Lake Yamanaka

LAKE YAMANAKA: Five Lakes of Mount Fuji

Japan’s highest mountain, Mount Fuji, presents incredible scenic variety in the region of the five lakes, including untouched nature, hot springs (onsen), heavily built amusement parks and many other, some quite unusual, attractions. The popular Fuji Five Lakes region is appropriately rich in spectacular natural scenery, with a number of the approach routes giving astonishing views of the great mountain itself. Certainly it is one of life’s great moments to first lay eyes on Fuji San, its noble white summit wind-whipped and pale with snow.

In keeping with an apparent Japanese penchant, themes rule the roost around the lakes: on Yamanaka the first thing I noticed was a colossal swan (then I realized it was the tour boat—or, more properly, ferry--- shaped like a swan with the slender, curved neck looming ahead of the broad-beamed vessel). Soon enough I caught sight of other birds, fish, and various lakeworthy houseware. All over the lake shore visitors are amused by this curious, themed stuff – kitsch it’s often called, a little brutally. Kitsch “a German term,” an on-line dictionary says, “that has been used to categorize art that is considered an inferior copy of an existing style.”

Well, the kitschy paddle boats and other rides aren’t really art, but they have been created in that charming, out-of-scale Disney-associated way. According to the web, “the term is also used more loosely in referring to [art or objects that are] pretentious or in bad taste,” (and you gotta wonder whose bad taste) it also refers to “commercially produced items that are considered trite or crass because the word was brought into use as a response to a large amount of art in the 19th century where the aesthetic of art work was confused with a sense of exaggerated sentimentality or melodrama.” Anyway, reminiscent of a carnival or the circus, many of the ride able or rentable objects here are colorful renderings of animals, fish, or household objects.

These 5 lakes so well known to the Japanese, Lake Yamanaka, Lake Kawaguchi, Lake Sai, Lake Motosu and Lake Shoji which seem to slumber so peacefully on the gentlest slopes of Mount Fuji’s base, get very little travel coverage in the popular media so are little known off the island. Each lake’s shore is pretty well developed as a commercial resort environment and all the trimmings -- for many travelers this means both good and bad. There’s lots of accommodation, and the already mentioned enjoyment of kitsch guarantees that there is a plethora of paddle boats and such in the shape of fish, fowl, and tea-cups. If you get a kick out out that sort of thing, it’s heaven; if not, you’re out of luck. [In general terms, it’s about 2 hours from Tokyo by express bus service to the lakes area; visitors can also take a bus from Gotemba or Hakone.]

Hakone Park

Hakone Park

Less than a hundred kilometers from teeming Tokyo, Fuji-Hakone-Izu National Park, internationally famous for hot springs (including Owakudani), hiking and outdoor activities, majestic natural beauty and fabulous views of nearby Mount Fuji is deservedly one of the most popular destinations for visitors and Japanese alike. Well served with and by mass transit, including on Lake Ashi, the big park offers tourists a range of choices in addition to scenic outlooks, including the opportunity of lengthening their lives by seven years!

According to legend, consuming eggs cooked in the restorative waters of bubbling, malodorous Owakudani, situated in the area around a crater made during in the last eruption of Mount Hakone perhaps 3000 years ago, has wonderful result. Smelly, sulfurous odors pervade the place where the special eggs, boiled in the geo-hot water (reputed to prolong one's life by approximately seven years, bus accidents aside) are for sale. The hot, mineral-rich water turns the eggs matt black (a pretty unusual look for eggs: “have a Gothic Easter”) but the taste is fine and the color doesn’t even go through the shell, much less to the food matter.






With a good guidebook in hand or a cabled-up laptop Goggled to any of the numerous sites offering diagrams of Hakone’s lavish transportation grid, visitors can trace access from, typically, Tokyo, to the park. Driving is, naturally, one way to scoot around the scenic curves cut into the landscape, driving around vast arcs gaining altitude and curling out again and again for seemingly every time more spectacular views of Mount Fuji. The sprawling place offers—aside from longevity, no mean benefit in itself—biking, hiking, and rope ways or gondolas. It’s served by rail and a funicular. Water taxi and tour boats cruise Lake Ashi (with busses dropping folks at stops, to connect with the rail head).

Indeed, there seems to be a clear difference in cosmology or “world view” between the United States and some other nation’s notion of park space and Hakone. One way to view park space is to reduce or avoid the evidence of the “hand of man.” In Hakone it’s as though engineers have fanned out to wrestle that rascal nature to the ground: it’s under control with rail, and pavement, and cast concrete and strung cable; parking lots, and sluice ways, and hard packed outlooks. It all really makes it extraordinarily easy to access the place.

Board Games

Beijing Board Game Players


Board Games

Board games, that is, rule-bound games played on table tops or floors, and involving role-playing, chance outcome, or skill, evolved very differently in the United States than elsewhere. When we traveled in China and Tibet, it was easy to see folks enjoying the traditional games which formed the foundation of some of these pastimes. Today, such games may be said to be central to American leisure and political culture.

In part all of that is because of the unique origins of the United Stated as a nation. Immigrant patterns and labor demands created a setting in which many of the globe’s wide variety of game styles—contributed from Africa, Asia, and Europe—arrived fully formed and at almost the same time. In part it’s because this presentation of all the world’s game forms itself took place in the midst of a quickly changing epoch of technological innovation and social evolution. Throughout China, Tibet, and Japan it’s easy to see enormously well beautiful, expensive, and of course well crafted board sets for sale. You can also watch people on the street, given a spare moment, fashion a game from a bit of discarded cardboard and bottle caps and set-to for an impromptu competition.

Leisure Studies scholars and Gaming Specialists understand that in spite of the enormous apparent variety in board games, just a few basic principles underlie all of them. Some games involve creation of a role-playing environment, some involve skills (and, thus, some play can be “skillful”), and some involve various mechanisms approximating random number generation. In the last sort, players “play” against the unknown future outcome of that device – often a die, a pattern of cards, or mechanical instrument of some kind.

In order for a “game” to exist, these basic features, ordered in some way, are then bound by rules of greater or lesser complexity. Games can then be made to model “real life,” after a fashion, by carefully combining elements of role-playing, skill requirement, and chance outcome components. In the New World, Go, Mah Jong and Chess, various European card-based games, African games such as Awele, Bao, Dakon, and others of the Mancala group, and games enjoyed by Native Americans were played in traditional forms by new groups of players, and were also hybridized. New, variant forms were then played.

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Chinese Drawings

Chinese Drawings at Bangkok’s National Museum

During our visit, the Bangkok National Museum, which is generally dedicated to preserving Thailand’s cultural heritage through its varied collections of art, anthropological, archaeological, cultural, and ethnographic material displayed in the Palace of Wang Na (near the Grand Palace, which itself hosts the remarkable Green Buddha), we enjoyed a wonderful traveling exhibit of contemporary Chinese drawings. Bangkok’s little visited museum is a quiet, rewarding break from the hubbub of a great city. It features 2-d art, traveling shows, a small sculpture garden and studio, and a café.

The Gallery of Thai History is located in the Sivamokhaphiman Hall, the Prehistory Galley at the rear of the building, the museum’s History of Art collection is in the south and north wings while the minor arts, including such interesting objects as the Royal Cremation Chariots and various ceremonial objects are on display in other buildings within the compound. Importantly, the center also hosts traveling exhibits and other work. On our visit a charming display of local portraits celebrating the monarch was there, as was the collection of Chinese drawings.

Contemporary Chinese Work

Several large, tranquil, and entirely suitable spaces were set aside for the suite of Chinese drawings on display some time back at the Bangkok National Art Museum. These included a selection of large works, such as a set from Chen Xinmao’s “Historic Book Series,” (2001), as well as drawings by Li Huasheng (1999) 197X196 cm; Bai Ming (2003) “permeating-corresponding-overlapping,” 140X267; and Shen Quin’s “mountain” (1986) 150X130cm. Although a thorough critique of this moving and excellent is far beyond the scope of this brief article, perhaps the most obvious element communicated was the powerful negotiation taking place between deeply traditional ways of “dealing” with paper, especially with pigment and with ink, the emerging and dynamic political situation of the Pacific setting, and the extraordinary vitality of creative forces available. Perhaps it’s easy to imagine that all creative energy is flowing toward the technical edge of the methods envelope – digital imaging and electronic reproduction of various kinds. These artists are handling utterly basic materials and entirely formal and elemental questions with astonishing creative resolve.

Wang Huang Shen’s multiple media “Civilization Sacrifice” does involve more than just the traditional media (as do some other of the show’s drawings). And, indeed, I found it to be the most impressive construction-assemblage in the presentation among many strong representative pieces. Other objects may very well be more suitable for particular spaces, especially smaller environments or long term exhibit. Civilization Sacrifice, which involved debris, found articles, drawings, electronic media, and performance, as well a music, in part focused on the terrorist act which destroyed the twin towers in New York. However, as is always the case, Wang Huang Shen’s large assembly spoke to larger issues as well.



The museum is open Wednesday-Sunday 9.00am.- 4.00pm. with an admission fee of 40 bahts; the telephone numbers are: 66 -2- 224-1404 , 224-1333 , 221-1842; fax. 224-1404 , 224-9911
It is located near the Phramane Grounds, the Thammasat University, and National Theatre
Use bus # 3,6, or 39

All The Dead Brollys!

All The Dead Brollys!
(c) 2007 Jon Donlon

A few weeks ago a wind and rain storm lashed our town here in Japan. Of course, for the twenty-five minute walk into work I grabbed my worn, worker’s-yellow poly-sylab-space-age-micro-pore-breathable-raintight parka that has traveled with me now for years, round-and-round the world. I slipped it on and then the zipper ran a’ fowl. Fortunately, it also has long narrow rectangles of velcro to seal the storm flap, so I was able to use that to hold the thing closed in the gusting wind.

Unfortunately, although because I’ve lived through hurricanes, including Katrina in Louisiana last year, and I knew that this particular blow was no typhoon, the storm was indeed a savage one. It left limbs down, debris liberally strewn about, and at our apartment complex a formerly quite leafy and fairly substantial tree uprooted. Velcro alone didn’t do the job and the wind lashed rain saturated my shirt and dungarees by the time I got to my office desk. If I hadn’t noticed that obvious damp reality, pretty much each of my students kindly pointed the fact out.

None the less, as I looked around during my walk, the Japanese had been doing battle with not only the wind, tormenting them with its whipping and curling, snapping and pounding, but with the umbrellas they insisted on trying to use. Perhaps needless to say – though I’ll say so regardless – many a brolly bit the dust (although every molecule of dust had of course been scoured away by the pitiless, driving rain) that morning. For days their spindly silver ribs glinted in the unusually clear sunlight, stuck in the weirdest places.

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Drawing Beats Painting

Sumo notes, Tokyo, graphte, ink, watercolor wash

Drawing Beats Painting

Jon Donlon


My upright Episcopal aunt enrolled me in a summer art enrichment class as a boy. By extraordinary good luck it was taught by Elmore Morgan Jr. in Lafayette, Louisiana. He was young in his own career and it was decades before he was acknowledged as one of America’s finest artists. He exposed us children to his ideas of color and line and marking with the same mix of kindness and discipline I found again, eight or ten years later, when I enjoyed his instruction in drawing class at the University of Southwestern Louisiana.

Last summer the New York Times had a wonderful review by Michael Kimmelman, “An Exhibition about Drawing Conjures a Time When Amateurs Roamed the Earth” (July 19, 2006). I enjoyed it because of my interests in old travel narratives and memoirs, some done back when the diarists did their own illustrations. And I enjoyed it because I have a special fondness for the great age of amateurism, the Victorian period with its explosion of Henry Higginsises collecting syllables or shells or whatnot. And it brought back such lodged memories of my own efforts to learn how to draw.

Now I reflect on the great good luck evidenced by those events in my life. As Kimmelman says, used to be that “drawing was a civilized thing to do, like reading and writing. It was taught in elementary schools. It was democratic. It was a boon to happiness,” Michael Kimmelman goes on in The Times review, “From 1820 to 1860, more than 145,000 drawing manuals circulated, now souvenirs of our bygone cultural aspirations... Before box cameras became universal a century or so ago, people drew for pleasure but also because it was the best way to preserve a cherished sight, a memory, just as people played an instrument or sang if they wanted to hear music at home because there were no record players or radios. Amateurism was a virtue, and the time and effort entailed in learning to draw, as with playing the piano, enhanced its desirability.” Matthew Perry, who had close ties to the Slidell’s for whom the New Orleans’s suburb is named, is most famous for “opening” Japan. But he was a great one for education. He helped develop America’s naval academy, recommending a curriculum including such practical subjects as “drawing, mapping, and gunnery tactics…” according to his biographer John Schroeder.

For decades, like Jack Kerouac, I lugged about cheap notebooks, writing notes and making little illustrations in whatever pen or pencil was handy. In fact, the very first day the Louisiana government offices were opened again in Baton Rouge after Katrina, I was chewing on a bureaucrat’s ear, suggesting we get a few cases of note books to hand out to the displaced and at the various shelters. Let people write and draw about their experiences. “It’s self-directed,” I pointed out, “and it’s quiet” a special benefit of journalizing. That ear was tin. I ran into folks with the tourism section, and suggested that narratives from journals filled as they were with heart and bravery would be an antidote to the news coverage of “toxic soup.” There was no traction there for handing out note books for journalizing and recuperative drawing, either. Now, of course, there are wonderful Post-Katrina books and photo projects and the State has come fully aboard collecting personal narratives and archiving them for the future. I’m still disappointed that I wasn’t able to get some journalizing and drawing sessions going way back there in the breach.

I don’t ape Kerouac’s nickel notebooks and bic pens anymore. His notebooks are, after all, important cultural artifacts while mine are merely repositories of information for my later use. Most of what I do, now, most of the time, are small, palm-sized water colors or India ink pen renderings in an ongoing series of bound, illustrated journals with thick acid-free paper (black ones I order from San Francisco, red bound ones I buy from a shop near Shakespeare and Co. in Paris, accordion-pleated page ones I get in Kyoto). I do a few domestic scale drawings using complex media—graphite, colored pencils, washes, ink, all that.

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Kyoto - Kawai Kankiro

Kyoto - Kawai Kankiro

(c) Jon Donlon 2007
Kyoto, established more that a 1000 years ago as capital of the Japanese archipelago, remains a thriving commercial center, humming with activity. This still beautiful urban center was established as "Heian-kyo" in the year 794.

For us, the place was a city of sights: we wanted to see Gion and its narrow lanes, we wanted to wander down traditional Pontocho dori with its many fine restaurants and the food market with that fantastic knife store – do I have a $1000 to buy cutlery for the $3000 stove I want? Maybe in my dreams, along with the “tea house” configured as a guest cottage—the one with the deep soak tub covered in mosaics I’ve been wanting to commission my Louisiana mosaic artist friend to do. Hummm…will it fit in the “tea house” or the rehabbed airstream I keep bugging Jolly would be suitable for us to snuggle up in?

Anyway, we wanted to see about a small piece of bricky red Kyoto ware, wanted to ramble around the “used” kimono fairs, and to visit the traditional house of Kawai Kankiro, “father” of the mingei craft movement. Proprietors of Wortman Potters, the increasingly trendy and collectable outfit on the Gulf Coast had carefully explained Bernard Leach’s connection, and our English/Welsh pals had taken us to Cornwall to show us the Japan-England pottery connection.

Kawai Kankiro’s place, now a living museum, is just south of the Gion. Ryoan-ji, with its 15 well placed stones, was way out in another section of the city – that was a day itself to take photographs, gander, and sketch images into my notebook. Indeed, the entire orbit of Zen gardens exerts a strong pull on us, though we are hardly aficionados.

Of course Gion, and of the book, “Memoirs of a Geisha” by Arthor Golden and the resulting, disappointing movie of the same name, as well as Yasunari Kawabata’s “Snow Country,” which presents geisha life from a different, if not too different, perspective, informed our curiosity about Kyoto.

Now, a bit out of the blue, I recalled our painful feelings of elaborate romance when we visited Seville years ago, where the general architecture is much more beguiling than that in Kyoto --- which features only islands of the extraordinary. What is it that calls to the human spirit or soul? Anthrony Trollop, having complained that his Spanish was poor since he’d been with “Maria” for but two months, hardly time enough for loving let along language lessons as he ably put it, adventures in Seville.

He wrote in “John Bull on the Guadalquivir,” wondering: “So felt I then, pining for something to make me unhappy. Ah, me! Iknow all about it now, and am content. But I wish that some learned pundit would give us a good definition of romance, would describe in words that feeling with which our hearts are so pestered when we are young, which makes us sigh for we know not what, and forbids us to be contented with what God sends us. We invest female beauty with impossible attributes, and are angry because our women have not the spiritualized souls of angels, anxious as we are that they should also be human in the flesh. A man looks at her he would love as at a distant landscape in a mountainous land. The peaks are glorious with more than the beauty of earth and rock and vegetation. He dreams of some mysterious grandeur of design which tempts him on under the hot sun, and over the sharp rock, till he has reached the mountain goal which he had set before him. But when there, he finds that the beauty is well-nigh gone, and as for that delicious mystery on which his soul had fed, it has vanished for ever.” (Trollop).

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I Could See Her Again, But Probably Not Any More

I Could See Her Again, But Probably Not Any More

(c) 2007 Jon Donlon
I recently spent a little time reconnoitring the Disney layout in Orlando. The scuttlebutt is that that outfit runs a tight ship, but it’s always a good idea to dot the “i”s and cross “t”s in terms of checking things for one’s self. We plan to bring in a cart load, or more properly, a bus load, of students next year. First we went to see Disney Sport, than on to get a gander, first hand, at how a great American university organizes its intramural sporting options.

After Florida it was necessary to fly up to Chicago and drive down to the vast, sprawling corn fields of “down state,” to the enormous campus of the University of Illinois. Two of us visiting from a prestigious private Japanese school would be beating the bushes, chatting up the faculty, and checking into local accommodation. The U of I campus is a costly complex, dense with resources. At one point an information specialist (librarian) mentioned in passing that the school’s library was “no longer the third largest in the country,” meaning that counting books was hardly meaningful in today’s world of electronic media. Yet, to be in the top five is not that shabby after all.

For all its egg-head trappings, C-U is still down to earth. I was able to do bed rock research when breaking ground in Controversial Leisure (the field I carved out in Leisure Studies). Previously, Leisure Studies, the scholarly pursuit of the understanding of the phenomena of human leisure, tended to be sunshine and apple pie. “What about what people really do?” I wondered. Before I settled into my current curiosity about travel and travel narratives, and cultural tourism, I codified lots of areas of “purple” leisure. I talked to cock fighters, coke dealers, and strippers, for example. Eventually I wrote publications informed by field research on areas including cock fighting, fads, and prostitution.

I talked to one stalwart of an unsavoury yet popular genre in C-U. Krystal Lynn, star of stage and screen. She was dancing the night I taped our interview at the town's finest, and only, strip club, and had at that time featured in more than 15 hard-core pornography videos.

She arrived late.

She told me earlier on the phone that she was "making the circuit," performing for just a few nights each along a vast series of clubs throughout North America and in Canada. "You might not know it," she giggled into the mouthpiece, "but that's where the money is." Then, thinking a moment, she said, "in cash." Of course I have no idea why being in cash would be better.

But in broad daylight, far from the hoochi-coochi pole and the sticky bar littered with change, cigarette packs, half-filled glasses and empty hopes, yet fully pickled men, she was scheduled for an interview with the local radio station and then a "signing." I'd never been to a stripper's signing before but, since I was working on research about strippers and their impact on the local economy [example eventual publication: “Attraction of the Naughty - Gentleman’s Clubs as a Tourism Resource,” with J. Agrusa] I thought I should find out what such a thing was.

The bookstore, in reality, was an adult video shop with a small, though selective, array of so-called sex toys and broadly humorous gag gifts. It also hosted a rotating kiosk of "patch pocket books," expensive paperback books cheaply produced and apparently not spell-checked or proofread. This is one area where the computer did kill print media.

Novelty was not a virtue of these novels, I soon found, flipping through them as I cooled my heels. They eschewed variance from a boiler-plate formula, each focused closely on a particular category of audience and offered a sequence of minutely described scenarios. After a moment I began to wonder just how many different ways oral sex could be described.

My Victorian curiosity and marginal academic interest was extinguished by the unmistakable sounds of stiletto heels tap-tap-tapping across concrete. I’d worked my way through undergraduate school, partly as a bartender. As a result, my autonomic nervous system had long ago been taught to slip into a perfect balance between fight-or-flight at the noise. Few women would be in such a shop, fewer still in heels. Krystal Lynn, at that moment, rounded the end of an aisle and rapidly closed the gap between us. Except for being obviously very fit--she must work out all the time I guessed--and very sexily dressed, the actress was almost peculiarly normal in shape, height, and weight. The name was obviously a thin fiction.

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