Impressions of Japan

Heather and Suzie spent a week with me in Kanazawa before heading off to find more adventures in Kyoto and then Tokyo.  I asked Heather to write something about her trip for my blog.

Impressions of Japan
By Heather Albrecht


When I grow up I want to be an old Japanese tea kettle shop owner who pulls curious-looking strangers off the street into the comfort of my cozy tea kettle shop and makes them tea from one of my many kickin’ tea kettles. And since I’ll be an old Japanese man I won’t have to wear any crazy fashionable strappy high heeled shoes.

Well, I guess the man part isn’t so important. I would very happily be a friendly old Japanese woman with lime green highlights who regularly leads lost, curious-looking strangers to the places they are trying to find.


Yes, definitely lime green highlights.

And I’ll be old enough that I can get away with fashionable flats.

Problem solved.


As a friendly old Japanese woman with lime green highlights I will eat soba noodles, ramen, and curry all of my days and drink tea from a kickin’ tea kettle given to me from my tea kettle shop owner friend and not miss rhubarb and apples so much because I wouldn’t know what I was missing. Maybe.

I will also be an active, spritely old woman who regularly runs through thickets of vermilion torii gates (I will never be able to run through them all because they don’t really end—they just continue on past Fushimi Inari shrine into the clouds) and bamboo groves and cool off from my run with thirteen of my favorite zen rocks. I will have to live in Kyoto.

I will divide my days between carving wooden ramen ladles and rice paddles (the ones that fit perfectly in your hand and make you want to sing) which I will sell in a pottery/chopstick store and gardening in one of the top three gardens in my prefecture. My specialty will be tree bending. I will do this with Tiny Tim Cratchet crutches. Tall ones. No tree will be safe. I will shape them all to my will. All of them.

I will be very happy with my life and think fondly on the days when I wasn’t a friendly old Japanese woman with lime green highlights. Indeed, I will have very strong memories of my first trip to Japan and then my return to Minnesota where the corn fields look like lush, overgrown rice paddies minus the paddy and the meadows turn gold and purple as the sun sets and give off a sweet smell that smells interestingly like tatami mats.