The cushion story

On a previous episode of Sauntering Sunflower, Jenn and Lance were shopping in Kyoto. Walking up and down Kiyomizudera and exchanging yen for fancy trinkets. But our famed protagonists were unable to find a zen cushion in Kyoto.

More importantly, however, we had not found a foo dog. Foo dog is a name I invented for the statues I liked in Nara. I doubt it's accurate, but a good author doesn't let integrity and accuracy get in the way of a blog post. We had seen the foo dogs in abundance in Nara. But searching the shops of Kyoto, we discovered a dearth of foo dogs. Kyoto was foo dogless. But because the train system in Japan is so phenomenal, we thought nothing of zipping between cities.

We went to Nara and bought a foo dog. We knew exactly where they were sold, and which one we wanted. So aside from waiting around while the owners manufactured a box large enough to wrap our purchase, that part of our trip was pretty uneventful. This post isn't about foo dogs, though. That's just a lead in to the cushion story. This is why this post is entitled 'The Cushion Story' and not the 'Really easy foo dog purchase story'.

So we were in Nara after an entirely uneventful foo dog purchase. We decided we had enough time to hunt for a zen cushion. I didn't actually know what a zen cushion was, but Jenn wanted one, and that was a good enough for me. Being pragmatic, I suggested we ask the local tourist information bureau where we could buy a zen cushion.

Unfortunately, the girl at the tourist desk wasn't prepared to field this sort of question. She sought the guidance of a higher authority, who sought the guidance of an even higher authority, and soon we had two co-workers and a manager digging through the Japanese yellow pages hunting for a zen cushion store. I took pictures of the robo-ninja deer. Eventually, it was determined a shop existed that could produce the cushion we were probably looking for. It was also only half a block away.

We set out for our cushion store. We don't read Japanese. We missed the store the first go by, but found it on the second. We sauntered (as sunflowers do) to the counter and the nice lady inside brought out one of the cushions. I thought it looked very nice, but a glance at Jenn informed me this pillow wasn't zen.

I don't know how many of you have tried to describe something you haven't actually seen into a second language with which you are marginally proficient, but let me assure you the experience is highly entertaining!

We had a quarter-dozen shop keepers scouring the store, trying to appease us mighty foreigners and sate our bizarre pillow related demands.

In the course of twenty minutes we established the following facts:

1) One of the shop keepers had at least a passing familiarity with zazen, and the cushions there of.

2) Japanese zazen doesn't use cushions anymore. They use little cushioned mini-benches.

3) The shop did not actually have the cushions we sought.

4) Lance actually remembered the japanese word for 'round/circle' at a key moment. Man, that saved a lot of potential headache.

5) The shop would make us cushions in 30 minutes.

Yes, that is correct. The shop did not have the cushions we wanted, but they had a square cushion filled with pipe bead. The square cushion was far too thick to serve a useful purpose in meditation, but the shop owner assured us they could remove the pipe beads from the cushion. He got the approximate height that Jenn wanted, and told us it would be ready in thirty minutes. We asked for two cushions, and he increased the wait time to....thirty minutes.

That's awesome math. We went for burgers.

No, wait. We looked at kimonos first. Jenn got a kimono last trip and I was going to buy a men's kimono this trip. Sadly, this shop didn't sell used kimonos; they sold custom-made new kimonos, in whatever fabric you desired. And if I had $9000, I would have totally bought one. We chatted with the shop owner about Banff, then went for Mos burgers.

After finishing our lunch, it had started to rain. We returned to the shop damp but unharmed. The owner had two employees furiously hand stitching pillows for us but they were not yet done. The staff seated us at the back of the shop by the heater and made us tea while they finished.

Roughly an hour after we arrived in Kyoto, we had two hand-stiched quasi-zen cushions in our possession, and they charged us a grand total of 60 cents for labour.