Japan, My Foot: Desperate Acupuncture

Third of seven, three-min sections: an unsavvy traveler can’t go anywhere without injury. Each part accompanied by original comic haiku.

Our third day in Kyoto, I woke unable to put weight on my foot.

Our plan that day was to head for Nara, a nearby city famous for sites more ancient than Kyoto’s. Walking was the thing to do in Nara: around the park filled with free-roaming deer; up a mountain; through the Daibutsu-den, the largest wooden structure in the world, built to protect and venerate Japan’s second-largest statue of the Buddha. We had arranged to meet with an English-speaking guide.

While Cliff was coming up with creative ways to allow me to visit Nara — crutches, rental car — I was remembering a sign I’d spotted the previous day: Hari. Acupuncture. I had to all but manhandle Cliff to get him to visit Nara without me. Then I cried for forty minutes and finally, limped toward the sign.

The woman who slid open the door looked to be in her fifties. She wore a white lab jacket, kept her eyes closed, and held her head at an awkward angle.

Blind.

In Japan, the blind are often trained in the healing arts. While I refused to see an allopath, I was fully prepared to pay a blind person I had never met to jab needles into my wounded foot.