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.