ami and gitanjali in japan

First night in Japan! Mostly we plan to recover from our travel day(s), with a little bit of city exploration if we are up for it. -------------------------------------------------- Sapporo (札幌市, Sapporo-shi, lit. 'Dry, Great River') is a city in Japan. It is the largest city north of Tokyo and the largest city on Hokkaido, the northernmost main island of the country. It ranks as the fifth most populous city in Japan. As with most of Hokkaido, the Sapporo area was settled by the indigenous Ainu people, beginning over 15,000 years ago. Starting in the late 19th century, Sapporo saw increasing settlement by Yamato migrants.

From Sapporo, we head to the Biei-Furano region! This area is an agricultural basin that has recently seen a rise in ecotourism. While there, we plan to visit Shirogane Blue Pond, a bright blue reservoir formed when the Biei River was dammed to protect the town from volcanic mudflow. We will explore the agricultural land surrounding the town by biking along the Patchwork Road. We will also visit the lavender farm Farm Tomita, and Ningle Terrace, a forest market selling “original works from Furano that use nature as a motif.” -------------------------------------------------- Biei (美瑛町, Biei-chō) is a town located in Kamikawa Subprefecture, Hokkaido, Japan. Biei is famous for its views of wide fields and hills, and is used as a backdrop for many Japanese commercials and TV programmes. The bright colours of its fields attract thousands of visitors in July and August. Furano (富良野市, Furano-shi) is a city in Japan’s Hokkaido prefecture noted for its lavender fields, such as Farm Tomita with views of Mount Tokachi. Besides lavender, poppies, lilies and sunflowers also grow in the Nakafurano area. In winter, the 2 connecting peaks at nearby Furano Ski Resort host skiing and snowboarding events. The Furano Ropeway, one of the resort’s gondolas with panoramas over the valley, stays open all year.

On our way from Hokkaido, we will spend a night in Osaka. -------------------------------------------------- Osaka (大阪市, Ōsaka-shi) is a designated city in the Kansai region of Honshu in Japan. It is the capital of and most populous city in Osaka Prefecture, and the third most populous city in Japan, following Special wards of Tokyo and Yokohama. Osaka was traditionally considered Japan's economic hub. Osaka made noted contributions to redevelopment, urban planning and zoning standards in the postwar period, the city developed rapidly as one of the major financial centers in the Keihanshin Metropolitan Area. Famous landmarks in the city include Osaka Castle, Osaka Aquarium Kaiyukan, Dōtonbori, Tsūtenkaku in Shinsekai, Tennōji Park, Abeno Harukas, Sumiyoshi Taisha Grand Shrine, and Shitennō-ji, one of the oldest Buddhist temples in Japan.

On Naoshima, we plan to seek out art by contemporary Japanese artists that develops this sense of place and human-nature relationships—Yayoi Kusama’s Pumpkin, recently restored to the pier after being washed away by a typhoon, and other installation works integrated into the art site’s isolated rural setting. On Teshima, we’ll visit a water droplet-shaped art museum in a reconstructed rice terrace famous for blending nature and architecture. We plan to not only examine how the art featured on the islands answers our guiding question, but also notice to what extent the advertised positive relationship between the island communities and the art sites holds true. -------------------------------------------------- Naoshima (直島町 Naoshima-chō) is an island town in Kagawa Prefecture, Japan located in the Seto Inland Sea. The administrative town is made up of 27 islands, of which Naoshima Island is the largest. As of April 2017, the town has an estimated population of 3,117. Naoshima Island is known for its many contemporary art museums. For example, the Chichu Art Museum (literally, "in the earth") houses a number of site-specific installations by James Turrell, Walter De Maria, and paintings by Claude Monet. Designed by Tadao Ando, it is located on one of the highest points of the island, and various exhibits and facets of the museum's architecture take advantage of its commanding view. Another contemporary museum (and hotel) is Benesse House, also by Ando. Another is the Naoshima Fukutake Art Museum, with an outdoor sculpture garden, and a third is the James Bond museum, inspired by the island's use as one of the settings for the 2002 Bond novel The Man with the Red Tattoo by Raymond Benson. The museums and beauty of the island draw many tourists, whose visits help support the local economy. However, it is Mitsubishi Materials, loosely affiliated with other Japanese companies of the Mitsubishi name, that dominates industry on the island, as Naoshima has been the site of massive refining by Mitsubishi since 1917.

Our next stop will be Kyoto, a city famous for its religious shrines. We’ll contextualize our investigation by visiting sites important to Zen Buddhism in Japan, learning firsthand about Shinto kami, visiting traditional Japanese gardens, and more. We’ll also take the opportunity to visit famous art museums in the city, seeking out contemporary art to complement that which we’ll see on the art islands and later in Tokyo. Finally, we hope to use our longer and less structured stay in Kyoto to meet other young people in the city, practicing our language skills and making connections more meaningful than the somewhat transactional tourist standard. -------------------------------------------------- Kyoto (京都市, Kyōto-shi) is the capital city of Kyoto Prefecture in Japan. Located in the Kansai region on the island of Honshu, Kyoto forms a part of the Keihanshin metropolitan area along with Osaka and Kobe. As of 2020, the city had a population of 1.46 million, making it the seventh most populous city in Japan. The city is the cultural anchor of a substantially larger metropolitan area known as Greater Kyoto, a metropolitan statistical area (MSA) home to a census-estimated 3.8 million people. Kyoto is one of the oldest municipalities in Japan, having been chosen in 794 as the new seat of Japan's imperial court by Emperor Kanmu. The emperors of Japan ruled from Kyoto in the following eleven centuries until 1869. The capital was relocated from Kyoto to Tokyo after the Meiji Restoration. The modern municipality of Kyoto was established in 1889. The city was spared from large-scale destruction during World War II and as a result, its prewar cultural heritage has mostly been preserved. Kyoto is considered the cultural capital of Japan and is a major tourist destination. The agency for cultural affairs of the national government is headquartered in the city. It is home to numerous Buddhist temples, Shinto shrines, palaces and gardens, some of which have been designated collectively as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. Prominent landmarks include the Kyoto Imperial Palace, Kiyomizu-dera, Kinkaku-ji, Ginkaku-ji, and Kyoto Tower. The internationally renowned video game company Nintendo is based in Kyoto. Kyoto is also a center of higher learning in the country, and its institutions include Kyoto University, the second oldest university in Japan.

We will spend two nights in Hiroshima as we travel from Kyoto to Kyushu. While here, we will visit the Genbaku Dome, a peace memorial at the site of one of the only buildings left standing in the area where the atomic bomb was dropped on the city. -------------------------------------------------- Hiroshima (広島市, Hiroshima-shi) is the capital of Hiroshima Prefecture in Japan. Hiroshima was founded in 1589 as a castle town on the Ōta River delta. Following the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Hiroshima rapidly transformed into a major urban center and industrial hub. In 1889, Hiroshima officially gained city status. The city was a center of military activities during the imperial era, playing significant roles such as in the First Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese War, and the two world wars. Hiroshima was the first military target of a nuclear weapon in human history. This occurred on August 6, 1945 in the Pacific theatre of World War II, at 8:15 a.m., when the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) dropped the atomic bomb "Little Boy" on the city. Most of Hiroshima was destroyed, and by the end of the year between 90,000 and 166,000 had died as a result of the blast and its effects. The Hiroshima Peace Memorial (a UNESCO World Heritage Site) serves as a memorial of the bombing. Since being rebuilt after the war, Hiroshima has become the largest city in the Chūgoku region of western Honshu.

After Hiroshima, we will meet up with our hosts through the WWOOF (World Wide Organization of Organic Farms) program. Our hosts are providing us with free meals and lodging in exchange for our labor either in the travelers' cafe or out in the fields. We hope that this experience will provide a truly hands-on and realistic perspective on contemporary human-nature relationships in Japan as we get to know our hosts and live and work in a rural area of Japan.

Finally, we will end our trip in Tokyo. Ami has distant relatives in the city, who we are interested in meeting as we spend a relatively unstructured period exploring the biggest city in Japan and one of the most highly urbanized cities in the world. We are curious about how the relationship to nature we’ll have experienced elsewhere in Japan can be seen in Tokyo’s built environment—so, in addition to experiencing some of the remaining famous contemporary art museums in the city, we’ll seek out green space, compare sustainability technology to the aesthetic principles of sustainability we’ll have seen elsewhere, and have meaningful conversations with Isaac’s extended family and other young people we might meet in the city. --------------------------------------------------- Tokyo (東京, Tōkyō) is the capital and most populous city of Japan. Formerly known as Edo, its metropolitan area (including neighboring prefectures, 13,452 square kilometers or 5,194 square miles) is the most populous in the world, with an estimated 37.468 million residents as of 2018; the city proper has a population of 13.99 million people. Located at the head of Tokyo Bay, the prefecture forms part of the Kantō region on the central coast of Honshu, Japan's largest island. Tokyo serves as Japan's economic center and is the seat of both the Japanese government and the Emperor of Japan. Originally a fishing village named Edo, the city became politically prominent in 1603, when it became the seat of the Tokugawa shogunate. By the mid-18th century, Edo was one of the most populous cities in the world with a population of over one million people. Following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the imperial capital in Kyoto was moved to Edo, which was renamed "Tokyo" (lit. 'Eastern Capital'). Tokyo was devastated by the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake, and again by Allied bombing raids during World War II. Beginning in the 1950s, the city underwent rapid reconstruction and expansion efforts, going on to lead the Japanese economic miracle. Since 1943, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government has administered the prefecture's 23 special wards (formerly Tokyo City), various commuter towns and suburbs in its western area, and two outlying island chains known as the Tokyo Islands. Tokyo is the second-largest urban economy worldwide by gross domestic product after New York City, and is categorized as an Alpha+ city by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network. It is also Japan's leading business hub as part of an industrial region that includes the cities of Yokohama, Kawasaki, and Chiba. As of 2021, Tokyo is home to 37 companies of the Fortune Global 500. In 2020, the city ranked fourth on the Global Financial Centres Index, behind only New York City, London, and Shanghai. Tokyo is home to the world's tallest tower, Tokyo Skytree, and the world's largest underground floodwater diversion facility, the Metropolitan Area Outer Underground Discharge Channel (located in Kasukabe, Saitama, a suburb of Tokyo). The Tokyo Metro Ginza Line, opened in 1927, is the oldest underground metro line in East Asia. Recognized as one of the most livable cities in the world, Tokyo was tied fourth with Wellington in the 2021 Global Livability Ranking.The city has hosted multiple international events, including the 1964 Summer Olympics and 1964 Summer Paralympics, the 2020 Summer Olympics and 2020 Summer Paralympics (postponed; held in 2021), and three summits of the G7 (in 1979, 1986, and 1993). Tokyo is an international research and development hub and is likewise represented by several major universities, most notably the University of Tokyo. Tokyo Station is the central hub for Japan's high-speed railway network, the Shinkansen; Shinjuku Station in Tokyo is also the world's busiest train station. Notable special wards of Tokyo include: Chiyoda, the site of the National Diet Building and the Tokyo Imperial Palace; Shinjuku, the city's administrative center; and Shibuya, a commercial, cultural, and business hub.