Japanese Poles

Back from Poletown, making preparations for my annual journey to the motherland.  This time, my visit is a bit belated as over last Christmas I opted for a trip to Japan.  A Pole in Japan is not as strange as it sounds.  Besides, Eastern Europeans and Asians share a gene pool reinforced by centuries of mutual conquests.  

I loved everything, and I mean everything, about Tokyo and the surrounding area (except for little white fish served cold.  I thought they were crunchy little noodles and took a mouthful. Surprise!). 

Soon after my arrival in Tokyo, I discovered a Polish-Japanese connection.  Ayako found a website for a bed and breakfast not far from my hometown.  It’s called Villa Akiko and run by Akiko Miwa, a Japanese woman who has made Poland her home: http://www.akiko.pl/index.html

Akiko built the hotel from the ground up, which wasn’t easy since there were no roads leading up to the land she purchased.  She speaks fluent Polish (she didn’t know it when she arrived in 1989) and gets along with górale (or highlanders, a particular ethnic group of which I count myself a member) who reside in the area.  The górale are a famously difficult and stubborn people, but apparently what Pani Akiko wants, Pani Akiko gets, and the górale of the surrounding villages adore her.  She’s involved in the life of the nearby village, Harklowa, and has founded an environmental organization in the area.

Polish National Geographic published an interview with Pani Akiko, not because she’s a Japanese woman living in Poland (there are others), but because she lives in the mountainous middle of nowhere among the górale: http://www.national-geographic.pl/artykuly/pokaz/mam-dusze-mezczyzny/.  She’s my new hero.  I hope to visit Villa Akiko when I’m in Poland.

One of my favorite adventures in Japan involved a trip to the mountains to soak in an onsen, traditional Japanese baths.  Ayako took me to Nikko, home of the famous Tokugawa Ieyasu shrine.  

   

We stayed at a ryokan, a traditional Japanese inn.

 
The Nikko style tofu dinner and breakfast there were incredible. 

Specific procedures must be followed at the onsen.  For Westerners like me, the ryokan provides a handy dandy guide complete with pictures.

After a week in Tokyo, Ayako was sick and tired of my questions.  Admittedly, some were just downright stupid but, in my defense, there is a fourteen-hour time difference between St. Louis and Tokyo.  Jet lag was a mammoth!  She flung the guide in my general direction and told me to memorize it.  Except for one mistake, all went well.  I scrubbed and rinsed in the correct order and manner and soaked to my heart’s delight.  The one error, however, came at a great cost.  Ayako told me that I could never be “a Japanese lady” all because once we put on the yukata and haori the ryokan provided, I immediately took off my undergarments.  This was apparently a grave error as it is inadvisable to walk downstairs and across the outside bridge leading to the onsen wearing only the yukata and haori, both of which tie at the waist.  

A highly impractical proposition, if you ask me, since the baths are gender specific, and all wear birthday suits anyway. 

While in Tokyo, I discovered just how much I enjoy taking photos.  Though I only have what Poles refer to as an “idiot cam,” some of the photos came out well enough to be framed.  This is one of my favorites.  I took it at Edo Wonderland (A Tokugawa era theme park outside of Tokyo):

During my time in Chicago, I snuck a little Japanese time away from Poletown and took Ewa and her adorable daughter Gaia to Rolls N’ Bowls, a tiny and really good restaurant in Lincoln Square.

 
I felt it necessary, however, to finish my Poletown adventure with a Polish meal.