THE COMPLETE JAPAN TOUR

EBB TIDE
2004

As threatened, I am inflicting upon one and all my impressions of the Ebb Tide Rugby tour to Japan. For those of you not familiar with the concept of a ‘rugby tour’, it consists of a large number of large men seeing if they can drink all the beer in whatever country has been unfortunate to allow them in. In the current case, the tour group consists of the Ebb Tide RFC of Victoria, composed of over 40 over-40 players (some well over) and five wives, or ‘camp followers’ as they were called in less enlightened days, and still are by rugby players.) As a point of interest, the first over 40 team to tour Canada was Fu Waku from Tokyo, who played in B.C. in the early 60’s. A Japanese team comes to Victoria virtually every summer, and Ebb Tide have toured Japan six times. We have five matches across Japan, each consisting of an over 50’s and an over 40’s. (The two are not mutually exclusive: over 50’s and 60’s and for that matter 70’s and 80’s can play in an over 40’s game, but younger players cannot play in an older age game.)

We left Victoria on March 2; to Vancouver overnight and to the airport next morning. The check-in was painless, and the flight was long. JAL, being used to rugby teams, set out hundreds of cans of beer and hid everything else. I suspect they didn’t make much profit on our flight. Landed at Narita, and bussed into the heart of the city. Checked in, discovered that traveling as a pair gives you a much MUCH bigger room (4 metres square, not counting the bathroom, which is 4 cm square.)  And so to rugby.  Played Fu Waku, over 60’s, 50’s and 40’s. Won all three games. And the hamstring I pulled two weeks ago now really hurts. I’ll let you know whether I’m going to be able to play more games as they come. For those who care, especially Alex, about 1% of the people in Tokyo wear face masks. Not odd, but not the norm. Tokyo features odd architecture: lots of buildings that look like any office and apartment buildings in large cities, and some that look like nothing you can imagine. Well, you might, but only after a bad night. Next episode – the bullet train.

JAPAN TOUR

PART 2

Day two or three or whatever. The morning was free, so a group of us, 20 or so, took the subway downtown and wandered around the Ginza area, just so we can say that we’ve seen. I can’t imagine any other reason to go there: it’s crowded, the buildings are tall and new and not very interesting, and in fact the only thing of note are all the signs on the buildings, and if you’ve ever seen a picture of Tokyo you’ve seen all the signs you need to see. Back to the hotel, onto another bus, to the train station. Thank God for a guide: the station is huge. There were (not by precise count but fairly accurate) about 500 cabs waiting outside the station. Trains come in from all over Japan, and many people use them. Collect a box lunch, delivered to the platform specifically for us. It is obvious that the Japanese don’t eat these sort of lunches, or the people wouldn’t look as slim as they do. To date I have not seen a single person in Japan who might be considered even slightly overweight. I suspect that the lunches were packed by someone who things all westerners eat like horses, or if you want to be more precise and less clichéd, like birds.

Onto the train. This is one place where you really don’t want to be tardy: the train left at 1:13, and they mean to the second. The doors open five minutes before the train starts, and if you are not in your seat with one minute to go the doors close and you are on the next train. Well, you are on the next train if you go to the ticket office and make a new reservation, as the seats are reserved, unless you want to take a chance on getting an unreserved seat, and if you’re the sort of person who is habitually late you won’t have a chance. The trains average over 200 km per hour, including stops, and they do that by (a) stopping only in major cities and (b) stopping only for three minutes. People have one and a half minutes to get off, and one and a half to get on. Mary went to her first tour court today, and received her first fine. She also had to take the spouses’ oath: “I’m a spouse and I can cheer. If I have to. I guess.” (If you’re not Canadian you probably won’t get that: if you can manage to watch the Red Green Show you’ll understand it.) She was fined for asking the sergeant-at-arms to leave our room the previous night. (Our room became the party room as we had a double and it was one of the few rooms that would hold more than two people: the singles are really small. At 11:30 Mary asked the six or so partiers to leave, and one of them happened to be the aforesaid SAA.) Her penalty is to greet everyone at breakfast in Japanese.

It’s Tuesday, and I am waiting for Mary to get ready to go to breakfast and greet everyone in Japanese: Oyaho gozaimass. I’ll tell you how that works out. Having been here three days, I am now an expert on all things Japanese, and can pontificate with authority. The best part about Japan is the hotel bathrooms. They measure four by five feet, the tubs are short and deep, the water is instantly hot and can be scalding, the same faucet set does for the lav and the bath (the faucet is long and swivels) and the toilet includes a bidet and ‘shower’ (back and front, respectively).

Well, it worked out. Mary overcame her inherent shyness and greeted everyone with aplomb (and also with ‘ohayo gozaimass’). Forget everything you’ve heard about the Japanese living on rice and raw fish: perhaps because we’ve staying in hotels that cater to westerners, breakfast has scrambled eggs, sausage, toast, ham, salad, kippers, as well as fermented soy beans, fried yuck, and other Japanese dishes, including my favourite, pickled plums, the sourest things I’ve ever tasted. But there are lots of Japanese staying here: this is what is called a ‘businessmans’ hotel, and they all eat the same breakfast. The salaryman uniform is dark blue or black suit, black shoes, dark tie and white shirt. The suits are close fitting, double vent, suppressed waist, narrow lapels, slight flare to the pants. I’ve got a closet full of them. I’d fit right in. Every travelogue has to include a few language vagaries, here’s the first one. Our room has an electric kettle made of plastic, shaped like a carafe, with the following inscription: ‘Refresh yourself in the serene air of a tableland. A jolly tea party with congenial friends.’ Long enough for now. Nagoya games and banquet next time. I’ll get this off while the wireless in the room is up.

JAPAN TOUR THREE

Morning of the 9^th, after games in Nagoya. We played 2.5 games again: the eight of us who are over 60 played an inter-squad game with the hosts, and there were over 50’s and over 40’s games. Nagoya is Japan’s fourth largest city, which means 2.2 million people and more than 40 Over 40 rugby teams!!! When touring teams come, the host team sends out an invitation to anyone in the league who wants to play, and can get the time off, and then picks teams according to seniority, and by drawing lots. And people play here until they die. My opposite number in the first game wore purple shorts – over 80. And played the whole 40 minutes. It’s a good thing that he wasn’t very fast (I only hope I’ll be as fast at 80) because one can’t tackle someone wearing older colours, and so if the person you’re chasing is really fast you have to get right on top of him and wrap him up. (For those who don’t know, the colour of shorts denotes your age by decade: white is 40 to 49, black 50 to 59, red 60 to 69, yellow 70 to 79, purple 80 to 89 and gold 90 and up. I don’t think there is anything after gold.)

Attrition is wearing down our numbers – I had to play most of the over 50’s game, hobbling around the pitch at my best pace, which is pretty slow at the moment. As long as I run heel down first, my bad hamstring doesn’t hurt. Much. We won both games, and then came the banquet. This is not a poor man’s sport, in Japan. I’ve never seen so much food. Or drink. Wine is just becoming popular in Japan – the common wine at these banquets comes in a 1.8 litre waxed cardboard box like an orange juice container. Totally forgettable. Off dry, no acid, no character, not much of anything but alcohol; 12.5% of that. Red or white. Had an interesting conversation with a gentleman named Kohnosuke Sato, the Director of the Advanced Fusion Research Centre at Kyushu University. University politics are the same everywhere, and so are old faculty members. We agreed that our respective departments are not what they used to be, although we disagreed about the students: he said his have no work ethic: I can’t believe how hard mine work, compared to me when I was there.

Off to Osaka, a three hour bus ride. Osaka is big, crowded, and has the best night-life street I’ve ever seen, Doutonbori-Dori. Three km of canal lined solidly on both sides with tiny novelty shops, small restaurants, large bars, huge Pachinko parlours, and enormous theatres (not movies: live theatre), every one with a neon sign telling the world what it has to offer. Thousands of people, bicycles, motorcycles: a madhouse.

And today we went to Kyoto, the original capital of Imperial Japan, and the home of dozens of temples, shrines, palaces, and on and on and on. Think Vatican City crossed with San Francisco: lots of religion and more than lots of tourist shops, all on the side of a series of very steep hills. Every major temple has thousands of tourists, 80% Japanese and 20% occidental. And every single person has a digital camera, and takes dozens of pictures. I don’t know why: you can grab a pic of the famous temples from the internet and, if you really want, put yourself into it. Tomorrow to Tenri to play.

JAPAN TOUR FOUR

Two games in Tenri, 30 km. or so from Osaka (although it’s actually one large city for all practical purposes: there’s more open country between Victoria and Sidney than between Osaka and Tenri). Tenri is the home of Tenrikyo, one of the worlds youngest religions. Founded in 1838 by a Japanese woman living in Tenri. The headquarters is a large temple surrounding a courtyard, which contains the actual place where God created mankind. (Different God, I think.) It occurred to me that it was a good thing she happened to live so close to the scene of the natal event: imagine waking up one morning to hear a voice say, “This is God speaking. I want you to start a new religion, based on the spot where I created man and woman. You’ll find that spot on top of a large mountain in the middle of Africa. You might want to learn the language before you go there.”

We won the games. Then to the banquet. Japanese style stir fry, meaning we sat, knelt or squatted on the floor to eat. Six people at each little table, with a supply of food to be cooked in a propane-fired wok in the centre of the table. Said food doused with sugar and saki as it cooked. Would have been enjoyable, had my hamstring not hurt so much from the kneeling position. And today is off, so Mary and I are going to wander, starting with the underground mall in front of the hotel. I’ll report on that later.

It is now Tuesday the 14^th, and we spent Sunday trekking through streets and streets and more streets lined with stores – tiny stores, small stores, mediums stores and huge stores. I would estimate conservatively that we walked past or into 5,000 business establishments, breaking down thusly: 2,500 restaurants (including 100 bakeries and confectioners), 1,000 woman’s clothing (including 200 kimono stores), 300 men’s clothing, 300 jewellery, 100 handbag and leather, 100 shoe, 100 Pachinko parlours, 50 music stores, and ONE grocery store, which sells packaged goods only – no fruit, no vegetables, no meat. The rest are every other kind of store of which you can think. Obviously people do the grocery shopping closer to home. Downtown is for consumerism.

Monday morning was more of same, and included a brief snowfall. And it was, and still is, cold. Really cold. We played in the late afternoon on a field owned by a steel company and used by their rugby team. (House teams composed of employees of a single company are very common in Japan, and play in leagues with social clubs, such as the ones we have in Canada.) The pitch on which we played was the practice pitch, with artificial turf. Cold, under the lights, and with a bitter wind right off the harbour. We won the over-50’s game handily, and lost the over-40’s two tries to one. I played in the over-60’s intersquad game and then most of the over-50’s as well, as attrition continues to take its toll. The usual banquet followed, this time with chairs, thank God.

Today we went to visit the home of the daughter of one of the team members, who married a Japanese and now lives in a suburb of Osaka. Visited the school her son attends, and made the day and probably the week for her son’s grade two class. Back to her house for lunch, the usual way too much of everything that seems to be the norm here. I still don’t see how the people stay so slim. Watching them tuck into the hotel breakfast buffet, you’d swear they eating for the whole day. Maybe they are. And that’s it. We’ll find a noodle shop for a light dinner, all we need after the lunch we put away, and then to bed. Tomorrow a free day, and Mary and I are going to Osaka castle and the natural history museum, both of which are ‘must sees’ in Osaka.

JAPAN TOUR FIVE

Wednesday, March 15. We are now experts on the Osaka subway system, and ‘system’ is the word. There are eight subways lines, all owned by the prefecture of Osaka, and about 15 private railway (read ‘fast tram’) lines. As long as you stick to the subways, you can purchase a ticket which will take you anywhere in the city. The subways I’ve ridden in the past had three lines at the most, and required a new ticket for each line. Here, You look at the map to see what the price is ($2 to $5 depending on the distance), deposit your money (coins or bills) in the ticket dispenser, punch the button for the amount you need, receive ticket and change if any, deposit your ticket in the turnstile, collect it at the other end of the turnstile (the machine sucks it in and spits it out two metres further on), find the platform for the train going to your transfer point, get on, get off at the transfer point, follow the arrows to the next subway line, get on the correct train, and either repeat the transfer or put your ticket in the ‘exit’ turnstile, which keeps it, and head for the surface. If you are dead tired, look for signs indicating the escalator or elevator. They are not obvious, and are not necessarily near the stairs, but as some of the lines are 30 metres below ground level, they can be real leg savers. If you have to use the tram system, you will have to pay each time you take a tram. You see more of the city on the trams, but it costs more, and the service is not as fast, since they do not run as often. (Subway trains run in each direction every ten minutes, have four or five cars, and carry about 500 people sitting and 10,000 standing. (Well, maybe not, but it seems like it.) One interesting things about the transit system here is that there is very little duplication. If there is a subway or train, there is no bus, unlike most cities where you have a choice. The only busses in Osaka serve areas where there is no subway or train.

The Museum of Natural History is great. It’s in Osaka park, which also houses the stadium and other stuff, and has the most complete displays I’ve ever seen. How about a room with every kind of food that comes from the ground: 20 varieties of wheat, 10 of rice, three barleys, four kinds of walnut (who knew? I thought there were only two), Pawlonia (gee, we’ve got one: have to try the seeds when they arrive), hundreds of vegetables, and on and on. Want to know about insects? Every insect in the world, mounted, labeled, classified, and, fortunately, named in Latin, so one can know what they are. (If one has studied Latin, of course. Fortunately, one has.) Then to Osaka castle. TIP: If you are going to visit the castle, which is one of the ‘you gottas’ of Osaka, don’t go in. Go to the grounds, look around, visit the gardens, and forget paying the $6 for the castle. It’s a repro, you can’t see out except from the top floor, and the interior is just displays about the history of the war lords who built it, and the battles they fought. How many Canadian battles can you name? I came up with eight, which is about the number these guys fought each decade from 1600 to 1800. (Naturally, if you take into account the battles fought by the first nations people of Canada before the white man arrived to spoil everything, our count would be a bit higher: say eight hundred thousand rather than eight.

Well, the games are over. In a churlish display of western boorishness we ran roughshod over our hosts in two matches, winning both by large scores. As our injury list is now fairly extensive, I played virtually all of the over-50 match, and except for a spot on my back, where someone seems to have poked me very hard with a stick during a ruck, I survived. And scored my first try of the tour. And my second. Which shows you how weak our opponents were. The usual banquet followed: endless speeches followed by excellent food and more booze than anyone could drink. Well, any sane person at any rate. I can imagine what such a banquet with two regular, as opposed to over-40, teams, would be like. Mayhem.

And today Mary and I went to the Osaka Museum of History and the Museum of Science. I have had enough of musea for the time being. Both new, elaborate, and very very very complete. The science museum is mostly for children: interactive, and well done. Unfortunately, all in Japanese, so not as interesting as it might be. The best item? A display of the periodic table with the actual element in each space. Except (I suspect) for gold, and (I know) for the radioactive elements. Early night tonight, for an early start tomorrow. We have the world’s worst connection: leave the hotel for the Osaka airport at 6 AM, get to Tokyo airport at 8 AM, and leave for Vancouver at…………..5 PM!!!! Who the hell arranged that????? But we’re on the way home. More in about a week, when we leave for Indonesia.