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Japan and the Orient are still mysterious to most Westerners, partly because one cannot rely on Romano-Greco word forms to make even partial sense of signs and conversation. Even the Cyrillic world is more understandable given a little elementary background in Greek or mathematics, but Japanese signs and sound forms are strange to us.

So, friendly traveling in Japan usually involves careful reproduction of sounds that are told to us. We struggle to remember them.

You can travel across the Japanese islands using Western style hotels with Japan's own Prince chain at the top of the pile, but many Japanese would prefer to stay in their own traditional inns: the ryokan. Many western hotels include some ryokan rooms but it isn't the same, even if lodgers then wander around in kimonos having bathed in some communal bath.

In our journey, we visited Kyoto, the old capital of Japan and now a wonderful maze containing 900 temples of all varieties. To savor old Japan I had arranged to stay for a few nights in a traditional ryokan. We had even gone so far as to employ the traditional Japanese method of transferring luggage from one place to another you didn't carry cases, you contracted for its delivery.

So, we arrived in Kyoto, fresh off the Shinkansen, with no luggage but clutching one small piece of paper on which were written completely unintelligible hieroglyphics. We had been told this was the address of our ryokan and our luggage would be there. The scrap of paper was our only connection with the rest of our journey and its commitments so my fingers held it very firmly.

That sort of uncertainty is quite acceptable when traveling alone, but in this case my companion was my wife-to-be. This was our preemptive honeymoon and it was my wife-to-be's first visit to the Orient. If the truth were told she had never even considered going to Japan before but was excited by the opportunity.

Arriving at the Kyoto station, I found a cab and showed the driver my piece of paper. He nodded, seemed to understand the scribble, and we got in.

Kyoto is a maze of tiny streets and footpaths many of which are clogged with cars and carts so we soon lost all idea of direction and distance but finally we stopped and the cabbie said something unintelligible and pointed.

We looked around. We were in a crowded street in which there were some shops open to the street and some homes but nothing even remotely looking like a hotel.

I gestured to the slip of paper with its scribbled message

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