Goodbye Japan

Japan was clean and industrialized when I visited 20 years ago and still is. Compared with other  
Asian countries, it is less polluted and less densely built, although not exactly offering wide open pristine urban spaces.

 For now we're at the Hilton Hotel at the airport waiting for our return flight this evening. Free high speed wifi in the lobby is a great treat after the satellite connection on the ship.

The  grounds of the Peace Museum in Hiroshima do exhibit wide open spaces,  the same large square spaces and sequenced foci as the palace complexes in Vietnam and Korea, with echoes of the Forbidden City. In Hiroshima, the ultimate focus is not a temple or a throne room, but the iconic dome of the building that survived the blast.

We saw two of the most famous tourist scenes, the golden temple in Kyoto and the  "floating" tori gate at Miyajima Island, which appears to float on water at high tide. Originally, Shinto priests arrived by boat at high tide and entered the shrine complex through that gate. Still another iconic scene was a Shinto priest blessing a couple's new car near a different shrine.

In the electronically minded countries of Korea and Japan, the group was fascinated with he control buttons on the side of some toilet seats, one with English labels illustrated here. The first one encountered only had instructions in Korean. One experimental soul among us pressed all the buttons simultaneously. Uncontrolled giggles emerged from the stall.

At the other end of the lavatory spectrum, many restaurants, temples and shrines offered low-tech "squatters."

Interesting factoid: there is one vending machine for every ten Japanese. Second interesting factoid: despite traditional ethnocentrism in Japan, ten percent of the children in Tokyo are multi-racial, so clearly there is some significant interaction with Chinese, Korean and even Afro-Americans occurring. This factoid was offered by our Afro-American guide, born in Japan himself, who has two half Japanese children.

Sailing out of range

At some time tomorrow afternoon the ship's internet connection will cease to operate because we will enter Japanese waters. Unexplained factors interfere with the connection to the satellite. The blog will be suspended as it is in cyberspace until a land based connection becomes available in Japan or the good old USA.

We will visit three ports in Korea:  Incheon from which we made a side trip to Seoul, Mopko, a small port where we are for another hour and Pusan for a last brief stopover. Seoul seems a somewhat less crowded version of the other Asian cities - traffic, high rise apartments and pollution are a bit less dense.

Both Korean ports have welcomed us with drum performances. At Ho Chi Minh City beauty queens in national dress released dozens of balloons into the air. All other ports have taken our appearance in stride.

The Chinese

guide from Road Scholar, who is accompanying us on his first trip to Korea,  says he feels he is still in China because everything is so similar, even a palace complex based on the Forbidden City, which the Vietnamese had also.

We have visited two amazing museums in which artifacts illustrating Korean heritage were displayed with beautiful modern design, a folk crafts museum in Seoul and a maritime museum in Mopko. The maritime museum here displays remains of ships and cargos that sank in the treacherous waters here in the eleventh to fourteenth centuries plying what some call the silk road of the sea.  Delicate pieces of celadon that have spent centuries underwater look as if they were produced last month.

We had a chance to strike a ceremonial Korean bell in a traditional shape but cast to welcome the 21st century,

One aspect of a cruise ship smaller than most is that we sometimes dock in essentially working port areas.   Just beyond our rear rail is a giant red crane and, beyond it, a large lot containing Hyundai and/ or Kias that are being loaded on a huge ship, possibly bound for the US.  The working ports communicate the economic rise of Asia as effectively as the skyscrapers.

Shanghai surprises

Although the impressive Shanghai skyline was visible when we arrived it had disappeared into smog as we prepared to sail back out the river way. Two surprising Shanghai experiences were a visit to a 2,000-year-old temple that survived the Cultural Revolution and a delightful visit to a neighborhood kindergarten for two- to six-year-olds away from the city's center.

The active Buddhist temple is a minority enterprise in a country with seven million Buddhists and 1.35 billion people. Chou En Lai, who was from Shanghai, saved it by ordering army troops to guard it. (He also limited the fate of Deng Xiaouping, the author of China's economic liberalization, to merely house arrest during that era.)

The children were delightful singing and dancing "for the foreigners" as our guide translated the teachers' exhortations. The Chinese man in the Santa suit in the picture of the dance is the principal. The children and we sang "Santa Claus is Coming to Town."  A recording let them give a karaoke-style performance. They sang and danced a number of other songs in Chinese.

The school's stairs illustrate the importance placed on English education. Each riser has an English word with accompanying picture. Our guide says he practices English with his four-year-old in the evenings.

Unfortunately, the activity at which we spent the most time was sitting in traffic getting to the places we visited. Cars are mostly late model possibly because a license plate costs $15,000, limiting car ownership to the affluent, even if it is good for as long as the purchaser wants. Nonetheless, they are issued by an annual lottery system, according to our guide.

In a city of 27 million, the now-familiar high rise apartments dominate the cityscape as they did in Hong Kong.

Arrival at the world's largest port

At 4 am we turned into the Yangtze, although I didn't get on deck to watch until 6 am. This arrival was the Ho Chi Minh City arrival multiplied many times but with the same industrialization and same pollution. As we came along the channel, a veritable convoy of freighters heading for sea passed very close - about a ship's length apart. Now we are docked just across the water from the famous skyline that has risen in the past 25 years.

On deck I briefly talked with one of  the ship's lecturers, a

former CEO of Honda. I commented on the Asian economic explosive growth of the past few decades and he said it was as significant as the Industrial Revolution but more striking for having happened in only 30 years.

Detour from the detour

Rough weather on the way to the intended substitute for Taiwan, a Japanese island east of Taiwan, led the captain to turn back toward the Chinese coast and request permission to dock at Shanghai a day earlier than scheduled. So we took a detour from the the intended detour from the original plan to visit Taiwan. After two days at sea, we will enter the the river way to Shanghai at 4 am tomorrow morning and will dock at noon only a short distance from the Bund. An advantage of the smaller ship is that in Ho Chi Minh City, Halong Bay, Hongkong and now Shanghai, the ship could dock close to a city center.

Sailing into Southeast Asian politics

After Hong Kong the next scheduled stop was Taiwan. However, ships docking at Shanghai from Taiwan need a special permit that has been denied this cruise for reasons unknown. Shipping company didn't pay bribe? Tensions with Taiwanese? The configuration of the planets?

Consequently we are shake, rattling and rolling across a not too calm South China Sea to a Japanese island called Ishigaki. Passengers are staggering around like drunken sailors even if they aren't and sea sick bags are arrayed on the railings at stairway landings. After one day on Ishigaki we will retrace our way to Shanghai.

The ship's internet technology cannot operate in Japanese waters so at some time I will disappear from cyberspace for awhile. Since the last four days of the cruise are in Japan, the blog will end early unless land based wifi becomes available.

How do seven million people live in a small place?

Hongkong has tall financial headquarters buildings, but the most striking set of tall buildings houses the seven million mostly middle-income residents. Elsewhere, there are two types of shopping places for daily life - short narrow streets of traditional shopping and modern shopping centers.

The city skyline is best seen lit at night, when the lights show through the smog that daytime views reveal. The wind of the northeast monsoon brings the pollution from mainland China this time of year.

A walk down the length of Nathan Street, the main street of Kowloon, the mainland peninsula part of Hongkong, started in an "old" area near the flower and bird markets, with five and six story aged buildings and an equally aged population. As we progressed the area got younger and more affluent. Midway, we happened on a large traditional street market. We ended at the historic Peninsula Hotel whose bottom two floors and basement are a super luxury shopping emporium - Tiffany, Prada and their kin.

When I went to a camera shop to replace the one taken in Ho Chi Minh City, I encountered two thirty-something Chinese salesmen who were flabbergasted by my lack of interest in getting the very latest, most advanced technology for the sake of being the most with it person.But they did succeed in talking me into a one step upgrade to replace my old model in the same series.