Posted on 11/14/2010 11:16:58 AM PST by STARWISE
President Obama reacquainted himself with a piece of his childhood on Sunday before heading back to Washington at the end of his nine-day, four-country trip across Asia.
Obama visited the Great Buddha in Japan's small coastal city of Kamakura.
He had stood in front of the imposing bronze statue, one of this country's most famous sites, as a 6-year-old boy. His mother had brought him there and then taken him for green tea ice cream, a memory he has reflected on fondly.
“It is wonderful to return to this great treasure of Japanese culture,” Obama wrote in a guest book at the temple. "Its beauty has stayed with me for many years."
The sacred statue of Amida Buddha is nestled in the hills around the Buddhist temple of K?tokuin. Dating to the 1200s, it’s roughly 40 feet tall and weighs about 100 tons.
Obama’s return to the site capped an overseas trip that was both business and personal.
From India to Indonesia to Japan, the president folded in stops that went beyond the state visits and global economic summits that brought him.
In Mumbai he visited a house where Mahatma Gandhi lived. Martin Luther King, Jr. had toured the home in 1959, signing the guest book just as Obama did last weekend. King and Gandhi are two of the president's biggest heroes.
In New Delhi, Obama walked the grounds of Humayun's Tomb. "Spectacular," he remarked as he left.
While he didn't stop at any of his childhood haunts in Jakarta, where he lived for four years, Obama said he found it "a little disorienting" to return to a modernized city he remembered for streets crowded with becaks and bemos when he moved there with his mother in 1967.
"I feel great affection for the people here,” he said at a news conference shortly after arriving. “The sights and the sounds and the memories all feel very familiar."
At the Great Buddha on Sunday, Obama told his guides about how he visited the statue with his mother when he was 6.
"I was this big," he said, holding his left hand at his waist to explain how small he was back then.
This time he gazed up at the statue, surrounded on three sides by low, tile-roof buildings, as president. He was shown around the site by the director of the Kotokuin Temple, Michiko Sato, and, Dr. Takao Sato, the temple’s 15th chief monk.
He sampled a green tea ice cream bar, like he had 43 years ago, and bought a pair of bracelets for his daughters at the gift shop.
Much of the town turned out to see the presidential motorcade wind through a small fishing village, past clusters of grocery stores and a group of surfers paddling around in the ocean.
At an ice cream store, a "Welcome President Obama" sign was hung over the door.
Before he flew to Kamakura, Obama wrapped up the two-day summit of Asian Pacific leaders. He will host APEC in his home state of Hawaii next year.
I call BS because the Japan of the early 1970s is far different than the Japan of today — considerably less internationalized, very parochial, even regimented in its tastes regarding food — and I STRONGLY doubt “green tea ice cream” had been invented then.
Traditional Japanese would have been intensely outraged at the very idea. Japan was a lot poorer then. The industrialization export boom had just started and the affluence of the bubble years was at least a decade in the future.
I vividly remember a train ride from Yokosuka to Tokyo in 1976, at which time most houses were still roofed with corrugated galvanised iron, air pollution was ungodly and the “honeypot” smell of human waste was prevalent in even the best districts because they were still upgrading the sewers.
Green tea ice cream? The idea would probably cause expressions of nausea even among what passed for internationalized Japanese of the era.
I know how you feel Onyx, I feel the same way. I just pray that he will be exposed as the fraud that he is. I believe he will be and I believe it will be his own side that eventually takes him down. They will throw him under the bus with all the others that he has thrown under it.
My wife , Japanese , doesn’t think that green tea ice cream was commercially available in 1967 .
We are left with the breathtaking, irrevocable reality that
NO ONE IS IN CHARGE !
God helps those who help themselves.
Lord, strengthen and protect those who
fight today to save America.
Thinking back, all of our Communist hunters have been smeared by the complicit news media, so-called historians and Hollyweird, which reamins filled with same today. J Edgar Hoover, Senator McCarthy, both smeared, libeled, -— given the Alinksy treatment. I honestly don’t know how we can have elements of faith in our once trusted FBI, while this Marxist sits in the WH and the other Marxist heads DOJ. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that our FBI has fellow travelers in positions of power. I find those very thoughts sickening, frightening and sad.
According to wiki, green tea ice cream has been available in the US in the late 70s in the Japanese establishments. It would be interesting to find out when the first green tea ice cream was created in Japan.
So, barry had this delicacy in the early 70s. hm. What a spoiled brat. Our US States children didn't get a chance to experience this ice cream but he did. IF he did at all.
Amazing, sickening.
I’ve been searching for a date when green tea first went on sale in Japan but have come up empty so far ( I’m in Japan BTW ) . I’ll ask at school today . Perhaps some of the older teachers know .
Oh, that’s rich. Wonder why he always has to embroider and lie. Good catch by your wife!
Here in the SF Bay Area, I recall that Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream (Edy’s to those of you east of the Mississippi) was the first to introduce green tea ice cream, and that may have been in the 1970s, certainly no earlier.
A grocery store in San Francisco’s Japantown carries Oreo cookie bars that are green tea-flavored, and I had a couple the other day. I’m no great fan of green tea, but I had to give them a try.
Thanks for the link and the research.
The article triggered a memory of another book or article that wrote about Michelle and her girlfriends shopping in Indonesia
when they lived there,
which conflicts with the Barry went alone to Bali myth.
Bali ,while not majority Muslim has 600 mosques
http://www.planetmole.org/indonesian-news/mosques-told-to-tone-down-during-festivities-bali.html
and it’s obvious that’s where Barry refreshed his memory on the Muslim call to prayer that he sang in
“ pitch perfect Arabic “ for Nicholas Kristof.
It wasn’t a childhood memory , it was an adult memory.
When the NYT article came out in 2008 I Googled Obama and Bali
and found an Indonesian blog where they said Barry had supposedly lived in Indonesia in the 1990s for up to 18 months.
I didn’t bookmark it and could never find it again.
These glaring black holes in Barry’s biography are prime examples
of the media’s continued malfeasance and corruption.
Just remember...the truth always rises to the surface. Obama and his media poll dancers can’t even keep the nativity lies straight anymore...a sure sign that it is all unraveling. One pull on the wrong thread and his whole empty suit will be in tatters.
Let’s just pray our country doesn’t unravel along with it.
Heaven help us.
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