Summary
A BUSINESS TRIP TO JAPAN - AND TOFUKUJI REVISITED
For the second time since I took charge last year of PHP Curasao, I travelled to Japan, in April, to drum up business among my many contacts there. Halfway the 3-week visit I broke away for an afternoon's exploration of the foothills of Kyoto's eastern mountain range, Higashiyama, where I had left so many footprints 20-odd years earlier. My journal entry of those few hours in April describes the ambivalence it triggered:
Rlglat now; it's the azalea season, but not a flower to be seen wherever I went today: first Tōfuku-ji Temple, then along the back road to other temples, ending at the Kōmyō-in, with its expanse of barren rock set against a backdrop of a sparsely vegetated hillock. The buzzing of bees emphasised the stillness. I sat zazen-like on the wooden temple veranda, then lay on my back, eyes closed but aware…. After a while, a soft shuffling of feet: two students in jeans reverentially joined my solitude, unwittingly destroying it. Got up and left. Still, this brief rest had repaired the damage done at Tōfuku-ji, where the ticket-selling woman (there was no entrance fee back then…) had answered my polite question about the availability of a tearoom with a bored and terse flSTai yol’ which translates roughly as ‘Forget it, buster.’
Inside Tōfuku-ji's spacious grounds there were other disappointments. Groups of tourists everywhere, and “No entry’ signs wherever you looked to keep them at bay. And then to think that I once had the run of the 20-hectare complex with its numerous outbuildings, and was invited to tea by the Chief Abbott seated on thick cushions in the innermost chamber of the main temple hall! I remember being ushered through a succession of matted rooms, door after door sliding away in synch with my advancing step. Now the stern entrance hall — where a barefoot novice with shaven head once greeted my arrival on a cold winter day ignoring the creeping cold of the floorboards with stoic disdain — was cluttered with the paraphernalia of a reception committee for a kimono exhibition. Fussing girls were pinning rosettes on arriving grey-faced bespectacled storeowners, their wives trailing three steps behind.
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- The Call of JapanA Continuing Story - 1950 to the Present Day, pp. 235 - 236Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020