Cultural leisure and the rules of its passage

In light clothing, with a backpack on my shoulder in the early morning of the summer month of August, I walked unhurriedly out of the anthracite building of the Kyoto station. The fresh bustle of a long awakened city smelled in my face – the day was shaping up perfectly! Having reviewed not the most amazing urban landscape, I decided that you can live here for a while, but we’ll figure it out.

Kyoto is a cultural city, pleasant in all respects with its majestic (but rather low) palaces and ancient temples – this whole song in three days will reach any sane person. And then the question arises of cultural leisure (the essence does not change in this case from a change in emphasis). Where to go Russian and lonely? In Japan, without local knowledge, this is a rhetorical question. But if the soul has longed for a warm company and a pleasant drink, then there is no reason to deny yourself pleasure, no matter how we live once.

You can go a lot where. At your service bars, restaurants, discos, baths, and other drinking establishments. I was never interested in restaurants at all, and after visiting Japan I didn’t like it at all. First of all, entry into the vast majority of Japanese restaurants is paid. At least two bucks from the nose. More often, but the price, at times, includes a glass of beer and a simple meal. In short, I wandered about poverty once in a Japanese restaurant for a quick meal, took food for 30 or 40 dollars; then he cursed himself for a long time for the lack of vigilance – they added another ten to the account. Now I don’t go to their restaurants unless someone invites me.

Japanese disco – concrete mixer drum. There is a dance floor and other eye-catching charms, but there is a complete fighter (in the sense that the brain decomposes), all sorts of slot machines, bizarre modifications and devices are mixed up on several floors, we would never have thought of creating such a machine. All believe in spinning and flocks of red-headed youth in the style of “I’m with my mother instead of a mop” plow the expanses of this “wonderland without brakes.” Maybe I’m certainly not a professional researcher, I haven’t studied ethnology, I have heard little about cultural tolerance, but I regard the Japanese youth as a mistake of nature, a quiet cataclysm of our time. Sometimes the Japanese ladies and their companions seem to be the fruit of a stoned stylist. Bright clothes of incredible styles, hair color that exudes the northern lights, tightly filtered Tokyo smog, boots and boots with such a platform that anyone who wears starts to look like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Oh east! – words are not just emotions.

In the baths you can wash, but you can … sleep. So, at least, do many conscious Russian sailors. The thing is that in Japanese baths they pay for a visit, not for an hour. In general, the Japanese bathhouse is the quintessence of the culture of the land of the rising sun, poetry expressed in harmony of water and aesthetically pleasing decoration around. Only somehow it is too well conspired, you will not immediately penetrate. Baths are natural (that is, with natural hot springs), there are artificial baths, one way or another they are all called “onsen” – a hot spring. To whom it is, and I most enjoy the onsen on Hokkaido, you sit in the middle of the snow and bastard. In Kamchatka, it’s also cool, but you must admit that it is more exotic in Japan. Baths are also good because there you can absolutely calmly splash around in waters with varying degrees of concentration of minerals, swim in the pools, and then go to the side room to the relaxation room. You can eat there. Wash, eat, sleep, wash … – the natural cycle of life. Someone will say that in this chain of carnal pleasures the main link is clearly lacking, organizing it does not constitute any special problems, believe me.

There is such a miracle in Japan as a snack bar. Since I am quite far from deep concepts of the Japanese language, I hardly can distinguish a hiragana from a katakana, I can say that, apparently, “snack” means “snack”. And in these institutions they eat the money of customers, so much so that it bursts behind the ears. The snack bar involves communication with cute girls from almost all countries of the world (from the former USSR and Eastern Europe to a greater extent). The Japanese sit there for hours playing games with them, talking in a language unknown to science, with a bang they understand each other and spend money. This is a status lesson, I remember how in one Japanese town far from the Tokyo-Osaka civilization, I had nothing to do to observe the cheerful red light district. After a hard day, elderly, respectable Japanese men dutifully went into snack bars to the cheers of local hostesses. Then, some time later, they descended, surrounded by a flock of girls of Slavic and Filipino appearance, to get into a taxi and … to his wife and children. Who cares about the details of the life of our hostesses in Japan, read the story “Kiev Dynamo” at www.susi.ru, the author knew what he was writing about.

A decent Japanese bar or disco (which is the same in our case) is no different from European, unless Japanese music plays and there are a lot of Japanese around