Fuji

The Misery Continues

Days 4-7

Some brief observations:

Vending machines are everywhere.  It’s like I’ve woken up into some post-apocalyptic nightmare world where the only inhabitants left are itinerant scavengers and vending machines.  They just stand there quietly in the train stations or outside of convenience stores staring at you sharply.  They wait as you glance towards them awkwardly, sweat collecting on your brow, and make a cursory examination of the beverages inside.  You look at the oddly shaped cans with mysterious names and think about all of the amazing possibilities.  And as you begin to reach for your pocket to grab a fistful of coins, you realize that paying for a soda only makes the machines win.  You’ve been deceived.  And you turn around in disgust and take a train far far away.

Japanese people are short.  I don’t trust short people.  I have no idea what they’re doing down there while my head is up near the ceiling.  They could be doing anything.  In no place in the world have I ever felt less confident about the security of my knees.

The weather here sucks.  I never thought I’d miss the depressingly foggy days of Santa Cruz where the sun can remain hidden for weeks at a time.  But here the heat will kill you.  Being outside for more than a few minutes will leave you drenched.  It’s not the same kind of heat as in California.  Here the air is so humid that it can actually drown you. 

Japan isn’t as homogenous as I thought.  I saw a black person today.

From the JR station Scott and I traveled to Nagoya.  The downtown was relatively nice, but the closer we walked to the castle the worse things became.  By the time we reached its gates we decided to turn back, partially because of the entrance fee, and partially because I was about to pass out again.

This time it didn’t have anything to do with the heat and awkwardness of an onsen.  This time it was related to something else: it sucks to be a vegetarian in Japan.  It really does.  It’s almost impossible to find a restaurant where they won’t sneak meat into your food.  Like the one we stopped in as we walked back to the station.  Scott ordered some characteristically bizarre soup dish and I ordered the only thing on the menu without meat: an omelet.  I prodded the eggs softly with my chopsticks while Scott devoured his food.  I left still feeling hungry.

But that’s where convenience stores come into play.  They really are convenient.  I bought a few boxes of chocolates and ate them on our way back to the station.

When we saw the flashing lights of an arcade Scott grabbed me roughly by the arm and violently dragged me into the establishment.  He was like a kid in a candy store.

The anime-themed games and the sounds of electronically generated explosions made my head spin, so I sat down as Scott busied himself at one of the nearby booths.

Later that day we left Nagoya and took the JR south.  We traveled through small villages surrounded by rice paddies and forests of bamboo.  It was so different from the crowded cities that it was like traveling to another world.  Ancient houses with black tile roofs rested between fields bursting with onions and leeks and who knows what else.  We stopped in the town of Tsu where I discovered delicious chizu kare (cheese curry).  And then we learned about the Kinsetsu line.  I hate the Kinsetsu line.

                From what I understand, the Kinsetsu line, despite being identical in every way to the standard JR (Japan Rail) trains, is completely evil.  You might wonder how I know this, and the answer is simple: it’s sneaky.  The Kinsetsu line is so deceptive in fact that we accidentally got onto one of its trains without knowing.  It took us to the town of Onsenguchi, where we quickly learned something was wrong.  After doing our best to communicate with the station attendant, the man hailed a cab for us and sent us off without a fine.

                The taxi took us to the top of a mountain where another onsen was located.  From the baths we could see clouds crashing against mountains as the sun slowly set.  The tangle of moonlight and light from the stars kept the clouds bright even after the sun vanished, and we watched the white ribbons of condensed water calmly ripple against the black voids that were mountains.  The rain started and made ripples on the surface of the water.

After the bath we relaxed in a large room with tatami mat floors.  Later that night we snuck off the main road and squeezed our tent into a small cut-out next to a tiny paved path bursting with foliage.

The next day we packed up our tent and started walking back to the station.  It was raining lightly, and not wanting to risk allowing my laptop to be damaged, I made the decision to stick out my thumb and try to hitchhike for the first time in my life.  It couldn’t have gone better.

In Japan, the streets are populated by these tiny pickups that look like lego cars.  I saw one approaching us, and when it was only a few meters away I stuck out my thumb and he instantly stopped.  I told him that we wanted to go to the station and he motioned for us to throw out bags into the trunk.  We hopped in after them.

The view from the pickup on the way down the mountain was incredible.

We returned to Tsu ostensibly to do laundry.  But I just wanted more chizu kare.  After a long conversation with what seemed like the town’s entire police force, we were given permission to use the washing machine of a nearby hotel.

Until that day we had used out Seishun 18 tickets to get from place to place.  ‘Seishun’ means ‘youth’, but the tickets are available for anyone and make traveling long-distances cheap.  But that day we decided to take things slowly, and backtrack up north at a leisurely pace.  We took the JR and stopped in a small town right before Kohan.

I can’t remember that town’s name either.  It’s only been a few days, but I guess that the sheer number of Japanese words that have been entering my head since coming to this country has made it impossible to remember everything.

The town had the nicest station I’ve seen so far.  We walked to a McDonald’s for dinner, then back to the station to brush out teeth and fill up our water bottles.  After a long period of indecision we decided to camp in the parking lot of an abandoned factory.  The factory could’ve once manufactured asbestos or chemical weapons or nerve gas or malaria, but I only worried about getting caught by the onion farmers as I assembled my tent and passed out.

The next day was Kyoto.  We arrived early and found a place to stay called Hana Hostel.  Scott left to find an arcade while I walked to the Kiyomizu-Dera.

The Kiyomizu-Dera (pronounced like key-oh-me-zu-day-ruh) is one of the billions of temples in Kyoto.  Kyoto was the capital of Japan before Tokyo, and the Emperors decided that they needed temples in their city, and lots of them.  There’s a temple on almost every city block, and Kyoto has a lot of blocks.

The Kiyomizu-Dera floated above the trees.  Kyoto was in the distance.  I returned to the hostel drenched in sweat.  In the shower I drained cold water over my body for what felt like hours.  After that ordeal was over I collapsed into a couch in the lounge and met Sandra.

Sandra was French but spoke perfect English.  “Bonjour” I said to her, and then I moved from the couch to the tea table and we quickly launched into a conversation.  She’d already been in Japan for three weeks with her family and had three more to go.  On previous vacations they’d visited the West Coast of the US, the Northeast, and the four corners region.  She recommended that I visit a number of places in the city, all of which I failed to remember.

When Sandra finished her tea and finished writing in her diary she left the room to spend some time with her husband.  After she was gone her son Maurice walked over to me and introduced himself.  He was eleven and spoke in very careful English.  He would search for words, use gestures, and occasionally draw on the nearby dry erase board to assist translation.  He’d use surprisingly advanced words like ‘chronology’ to help refer to things he was trying to speak about.

Maurice liked Japan a lot but didn’t like Japanese food.  He thought San Francisco was great and could play the piano.  He offered me a handful of M&M’s and showed me how the television worked.  He told me that he was trying to find CNN, but we were quickly distracted by the Japanese cartoons and NHK children’s programs.

Maurice thought that the little Japanese children trying to speak English were funny, and would point and laugh.  I did the same.

The rain started crashing onto the ceiling and I wondered when Scott would return.  Maurice returned to the other side of the room where his family was having dinner.  As they finished up and left Scott returned.

Then we met Mark.  Mark was a tall computer programmer from the Netherlands, though he didn’t look anything like a computer programmer.  The computer programmers I know tend to be skinny, pale, and have long hair and glasses.  He met none of these qualities.

We went to a fire festival with him.  The festival was very Japanese.  And by Japanese I mean it was weird.  Old men wearing bizarre dresses walked around a giant bonfire chanting and performing mysterious rituals.  It didn’t make sense to me.  It didn’t seem to make sense to anyone else either.

The smoke and embers twisted towards the yawning beams of the temple, melting into the gold leaf and clay tiles.

The next morning I met Youji Hirayama.  Like Kurihara he was enthusiastic and energetic.  But unlike Mr. Kurihara, his English was very good.

Mr. Hirayama was stuck in Kyoto because his train back to Aomori had been canceled due to rain.  I’m writing this two days after I met Mr. Hirayama, and this morning I learned about how disastrous the floods up north were, but at the time I just assumed that it was some sort of minor incident.

Mr. Kurihara told me about the things to see in Aomori, which turned out to not be very much.  There were a few onsens, a trail or two, a lake, and some trees.  I decided that I’d impress him by showing him pictures of the Grand Canyon and Mesa Verde on my laptop.  He seemed impressed.  A half hour or so later he left to return home. 

We needed to switch hostels because Hana was out of rooms.  After moving my stuff a few blocks down the street to my new temporary residence in Hostel K I left for Nara.

On the train I met Phil.  Phil was a forty-something year old American who’d just attended the International Conference on Thrombosis and Homeostasis.  Phil was fat and had thinning hair and was from New Jersey.  I felt very sorry for him.  Phil seemed like the most typical American one could find, which was odd, because this was in Japan.

In Nara, Phil was ambushed by the aggressively friendly local deer who tried to steal the biscuits he’d bought to feed them.  The deer clearly weren’t Japanese.  From what I’ve learned so far I can tell that if the deer were Japanese they would’ve stayed far away and bowed deeply after making eye contact.  The Nara deer did none of this.  They mugged Phil and trotted away with the biscuits.

Then there was the Todai-ji.  Inside was the giant stone Buddha, Dia-Butsu.  It sat in the middle of the wooden temple, legs crossed, resting on its golden throne.  The Buddha had a vaguely content smile on its fat face, like it’d just consumed a particularly delicious slice of pizza.  We snapped a bunch of pictures, got curry for dinner, and parted ways.  Then I met the Australians.

I sat down in the lounge in the hostel and was surrounded.  They weren’t normal Australians, they were karate Australians.  “We’re ‘ere for a karate seminar,” the leader of the group informed me.  “We’ve been practicing o’er on the other side of town in the prefectural gym.  It’s a fuckin’ huge building mate.”

I nodded.

“Over there is Jim,” he said, pointing to a muscular man on the couch across from me.  “Show ‘em the welts ya got today.”

Jim smiled and pulled off his shirt, revealing large red marks above his kidneys and on top of his shoulders.  Jim laughed and make a few clever remarks.

I liked the Australians.  One of them was a teacher in Korea.  He’d left his home country because of the giant spiders and poisonous jellyfish and deadly snakes and expansive deserts.

The next day I left for Monkey Island.  Monkey Island, as its name implies, was full of monkeys.

I had to hike up the side of a forested mountain.  When I reached the top I was covered in sweat.  I leaned over to rest against a tree when I saw a man in a large straw had chasing after something.  I flicked my camera to life and walked over to him.  It was a monkey.  I took about a thousand pictures of it, assuming that I wouldn’t get another chance to see one.  I was wrong.

Just over a small hill was the human cage.  That’s right, the tables had turned.

Adjacent to a small building was a large tin-roofed cage, intended for humans, not monkeys.  On Monkey Island, the Japanese had decided, it was the monkeys that ran the show, and humans were the ones who belonged behind bars.

I relaxed in the cage for a few minutes, trying to soak up as much of the cold air form the ceiling fan as possible.  After a half hour of this I heard someone yelling “oi” outside.

I left the cage and discovered one of the monkey-attendants making the call.  He was summoning them.

Monkeys slowly poured out of the trees in an invasion-like procession and waited patiently on the peripheries of the clearing where the cage was located.  About five minutes later they brought out the buckets of monkey food, and things got exciting.

In the lounge that night I met another Dutchman named Mark.  I told him about my trip to Europe and he told about the time he spent in San Francisco.  Brussels was very nice, we agreed.  So was San Francisco.

The Beginning of the End

Hi, my name is Cameron Smith, and if you don’t know me already, here’s a brief description:

                                Height: 6’7”

                                Weight: 200 lbs

                                Blood type: O negative

                                Species: H sapiens

And that’s basically all that you’ll ever need to know about me.  Well, except maybe my reason for embarking on this adventure in the first place.  I’ll get back to that later.

It didn’t take very long for things to get weird in Japan.  In fact, it didn’t even take until Japan for things to get weird.  Everything became incomprehensibly foreign the second I stepped on the Korean Airlines flight to Narita International Airport.  It was the stewardesses that freaked me out the most.

They had starched white faces and shiny black hair and neon blue handkerchiefs around their necks that made them look like some endangered species of aquatic beetle.  I was afraid to approach them, but unfortunately they took the initiative to approach me first.

She asked me whether I’d like a drink first in Korean and then in Japanese.  I tried to reply in my broken Japanese but she switched languages again and decided to ask me in English.  I was crushed.  I felt as though I had failed my first test in Japanese-language communication.

I spent the next several hours wondering whether the stewardesses were Japanese or Korean.  It bugged me a lot.  I was concerned that the stewardesses might be spies or saboteurs or worse.

The stewardesses returned half way through the flight to bring us food.  I was even more confused when it became apparent that I was the only person being served American food.  They were clearly plotting against me.

But the stewardesses were soon dwarfed by the weirdness of Narita.

Something seemed wrong when I was unable to smell industrial pollution while exiting the plane.  Things became more disturbing when I realized that the bathroom was free from graffitied penises and curse words scrawled in large childish handwriting.  When I failed to see any abandoned buildings or toothless hobos or muggings in progress I was able to confirm that something about Japan was terribly amiss.  It was so different from what I’m used to.

We stayed at a hotel that night.  The “Excel”.  It was about a four kilometer walk from the airport.  Despite being named “Excel” nothing about the place exceeded my expectations.  It had an English-speaking staff, English-language city map, and normal sized rooms free from tatami mats or anything else remotely Japanese.

However, one element of Japanese culture had managed to invade the place.  The toilet.

After finishing my business I stared down at the bowl and thought of how terrible a mistake it was to have ever come to Japan.  The toilet didn’t make sense.  There were buttons and dials and knobs where pure white porcelain should’ve existed.  I was horrified.

I tried pressing buttons and turning dials and pulling switches to get the machine to flush, but to no avail.  My shoulders shrugged.  I was a defeated man.  I stared about myself in the mirror, reflecting on all the failings in my miserable life.  How could everything have gone so wrong, I thought, it’s my first night in Japan and I’ve already failed as a human being.  Later that night I discovered the plunger in exactly the same place as it existed on rational toilets.

Japan is sixteen hours ahead of California time, but within it’s time zone sunrise and sunset are both an hour earlier than California.  That’s why the next morning we woke up at 4:30am.

I should probably take this opportunity to introduce Scott.  He’s the person I’m traveling with and the guy whose existence I’m implying when I use the pronoun ‘we’.  I don’t know Scott’s height, weight, or blood type, but I can safely assume that he’s human due to his bipedialism, opposable thumbs, and use of stone tools.

Scott’s Japanese is better than mine, which isn’t saying a whole lot given that my Japanese borders on being incomprehensible.  Actually, my Japanese is incomprehensible.  I just know a few Japanese words and particles and randomly string them together in the hope that they’ll make some sense.

Because of this, after a couple of hours of walking it was decided that Scott would ask for directions.

We’d wandered off the highway and were following a dirt road that came to an end when a man with a red and blue striped shirt and glasses appeared in the distance.  We stood around looking like idiots until the man approached us and Scott muttered a few words.

“Narita-san? Oh!” the man said, and immediately turned around to show us the way.

We were expecting him to point us in the right direction, or maybe lead us for a few minutes, but he led us all the way through jungles of concrete and residential neighborhoods and at least one bamboo forest until we suddenly appeared at the base of the temple.  Before parting ways I muttered a question to the man: “Jinja to otera to ka arimasu ka?” I asked, hoping that he’d understand that I was wondering the building was a Shinto shrine or a Buddhist temple.

It was a Buddhist temple, he told me, and commented that Shinto shrines contain ‘mikoshi’ inside of them.  I haven’t had the opportunity to look up what a mikoshi is, but I assume that it’s some sort of religious thing.  Narita-san had a lot of religious things.

‘San’ a Japanese word that can mean ‘mountain’.  From what I’ve gathered, when used as a suffix ‘san’ often means something along the line of ‘holy place.’  Narita-san is Narita’s ‘holy place’, and it was packed with temples.

The first one we saw was clearly the most impressive.  I have no idea what the temple’s name is, but it was an enormous tower sitting on top of a hill surrounded by terraced gardens.  Red-painted wooden beams held up roofs of black tile like many mushrooms flipped upside down and stacked one on top of another.  Birds were chirping, insects singing, and a light breeze whistling through the bamboo.  We were both very impressed.  The vending machines spoke to us.

It was perhaps the most astonishing moment of my entire life.  “Irrasshaimase” a squeaky female voice shouted to me right after I slid my coins into the chute.  I looked around to see who’d just beckoned me when I realized that it was coming from inside the vending machine itself.  I made my selection, glanced back nervously at the machine as we walked away, and found the JR Station.

We took trains north to Kofu and then down to the town of Fuji.  That was probably a mistake.  Fuji is a nasty place.  But the people aren’t.  We had dinner in a hole-in-the-wall ramen shop and I tried my best to figure out how to distribute the wasabi throughout my noodles.  It was an extremely difficult task.  I think that it’s likely that the reason why Japanese people are so much skinnier than Europeans or Americans is out of sheer frustration over how difficult their food is to consume.  In the States a person can consume half of his bodyweight in mashed potatoes in just under fifteen minutes with the aid of a spoon.  With chopsticks, that task is impossible.

Anyway, Fuji was nasty, but the people weren’t.  We were the only customers in the ramen shop, and after we finished I asked the owners, an elderly couple, where we could find a shrine.  After an epic game of charades we were given a map and a bag of chocolates and thanked them and left.  Soon we arrived at the factory.  Temple.  Factory.  Same thing.  There was a beautiful temple complete with Buddha carvings and incense burners kanji-covered gravestones right in the shadow of smoke belching towers.  We waited  few hours and then set up camp in an abandoned lot next to the temple.  I had a good night’s sleep, Scott didn’t.

The next morning we examined our bug bites and packed up the tent with the hope of making it to Nagoya before sunset.  We didn’t.  We were distracted by X.  X was a beautiful city whose name I’ve already forgotten.  We visited the park in X, bought a soda from a vending machine, and relaxed in the shade beneath the walls of its reconstructed castle.

The next city down the line was Hamamatsu.  In Hamamatsu I discovered the deceptiveness of tourism centers.  The brochure recommended that we visited the city’s castle, which was fine.  But another recommendation, the Nikatajima sand dunes, turned out to be intentionally misleading.

That’s right: it was intentional.  I’m absolutely convinced that the Japanese government and tourism bureau were conspiring against me.  There’s no other explanation.  They noticed the tall lanky foreigner and swapped the normal brochures for the deadly ones.

Scott remained downtown to do mysterious things in an arcade.  Nikatajima was a two hour walk from Hamamatsu station.  By the time I arrived I was so drenched in sweat that I barely made it thirty meters into the dunes before turning back.  My feet were burning from the sand, my face and forearms from the sun, and my eyes from the sweat rolling down from my brow.

I took a bus back to the station.  I changed my clothes in a bathroom and slowly walked through the frozen foods section of a grocery store.  I carefully examined each item on the shelf, staring dully at the incomprehensible kanji characters and thinking of how good it felt to be in an air conditioned room.  I remember wishing that somebody would cover me in saran-wrap and place me on the shelf next to the ice cream cones and frozen octopus balls.

I left the station and sat in the shade beneath a building near the station.  The streets in downtown Hamamatsu were clean enough to eat off of.  I decided to relax as I waited for Scott to finish whatever he was doing at the arcade.

But then I noticed the staring.

At first I thought that it was my new laptop.  It’s a very nice laptop, you see, but I was surprised that it was attracting the attention of elderly people and salary men who I imagined cared little for computers.  My suspicions were deepened when I returned my laptop to my backpack and the stares continued.

Business people and store clerks and school kids dressed in their bizarre sailor uniforms all stared as they passed.  I examined myself closely.  As far as I could tell, my attire and demeanor were perfectly in line with the polite Japanese standards.  My hair was clean, my teeth brushed, and my body free from any deformities that might attract attention.

Gaijin, I thought, they’re staring at me because I’m a gaijin.

Japan is an ethnically homogenous country that receives few tourists from the western world.  I’d heard stories about white people being stared at without provocation, so I assumed that this was happening to me.

But then I looked across the street and saw something unusual.  There was another white person.  A fat well-tanned woman in her forties or fifties with a tall feathered hat and disgusting flowery handbag.  It looked like some sort of horrible combination of human body parts and rotting leather.  I stared at her.

Then I discovered something terrifying: nobody else was staring at her, not a single peron.  They acted as though she didn’t even exist.  They were all staring at me.

There’s no way, I thought, that I could be more unusual than this squat gnome-like creature across the street from me.  But apparently I am.

I attract stares in America too.  I assume that it’s a result of being far taller than the average adult.  But I’m not sure.  Maybe I have some horrible physical malformation that I’m not able to notice and nobody tells me about.  I wish that I knew.

From Hamamatsu we took the train three stops down to the town of Bentenjima to find an onsen.

It was a horrific experience.  Scott implored me to get naked like the rest of the patrons but I refused to remove my shorts.  Fortunately, by sheer luck I was spared the trauma of seeing any male genitalia and the baths themselves were empty except for the two of us.

I scrubbed myself off with soap and almost passed out in the bath.  It was part of a trap.  The onsen’s owners were also plotting against me.  I’m not sure why, but they were trying to kill me.  The room started spinning and I had to bend over and shower myself in ice-cold water for twenty minutes for my head to return to normal.

Scott congratulated me on a job well done, I snarled at him, and we collapsed into wooden chairs in the basement lounge.

About twenty minutes later we met Mr. Kurihawa.  Kurihawa wasn’t his real name.  He told us his name towards the end of our conversation, but we immediately forgot it.  But the man definitely acted like a Kurihawa.  He was energetic and excited just like the Mr. Kurihawa that I met in the basement floor of the onsen after almost passing out.

Communicating with him was like a mixture of charades and twenty questions.  We guessed the meanings of Japanese nouns by asking him for adjectives to describe them and we used hand gestures to try and communicate sentences from English.

He was interested in our story and was amazed that we had decided to camp in Japan.  He recommended that we try the miso soup in Nagoya and visit the Shirikawa village up north in Tohoku.  He might’ve studied English at one time and his son lived in either Chicago or LA.  There were also spiders the size of cars in Hokkaido, according to my understanding of Japanese.

I unfolded my map of Japan and he began pointing to places and telling us what we should see.  I marked down a few locations in pen.

Towards the end of our conversation his wife appeared and introduced herself.  She was also suspiciously nice. Everyone in Japan is suspiciously nice.

The people in the ground floor lobby of the onsen were suspiciously nice as well.  They saw us trying to get free lodgings by sleeping on their couches but said nothing.  Scott fell asleep first.  I couldn’t, so I decided to grab my backpack and walk across the street to the train station.

I slid onto the abandoned platform and slithered into the darkness on the far side.  I unpacked my sleeping bag and laid down, staring up at the sky.  Clouds passed by, making patterns of stars dance in the gaps between them.  The clouds were an orangy-white color, and the lights on the horizons were a diffuse yellow.  The intensely loud noise of the screaming insects would be muted every few minutes as a shinkansen passed by.  Local trains passed as well, but at a much more leisurely pace.

It was beautiful.  But after a half hour or so I saw flashlights approaching me.  I’m fucked, was all that I could think, someone on one of the trains saw me and called the cops.  I sat cross legged and waved at them.  I shouted ‘konbanwa’ (good evening) and waited for them to approach me.

I expected tasers and handcuffs, attack dogs and laser-guided missiles, army squadrons and nondescript black helicopters.  But then I remembered that I wasn’t in America anymore.

The two people weren’t cops, just station attendants.  They were wearing bluish dress shirts beneath neon orange vests.  They smiled as I stood up and bowed to them.

I spoke to them in broken Japanese, occasionally lapsing into English.  I said that I was a stupid American and didn’t have a hotel and didn’t know where to go and that I was separated from my friend and we were supposed to meet at the station.  This was partially true, as Scott was supposed to come to the station in the morning to wake me up.

We walked towards the entrance to the station and, rather than fining me or asking me to accompany them to the police station, they  led me past the gates and told me that I could sleep in the small open area next to the information desk.

I smiled.  They smiled.  I bowed and thanked them.  They bowed and walked away.

But five minutes later they returned.  By that time I already taken my laptop out and was charging it in a nearby wall outlet.  I thought that maybe there was some sort of cultural prohibition against using computers in train stations, but rather than chastising me one of the men walked up to a vending machine and bought me a bottle of green tea.  “Nihon no o-cha,” he said, “dozo.”

I got my picture taken with one of the men and fell asleep in the corner of the room.

Fukushima

I circled Fukushima.  You can barely see it.  It's near the bottom of the crease running through the middle of the map that cuts Miyagi Prefecture in half.  Japan isn't a small country, but everything feels as though it's adjacent to this nuclear reactor.  An ominous feeling hangs over me like a cloud of radioactive ash.  I leave for Japan the morning after next.

*Disclaimer*

I promised myself that I wouldn't take this trip seriously.  In fact, I won't even refer to this as a trip: it's much more of an adventure.  This adventure has no set itinerary, no specific goals, and no time frame. We've come well prepared with a small budget, second-hand camping equipment, a limited understanding of the Japanese language, and a combined total of two weeks of backpacking experience.  We're doomed.  There's even a slowly melting nuclear power plant coughing clouds of radioactive dust ominously close to where we hope to travel.  Nothing could go wrong.

I leave in twelve days.  I promised that I wouldn't take this trip seriously.  I won't.