buddha, beaches, and boardwalks
catching up on the blog has been super annoying, as the place i am staying has the worst internet i have seen in the last 10 years. it is basically unusable. i could not edit the website at all while i was in kamakura, so i did it all in a notes app with intent to port it over once i get somewhere that lives in the 21st century.
i did more today than i ever imagined i was going to do. i think i was eager to get into the swing of things with the solo traveling i am used to for these trips. it allows me to focus on the photography aspect of it a lot more. i tend to walk very slowly and stop to take photos quite a bit, and traveling with a group makes that difficult to accomplish.
i have as many photos from today as i do for april 5, 6, 7, and 8 combined.
kotoku-in temple
one of the main things that draws tourists to this city is kotoku-in temple. i’ve been to several temples in various cities in japan, and while this one is not very big, the gigantic bronze buddha alone makes it worth visiting. its very nearly the only thing here other than a stamp book window and 5 different tourist knickknack stores.
one thing i want to highlight is how crazy ai is getting with photography editing. adobe lightroom just has a single button now that identifies all the people in an image and can remove them for you. i had to tweak what it did to a couple of them, but the edit time on this photo was only around 10 minutes. and i am far from an expert photo editor. i essentially have no idea what i am doing in lightroom.
aimless wandering and meeting the god of comedy
after i finished up at the temple, i didn’t really know what else to go do. so i did my favorite thing to do in a new city in japan, pick a direction and just “go that way til i see something interesting”.
i walked for a bit and found a fruit smoothie stand. fruit is a rare thing in japan. it is difficult to find, and when you do find it, its generally expensive and marketed as a luxury thing. i imagine japan has to import 100% of their fruit, and being an island nation probably makes that rather inconvenient to do.
fruit smoothie acquired, i kept walking that way and found a little smoking section with a vending machine and some benches. i sat down on these benches for a bit, and an old man came up to me. he immediately sat down uncomfortably close to me and put his hands around my thigh and said “you so fat!!!” in english, and then started laughing. i thought this was hilarious.
then, he made a circle around his genitals, pointed at me and said “ehhhhhhh?” and started nodding and moving his eyebrows up and down. ok so this is the funniest person in all of japan.
we started talking for a bit and it was quite difficult because he didnt want to use google translate or anything. he told me he is 90 years old. i dont believe that, he doesnt look it at all. my best guess is like, 75. he then asked me what my dad’s name was. i said bryan and he goes “wow!!! bryan! good name! strong name! powerful name!” and starts cheering and flexing. he kept saying america is very cool and strong. he told me there is a u.s. army base close by.
he told me one time barack obama visited kamakura and there were secret service snipers on the rooftops. then he made what i can only describe as “james bond motions”.
he goes on to talk about how his favorite american is douglas macarthur, the commander of the u.s. army in world war 2. which i am realizing now is an absolutely insane thing for a japanese person to say.
he started asking me if i think kamakura is the best. i said yes, because what do you really say to that other than yes. he asked me if i like japan, and if i think japanese girls are sexy. this is the funniest person i have ever met in my life.
then he demanded i take a photo of him. not with him. of him. just a picture of him. so here he is.
this man is probably world class at embarrassing his grandchildren in public. i could talk to this man for days.
i keep calling him “this man” because i asked him what his name is three times and he just ignored me and moved on to something else he wanted to talk about.
at one point he made another circle around his genitals, then put his ankle up on his knee, mimed like his penis came out the bottom of his pant leg, and then pointed at me and nodded repeatedly.
at one point he went silent for like 45 seconds and then said “you have big nose” and started nodding again.
i genuinely think this man is like a mythical prankster god in the flesh. i will never see him again, but i hope he has conversations like this with tourists every day. this interaction was so weird that i am not even sure it happened. i think thats why he made me take the photo. if i didn’t have the photo, i would be convinced this was a dream.
beach + birds
weirdest interaction of all time complete, i decided to go check out the beach.
it feels oddly comforting to know the pacific sea breeze smells the same from the other side of it. not that i really expected it to be different. but theres something so strange about being reminded of home when you are as far from it as i am right now. and i have to say, the smells of the restaurants making japanese food, particularly the iconic smell of dashi (japanese soup stock) mixed with sea breeze is absolutely delightful.
i walked around on the beach for a while and saw some pretty interesting stuff.
one thing i saw a bunch of on this beach was birds. there were hundreds of crows on the beach. they look quite different from the crows back home. i’ve looked up these birds, and they are “large-billed crows”, or in japanese “karasu”. they apparently used to be called “jungle crows”. they are extremely common all over asia. they have fuzzy heads and much larger bills than the crows we have back home.
they are also absolute fiends. if you’ve ever thought pigeons were ballsy, these guys aren’t afraid of anything. i saw a crowd of probably 30 of them chasing a girl holding food. they are a menace. but in a kinda endearing “oh, you rascal” kind of way.
there is one other kind of bird here, which google has told me is called a “large black kite” or in japanese, “tonbi”. they apparently are only found in the small area around kamakura.
one of the things my current camera lens setup is really really not equipped to do is aerial bird photography. good bird photos need a lens that can zoom really far. my zoom lens cannot zoom that far. i took 85 photos of these things, but only 5 came out useable. and of those 5, only 2 are any good.
these things are a more literal menace. i watched them dive bomb people eating. they glide against the wind, appearing to hover in place way high up in the air, and then tuck their wings and dive straight at people who look like they have food. they are really beautiful, in a terrifying sort of way.
side quest: warmth
i headed back to the airbnb and thought i was going to be mostly done for the day. my original plan was to get up very early, at like 4:00 am tomorrow, and walk an hour away to a famous train station called kamakurakoko-mae. this particular station is a very very very popular spot to take photos, as you can get a shot of a train crossing the street with the ocean in the background. its a great photo opportunity. the idea was to get there before the first train leaves for the day, so i could get the photo without having to deal with 5,000 other people doing the same thing. but then i thought about it some more and realized that an hour long walk at 4:00 am was going to suck. and i still haven’t completed my side quest to find gloves and a scarf. i will absolutely want gloves and a scarf by the time i reach the end of my trip in hokkaido, so i decided to cancel the journey to take an identical photo to 5,000 other people and go take care of this side quest.
but just doing that and coming back would be boring. i looked around on google maps and the internet for places that might have what i need, and many people were recommending a store called mont bell. its like an outdoorsman gear type store. they have tents and supplies for camping, jackets, etc. i’ve discovered from asking at a few places that scarves are out of season right now, and are hard to find. so an outdoorsy type store is gonna be the place to go.
problem: there isn’t a mont bell store in kamakura.
solution: there is a mont bell in the neighboring town of yokohama. and yokohama is a place i have repeatedly intended to go every time i visit japan, and something has come up on the day i was going to do it.
so i was off to yokohama. it was about 75 minutes to get there, and i took very few photos because most of that time was spent inside a train. but i made it to mont bell, bought a scarf and some gloves, and then set out to go explore yokohama.
yokohama
now, i could have totally planned this out better than i did. i could have sat down and looked at the map in detail and decided precisely where i wanted to go. but thats boring. so instead i very quickly scanned the map, saw the word “pier” and pressed navigate. it was about an hour from the mall the mont bell store was in to the pier i picked out. half on trains, half walking.
i finally reached this pier and went “hmm why are there no people around here”. i kept walking and saw a couple runners getting their exercise in. and then i saw a sign that said it was a customs entry point for cruises. at 8:15 pm. its not like a fun pier to walk on. its where cruise ships land.
but i picked an incredible pier nonetheless, because it allowed me to get an awesome view of the yokohama i was trying to see.
for a little peek behind the curtain, i will often take like 5-10 photos of a thing, and then pick out the one i like best in post and only keep that one. but with this shot, i tried a few different ways of editing it, and ended up liking a bunch of them. so its a bunch of variations of the same photo taken a few seconds apart.
with that out of the way, i still wanted to actually go there instead of take photos of it from 2 miles away. so i headed that way and found the thing you tend to find when you go anywhere cool in tokyo, a mall.
i walked around the mall a bit, and then got yelled at and told i need to leave because it was 9:03 and they apparently close at 9:00.
all in all, i am glad i did all of this instead of wake up at 4:00 am to take a photo of a train. i solved a future problem and saw something i missed 2 years in a row.
the trip back home was quite long, nearly an hour.
