this morning i woke up to the rain. rain on a wooden building, held together without nails, through the sliding paper window coverings. feeling safe and warm inside my room, snuggled into  the warmth of the futon.

i had booked an early breakfast again, hoping to make it to nara for a 9.55am start to the walking tour i wanted to do. giving in to tourism of some sort and being guided around the unknown city. and so i ate the japanese omlette filed with enoki mushrooms and rushed out to get the train on time.i always seem to time the trains to be the ONLY ones i can catch to make it, and they seem to usually work out. which this one did. i made it to nara, and then walked through the rain with my new, 100Y red/clear umbrella and tried not to be tempted to look in all the shops. so many shops! luckily they didnt really seem to open till 10, and i needed to be at the meeting point at 9.55.

i got to the kintetsunara train station (different train company, different station) and found the group i would be walking with. the tour is called ‘naramachi walks’ and is an english language guided tour of the naramachi area – apparently an often overlooked area of the city, with most people visiting the park and the temples. the naramachi area is the old town, perhaps like the rocks in sydney? with lots of old houses, and also the home of the city’s few geishas and maiko (geishas in training). the tour group was me, the gaijin, and then 5 japanese women who were looking to have english conversation practice/thinking about starting up tours in other cities. it was a nice group, and we set off (still in the rain) on our walk.

we walked through to one temple area, where we saw from a distance the second biggest pagoda in japan. only from a distance though! and then as we walked through the temple grounds we were also shown a cluster of little jizos, watched over by a bigger one. their bibs were sopping wet from the rain, and our guide told us about the tradition of making the red bibs and writing children’s names on them, for protection and good luck. the other women in the group remembered their grandmothers doing this too, and i  enjoyed hearing their stories of the traditions they could remember, but that they didn’t necessarily continue themselves. the memory is perhaps a substitute for the practice.
and this i suppose was my first encounter with the jizo in japan.

we kept on walking, hearing about the house design, and good restaurants, and looking in on certain shops (the apothecary was very cute). and our guide told us about what i think is a young gentrification of the area, with (hipsters) young people wanting to move into the area and rejuvenate it. it’s happening the world over, and so maybe the naramachi is more the redfern of sydney?
finally we visited a model naramachi house, with its perfect design for function and beauty, all the lines balanced and the rooms with purpose.

we had our photo taken and then the tour was done, but not before we had a chance sighting of a maiko (maikosan! maikosan!) and then four of us headed back to a restaurant we’d passed for lunch.
and over lunch we talked in english, and i didn’t feel bad for my lack of language because these women had specifically wanted to practice.

we talked about their families, their children. the things i was planning to do in japan, what i do in australia. i said i wanted to go to an onsen, but that i was worried they might not let me because of my tattoo, as i slid my sleeve up to reveal the diver. they gushed and one of them touch it, and they asked what it was for. i explained my ideas about diving in, taking a big leap with my study and so forth, and reflected to myself on where i am at with that leap. somewhere, but maybe resting on a lower platform perhaps? and they said to me to just put a bandage on it for the onsen, and then i pointed out my other markings. the woman next to me asked about why an envelope and i said it was a reminder to me to write to people, to think of people, and that i go it recently after i had a miscarriage, to remind myself of the letters i wrote in my head to that possibility. and she said what is now to me the universal ‘oh,  i’m sorry’, and then translated to the other two what i had said (i’m assuming miscarriage isn’t a common vocab word when you’re learning a language). and that was it, we moved on to the next conversation, but it’s marked as a revelation time for me on this trip – and started me wondering how many times i’d ‘reveal’, and to who and why. i wanted to ask them about their pregnancies, and if they had had miscarriages, but it wasn’t the right time, and so we ate and chatted. and then parted ways, with big smiles and arrigatos.