A BUSINESS TRIP TO JAPAN - AND TOFUKUJI REVISITED

For the second time since I took charge last year of PHP Curasao, I travelled to Japan, in April, to drum up business among my many contacts there. Halfway the 3-week visit I broke away for an afternoon's exploration of the foothills of Kyoto's eastern mountain range, Higashiyama, where I had left so many footprints 20-odd years earlier. My journal entry of those few hours in April describes the ambivalence it triggered:

Inside Tōfuku-ji's spacious grounds there were other disappointments. Groups of tourists everywhere, and “No entry’ signs wherever you looked to keep them at bay. And then to think that I once had the run of the 20-hectare complex with its numerous outbuildings, and was invited to tea by the Chief Abbott seated on thick cushions in the innermost chamber of the main temple hall! I remember being ushered through a succession of matted rooms, door after door sliding away in synch with my advancing step. Now the stern entrance hall — where a barefoot novice with shaven head once greeted my arrival on a cold winter day ignoring the creeping cold of the floorboards with stoic disdain — was cluttered with the paraphernalia of a reception committee for a kimono exhibition. Fussing girls were pinning rosettes on arriving grey-faced bespectacled storeowners, their wives trailing three steps behind.