TRIP DECISION 2014

Kane Notebook UM 1990

SYNOPSIS: WHERE TO GO?

Japan!  Sometimes things come about by a fluke.  This year was going to be Indonesia — but then, there were passport issues and from one day to the next I changed gear.  Why not Japan?  I had put Japan on my travel list years ago, and after ten years perhaps I just needed a break from traveling in the Middle East and from the hardship and heat that I experienced in Mali last year. A country where trains run on time even more reliably than in Germany.  A country with exotic foods and a colorful language.  But most  of all, a country where cultural monuments are so abundant that even 10 weeks won't allow me to cover them all.

13 cultural UNESCO sites for starters (four more natural ones) and thousands of declared national treasures in between!  A half-forgotten course I took in graduate school in 1990 with my beloved professor Kane on the Arts of Japan made my heart beat faster. It all came back to me: the religions (Shinto and Buddhism) the peculiar Japanese sects (Tendai, Shingon, Zen and Pure Land), the  shogunates, the samurai, the gardens, temples, castles, and scrolls.  In neat cursive and still flawed English I had written it all down. And I had kept them over all these years — those notebooks from graduate school.  Some day, I knew it — I would go  there and see it all.   In ten days, if all goes well the blog will start (around 5/25).  I hope you will join me!  ~ ET

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