations go through the roof during Chinese New Year.

Choices were limited. Luckily, I am not much of a beach bum. Flights to Japan were still cheap, and I love to go to Japan. I have been there on business trips and short city holidays numerous times and always had nice experiences.

For me Japan means lots of interesting idiosyncrasy, marvelous food, and all the creature comforts one would want. So far my trips were limited to Tokyo, Osaka, Kawasaki (don’t ask), and Kyoto (absolutely stunning, especially during autumn or spring).

This one week holiday was the chance to branch out a bit and  go beyond the big urban sprawl along the southern coast of Honshu island. We flew to Hiroshima and then drove around Kyushu island in a rental car.

One of my friends here in Hong Kong can’t stop talking about the lovely time she and a Japanese friend had driving from one ryokan (old-style Japanese Inn) to the next in the Japanese mountains. I envisioned something similar, and was looking forward to travel around Japan’s country side for the first time.

A Japanese-speaking friend while driving around Japan is handy but not necessary as I found out. Locals go out of their way to help lost gaijins (strangers) with hands, feet, and as much English as they can muster.  Most importantly, all road signs in Japan have a second line under the Japanese script in Latin letters. And while my rental car’s navigation system was in Japanese only, together with the rough maps in the Lonely Planet Guide, it still helped to find our destinations, a few detours included.

Before driving over the bridge to Kyushu island, we stayed in Hiroshima for two nights. I didn’t know exactly what to expect of Hiroshima. How does a city look and feel 65 years after a nuclear bomb had been dropped on it?

Hiroshima is relative quiet. It still has the hustle and bustle of a Japanese city, but doesn’t have that pressure cooker feel of Tokyo or Osaka. It’s a provincial town in a very pretty natural setting. It’s located among a river delta surrounded by beautiful soft-rolling hills.

The mountains fencing the city in on three sides were one of the reasons the Americans selected it for the atomic bomb, as they limited the blast. Hiroshima was also selected because it had a major military shipyard and large army base.

In the summer of 1945,  school children were busy helping to tear down buildings along fire safety channels.  In the years before, all major Japanese cities, largely consisting of wood houses, had been devastated by American air raid attacks. Hiroshima was preparing for the worst, and people wondered why their city had been spared from fire bombing so far.

You could think that Hiroshima must be a very sad place, but really it is not. When we visited the Peace Memorial museum near the epicenter of the explosion and later walked through the surrounding Park, one word kept popping up in my head, and that was resilience, the resilience of people’s spirit. It’s hard to get your head around the suffering and hardship that people went through, but still they went on and picked up the pieces as best as that was possible.

The Peace Park has a collection of origami paper cranes sent by children all over the world in wish for peace and in memory of Sadako Sasaki. An ancient Japanese story tells that whoever folds 1000 paper cranes will be granted a wish by a crane. Sadako suffered from leukemia when she began folding paper cranes. She achieved her goal of folding 1000 cranes but died a few months later. Her friends from school helped to raise the funds for her memorial. Children from all over the world continue to send origami cranes to Hiroshima in hope for peace.

Hiroshima reminded me a bit of German towns. You can sense the past devastation among the 1950s and 60s buildings. Maybe it was only in my head, but in the Peace Memorial museum I could also sense the same careful dance around representing the suffering of your own people. The museum especially highlights the suffering and death of children, the suffering of the innocent.

Are you allowed to grieve when your country started the mayhem? Are you allowed to tell about hardships when in the countries you attacked people’s suffering were as bad or worse than yours?

The posts will come in a burst now, because 1) I found the battery charger for my camera, 2) I traveled to Japan with a stopover in Shanghai, and 3) I feel like blogging again.

So first things first: the 5 hour stopover in Shanghai.

We took the Maglev train into the city, courtesy of the German taxpayer. In Germany this train generated too much protest (too expensive, too much noise for the people living nearby, too much of everything). In Shanghai it was built, because no one living nearby was asked and a good chunk of the cost was paid by German tax payers. So you can travel from and to the airport at a maximum speed of 430 km/h (267 mph), as clearly seen on the display above the doorway.

It was all a blur to me. You don’t need to travel at 430 km/h into downtown Shanghai, you can take the subway at much lower cost, but it won’t be as exciting for your speed obsessed 8 year-old son.

The end of the Maglev train is not in the city center, and you have to either take the subway or a taxi to get to the prime postcard spot of Shanghai, the Bund. Which may explain why the Maglev was very empty.

Friends told me that Shanghai is a mega-metropolis with just one beauty spot, the Bund.

And beautiful it is. As a nostalgic European you could fret about all that was destroyed in Shanghai since it was the gateway to the East in the 1920s, but let me tell you, the line-up of pre-war buildings at the Bund is truly breathtaking and more historic architecture than you will find in entire Hong Kong. Considering that they are basically colonial buildings and – although beautiful – represent a very sore spot in China’s history, I find it truly amazing that the Bund survived through the cultural revolution and the recent spout of destroy-and-build-higher frenzy.

The promenade in front of the Bund was full of tourists, whereas the new business district Pudong on the opposite of the river was full of cars stuck in a traffic jam among the new skyscrapers.

If I have the chance to visit Shanghai again, I will stay on the old side of the river and explore all the little streets behind the Bund.