Day in the Life of an Idiot

 
Image: Kasuga-tashi Shrine in Nara, Nara Prefecture

This time our tour guide for the HeyGo tour was a middle-aged coffeeshop owner named Hiro. Hiro lives in Nara, where this shrine is located and he's... a bit of a character. Americans have this sense that the Japanese are all polite and/or deeply enthusiastic. Hiro, meanwhile, started the tour explaining to us that he finds visiting shrines to be deeply boring, but the food shops, now that's something!

He then proceeded to walk up up a row of food venders and stop at one. He was hungry and he bought himself a hashimaki (okonomiyaki on chopsticks). This by itself is fine? Like, I like looking at food vendors. I even took a postcard of what he got, because it did look very yummy.


Image: Hashimaki (a kind of crepe-like omelet on a stick.)

But then, he proceeded to eat it ON SCREEN. I can not explain quite how WEIRD and off-putting this was. In fact, I had to look away. I went off to another screen because I couldn't stand it. 

He did get a nice shot of the okonomiyaki being made. 



But, he wandered into the parking lot to show us how busy it was, and then he kind of harassed a police officer who was just trying to direct traffic by asking him about how many visitors had been to the shrine so far. (All in Japanese, of course.) It was awkward though? Like the guy was clearly trying to walk away from him??

Plus, Hiro had a vocal tick where he snorted a lot??? It was just... awkward.

At one point, he just randomly talked to someone else trying to set up a stall. That guy blew him off, but he ended up being followed by a gaggle of college students, who asked him what he was doing, and while I could not understand all of it, but he expressly used the term 'gaijin' to describe us, which isn't exactly an insult, but it can be. If he were being polite to describe his job as being a tourist guide for foreigners, I would suspect he would be more likely to call us the more formal gaikokujin... (especially when talking to strangers, though I did notice he used casual speech with EVERYONE he interacted with, even the traffic cop.) However, it was pretty clear from the guffaws from the college students, that we were being insulted. 

Hiro was kind of a dick.

I did end up tipping him, but only because it was 5 am in Japan when he took us to this shrine and he complained a lot about the hazards of running a coffee shop in the era of COVID. Even so, I kind of regret the paltry five dollars, honestly. I did notice that there weren't nearly as many people dropping tips into his jar. 

For good reason. 

So, I guess this is a lesson learned. It really does matter who your tour guide is. They are not universally awesome... and it is also possible that Hiro is great most of the time, but was just not at his best at 5 am. His camera got crappy reception at the beginning of the tour, too, so that didn't help my ability to appreciate him.

The torii gate at the beginning of the shrine was lovely, though. It is apparently (I found out not from our tour guide, but from wikipedia) one of the oldest of the Shinto torii gates. 


And he walked us past some of the stone lanterns that Kasuga-taisha is famous for.


Image: A row of the three thousand lanterns of Kasuga-taisha.

He told us almost nothing about this Shinto Shrine which is the home to four gods-- Ame no koyane (a divine founder of the Fujiwara clan), Himegami, Futsunushi no mikoto (a warrior god), and Takemikazuchi no mikoto (a thunder god/sword god.) At some point, a child of the gods was added to this grouping. Like, the path to the shrine passes through a deer park?? I would have loved to have heard something about that.

Anyway. I would say this was a bust. I would probably feel less grumpy about it if I had stuck to my guns and not tipped.