Niagara Falls[September 2013]

KOBORI Sojitsu (the 13th Grand Master of the Enshu Sado School )

It was a little while ago but I went to Canada for 5 days. I went to watch my second daughter compete in the national team in a match in the 2013 World Cup FIL Lacrosse tournament in Oshawa from July 10th to 20th.

There aren’t so many hotels in Oshawa and my wife and I stayed in a hotel in Toronto and travelled by car for an hour every day to watch her matches. Tronto is the most famous city in Canada and it is said that 4 million people live there but the city more spacious than Tokyo.

The traffic on the highways was bad both in the mornings and evenings and the locals told me that public transportation, such as trains, are not as convenient as that in Japan and that many workers commute by car. Most people keep to the working hours of 9 to 5 and as a result there is a heavy rush in the mornings and evenings.　

We spent lots of time watching the matches and going to and returning from the stadium but we told ourselves that we would at least visit one sightseeing spot and decided to go to the Niagara Falls.

I think many people, when hearing the word Niagara, think of the Hollywood movie 'Niagara' starring Joseph Cotten and Marilyn Monroe. The movie was produced in 1953 before I was born and was the origin of the "Monroe walk”.

I watched it later in life and, besides the cute and sexy Marilyn, the splendor of the Falls left a deep impression on me.

It takes three hours to get to the Falls and back by car so if you spend three hours there, you will need about six hours in total for a visit to Niagara.

Once we arrived in Niagara, we got into an excursion boat. It surprised us that we could feel tiny misty splashes of water even before getting in the boat and where we could only see the Falls at a distance. We got totally wet despite wearing the raincoat because of the big splashes of water when nearing the falls. I was very surprised and moved by the amount of water; it was almost as if there was a torrential downpour.

It is often said that seeing is believing and until I visited this place, I don't think I knew what that meant. I realized that there are many places in the world that I know nothing about.