Log> My Japan this far

I traded Kyoto's sweltering heat for Osaka's soft summer rain today. The mere hour on the train made a huge difference. Kyoto had been surprisingly peaceful: as if the cultural heritage evident everywhere would cool things down even in the +35 centigrade heat I bicycled through to temples and shrines for two days. Central Osaka is like Tokyo but even a bit more condensed, perhaps magnified by a lot of the action concentrating in massive underground shopping malls.

So I'll reflect on Kyoto's tranquility instead. I've had a World Heritage temple completely to myself, and climbed the mountain of the Inari shrine seeing only one person every 15 minutes. Granted, the central areas were brimming with people, but I'd only need to go there to sit in an air-conditioned manga kisa (an internet cafe of sorts with a massive selection of comics and free drinks - you just pay for the time you spend there), and that was welcome energy.

The rain just subsided and the sky is glowing the tired, pale yellow that only Dali has ever been able to capture on canvas. It was a summer rain, so fittingly seen from the train window - a train that was on time, clean and comfortable, reminding me of criss-crossing Finland by train over the summer weeks there. The two nations have more in common than I thought before, and I'd always harbored expectations of commonality. The largest differences stem from the fact that though the countries are, in the ballpark, of similar landmass, Japan has just 25 times as many people. Yet, I can have a millennia-old buddhist temple to myself for an hour.

And tomorrow could be a good time to visit some national monuments in peace and quiet - it's the elections. The LDP, in power for almost 50 years, is said to 'need a miracle' to keep it's lead, especially now that Koizumi's charismatic halo has faded. And Japan is on a watershed - they need to address the problem of the aging population, further complicated by what Jim Rogers calls 'rarefied racism' and isolationism. Japan isn't close to admitting the hordes of foreign workers that are currently easing the the pressures of similar demographics in western EU countries.