Day 19, to Kyoto

Today started early. I had planned to surprise my younger brother for his 23rd birthday by calling him. I had already tried to reach him yesterday evening, but then nobody answered because it was 1 pm in Europe. That’s why decided to try again at 7 am. First I had to walk through town with my sleepy head, to get to the payphone. But then, quite miraculously, everything worked fine, and I was able to congratulate him. It was just past midnight in the Netherlands, and it sounded like he had fun.

There isn’t much else to say about today, which (if you have read some of the other reports then you know this) probably means that it will be a lengthy story again. Today was the day of the return Kyoto. Like Tokyo, it felt a bit strange. About half a year ago, I had already visited all main sights in both cities, and somehow that makes it difficult to feel like a tourist. In the afternoon I did decide to visit a shrine that I hadn’t seen last time, because it located a little distance from the city centre. It is one of Kyoto’s most well known shrines (it also appears in foreign-produced movies about Japan, such as Lost in Translation, and Memoirs of a Geisha). It main feature is a path that is going through a ‘tunnel’ of hundreds of torii. A ‘torii’ consists of two poles with one or two horizontal bars on top of it, and usually marks the entrance to a shrine. Well, just check the photo. The tunnel you see goes on for several kilometers.

To fill this space I could maybe tell something about telephones in Japan. It turns out to be quite difficult to make a call to another country. With a mobile phone it would be easy. But because Japan doesn’t have a GSM network, our western phones (that use the GSM technology) don’t work. The reason for the lack of GSM is that it is an outdated technology. It is not very good for transmitting data, for example for internet-type applications. And that is what many Japanese use their ‘keitai’ for. Even though they have a laptop with internet connection, they will still check their email on their mobile phone. So this requires newer generations of networks. For example, UMTS is such a technology that is being installed in the Netherlands. Whether it will be as successful as it is in Japan is highly doubtful, because we are much more computer oriented.

You can also rent phones that work here, but they are quite pricy. In the West they are very hard to get, and in Japan you have to be able to prove nowadays that you live in Japan before you can buy one. Also, there are several different providers, that all have their own network infrastructure, and sometimes even use different network technologies. Often it seems that Japanese are playing on their keitai the entire day. Age doesn’t really seem to matter, and they all have the same type; the one that you can flip open. They have come in all colors imaginable, and there is always a cluster of small (cute) things hanging from it.

So it might seem that we, as tourists, have a hard time. However, imagine the situation from the Japanese perspective: their phones don’t work anywhere else in the world, because almost all countries use only GSM. Anyway, the only way for me to call to the Netherlands (besides stealing someone’s keitai), is to use a static payphone. But then I’d have to find one the accepted coins (those are uncommon, most use cards, which I didn’t want to buy for only one call), and that has to capability to make international calls (these are even rarer). Luckily there was one quite close to my ryokan, and the owner knew where. Even better, the Lonely Planet book contained a nice guide on the procedure to make international calls. This involves checking the provider of the payphone (NTT in my case), and then entering a list of digits depending on the provider, before entering the actual number.

0033 010 31 72 519 8216

Try guessing that… (the number is fake, by the way)