I dragged myself out of bed early once again and rode into the mountains, this time straight up the promising road I’d identified the day before. Alas: it didn’t lead much farther than I’d already taken it, or reveal any more than I’d already found. Past a small remote cluster of houses, it narrowed to a gravel path forbidden to any but locals–and I’m the sort of guy who generally obeys signs, especially under circumstances like these. A small disappointment but a nice ride regardless. Now I have to decide on the next direction to explore.

The whole school dressed formally and assembled in the biggest of the second-floor classrooms to hear an address from the principal, who is of course Oiemoto. For me this was an exercise in patience, sitting up straight and looking alert for an hour and a half while not understanding a thing that was being said to me. Heck, I could barely hear any of it to begin with: Midorikai, typically, sat at the back of the room, and Oiemoto’s microphone didn’t compensate for my worsening hearing. Gary-sensei has promised to provide a rough translation when he’s deciphered his notes. Our senpai tell us that these lectures are usually pretty interesting. Oiemoto graduated from Dōshisha with a degree in psychology, and his interests extend far beyond tea.

A hot afternoon in the tea room despite the air conditioner running. Ro-sensei clearly felt the heat too, mopping himself frequently with a hand towel and opening every window he could find to open. Despite the air conditioner running. Another in the series of kazari temae today, this one showcasing the chaire.

Then I went to war with a bowl of ash, and lost. In 45 minutes, I started my haigata, got disgusted and destroyed what I’d done, started it again, gave up, started once more, and gave up for good. Threw around my haisaji a bit for good measure, and got worried looks from the Japanese students fighting with their own haigata. I might have calmed myself down and finished the job except that I knew it didn’t actually have to be done until Monday, so I’d have the opportunity to come back to it with a better attitude.

I walked out of school into the aforementioned downpour, ate quickly, still in a foul mood, and retreated to my Fortress of Solitude to pull myself together with the help of some strong air conditioning. Restored equilibrium and spent the evening quietly.

Naturally, the community I’d discovered the day before was somewhat less enchanting on the second visit; I worried as I rode through it that I’d oversold the place in my blog entry. Still: a world apart from the city, and a wonderful mountain setting. As I curved around the hill to the north, though, the population density increased and retail reappeared. Then I happened across a golf course, and decided to turn back; I was bored, and knew that the road would soon lead me back around to the south, where I’d already been on foot.

But because I had some time left (the return trip was a very speedy downward slope), I decided to try the only fork in the road I’d found on my way out. Past it, the asphalt grew even narrower, the grade steeper. Now there was no community at all–just occasional houses, all old, generally with unusual amounts of clutter in what yards they had. No cars up on blocks, but I wouldn’t have been surprised. Between the houses, long stretches of forest. Mysterious chained-off gravel roads: probably logging access once upon a time. The furthest into true wilderness I’ve managed to get in this country.

I ran out of time before I ran out of road, and planned again to return for further exploration. I sped (for real, this time) back home and changed into western clothes. No lectures today, but a field trip!

We met at what looked like an old Japanese-style house sandwiched between storefronts on Ōmiya street near Daitokuji. This was, in fact, the workshop of the Nakajima family, who for three or four generations now have been doing wonderful things with glue and paper. They are the official mounters of scrolls for Urasenke; they also make sliding paper doors for tea rooms and other traditional applications.

Despite its old-fashioned styling, the building is almost new. We entered through a small reception area and climbed a flight of stairs to the second floor: one big room of wooden floors and giant exposed rustic beams and an air of good work being done tidily. At least two generations of Nakajimas and the rest of the staff of fewer than a dozen greeted us most enthusiastically; they seemed genuinely happy to have us visiting. I’ve never gotten such a smiling reception in similar circumstances: not here, not at home.

And then we learned how a piece of paper becomes a scroll. It takes a lot of thin glue and a lot of paper. Using a brush, the mounter saturates a sheet and affixes it carefully to the back of whatever it is that is to become the scroll, using a separate brush to work any bubbles or wrinkles out. Then the process is repeated: the extra layers and glue pull flat the original, which is generally thin calligraphy paper that has wrinkled after the application of ink. The mounter uses yet another kind of brush, a big, heavy, stiff-bristled one, like a meat tenderizer, hammering the paper to break the fibers so that it will roll up later without creasing. Then the paper is left to dry. We got to try our hands at gluing. It’s tricky work, but every other part of the process is trickier.

The dried paper-sandwich is glued together with various precision-cut pieces of other expensive papers and fabrics into an incredibly complicated sort of jigsaw puzzle with all overlaps measuring about 2 mm, and a last layer of paper backs the whole. I’ve been looking at these things for over a year now, and never had any idea what all was in them. A shaft and hanging cord are attached to the top; a thicker weighted shaft (jiku) with protruding knobs to the bottom. (The scroll winds around the jiku; when hanging, the weight keeps it straight.) We watched one young lady make little tassel decorations for the vertical strips called fūtai: she sewed six pieces of thread together, unraveled the ends, bunched them up just so and went snip snip snip with a pair of shears, and ironed them flat into perfect half-moons. Like magic. Another employee, the newest apprentice, was busy doing the new apprentice job: making custom boxes for each scroll-in-production. I don’t have the patience.

We were sent on our way with more smiles and an invitation to come back if we ever did any calligraphy we wanted glued flat. My legs hurt from an hour and a half standing in slippers that only accommodated half of each of my big feet. But it was worth it for what we learned, and for the chance to see such skill on display. (And anyhow, Gary-sensei likes to remind us that if tea doesn’t hurt, we’re not doing it right.)

Afternoon practice upstairs, where, for the first time this season, the air conditioning was operating. It didn’t exactly keep us cool, but it was a major and most welcome step in the direction of coolness. Temae of the day was a koicha procedure called chasen kazari, used to call attention to dōgu, usually the mizusashi, that has some special connection to the 1st guest. I liked it: it’s done without a tana, so everything but the furo and kama is taken out in the end, which appeals to me aesthetically. And because it’s not very different from the most basic koicha, it’s a good review of things that I’m attempting to make second-nature.

Class ran late, and on the one day when several of us actually had to get somewhere in a hurry. We raced through tatami cleaning without going home to change out of kimono first, threw back our suppers, and put on nice shirts and slacks for the evening.

Then Sean and I, followed a few minutes later by Tanawat, rode over to Dōshisha University to meet Tanja, Nadia, and Anita.

To see a free concert.

By the Yale Whiffenpoofs.

It’s not just the (almost) all-expenses-paid year studying tea in Japan. It’s also all the random unexpected stuff that comes with it. Like free tickets to see the Whiffenpoofs.

I’ve long been aware of the group’s existence; I’m not sure that there’s a more fabulously silly made-up word in the English language than their name. I’d known of their reputation for excellence. Now I know they deserve it. The Whiffenpoofs sing astonishingly well and put on a fun show. The very competent Dōshisha U. Glee Club, which sang a few numbers, just couldn’t compete. We hung around for a while after the concert to meet the Whiffenpoofs before I rode home with the boyz to prepare for the next day’s temae.

I set off to the west through the empty streets, aiming to find out whether or not there’s hiking access to the hill with the character for “big” cleared into it: one of the giant mountainside characters that will burn in the night at the end of the bon festival. When I reached the lower slopes of the first mountains to the west, I realized that I was too far to the south to find my answer on this trip, so I skirted the southern slope and realized that I’d found the neighborhood of Kinkakuji, the famous “Golden Pavilion,” and Ryoanji, home of one of Japan’s most famous dry gardens.

I visited both places in July of 2006 on a rainy overnight trip with my host parents, who sprung for a room in a rather nice ryokan near Heian shrine. We did a round of sightseeing, checked in to the inn and changed into yukata, casual lightweight summer robes, hit the bath, had an old-fashioned fancy Japanese dinner, and went to bed before nine o’ clock, because my host parents are elderly and don’t go in for nightlife–not that there’s much of that near Heian shrine anyhow.

The three of us shared a single room; an attendant had laid out futon while we ate dinner. Because of the strange surroundings and the early bedtime, I woke up again around midnight and couldn’t get back to sleep for a very long time. I remember that my very small pillow felt and sounded like it was packed with dried beans; every adjustment of position crunched and rattled in the close dark space while my host dad breathed loudly in his sleep.

Kinkakuji underwhelmed me. The big draw is a smallish pagoda covered in gold leaf. Slightly garish. Ryoanji was better, except for the giant noisy crowd of tourists both foreign and domestic on the porch overlooking the ancient rock garden. “Don’t look at it with your eyes; look at it with your heart,” my host dad told me. But my heart was busy disliking the tall, neo-hippie American in his Patagonia gear chatting up the local girls; he looked like the classic Not-Religious-But-Spiritual and Cherishes-Traditional-Cultures-the-World-Over type. We lunched at the restaurant on temple grounds that serves just one dish: an exquisite tofu in a delicate broth. You walk a wooded path to get to the place, across a little stream filling a bamboo cylinder that empties itself when its center of gravity shifts, and you eat in an air-conditioned tatami room with a large loud party of Americans at one end and an attractive Japanese girl at the next table whose underpants peek distractingly from the back of her jeans.

I returned home and changed, and gave thanks for clothes that fit properly. On Friday after school I’d picked up my brand-new made-to-measure kimono, and now I got to wear it. True, it’s not as nice as a piece of work as the more expensive garment that the school gave me, but it’s a much better thing than the oversized ready-to-wear kimono I’ve been struggling with for the last month and a half.

Hamana-sensei lectured on tea in the month of July, and Tanihata-sensei breezed in to resume his history of tea in Japan, getting us right up to Sen Rikyū.

For a treat, we got to practice in the afternoon on the third floor, which meant that we didn’t have to carry the two heavy furo and their iron kama downstairs and then up again after class like we do most days. We worked on the koicha variation of kinin kiyotsugu, which I like even less than the standard usucha. First of all, I just don’t care for this kinin stuff at all. Second, koicha means sitting longer, which means more pain. Finally, making koicha for one person at a time is difficult: the volume of tea and water required is so small that it’s hard to whisk properly. Hard to drink, for that matter–most of it sticks to the bowl.

A confused little bird, the kind called Japanese White-Eye in English, flew across the room and into a pillar. It lay dazed for a moment, then took off straight into another pillar. Verena picked it up gently and held it out of a window, but it wouldn’t or couldn’t fly away, so she set it down on the top landing of the fire escape stairs. I forgot to check whether it ever recovered and got away.

After supper I resumed my search for access to the character on the hillside. Doesn’t seem that the public can get to it after all, but my time wasn’t wasted. Skirting this time the north side of the little mountain that is apparently called Shōzan, I came to a place where the houses end and a narrow winding road disappears into forest gloom. Occasional incongruous fluorescent street lamps arched over the road; it looked like the path to a modern Japanese Narnia. Beyond the guardrail, the ground sloped sharply down to a shallow, brisk stream cutting through green shadow.

When I stepped back into late sunlight, I was in a Kyoto I’d never seen before–if it was still Kyoto. Pockets of rural-looking houses and other buildings nestled between forested slopes; I saw cords of firewood stacked in yards. Whatever businesses might have operated in this satellite community were closed for the day, and few people or vehicles appeared on the streets.

Where the road disappeared into the woods again, I turned around, resolving to press further into the mountains sometime on bicycle, when I can cover ground faster.

After two lengthy adventures on foot in one day, I didn’t have to make a special effort to go to bed early. I futzed around online for awhile, tried to help Szymon get the sense of some difficult words in an English translation of some opaque ancient Japanese for the thesis he’s revising, and called it a night.

Gary-sensei gave an unenthusiastic and more-than-ordinarily unfocused lecture on kaiseki, charcoal, and the way to wash ash. (Of course we wash our ash. Our charcoal, too. Did you expect any less?)

In the afternoon we practiced making koicha using a tana. (The marujoku version, in my case.) Iit differs from making tea on the tatami almost exactly as tana usucha differs from hakobi usucha, so having gotten my head around tana complications and koicha complications separately, I was able to combine them without too much difficulty. And Hamana-sensei had a rather genial air–not that he’s ever unpleasant, mind you.

After supper, Sean and I paid a visit to our favorite local dōgu shop to see if we couldn’t relieve ourselves of some of the scholarship money Oiemoto had handed us on Wednesday. I finally picked up one of the tea person’s basic behind-the-scenes mizuya necessities: a sifter. Matcha is so fine that it packs itself tightly when you leave it alone for a while, so just before making tea it’s best to sift it. You can get an nicer, clump-free suspension in water much easier that way. Sure, you can get the desired results with a standard kitchen model, but I felt like shelling out a little extra for the kind common in the tea world: a tidy stainless steel lidded canister with a bamboo paddle for pushing the tea through the removable screen. More significantly, I acquired what I think of as my first real piece of temae gear; that is, not just the cheapest practice implement available–not something I’ll be looking to replace anytime soon with a better version. I bought a lacquered tray for doing bonryaku and chabako temae. Very basic, very useful. Very pretty. Standard black kakiawase with the bright red tsumagure rim. Not expensive. Just exactly what’s needed. Yes. I’m a little giddy over my new tray.

Late in the evening, Sean and Szymon and I put ourselves into a certain condition with a bottle of Polish vodka, and went for a long ramble around the neighborhood in the quiet small hours. Our stated aim was to locate Funaoka Hill, which is tricky even in broad daylight and sober; it’s a low enough rise that you can’t see it until you’re nearly on it, and no street runs directly to it. We circled until it rose black immediately ahead of us, by which time we didn’t feel like climbing it anymore, so we weaved our way home and to bed.

I assume there’s a lesson here.

Anyhow, it was a troubled sleep followed by an early start: Oiemoto’s schedule required that he distribute our monthly scholarship money a few days early, so we lined up in Konnichian’s old kitchen at 8:15 in the morning, shifting this way and that to accommodate the dozens of other people going in and out and through on their way to and from formal morning greetings with the Head Dude. The 28th is the day each month on which all Urasenke employees are paid. In cash. From the hands of Oiemoto himself, so nobody forgets where it’s coming from.

I aced the morning quiz on koicha but struggled to keep my eyes open during Hamana-sensei’s lecture on the month of June in Japan and in the tea world. In the old Japanese calendar, the season during which June now falls ended in what is now dry, hot July; thus the oddity of one of its traditional names: “the green month of no water.” Odd because the modern calendar’s June sees the main thrust (here in the Kansai region, anyhow) of tsuyu, the rainy season. (Tsuyu means “plum rain”; the name comes from the fact that Japanese plums ripen around the time the rains begin.) Temperatures will vary dramatically for the next month; then July and August will arrive to oppress us.

Tea sweets for the summer use transparent kanten (seaweed gelatin) and translucent kuzu to evoke water and ice, hopefully giving guests a cool feeling in the midst of sultry weather. Plain wood and black lacquer dōgu are used in the tea room for the same reason; they are thought to feel cooler than many of the ceramics used in other seasons for flower containers and the like.

In the afternoon we staged the first half of a chaji in two downstairs tea rooms so that we could practice the eating of a kaiseki meal. Yesterday we had the food itself; today we had all the dishes, empty. As involved as kaiseki cooking is, actually serving and eating the meal rival the preparation in complexity. All the various dishes come out in predetermined order, are set down in specific places, are received with scripted words and movements. We pantomimed eating the foods and drinking sake from shallow red hikihai saucers. We learned how to use chopsticks properly in the kaiseki context: first pick up the bowl you’ll eat from, and hold in in your left hand; then pick up the chopsticks from the tray in front of you with your right, holding them from above; transfer them to the hooked little finger of your left hand so that the right can orbit the back ends of the chopsticks and grasp them again from beneath in order to use them.

Don’t ask me to explain the part of the meal when the host brings out the hassun tray and serves each guest in turn while also pouring sake for each and drinking a serving of sake poured by each. I participated in it and the procedure still has my head spinning. All I know is that this can be very dangerous for the host at a chaji with many guests. Hamana-sensei told the story of a chaji he’d helped to host, at which the host himself actually passed out after this portion of the meal, and had to be revived with strong tea and a walk around the garden.

After two long, painful, hot hours of pretending to eat, I had a crippling headache. We finished the practice with bowls of not-imaginary tea, and packed up all the dishes for transport back to their home in storage at the girls’ dorm. I pulled the large wheeled cart piled with dōgu up the street, feeling a little like Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof. In a polyester kimono. On the way back to school with the cart, I was spotted by an elderly lady on a bicycle whose face lit up at what was apparently a sight that took her back to the old days. “Pulling a cart–oh, the nostalgia,” she exclaimed in Japanese. I grinned and bowed low, and she greeted me politely before crying out again, “natsukashii”–a word that doesn’t slide comfortably into English grammar but that means, basically, “inspiring feelings of nostalgia.”

Cloudy skies and bruised dusk light threatened rain; by dark it was pouring down. A couple of ibuprofen from Anita, some caffeine, and supper soon had me feeling functional again, but still exhausted. I passed the evening quietly and went to bed early, thinking about starting to write a will of some sort.

Well, I was stopped at one today on the way to school next to an old man astride a bicycle, muttering to himself. A gaijin coming toward us on a bicycle slowed at the intersection, checked for oncoming traffic, and pedaled on through the red light. “Aka. Aka deshō. Aka,” muttered the old man. “It’s red, you know.” He said it to himself. I suspect he deals with most of his dissatisfaction with the world this way, sharpening up reprimands but never firing them at their targets.

Today’s tana was the kōkōdana, a favored item of Gengensai (Urasenke XI). It has one shelf more than the marujokudana, and is square instead of round. This adds up to a bit of extra stuff-shuffling and having to remember to set the hishaku on the tana with its mouth facing up at the end of the temae.

Glad you asked. Because tea developed to incorporate a lot of imported Chinese cosmological stuff about elements and yin and yang and so forth, and so the dōgu and temae strive for various balances. Like, we draw a glyph for water in the ash in the furo, because it’s thought to balance the fire that will sit atop it. That kind of thing. Likewise, the bottom of the hishaku’s cup is reckoned the circular part, and because the kōkōdana is square, you want to set the not-square side of the hishaku on it for balance.

Terrific sweets today: kashiwa mochi. Sweet, gooey mochi filled with bean paste and wrapped in an oak leaf. Kind of a hassle to eat, though. I didn’t start early enough when I was guest, so to avoid making my host pause in his preparations, I had to squirrel most of mine away in my sleeve after just a small first bite.

Imagawa-sensei tried to improve my hishaku handling today. When picking the thing up from its resting place atop the kama before drawing hot water, you reach across your body with your right hand (the furo sits ahead of you and to the left), palm flat, hand extended straight out from the forearm. The tip of the middle finger lifts the end of the hishaku’s handle from beneath. The handle’s tip should describe a straight line, not an arc, as you bring it up and to the right to get a better grip on it. When pouring water from the hishaku, the joint between cup and handle should remain stationary in space as it pivots.

These are the things that consume me these days. And I’m giving you the irresponsibly simplified version. The hell of it is that I really, truly care about these minutiae.

They say you can spot a tea person anywhere because his fingertips are always in a straight line.

Sean wanted to buy some stationery at Vivre, and I elected to have nothing better to do than go with him. At a red light on the way there, another old man on a bicycle muttered to himself as he nursed a tall can of chu-hi. At least, that’s what I assumed until I realized he was, in fact, addressing me. “Buchō. Buchō. (Boss. Boss.) You teach me English, okay?” he said, in English.

“I cannot speak English,” he continued. I protested that his English sounded fair enough to me, but he ignored me. “Where. From. You come?” he asked. “America. California,” I said. “Los Angeles?” he asked. “Sono tōri,” I said; “you got it.”

“United States is. Greatest country. In the world,” he concluded, and then the light changed and we were off.

What do you say to that? Even if it is just the booze talking?

But that will have to wait. Today we continued our recent okonomiyaki streak at a hole-in-the-wall even better than Mr. Young Men but without the most excellent name or mirrored signage. Sean, Szymon, and I had woken to a cold rain that would persist, western Washington-style, without change or interruption until the following morning; and we had descended to the first floor to find that my umbrella had been taken. I endured the drizzle while we explored the neighborhood to the north on foot in search of used dōgu shops reputed to exist there. We didn’t find them.

There were, however, appliance stores and convenience stores and clothing stores and tea stores and liquor stores and drug stores and hardware stores and vegetable stalls and fish markets and butcher shops; only the fishmongers and butchers were doing much trade on a gloomy Saturday morning. One dark shop with no employees in sight displayed a scant few 10-dollar bags on 40 year-old shelves; it looked looted, abandoned, Dawn of the Dead-style. Would have thought it long out of business if the door hadn’t been open. Official luggage suppliers of the Apocalypse. I also peered through a cracked display window belonging to no obvious establishment: inside were lined up at least half a dozen ancient, dust-blanketed sewing machines in various stages of disrepair. None of us could account for the sight.

I was dripping wet by the time we made the Kitaoji subway station. We rode to the Karasuma-Oike stop and walked the last few blocks to the shopping labyrinth. There, sheltered from the elements, I finally bought a new umbrella. 260 yen buys a whole lot more umbrella than 100 yen does, it turns out. Now I’m spoiled. But then, I’ve always had rich tastes. That Boydston, with his 3 dollar umbrella–who does he think he is?

We warmed up at the previously-mentioned okonomiyaki restaurant, where poor Szymon concluded a gargantuan, delicious, affordable meal by spilling a pot of okonomi sauce all over himself. He ran–literally–back to the dorm to change while Sean and I got some important window-shopping and girl-watching done, then raced downtown again on his bicycle to meet all of Midorikai except Nadia at the movie theater.

We watched Zhang Yimou’s Curse of the Golden Flower, which I’d seen over a year before in Honolulu; movie release schedules over here cannot be predicted. (Tanja and Verena, also having seeing it and not in the mood to see it again, split to watch The Golden Compass.) I was glad, indeed, to have seen it before: this time it was presented in Mandarin with Japanese subtitles. I would likely have been thoroughly lost if I were seeing it for the first time. Then again, there’s a lot of eye candy in the movie, so I wouldn’t have been bored, at least.

We reunited in the lobby with Tanja and Verena afterwards and Almerindo disappeared to wherever that guy disappears to when he disappears, which is not infrequently. The rest of us popped open our umbrellas and walked home, ambling through the Imperial Palace park in wet, chilly twilight en route.

Then Sean and I took care of some business we’d been meaning to attend to since long before coming to Japan. We are lucky to have in Honolulu a few outlets of the Japanese curry chain Coco Ichiban, and we’d long wanted to compare them with the original. So we hiked down Horikawa and negotiated the purchase of some curry. Turns out it’s pretty much exactly like what you get at the stateside establishments, except with better rice and the option to get it much, much spicier. Also it’s a bit more expensive. So we enjoyed our supper but feel that we can cross that restaurant off our list.

We closed out the day by resuming work on our case of chu-hi and watching Tigerland on Sean’s laptop. Not a dreadful film but definitely not an enthusiastic recommendation.

Tabi are like any footwear in that sizes vary according to manufacturer. Sadly, though the 500-yen pair I bought yesterday are labeled 27.5cm like my more expensive pair, they’re just fractionally too small for my feet.

The bicycle I’ve been riding around town probably sold new for around 8000 yen. I’ve already spent around 3000 replacing a tire, a tube, and a lock. Now the rusty, loose chain has gotten into the obnoxious habit of slipping off one sprocket or the other, or both, when I pedal too hard or hit bumps. Would it make more sense to buy a new 8000-yen bike than to keep dumping money into this old one?

A welcome return to cool and cloudy weather today. Sean and Szymon rode off in the morning to do temae at a tea event at the private tea room they’ve spent the last few weekends cleaning. I didn’t feel much inclined to head out anywhere on my own, so I stayed busy at home. I visited my student loan lender’s website to discover than my application for deferment while I’m in school here has been denied. What gives? Despite my monthly stipend, I’m not exactly rolling in cash over here. I may be able to work something out with my parents until I’m either earning money again or back in some lender-approved course of study.

The day darkened in the afternoon and a light rain deepened my lethargy until I gave up and took a short nap. Then I roused myself and walked Szymon’s bicycle up to the shop to have its tire and tube replaced (another 2580 yen) before riding out of town north along the Kamo with Steve-o Radio playing on the iPod. Clouds draped themselves over the mountaintops as the city thinned, roads narrowed, sidewalks disappeared, green spaces opened. Apartments and houses on the fringes look old, weathered, inexpensive; heavy industry operates at a remove from the urban center. Shortly before the city ended altogether in forested mountain slopes behind the melancholy steel towers of some sleeping factory, I ran out of obvious safe space to ride my bicycle; though traffic was light, I don’t know the rules of the road here and would prefer to stay out of trouble. I turned around and sped back along the river toward home to the memorable accompaniment of Iron Maiden’s “Run to the Hills.”

Then, finally, after a month here, I made it to the sentō. Going to a public bath was one of the highlights of my first trip to Japan, and I’d been looking forward to the opportunity to go again. My friend Victoria, a Midorikai alumnus, had provided Sean and me with a map of some of her favorite places in this neighborhood, including the “best sentō in Kyoto,” but between one thing and another we didn’t make time to investigate until now. Gaijin seem largely to be intimidated by the idea of soaking with a bunch of other naked people, but most people I know, once they work up the nerve to give it a try, get hooked.

We packed up our towels and soap, and followed Victoria’s map (and instructions from Sean’s Lonely Planet guide to the Kyoto, which seconds Victoria’s opinion about this being the best sentō in the city) to an unassuming little structure on a back street of cramped houses interspersed with convenience stores. Took off our shoes at the door and paid the lady at the front counter. (390 yen–about 4 bucks–for as long as you want to stay. Cheaper than a movie and more relaxing.) I had to ask which curtain guys were supposed to go through: blue or red. (Answer: blue.) Pushed through the curtain, got nekkid and stashed stuff in lockers in a straw mat-floored changing room decorated with ornate carved-wood panels that I didn’t examine closely. (Lonely Planet guesses they date back to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria.) Smoking wasn’t allowed inside, but it sure had been once–the place had the warm musty smell of a half century of tobacco smoke permeating the woodwork. (A scent I’m partial to, actually. Reminds me of thrift stores and the Chieftain restaurant in Tacoma, Washington.) We scrubbed ourselves down at low washing stations, sitting on the tiny plastic stools that the Japanese always use for this purpose but that aren’t made with my particular legs in mind. Then we soaked.

We soaked in the big shallow hot bath and in the small deep really hot bath. We soaked in the bath with bubbles and jets and in the electrified bath. (Really. Panels in the walls emit some considerable charge. Depending on how close to them you move, you can get anything from a tingle to strong involuntary muscle contractions. I recommend it enthusiastically.) I soaked in the lukewarm bath under a cascade of water from the ceiling, and Sean spent some time in the sauna. We refreshed ourselves in the cold bath and then soaked in a fragrant cedar tub in an open-air courtyard with a dark pond where koi circled listlessly.

A trio of young boys practiced their English “hellos” on me and asked if I was a Canadian. When I admitted my Americanosity, I discovered that I was sitting next to a fellow Californian. Two little Japanese girls (this, like most sentō, was gender-segregated, but the very young can accompany their parents regardless) got curious about the big gaijin and followed me over to the cold tub. I lowered myself in, cringed, and squeaked, “tsumetai!” (“cold!”). The girls laughed and tested the water with their toes. “Tsumetai!,” they cried. I dunked my head and came up sputtering. “Brrrrrr!,” I trilled. “Brrrrrr!,” they echoed, delighted.

After an hour and a half or so we felt we had attained maximum soakage, so we dried off and got dressed and sort of floated back out into the street in a daze of relaxation. We flopped onto our bicycles and pedaled limply home. Very. Slowly. I stopped at Lawson for a tray of yakisoba topped with an omelette topped with ketchup and mayonnaise (another enthusiastic recommendation), which the girl behind the counter heated for me in the microwave.

Then, though we would have been happy enough to drift off into de-boned, tenderized sleep, we had a rooftop appointment to keep with Szymon and a bottle of plum wine and a jar of long tough strips of unidentified-sea-creature jerky that tasted like the smell of low tide and made me think of Manzanita beach on Maury Island, Washington. (Second Washington nostalgia reference in one post. My parents, I hope, will be pleased.) I brought up my little LED candles in their glass votive holders and decorated our nest atop the elevator shaft. It gave a cozy look to the scene but didn’t make the night any warmer.

The wine took care of that.

I pointed myself in approximately the right direction and began winding my way through the tiny residential streets, making what I hoped were appropriate adjustments when I hit dead ends and when angles of streets changed. Then I turned a corner, and there at the end of the street was my destination.

Turns out it’s called Funaoka Hill, and the roof I’d seen belongs to part of a complex of buildings known as Takeisao shrine or Kenkun jinja. The shrine was established in 1869 by the Meiji Emperor but the hill’s significance dates back to 1582, when Toyotomi Hideyoshi chose it as the site of his predecessor Oda Nobunaga’s grave.

Bright red torī straddle a stone staircase climbing the wooded hillside; a parallel path leads past an obelisk (Nobunaga’s?) and up to the main temple buildings, quiet today in their immaculately landscaped clearing. A monk swept leaves from around a little shrine to Inari, the fox god. (Should be “god whose messengers are foxes,” or some such. –edb, 02 May 2011) Only a few other visitors crunched along the gravel paths, snapping pictures. The noon sun pressed with a flat light that made the day look hotter than it was; great big bumblebees buzzed idly around my head. Past the temple, paths crossed the bright top of the hill, where I passed a man napping on a bench with his hat covering his face, and wound through the shady trees on its sides, where unseen birds chirped and whistled in the foliage overhead.

I was on the west side of the hill when I heard a recorded announcement blare from tinny P.A. speakers somewhere in the streets below; it was backed by some romantic, antiseptic orchestral score that sounded old and faded: the Longines Symphonette or some such. I wondered if an event of some sort was beginning at an outdoor venue. I followed the sound to a view through the trees of a dirty, partly filled institutional swimming pool, but the music was already fading: obviously the recording was being played from a vehicle on the move.

When I returned to the east side of the hill, the monk had traded his broom for a gasoline-powered leaf blower. I headed back to my apartment to eat a sandwich and then out again to wander around Vivre and the 100-yen shop; retail wasn’t observing whatever today’s holiday was. My legs had had enough then, so I came home for a shallow nap and the usual round of writing, photo-sorting, and puttering.

Sean, Szymon, and Tanawat returned after dark from the tea house cleaning project they’ve been volunteering for in their spare time recently, and after they got cleaned up, the four of us put our heads together in Szymon’s room to study for the next day’s quiz. Then Sean and I had time enough before bed to watch a television drama set at an old-fashioned Japanese restaurant: an hour of romantic tensions and much fretting over the conversion of soybeans into miso. (Apparently the traditional way to do it involves mashing them with your feet in big wooden buckets, like grapes for wine.)

At lunch we met two of the female Midorikai students who have been here since September. Tanja and Verena are both from Finland.

After lunch (chicken katsu), the new students gathered at the Urasenke center to fill out a round of paperwork. We met, in passing, one of our teachers, an American named Gary-sensei, with whom I may have gotten off on the wrong foot–or hand, anyhow: when I gave him my standard firm American handshake, he quietly but curtly warned me not to squeeze so hard. Bouncing off a plane from the Czech Republic and into the office was another new student, Nadezda, who goes by “Nadia” for simplicity’s sake.

Then we were led to the local ward office to register as resident aliens. The bureaucratic machine here looks and operates much like it does back home; it was like going to a DMV where I didn’t understand 95% of what was said to me.

After dinner (some sort of fish), Tanja and Verena led us to the women’s dorm and persuaded the vigilant attendant at the lobby desk that the men were there with only the most honorable intentions. Then we got to see their own second-floor tea practice room and cast-off stuff collection, and the room full of dōgu (tea implements) that we’ll be able to use for our own ceremonies later in the year.

On Szymon’s recommendation, after dark I returned to Nijo castle with Sean in tow. A huge crowd had lined up outside to pay a 400 yen admission fee: during sakura season, the castle illuminates its trees and some of its structures for a nighttime celebration they call “Nijo LightUp.” The path through the grounds is chosen with care to create a sense of pacing. Entering through the giant gates and turning left, we first found one little pink-blossomed tree glowing in the walls’ corner beneath a spectral guard tower. Then a restrained row of trees; then larger clusters, larger trees. The ones with bigger blossoms were crowd favorites, and everyone pressed close with camera phones held aloft to get pictures.

Down one path, tea ceremony was being demonstrated in the castle tea house, but Sean and I decided to skip it, following the majority of the visitors past a pond where a particularly lovely sakura hovered delicately over its reflection in the still water. The tour’s grand finale was a long straight lane between rows of giants, old trees that had grown to overhang the path almost completely with their branches: a dizzying barrel vault of floral lacework.

We exited through a makeshift market where food and souvenirs were peddled from brightly lit white fabric pavilions. Happy families huddled on benches in the cold with steaming bowls of udon noodles; Sean and I bought skewers of hot, chewy dango balls dipped in a sweet and savory sauce before hiking home up Horikawa-dōri through the finger-numbing night.