I managed a 7 hour layover in Beijing so I just drove in an out of its major tourist trap.

Tienanmen Square is a huge empty expanse of flat stones. Mao used to stand a million people in there just to have a chuckle at being leader of all China. Its surrounded by soviet inspired architecture and sitting in the middle of it is Mao’s reliquary hall containing his remains preserved in stasis.

The forbidden city really is a small town within Beijing. Huge halls that now contain museums surround even larger ornate buildings and vast empty plazas. The city gives echos of its past power, but denuded of the live processes that would surely have filled it while it was active. It might be cheesy, but I think historical re-enactors would help fill the vast and dead feeling courtyards in the forbidden city.

I was reminded I was in Asia on the way back to catch my plane when my taxi driver pulled off the highway to urinate against a tree.

I only managed a couple snapshots of Beijing.

Geoff and I took the train into Shanghai for the weekend. In between Chinese cities the landscape alternated between abandoned communes, and freshly stamped out planned communities. Five hundred units of the exact same house arranged in maddening tessellation. The families I saw on the streets and in restaurants were odd inverted pyramids of attention. Grandparents and parents all focused on one single child.

I hadn’t seen many pictures of Shanghai, so the quantity of inventive, colorful sky scrapers that appeared all around us surprised me. The 1930’s architecture of The Bund has banker’s granite fortresses standing shoulder to shoulder with each other. They form a stolid line of columns that look out over the river over at the new growth appearing every year in Pudong. China is pouring money into Pudong to see how many crazy looking multicolored steel and glass buildings its can stuff in one small area before cosmic fish mistake it for a reef and start swimming about it.

Other than touring The Bund, Pudong and Nanjing Road, we didn’t have time for much other than drinking formaldehyde free beer. A barmaid we talked to wanted to know all about the USA. “Is there really a problem with racism against black people?” Every time China is in our news, we feel obligated to mention Tibet or Falung Gong. I think Chinese news compulsively mentions that the US keeps huge populations of black people in rape cages for smoking joints.

Photos of Shanghai.

I went to China for work a couple months ago. It was my second time in China and I got to visit much more central urban places. My workplace was in Hangzhou, a small city of six million people built around an enormous lake. It felt like walking around a city of one million in a rich country with an excess of tall apartment buildings and hotels. Geoff figured that it was indicative of the fraction of people there with enough disposable income to patronize shops and services.

Every horizon was prickly with cranes pulling up dozens of new high rises. Little patches of old asia were still around, but I almost missed the narrow alleys of vendors and people squatting to play cards or eat noodles entirely in the cities. There wasn’t much street food in the parts of China I saw on this trip. The traditional markets were there under old cement communist bunkers, taking cover from the shiny new towers. Several times a day small colorful bursts of fireworks pop off over the sky, likely launched by individuals. Occasionally larger barrages go off that might be part of a corporate or government event?

On our daily commute to work we often couldn’t see across the river through the smog.  Due to the oppressive pollution, the Chinese have outlawed most petrol fueled bikes. So the scooters are all silent electrics with a few propane models scattered among them. We did see a cop on a proper 450cc motorcycle.

The overall level of wealth in Hangzhou was  greater than I’m familiar with from southeast Asia, but there’s clear economic disparity. There aren’t legions of beggars in Hangzhou. Actually, there were hardly any beggars. The wealthy were far more noticeable. Buick is doing quite well there. Owning one of their vehicles is a status symbol. The VP of my company’s China office had a personal driver for his. There were plenty of Audis and BMWs on the road. A Ferrari was parked on the sidewalk outside my office building. We saw Porsche’s, Maserati and an even a Bently on the road. Near our hotel was a Rolls Royce dealership. Geoff commented that he saw more exotic cars in Hangzhou than he has in San Francisco.

With an inexhaustible cheap labor pool a great many people are paid to stand around. At the entrance to restaurants two girls would hang out like curtains and sometimes two more inside just to usher you to the host. Standing around all day doing absolutely nothing, the girls look more look bored and dejected than attractive. Men who are paid to stand around look a little better, mostly because they’re wearing security uniforms or are actually in the military. Standing at forced attention masks their brains melting under the excruciating tedium.

Despite the plight of the underclass, one of my favorite things about China is how assertive the women are compared to other Asian countries. I’m guessing its a product of communist egalitarian ideology. Its quite pronounced when you compare it to the rest of Asia, where women are very subservient, basically do most of the work and reap few of the rewards.

Some photos of Hangzhou.

Tokyo is very spread out with four or five downtowns. Buildings ripple with animated neon and humongous video advertisements. Twisty weird architectural creations jump out and vie for your attention as you pass them on the train, but there’s rarely enough in one place for a skyline. In parts of O Daiba you can’t see the ground through the web of footbridges, aerial building to building tunnels, trains, and highways. Think Metropolis.

Where we stayed was quite a contrast from all that. Tokyo’s fairly expensive, so our hotel in Ueno was the cheapest place we could find in a poor part of town next to a soup kitchen. The joint was spotless. Absolutely immaculate. Important fact: In Japan, the ghetto is clean.

Shinkjuku has big business and the totalitarian looking metropolitan government buildings on one side of the tracks and the bright lights of a fading red light district on the other. Japanese drug laws are fairly liberal so there’s all kinds of weird fungus and colored powders for sale on the streets. The rattling pachinko parlors and throbbing strip joints are succumbing to Big Retail kinda like Times Square.

Everything new, cute, glowing and popular can be found in Shibuya. Fashion and toys predominate. It was a fun place to window shop, but for tourism, Love Hotel Hill took the cake. There’s a little hill in Shibuya covered with hourly rate fantasy hotels. They look like little castles, mosques and spaceships. You can rent a room for a quick tryst in whatever theme you like: Underwater Adventure, Sultan’s Harem, Dungeon, Outer Space, Hello Kitty, High School Classroom, you name it. They even offer concealed parking and –as should go without saying now– its all very clean.

We tried to capture some interesting stuff in photos, but not a single giant penis destroyed even so much as a city block while we were there. Maybe next time. Out of money and a little travel weary, we fluttered off to San Francisco. Perhaps to settle down for a bit…

We went to Yokohama to visit an old high school friend of my mother’s, Kazuko Yamamoto. Our bus arrived in Shinjuku station, early in the morning and Kazuko was very worried about us encountering a homeless person there. A homeless person. One. Coming from the USA and recently from Indochina this was quite a perspective shift. We mentioned all the stray animals in Europe to Kazuko and she said that there are no stray dogs in Yokohama. I believe it.

By now we had a sense of what it means to be a visitor in Japan, but the Yamamotos generosity was still surprising. We just wanted to drop in and say “hi” for an evening, but they effectively captured us. The Yamamoto’s tried to put us up at real hotel for a week. We haggled it down to two days as we had a plane to catch and Tokyo to explore on our own. The moment we were in Kazuko’s presence we could not pay for anything: food, train tickets, even a newspaper. We had to be very careful about even intimating wants or needs lest Kazuko suddenly inconvenience herself to provide it for us.

Mr. Yamamoto works from 8am to 1am (!) most weekdays as a manager at Fujitsu. Their daughter Maya lives at home and works the same schedule at the same company. Their other daughter Yuka, is in University studying Chemistry. Kazuko works more reasonable hours as an English teacher, but does all the housework. Although Americans work longer hours than the Japanese nowadays. In Japan the long hours are spread throughout the economic classes more evenly. Japan is like 80-90% middle class.

We got guided tours of the Yokahama bay with slidewalks and modern architecture, Yokahama Chinatown, and Kurakuna, Tokyo. The Yamamotos also took us to Mr. Yamamoto’s father’s house in the middle of a US Navy base. The house stood inside a little bamboo wood dotted with fruit trees shielding it from the Navy trailers. It was a nice old traditional house with tatami inside and a traditional garden. I’m still not sure how Mr. Yamamoto Sr. saved his house, its the only one there. It sounds like he was a royal pain in the ass to just the right people.

Photos of Yokahama and Kunakura.

We had a great time with the Yamamotos even while trying to dodge their generosity. But eventually we struck out on our own to set up camp in a very poor area of Tokyo…

Kyoto is the old capitol of Japan where the nobility built castles and numerous temples. Through green bamboo forests you can catch glimpses of old Japan surrounded by a restrained modernity. The architecture is careful and tasteful and traditional. Its a bit like an austere Europe done in dark cyprus instead of ornamented marble. Wood, paper and stone provide their own natural detail if lit and arranged properly. Much of it is set up to look like it wasn’t arranged all.

We got to walk around the traditional entertainment district on Coming of Age Day when all the twenty year olds dressed up in kimono and went out on the town. We even bumped into an apprentice Geisha.

We were able to stay in a traditional dwelling while in Kyoto. Japanese homes are constructed post and beam with sliding rice paper walls. Tatami mats cover the floor and “outside” is just a gradual succession of increasingly open walls. The sliding walls mean you can reconfigure the interior rooms to fit your whim and makes small houses seem deceptively large. This design is meant to air out nicely in the summer. In the winter it meant huddling around kerosene space heaters.

We spent a long time just shuffling around temples in our socks going from one grey stone and green bamboo setting to the next. Walkways in the gardens turn into stepping stones to force you to slow down and notice a detail and then twist about to show you something else. One technique is to frame a garden with the larger landscape around it. Mountains overshadowing bonsai messes with your perspective.

Most religions attempt to inspire divine awe in their followers by building big stone and glass buildings. Shinto plops a temple down in the middle of a spot of natural beauty and lets creation speak for itself. But then of course the monks are Japanese. So they tweak the hell of the area with meticulous millennium long gardening plans. Nature is grand, but everything can be improved.

There are more temples and shrines then you could ever possibly visit in Kyoto, but some people try. Surrounding the temples are religious pilgrims in traditional attire that travel from temple to temple on foot, waving their hands in prayer seeking enlightenment through repetition. Also surrounding the temples are ridiculously fit guys in traditional garb that will haul you up temple hills in a rickshaw for a hefty fee. After hanging out with struggling cyclo drivers in Vietnam it was very strange to see these well fed guys just getting in a good workout on your yen.

After China we were expecting a continuation of Tea Heaven. But the Japanese drink so much American style coffee it actually took us a while to find a tea house. When we did, it was very upscale joint. Quoth Mandy: “This tea had better have been shat out by unicorns. For this price you could go to China, buy great tea and have a lovely holiday.” Which is, I guess, what tea merchants do.
Nenjo Castle is right in the center of Kyoto surrounded by gardens. The Shogun had the palace inside the castle equipped with “nightingale floors” so you’d know if ninja were sneaking around the joint. The floors sing when you step on them. Its not squeaky at all, it sounds like a chorus of tiny violins every time you move. Its an impressive blend of aesthetic and security. The rice paper walls are elaborately painted with phoenix, tigers and trees.

We loved Kyoto. Mandy keeps saying she wants to move to “Kyoto, Vermont.” Unfortunately we had to pace ourselves and do a lot of half days so that Mandy’s evil Chinese cough didn’t turn into a flu.

Photos of the pretty city.

We wanted to take the bullet train to Yokahama (2 hrs!), but though an interpreter we found an overnight bus for much less…

Japan is supernaturally clean and polite. In our plane trip from mainland Asia we were magically transformed from being some of the tidiest, most respectful people around for miles into obviously the most slovenly and rude.

I’ve met clean and polite individual Japanese before, but a whole society of this behavior almost defies believability. Even the machinery is very polite. Little animated people bow at you every time you use a public phone, ATM, or kiosk.

A girl accidentally stepped in front of me in a queue one day, realized what she had done and jumped back a mile: “Gomen! Gomen! Gomen-nasai! Gomen!” with repeated bows. Another girl briefly touched my hand in a train station and did the same thing.

The Japanese were extraordinarily helpful. We had to be careful how long we spent looking at maps in public. People would go far out of their way to help us out. Once a woman biked all the way down a hill, gave us unnecessary directions, and then biked all the way back up. Concerned that you won’t be able to navigate the subway, people will offer to go hours out of their way to guide you and “make sure you arrive safely.” For Buddha’s sake, its Japan! What could happen?

I don’t think you can properly appreciate how cleanly the Japanese are without being surrounded by it. There’s a national obsessive compulsive…habit, lets say, regarding tidiness, dirt and germs. Everything is always being polished, swept and arranged. Its very rare to see anything larger than a cigarette butt on the ground. We saw someone spill a soda in a public park in a poorer part of Tokyo. They immediately got down on hands and knees to clean up their mess with napkins while their companions ran for more cleaning supplies.

There’s no vandalism. Public machines go unmolested so they don’t need to be fortified. Graffiti is pointless what with how often everything is cleaned. When a train reaches the end of the line, white gloved and masked sweeper teams rush in. Blue collar workers wear white gloves. Truck drivers too, that steering wheel could get filthy. Doilies cover the seats in taxis. Rubbish collectors jump off the truck wearing white jumpsuits with white gloves. Its like a 50’s science fiction movie.

Just before supper the Japanese shower, soap and rinse. Then they climb into a short, deep tub to soak. Climb out, rinse again and your done. I must get myself a Japanese washroom.

I personally hope that Japanese politeness and cleanliness spread like a virus over the globe. Okay, that doesn’t seem likely. The Japanese had to be instructed with the nasty side of a 3 foot razorblade over many generations to train these habits into them.

We never got in contact with the people we know in Osaka and Kobe, so our first stop in this country was the old capital, Kyoto.

What’s stunning about technology in Japan that everyone possesses the very latest gadget. The same thing also seems to apply to public infrastructure, but the Japanese are so cleanly that even things from thirty years ago appear brand new.

Everything that can be is automated. Traditional Japanese doors are sliding screens, so modern doors are all powered glass sliders. There’s a couple of vending machines on every city block that sell beer, cigarettes, hot canned coffee and electrolyte drinks. How long would an unattended beer machine last in Europe or America? If you wander around enough you can find machines selling batteries, books and even stranger things. Public toilet seats are heated and have several touch-pad controlled bidet settings. The bidet extends on a delicate little robotic arm. They are always immaculate, vandalism does not exist.

Mobile phone culture in Japan is completely pervasive. Everyone does everything with their phone and has for a long time. Everyone totes about a tiny transforming toy with thumbprint security that’s also a PDA, 2 megapixel video camera, photo editor, MP3 player, email client, web browser, bluetooth and IR remote, GPS with map, and radio. I’m sure I left something out. Oh yeah: videogames, chat clients, and barometers. This year’s phones will have bone-phones for quiet conversation and payment chips for use at the store. Half the people in any train are absorbed with their phone’s non-voice features. At temples most people took photos with their phones. The serious photographers unfolded shiny digital tubes that looked like space weapons.

The Japanese enjoy the best trains in the world. They go everywhere, are fast, clean and whir like electric toys. Major routes are served by bullet trains. Automobiles all have full color GPS mapping devices. Parking garages are all strictly vertical arrangements with elevator bays. Half the bicycles are compact models you can fold up and wear on your back. Taxi doors open with servo motors.

If you’ve ever wondered why Japanese websites take so long to load, its because a 100 megabit ADSL connection only costs $40 a month. This means that the Japanese have high quality movies on demand and high quality video telephone. I hear the Korean government is rolling out 100 megabits free to every citizen this year.

Japan is culturally very far from mainland Asia, it has a lot more in common with Europe. Lots of little specialty stores compete along side big chains and traditional culture mixes with an ultra-modern techno fascination. Japan is very clean, very polite and very orderly. Everyday objects are small and efficient. The flora is similar to that I grew up with in New England. Giant crows were everywhere, their wings make a tremendous swooshing noise every time they flap.

For such a modern society there’s a surprising amount of traditional dress. Women wear kimono and wooden sandals. Older guys will wear kimono, happi overcoat and the skirtlike horseman’s pants. Younger guys sometimes will don a happi coat, pantaloons, and two toed boots.

Japan is incredibly safe, they have no crime. All right, no blue collar crime. Honestly, its no blue collar crime against men. Gender relations are still right out of the nineteenth century and sex crimes go largely unreported. The scope of the problem is evident in the “Ladies Only” train cars that are necessary to prevent molestation. That these cars even exist is heralded as a sign of progress!

The Japanese have toked on the confucian pipe a little too long. The desire to constantly improve (kaizen!) and impose order has led to everything natural being tied up. Nothing can be just left alone. Every tree is bound and sculpted with ropes, sometimes just to change a branch angle a couple degrees. Stone animals guarding buildings are leashed as if they might run away.

Novel sized weekly serial comics (manga) are hugely popular. Schoolgirls in the train station read tangled romances with all the brakes off. I couldn’t read the words, but slice and dice samurai, gangster rape and giant-penis-destroys-Tokyo all seemed to be popular themes. Illustrated expression is not limited to narratives. Lots of instructional books are published this way and little drawn people figured into many forms of public communication. There were lots of public notices narrated by illustrated policemen with big heads and small mouths.

Japanese TV is hilarious. One one station you have a quiz show where an automated crotch smashing machine punishes wrong answers, on another there’s animated drama and on yet another we were able to catch the beginning of the Sumo season. Sumo kicks ass. What could be better than a ten second duel between dumptrucks? We watched highlights every night on TV and wanted to go see it live, but Mandy was too sick.
My favorite TV show was a “reality” obstacle show featuring small children. Mom asks the kids to perform a big task all on their own while they are filmed by concealed cameras. In one scenario a five and three year old had to climb up a hill, get on a train and then transfer to a bus to bring their father a helmet at his job. In another episode, two three year old girls had to go buy diapers from the store in the city. These are huge tasks for such little people and the kids get quite stressed out. This show might freak out Americans.

As we walked over the bridge, China looked like a wilted Vietnamese plant finally getting water. Tall glass, shining steel and strobing asian neon loom over the border. On entry, our bags got scanned with color coded 3D X-ray gear. The cities were clean and investment firms held up by giant stone columns took up entire city blocks. Instantly everyone was bigger, taller and healthier. Most of the vehicles on the broad streets were cars. Cops in white gloves directed traffic that obeyed set rules. Bike lanes, pubic recycling, public toilets, and clean working public transit stopped striking me as European or Asian. Its just anywhere in the world with money that’s not the United States.

There were people with lots of leisure time in urban China. Women seemed assertive. Men were seen playing with their children. Fashion was back. Billboards with half naked westerners selling expensive clothing filled the sky. Everyone had a mobile phone. We saw a girl with pink hair and rainbow colored clothing. Everyone was very friendly, if a little unused to seeing westerners. Being among economic equals again was a pleasant change but there was almost no English, very little Pinyin, and there are so many Chinese characters.

In Kunming we lived and mostly ate in the muslim quarter where there was lots of yummy street food. After being in Indochina our sketchy food detectors were set on high, but everywhere sanitation standards were beyond worry. We sat down at one restaurant and tried to interpret the menu with the help of the cooks and waiters. We had successfully translated several dishes when we realized we had ordered all of them. We ran back to the kitchen, set things straight and had a very tasty meal. The next time we played roulette with a menu we got a bowl of warm water with organs floating in it. We opted for food we could point to after that. The Chinese eat some wonderful things, but they eat everything else as well.

China has clean, white, modern, herbal pharmacies dispensing traditional Chinese medicine. Their windows showcase giant twisty roots, strange powders and big shark fins. Professional looking massage, acupuncture and reflexology clinics are common as well. There are a couple of tea shops on every block with tiny teapots, big coin shaped bricks of leaf and huge glass jars of loose tea for sale. A nod was all it took to get us sat down for a tasting. Several tastings. Mmmmm tea. We didn’t sleep much after these sessions.

We heard the communists instituted an anti-spitting campaign that was wildly successful. I can’t even imagine what it was like before. The Chinese are constantly coughing with their mouth open and spit like its their job. The whole place is a rhinovirus swap meet. This might have been only a curiosity, except that Mandy came down with a very debilitating cold. Its making exploring Japan a little difficult.

We didn’t get to spend much time in China and we were sorry to give it such short shrift. We were supposed to stay long enough to meet George and her friend Alanna skipping over from Hong Kong and Pippin and Caitlyn traveling over land from Nepal via Tibet. But we had reached the end of our money, so we had to bail. The remainder of our travels have been subsidized by some generous contributors.

Photos of Yunnan.

We had an unexpected layover in Bangkok (Damn, but the Thais can cook!) and eventually we flew into Japan…