Aranpplaty, wehn we raed Eglinsh, we raed by lnooikg at the wolhe wrod, not the ividnidaul lrettes. As lnog as the frsit and the lsat leettrs are in the rhgit palces, we can pttery mcuh raed at nroaml seepd.
+ 0 - 0 | § ¶The Street of a Thousand HandsJapanese names naturally tend to conjure up images of ruthless, powerful samurai warriors - Tokugawa, Kamikawa, Oda, and so on. However, translate the literal meaning of the kanji in the names and you end up with some interesting results. From the rather American Indian sounding Great Mountain (Oyama) to the distinctly Dickensian FatField (Oda) and even occassionally Jazz Sazophonist Little River (Kogawa), all share a somewhat Tolkeinesque, hobbity feel. Here are some of the ones I've collected from teachers and students:
Okada - HillField
Yoshikawa - LuckyRiver
Ogawa - GreatRiver
Nozawa - RusticPlain
Sawano - (just) Plain Rustic
Takada - HighField
Noguchi - RusticMouth
Washio - EagleTail
Kitahara - NorthernSource
Place names particularly are named very often after natural features:
Niigata - New Swamp
Nagaoka - Long Hill
Akita - Autumn Ricefield
Ojima - Big Island
Hokkaido - North Sea Road
Tokyo - Eastern Capital
Fukushima - Happy Island
Fukuoka - Happy Hill
Roppongi - Six Trees
Street names too continue the theme - in Nagaoka we have the main shopping street named Big Hand (Ote), which further down intersects with my personal favourite, Senju - Thousand Hands Street.
The second half of our trip took us further into Tohoku, towards our final destination of Morioka, at the very end of the Shinkansen line. On the way we arrived at another entierly new episode of history, some 500 years before Date Masamune. Hiraizumi, a small and initially underwhelming collection of temples a small distance north of Sendai. It is however host to some Japan's most famous historical characters, the brothers Yoshitsune and Yoritomo. Yoshitsune, a young and dashing warrior had been training with the warrior monks of the Fujiwara clan, whose power was centred around Hiraizumi. However, their growing might began to worry the head of the Minamoto clan, and Yoshitsune's brother, Yoritomo. When Yoritomo turned on the Fujiwara, Yoshitsune fled north, but was soon betrayed by his hosts, and died in a valiant battle alongside his loyal servant, the giant Benkei. Yoritomo in turn annihilated the Fujiwara, destroying their temples and leaving Hiraizumi a crumbled ruin. According to one bizarre legend however, Yoshitsune in fact escaped and fled to Mongolia where he resurfaced as - wait for it - Gengis Khan. Yoshitsune is a very popular historical figure, and is from a period where history and myth are still somewhat mingled. Dolls in his image are popular gifts for boys on Children's Day, and he is the subject or at least inspiration for many manga and anime series, as well as the Kessen videogame series. Hiraizumi itself, before Yoritomo's wrath, was the sight chosen for the Fujuwara's 'Heaven on Earth', and the many small temples dotted up a winding forested hill path still survive. The route itself finishes at the bizarre Golden Temple of Konjikido, which is, in the very purest and most basic sense, a golden temple. It is completely gold. No decorations, no peacocks, cherry blossoms, subtle hints of four seasons woven into a single scene, just completely gold. It looks like someone just took a perfectly normal Japanese temple and dropped it in a bucket of gold paint. While it is initially quite incredible to see quite so much gold in one place, it isn't actually very beautiful, as there's nothing to really set the gold off. It resembles, more than anything else, a large cake. Still, it was a far cry from the final leg of our trip, in which we had a meal entirely made out of tofu, actually saw some young people, and encountered three different kinds of animal...
I walked past these in the supermarket yesterday. They are Edamame - green soya beans - still on the vine, in the same way as you can sometimes find sprouts at Christmas. Finally have the laptop back after a month of repairs - I'll get the rest of the Golden Week photos up soon.
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