(for babies and winning)

Temples 24 and 23, Nakayama-dera and Katsuo-ji

When we last left our pilgrim, she was driving away the good people of Kyoto with her odoriferous funk.

Let us briefly consider the temples visited on this glorious, if funkfied, day.

It was August 21st when I rolled out, armed with knowledge grated to me by the good grace of the folks at Rocky House, who looked up the Takarazuka local bus schedule for me (where on the internet is this stuff. Where?). I hopped the highway bus to Takarazuka, then managed to get a bus headed right for the Nakayamadera temple area.

Nakayamadera, it turns out, is really nice and pretty fancy. Their main deal is prayers for pregnancy and babies, so the main stairways are equipped with escalators. There is also a kofun on site, and not off on some other side of the mountain - this ancient tomb is tucked right up under part of the main front area.

Oh ancient tombs, I do love thee.

I found the sunny garden while I was looking for my real quest, which was the path to the okunoin. There was supposed to be a sacred spring up there, coming from a rock that cracked open when a sacred bird landed on it after flying out from a tomb lower down the mountain... or something like that.

Things like this along the path.

I was really thirsty by the time I got there. I was under a time limit and had booked it up the mountain in pretty good time. I was also totally disgusting, but I didn't meet too many other people on the path so it didn't seem like a problem. I was counting on refilling my water at the sacred spring, and was a little worried when I saw it all caged up and flanked with signs.

Okunoin!

But then this lady started filling up bottle after bottle and I figured the signs just said "don't stick your face on the spring" and "don't use our buckets and cups to drink the water." Actually drinking of the water was a-OK. Mountain water tastes good anytime, but especially when you're that thirsty.

Back down the mountain, a brief rest, and on to Katsuo-ji, the temple of winner's luck. The bus schedule for this place was so limited that their website just says "take a cab." As our bus wound its way up the mountain, I was extremely grateful again to be on it, instead of trekking up the mountainside.

We want the blue column furthest to the right. Three buses a day? YES.

If you were walking the temples in order, this is the way you would have come in.

Despite its more remote location compared to Nakayama-dera, Katsuo-ji seemed like a well-funded temple in its own right. Seems like winners want to keep winning, so they make sure to give a little back. The temple is famously connected to Daruma dolls, those little wooden guys who always return to standing position no matter how many times you knock them over and onto which you paint one eye when you set a goal and the other eye when you achieve it.

Winner darumae

"Achievement" darumae are often dedicated at this temple. They also quite naturally sell the dolls in various sizes, to serve your various-sized goals.

The landscaping was immaculately kept, with the added oddity of there being little darumae in every nook in cranny, on every ledge, inside tree hollows, just everywhere! Many of them, I noticed, were just the ones that housed the omikuji, or fortune slips, you could buy, but their presence too made the place seem full of winning.

I did the 'wisdom stone walk' after seeing a father take his kid through it. It was a nice place on a nice day.

Follow the instructions to gain wisdom. Step one, walk in toward the center, following the spiral. Step two, spiral out. Step three, sit on that rock bench off to one side (I kid you not). 

As you may have already heard, I ended the day in Kyoto, catching one of the last city buses to Miriam's apartment. By then, in addition to smelling like gym socks, my phone had died.

I actually took this photo so I could then check and see the time stamp on it to know what time it was.

Still, the day was a win.

How to Maintain Personal Space

(even on a crowded bus)

Well.

In Japan, personal space is often at a premium. People are pretty polite about it, but they do spend a lot of time in your bubble, so here is one way I discovered, somewhat inadvertently, for dealing with it.

It starts with your clothes. Since you live in Japan, you know about the rainy season. You also know about the way that drying your clothes is done by hanging them outside. While clothes dry quickly in hot dry August and take a freezing forever in the depth of January, the combination of heat and humidity you experience throughout June creates the perfect condition for the production of a 'lying shirt.'

A lying shirt is one which, when dry, looks and smells just fine. It also smells just fine when it is still wet but fresh out of the washing machine, laden as it is at that time with the smells of detergent and softener. But get it wet under any other conditions, and it will give off a muted but pervasive funk that will make you wrinkle your nose and look around, wondering if it could possibly be you.

It takes a while to figure out if what you have on your hands is a lying shirt, but once you have one (and by June's end, you should, and after two Junes you definitely should), it will hold true for you even when dried under the August sun. Since August is the hottest, it is also the time when it's nicest to have personal space.

Now, make sure you have all day clear, and get your stuff together for a weekend or overnight trip. Carry all this stuff preferably in a backpack, so you get nice and sweaty. You can leave the backpack in a train locker for this next step.

Find a mountain. I used the hike from Nakayama-dera to its Okunoin, which was described as being a one-hour walk. If you use a one-hour walk, give yourself exactly two hours to complete the round trip and you should be good. This will impel you to book it up the mountain and also back down again. Do this at midday for maximum levels of disgusting; if there aren't white traces of salt on your shirt as it dries, you aren't really trying. Make sure, of course, to stay hydrated -- keep buying those water bottles and Pocari Sweats (I prefer Aquarius, but whatever).

After you return from this endeavor, you should be pretty soaked. Allow yourself to dry off as you move on to your next destination - I used Katsuo-ji in northern Osaka. You get extra points if you work up another sweat, but at this point it isn't really necessary, because your lying shirt should be doing the work for you.

By the time the temples all close at five and you are on your way to stay at a friend's house, you will actually have people moving out of the seat next to you on the bus into seats some distance away. Congratulations!

"Miriam, for the first time since I became homeless, I actually smell like I am." - not the most PC thing I ever said. (She laughed at me because I had thrown my clothes outside onto the balcony and leaped into the shower almost as soon as she opened the door.)

As a side note, I was really tempted to see if a run in a good old American household dryer would cure my shirt of its lyin' ways, but in the end I just couldn't take it anymore and stuffed it in a trashcan in a bathroom somewhere in Miyagi prefecture. True story. Sometimes I still miss it. But not its lies.

Temples number Six and Seven: Okadera and Tsubosakadera

I returned to Kyoto on Tuesday evening, arriving at Nami’s at just the time I had planned to on the first calendar (that is, the one that had me in Tokyo from Saturday until Tuesday early morning), and so things resumed as planned from there.

Typical.

I love visiting Nami’s household, but it can be sort of like a time warp. Time slips away at a faster pace than other places, and before we knew it, we had chatted later into the night than one would necessarily want, having spent the whole weekend traveling and preparing to get up at 6 the next morning.

Yeah, 6 am. It turns out (and I wouldn’t have known this without their help) that it takes a very careful schedule to make the buses and trains necessary to get to both Okadera (7) and Tsubosaka-dera (6) in the same day, although they are relatively close together on the map. I was due to take the same train in the morning as Hiroshi-san was taking to work, so we ate breakfast like a sort of cobbled-together family… the married couple and their adopted foreigner little sister, and then he and I hustled to the train station. I thought we must look funny together, he in his working clothes like any other Japanese working guy, me with my pack and walking shoes like any other tourist… neither is a particularly rare sight in Kyoto-Nara area, but to walk and talk and sit together on the train is something else. Nami-san waved to us from the balcony of their apartment as it flashed by, and we were off.

My first destination was Okadera, one of the oldest temples on the route snugged up in the mountains of Asuka, which is the most ancient first capital of Japan (and you thought it was Nara..! Well, I did anyway). Asuka, it turns out, is an area full of ancient things, archaeological stuff. Other than that, it’s as countryside as countryside can be, which is why the public bus runs only a handful of times a day on such narrow roads and was so sparsely filled.

Attempt to capture the field of lotus blooms... fail.

Okadera was perhaps the first temple I was earnestly able to make it to in the morning. The feel of the place as I walked up (sweaty as ever, despite the morning hour, having gotten a little lost already thanks to some construction work) was relatively empty; I paid my entrance fee as though I had managed to catch a tourist spot unpopulated for the first time in Japan.

The main hall from above on the mountainside.

What set in my mind first was the mountain-garden feel of the pathways I followed through the woods there, and the insects.

Okadera is famous for protection against disasters, and I saw part of what I think was a ceremony or prayer for a woman at one of the vulnerable ages. There is a list of the vulnerable ages for women and men on the bell tower; I’ve seen these lists before, and Okadera is pretty big for trying to make sure those bad years go well. I was pretty sure I heard the priest say “thirty-three” during his chanting, so I sat still and listened for a bit because I find the chanting and bell ringing that goes on pretty soothing.

View of Asuka from near the pagoda.

Okadera is also perhaps the first temple where I was able to see the main image of Kannon. At many of these temples, the image is not seen except every 33 years or so (some places, not at all, ever), but at Okadera, she is in full view all the time. The statue is a large clay image, the largest clay statue in Japan, and it has a really earthy look and energy about it. It has been restored often, but has essentially survived since the 700s, which is what gives it the reputation for protection against disaster.

I took my time exploring around a bit, eventually coming to the Okunoin further up the hill. That’s the inner sanctuary, which is often tucked away somewhere further up the mountain. This one was a little cave which went back into the earth rather farther than I expected from looking at the front of it. There’s a small statue inside of the Buddha of the future, and an older couple who was praying in there ahead of me (I waited til they finished because there was actually not enough room for more than two people side by side in front of it, plus I always feel awkward when those I regard to be the ‘legit Buddhists on legit business’ are doing their thing and I’m just wandering around spectating) gave me a piece of tarp to sit on because the cave was damp and puddle-y. After sitting inside a little while, I stood up and noted how the cave at that point was just barely tall enough to accommodate my height, though I couldn’t walk upright through the cave. Then I noticed just just above my head a pair of the biggest effing camelback crickets I have ever seen, and I crouched right the hell back down, packed up my piece of tarp, and with one more bow, hurried back out into the light.

Entrance to the cave...

So, yep, bugs and mountain-garden foresty earthiness. It was a beautiful place and I’m glad I got to go in the morning when it was so quiet and peaceful.

I next caught another bus to a tiny train station (Asuka), from which I was to proceed by train to another train station (Tsubosaka-yama) and wait for a more different bus, which would not come until 1:15, although I had to get on the first of these buses at 11:06. This meant I would have time for lunch in the train station area, and here is where I made a Saiou’s Horse kind of mistake.

Asuka station was flanked by your usual handful of little restaurant places, none of which looked particularly good, so I decided to eat in the area of the second station. Getting off the train in that area, I looked around, noted it to be a touristy-looking street ahead of me, and decided to wander til I found something, since I had nearly two hours to kill. The sign above the road said that the town was one of “sightseeing and medicine,” which I thought odd, but shrugged off and began to walk with my little parasol overhead. I wandered in a sort of loop for twenty minutes or more, finding that every single likely looking place I came upon was not a restaurant, but instead a hair salon, dentist, or other treatment facility, and half were closed. There had been one well-marked restaurant just by the station, but the sign on the door said “closed today.” Ah the perils of traveling on quiet weekday afternoons.

Oh why are you closed...?

I returned to the station along a sweaty, perilous highway with a tiny sidewalk and asked the station guy about food. He pointed to the tiny closed place and I protested its closedness. He shrugged sadly saying, that was it. I sat down on a bench to reconsider. This was crazy. Not eating was unacceptable; I would have to find a combini or something.

It was then I remembered that I do have a smartphone and it is good for more than just email and mapping exactly where I am. It also has a ‘find restaurants in my area’ function, of course. I put it to the test. The first listing was for a place half a kilometer away, not so bad, and a ten minute walk according to the review written in Japanese. The place was just past where I’d come upon the perilous, sweaty highway, and I did not relish taking that walk only to find the place ALSO CLOSED, so I did the thing I always dread doing, prepared myself for Japanese and phoned the place. I was about to give up hope when an animated voice answered pretty late in the ringing cycle, confirmed that they were open, and that it was a ten minute walk from the station. I needed no more than that, and set off.

The place was across from a combini, and I briefly considered grabbing some quick food there instead, because now I was beginning to worry I wouldn’t be back at the station in time to catch the bus at 1:15 if I had heard right and the restaurant I was headed for would take some time in food preparation. But I thought I saw a bus stop sign just a little further ahead and felt sure it must be on the route I wanted, right? And if it all went to hell I’d just call a taxi and catch up with my schedule later.

I then stepped into the restaurant and had the best damn udon I’ve ever eaten, and I’ve been to Shikoku AND I don’t even like udon, but I was supremely glad I hadn’t given up and gone to Lawson’s. The lone guy running the place was apparently making the stuff from scratch, and it was a beautiful thing. If you are ever in the western end of I-think-I’m-lost Nara prefecture, I give it a thumbs up.

My food was ready in about perfect time for me to eat it, pay, and get to the bus stop which was in fact the bus I wanted, which took my up the winding paths to Tsubosaka-dera. Tsubosaka-dera was, once again, totally different from the other temples I had been to so far, especially in its palpable connection to India and Indian Buddhism. Without really solidifying in my head what that image is, I have formed an idea of what a Japanese Buddhist temple looks like, but Tsubosaka-dera does not look like that. The imagery was different, the atmosphere followed suit.

This temple is connected especially with sight and eyes, not only in the prayer sense, but also in the very real sense that there is a home for the blind on the premises. The connection to India is in their ongoing support of programs in India. This temple therefore felt like a museum in some ways (I mean, there was a wall, a relief carved wall with stories from Buddha’s life!), but also like a functioning thing, not a relic. 

This statue is related to a legend associated with the temple about a man healed of his blindness.

Maybe because it was a weekday afternoon and tucked far away up on this mountain, but there were hardly any other visitors that I could see. I walked around a little and made my way to the main hall, where I slipped in quietly and looked around. The main statue here is also visible to those in the hall at all times, this one because it is meant to be seen, in connection with its healing for sight issues. Just as I was about to head out and explore the grounds some more, a large group of older-ish Japanese folks had massed at the entrance, looked like they had come by big tour bus, and were being given a short lively speech by the guy I’d nodded to solemnly on my way in. I passed the merry crowd and walked again through an area that made me think someone was burning lavender incense until I realized I was surrounded by lavender plants being baked in the sun.

Made in India, actually, then shipped over and reassembled in Japan.

I checked out the great Kannon, and reclining Buddha, and inspected the building that is covered with tiles made to imitate the ancient tile found in the area, and tried some of the eye-healing tea. I knelt on the power stone, and asked for clearer sight, to which I swear I heard Kannon-sama chuckle and say, get lasik, you.

The last bus out was at 3pm, which I at the time thought a bit strict, but found to be perfectly timed for me that day. I bought a bottle of Tsubosaka spring water and beat it toward Hasedera. The final walk to my ryokan for the night was pretty sweaty, given that I was wearing a backpack and walking for over a kilometer even if it was through cute streets (the kind that lead the way to important temples or shrines that get a lot of visitors… these kinds of streets develop with gift shops and inns and restaurants to serve the travelers, even from really old times). It was just after the heat of the day and I was beat.

I took this before she brought the soup out even.

I was the only guest that night at Yoshinokan, so I had a little tatami room all to myself. I bathed, put on the provided yukata, and ate my fancy Japanese dinner while watching the Olympics with the proprietess. Then I took a little walk up to Hasedera’s steps and back along the small river. I thought maybe it was kind of neat to have walked up to temple number eight on August 8^th, even if I wouldn’t really go in til the following day. Nami-san had set me up to stay the night basically at the temple doorstep so  I could attend the morning prayer service which is open to the public.

Once darkness had fallen, I retired to my room and happily conked out at about 8pm (perfect for a 5:45 wakeup, if you ask me!).

Ganbaru-sugi

In Japanese, there’s a word (sugiru) you can put on the end of another word to add the meaning of “too much.” I hear it a lot in kempo, attached to “far” or “close,” meaning, “You’re too close for that kick to work properly.” But you put it in verbs, too, like “eat,” and it means “to eat too much.”

So ganbaru is the verb for “to do one’s best.” In English it always comes out sounding a little weird, because we don’t have this exact idea. Sometimes kids will translate it as “fight!” which is occasionally appropriate, but in many contexts, hilariously not so. “Do your best!” Sounds a little patronizing and stilted, but it’s close to the meaning of the word. It means to strive to accomplish, I think, most especially in the face of difficulty.

Anyway, from time to time, I’d hear people sticking them together. Saying ganbari-sugiteru. That kid is doing his best too hard. Which was difficult for me to wrap my head around, because if you’re really doing your best, how can you over-do the best? It’s a superlative. If you aren’t giving it everything you have, then it’s not really your best, I mean, not to split hairs and stuff…

Of course it would fall beyond my grasp to get the idea of overdoing it. I like to overdo things. Overdo is how I DO, not always, but enough of the time that it seems normal to me. But that’s just in my nature, so for me, overdoing it a little is just how it gets done. It makes me a little nuts sometimes, but I’m pretty used to dealing with it. It does sometimes have negative effects, mostly stress things, but sometimes for me it’s just better to push myself harder than to feel like what if I had pushed it, but I didn’t, and I wasted an opportunity maybe.

Anyway, I’d like to tell the story of my latest ganbari-sugi adventure, because it’s the first one in my memory where I knew immediately that it was a ganbari-sugi thing; no retrospect necessary.

It started with the bus, the bike, and the broken car: I had a sore throat and a bunch of bike time under my belt that I was calling ‘training.’ I had a decision to make. If you’ve ever seen me make a decision, you know that this not only was painful but also took forever. I prevaricated right up to the train ticket vending machine, which is saying something, because to get to the ticket machine I had to drive an hour all the way to Himeji, bags packed and everything. Parked, packed, eye on the train schedule, I still wasn’t sure I was going.

I mean, I wanted to go. I wanted to meet new people, and spend a weekend biking because I never had before, and I was thinking about doing the PEPY Ride, and because I had worked up the training. I knew it meant a sore butt and legs, and probably sunburn, and that the trip there was expensive. The extra factor was that damn sore throat which had not gotten better, though it had not gotten bad enough to ground me entirely. I stood up and crouched back down about eight times. Finally, picturing what I might spend my weekend doing if I did NOT go, I bought tickets. Once I bought tickets I kind of had to go. So I went.

I’m not a cyclist, and I didn’t know much about the Oita Ride’s chosen charity before they mentioned it. I seem to get into a lot of bike charities, but it’s similar to my ski trips: I go because shit is worth doing. (That was the motto of the first Himeji Ride, actually: Shit is Worth Doin.) And if you don’t do it, you may never know HOW worth doin’ it is.

Our host for the night was a really nice volunteer, upon whose floor I fairly promptly passed out. She ended up hosting five people that night, and even gave us breakfast in the morning. On the train to the ride start area there were a lot of bikes in bags (apparently you have to take the wheel off for it to really be luggage. If you don’t, it’s just a bike in a bag) belonging to people with the t-shirts (or cycling jerseys) and stories to prove that they were far more serious cyclists than I.

Yeah!

We occupied the MaxValu parking lot in Sakanoichi, and although I was offered a road bike that would probably have made good time, I picked a mountain bike instead because I just liked it better. We weren’t going to be off-roading, but I prefer the solidity of the fatter tires and shocks to the nimble speed of a road bike.. I didn’t need speed, I was taking the slow scenic route. I never so much as considered anything else.

After orientation and information, route maps and optional detours were explained, and we were finally on our way. I fell in with another who didn’t really know anyone there who planned to take the slow route and we were joyfully off, glad to be on bikes moving down the sidewalk, hearing the sounds of several elementary sports day festivals as we went by.

At a road-station along the sea, where we encountered our first bike casualty.  I didn't have my camera (sand repairs post-Korea), so I took a couple shots with the phone.

It was like a cycling picnic for me. There were support cars that would park here and there along the route to provide directions, refill water bottles, pass out healthy (and not so healthy) snacks, and generally just give the sense that you were not on your own out there even if you were the very last of the riders (which we were not quite). Someone had made the most delicious cookies in the world (or so they did seem at the time) with imported ingredients from Costco, and there was fruit in abundance, along with Clif bars, and a bunch of other stuff I haven’t seen, much less eaten, in years. Spotting a support car was usually cause to hit the brakes. Woo! Snacktime!

This is them loading up in the morning.

We didn’t get lost and we didn’t feel beat that first day. The air smelled like blooming flowers and like the sea, the vistas were great, and the sky was overcast by turns, making it just cool enough to enjoy. I was riding with some cool people from different parts of Kyushu. Joanna and I made a detour to see the Stone Buddhas of Usuki, where it was nice to get off the bike and walk around a little.

With Joanna on the road. This is early in the ride because I'm still actually wearing the backpack.

There was one major hill on the route, which I wouldn’t call steep, because it was certainly bike-able, but it was a hell of a grind. I’m proud of myself in that I did the whole thing. I think I heard it was 12km altogether, 6 up and 6 down, which is grueling and seemingly endless upward, steep enough to put you in 1^st gear and make you hate it. I did stop twice to drink some water, but I biked the whole hill at my own pace.

At the top of the hill was the hill tunnel. Now, we were informed that the second day would not contain the hill because we would take a tunnel instead. A very scary tunnel nicknamed TOD (tunnel of death) because it was a narrow thing 2km long with no sidewalks and peopled by drivers that didn’t give much heed to bikers. So we had a healthy fear of TOD, but since TOD has such a reputation, it was incredibly well-handled by our support cars this year. The hill tunnel was therefore the scariest thing ever.

On the way up the hill, I was loath to stop unless I really had to, because I just couldn’t let go of my momentum. There were cars on the hill but I skipped them. There was a car at the hill tunnel entrance, and I didn’t realize that the tunnel was the top or I might have paused in my relentless pursuit of the summit for a second to receive more information from them than “Wait! Well, just be really careful in the tunnel.”

It was dark. Most tunnels have some lighting, you see, dim orange glowing things set in the ceiling. Not so this almost makeshift looking hill tunnel. It was short, or fairly short, but very narrow. It wasn’t heavily traveled, but there were these trucks that would pass us on the hill going up or down, maybe coming from the cement factory on the other side. I went into the tunnel and I turned on my light. By its illumination I saw that some of the gutter covers on the far left were missing, which means the gaijin trap was set and open. I didn’t want to fall into THAT; it also made me realize that there might be pits anywhere in the road that I wouldn’t see. I moved more toward the middle (insofar as I could tell where the middle was), and then a truck entered the tunnel coming toward me from the far end. I swallowed and for the first time since I’d started the hill, a thought made its way into my mind. That thought was, I might die.

Luckily, the rest of me didn’t care much for this thought and just did what it had been doing for the last 6km, which was keep your head down, find the right path, go fast enough to get the ef out of there asap, but not so fast that you risk shit. And soon it was over, and I was back out in the sunlight, and more than that, the road was curving down. Sat on the side of the road to get my senses back, and until Joanna appeared out of the tunnel too.

The rest was kind of a blur. After the hill I felt more ‘done,’ and I could no longer take a deep breath without inviting a small coughing fit. I knew that didn’t bode well, but I also knew that if I needed it, there was a kei-truck into which my bike could be thrown, so we just kept on. Eventually after what seemed like (and was) a long way, we made it to camp, which was a collection of cabins on a rough beach. Stretched, showered, ate, tried to stay up socializing and avoiding mosquitoes, failed, and passed out on the small pile of blankets I’d folded up in my bunk.

Day one, complete.

Day two, staato!

Sunday though, Sunday. I didn’t feel fresh and hot to trot, but I knew that no one must really feel that way. Everyone had a sore ass already, who wants to mount up then? I did let someone know that my cold had kept up with me (I could take deep breaths again after I got warmed up that morning though) and I might not finish the ride. Then we rolled out! That day’s potential detour was the Marriage Rocks (Futamigaura), for which we missed the turn and I actually voted to backtrack to them because they were the only thing on my menu for that day other than just go back to the starting point.

They were nice.

The rest was just riding back, in a little more pain with a little less juice than the day before. While waiting for TOD, we met an old man with about four teeth who was digging up take-no-ko (“bamboo’s children” .. it’s a food) on the slope below our car pulloff area. He gave us a whole bag of them, and added he would give us the second bag, but he had to give it to his girlfriend or she wouldn’t let him do naughty things. Laughing, he drove away.

After TOD, I began to lag more and more behind our small group which was still one of the last one or two. I couldn’t imagine where they were getting the energy to keep up the pace they were going. At some point, I might have pulled over and given my bike back to the truck, rode along in one of the cars that stuck with us slower riders, cheering us on.. but I never did because I’m stubborn or stupid or tough or all three. By the very end, I was the second to last person to arrive back at MaxValu. I promptly began to cry, which is embarrassing but motivated entirely by exhaustion. I heard it being discussed that maybe they were tears of joy at having finished the ride, but I didn’t know how to explain that it wasn’t really joy, nor was it pain or sadness or any kind of negative thing.

 I didn’t feel negatively, nor positively.. didn’t feel hungry or much of anything else either, just tired. I had completed 140km over two days with a cold and during a bad time of month. It’s something to be proud of, I’m sure, but at the moment I didn’t feel that either. Normally after adventures I arrive home wanting three things: a shower, some dinner, and to go to bed. None of them can be done simultaneously, unfortunately. At that moment, though, I was almost too tired to sleep. It’s a really strange feeling that I’ve only had a few times in my life. I feel like there’s something special about giving it so much of your everything that by the end you really are just emptied.

All in all, I really am glad I went, and I would do it again (preferably in a better state, and maaaybe with more training under this belt), because that shit was definitely worth doing. Even over-doing.

I don't quite remember this..

When I got home to Shiso, I discovered a bunch of mosquito bites on my feet that I must have gotten while sleeping. For the rest of the week I looked like I had the pox!

the bike, the bus, and the broken car

I just love the way that things come together and the way that they fall apart. I want to tell this story for very little other reason than that it's funny to me. It's long as hell, so if you skip this one, I'll understand. ^_^

So first, let me refresh you on our cast of characters. First, The Bike:

China Downtown. Nowadays she is a little more rust-spotted, and the front basket is all bent because this one time we had a typhoon which sent her crashing to the ground.  Her story is here.

I had thought about biking to school before, especially when the weather was nice. I see high schoolers doing it all the time, which speaks to me that it isn't really all that hard, and come on Lem, you are certainly fit enough to do it if they are, aren't you? I mean, aren't you? I even did bike up to Ichi a time or two, for afternoon events where parking would be hard to come by. But there was always a reason not to do it, that reason mostly being time. It takes longer to bike than it does to bus, and I have a hard enough time catching the bus some mornings.. the idea of leaving early enough to make it to work on time by bike was daunting, and always ultimately overthrown.

But on nice mornings, as I watched high schoolers biking by from the bus window, I would sigh and think, if only I could get my shit together. Alas.

As you already know, I have a weakness for charity bike rides, as best evidenced by my twice-yearly leading of the PEPY Ride Himeji since the spring of my first year. So of course I was interested in the Oita Ride, which sounded cooler and cooler the more I read about it (and also more and more insane for someone like me who cannot really call herself a cyclist). There are a lot of issues with this, mostly being the ride is in OITA and though it is on a weekend, the logistics of getting to and from Oita in the time available is a bit daunting (and expensive). But ticket prices be damned, if Japan has anything, we have speedy trains!

So I signed up (shut up brain). And some of the emails were like, you should do some training, bike some more, try to spend some time biking, and I knew that biking to work would be a good way to get that time in... because it would serve so many purposes at once and would even be kind of good for me; still I could not get my crap together and budget that extra 40 minutes.

Unrelatedly, I had to go to the BOE a couple of times to ask about visa things and return plane ticket request forms. At the end of my second visit, my BOE contact added, something to the effect of, oh, one more thing, don't drive to school, only bus. And I was too surprised to say anything but yes.

(Cast member the car: Robin Red:)

My tiny and oh-so-recognizably red vehicle.

But later, that 'reminder' began to stew for all its implications.

First of all, I get that taking the bus is better for me and the environment in a lot of ways. The bus gives me time to chill out, read, look out the window mindlessly, sometimes even nap awkwardly. It gives me a good excuse to leave earlier than other people (I don't make the schedule! I just gotta follow it... ^_____^ heh, bye guys!) at work, and removes the carbon footprint I'd leave k-car-ing up to Ichi and back every day. It's true.

But there are times and places in which it just makes more sense for me to drive. One is when I plan to spend the whole day in Ichi (when I have adult class from 7:30 to 9, as there are no buses after 9, I have to drive myself-- but if I am going to be driving there and back once anyway, why waste the time of busing back home and driving back up there between school and the evening class?). Another is when I go to small elementary: rather than either rush a connection (making bus connections at all  ;_;) or wait half an hour for the connection (which gets me there late anyway..!), it's way less stressful to just handle it and bring myself to school at whatever time I think is necessary or important based on what I am doing and what materials I need time to arrange.

Other less legit reasons include having stuff I need to do, like wanting to hit the bank or post office or grocery store for lunch in the middle of the day. Or having stuff to do on the way home. Or suspecting that we might get out early and wanting to be able to just go when the VP gives the word. Perhaps less legit, but they have been reasons all the same.

But mostly, the 'reminder' was upsetting because it implied more than a lack of sense. It meant, we know you've been driving, and we take enough note of it to say something about it.

See, in Japan, they have this handy way of dealing with stuff. There is the official line, and then there is what actually happens. Back home, this line is a bit blurred most of the time. Everyone knows there is the Way It's Supposed to Be, and then the Way It Is, with the Supposed to Be actually being a sort of ideal that is hardly ever achieved. In Japan, Supposed-to-Be is more like a set of rules that may or may not make sense, and then the Way It Is is just the thing that happens while the higher ups cheerfully look the other way. Which has been the way this whole driving thing has been handled by everyone here for a long time.

I know that other JETs have also been driving daily when "not supposed to," and that no one ever said anything to them. My own teachers and staff have sometimes joked with me about how "it's a secret" that I drove that day. It's not a secret; everyone knows, we just don't talk about it and pretend I take the bus every day-- I drive rarely enough that it's not predictable anyway!

The other irksome thing is this. I'm a grown-ass woman. I do my job and I don't make trouble. Most people around here like me, and those who don't at least don't have it out for me. After three years, trust me to handle this. Because really, I got this. I do need help in some things, but in a lot of others, I think I can be allowed to make the call, because I'm not a little kid anymore.

The other paranoia-inducing part is, this must mean someone sold me out. Because I highly doubt that the BOE people are concerned enough about it to ride by my house and note when my car is missing during a weekday. So this leads a person to stare shiftily around the staff room wondering which of these two-faced jerks is perfectly nice to my face but in the evening sells me out to the higher-ups, and for what?

Basically it made me really, irrationally mad. And was also the little push of rage I needed to start biking to school! Don't drive, you say? Only BUS, you say? What about my bike, jerks?! I'll show you!!

..yeah. I'm not really showing anyone. But I did start biking to school, because I finally got over being embarrassed about being seen doing it (the one time I had brought my bike to school after going to fall festival, the kids completely missed the part where they were supposed to be impressed with my strength and power and were more making fun of my bike for being a 'mamachari' -- which I now know actually includes the word mama, which is just what it sounds like, and it means instead of gaining cool points, I lost them for not having a sporty bike, wtf) the day I put "please donate money to Oita Bike Ride" flyers on all the desks and a colorful donation box on my own. Now, it might all make sense. Emily bikes to school not because she is insane, or stupid, or irrationally mad and trying to stick it to the man, but because she is training for her upcoming event!

On the day I went to small elementary, it was raining, so I took the two buses I am supposed to take. As I dolefully prepared to go home, the principal of that school asked me, "Are you going to drive home now?" to which I replied with a sad sigh, "No. I'm taking the little bus."

"Oh," he said, "I think it's better." 

Aha. Of course. The guy who is always like "Are you driving home now?" and then "Be careful." What are you worried about? That the road is too narrow, this road I've taken six dozen times? That I can't drive well? Why, because I'm a woman? Because I'm a foreigner? Because I learned on the right? Because I left that "beginner" sticker in my window out of laziness and because people are generally kinder to you when you have it, even though I've been driving for almost a decade? Do you think it's others I will hurt with my car, or me? Why don't you believe in me?!

The irrational anger was back with a rage-spiced vengeance for this poor guy who is only trying to look out for me by telling the BOE to tell me not to drive to school, as I now believe happened. Nonetheless, the discovery did help me feel more at ease about my upcoming days -- days on which I wanted to drive because I wanted to skip out early, mostly (all errands or departure for Oita, actually).

One of those days was Thursday. Because of inconveniently timed rain, my poor bike remained in the large-elementary parking lot (more like parking pit, kinda) Wednesday night as well. I drove to large-elem Thursday, but on the way noticed that something about Robin Red didn't feel quite right. Usually, I notice a smell or a sound first, but this time it was a feel. She had been acting a little weird when idling, sometimes running high in RPMs for no reason, but I had never driven her farther than to kempo or Jusco, both approximately six minutes away, and I hadn't called the car people about it yet. I studied the dash for a moment. Shit. The temperature gauge was high, not quite in the red zone, but way higher than normal and way higher than okay.

I was almost to school, so I figured I'd just try to make it there and turn her off so she could cool down. She died right in the road when I stopped, waiting to turn in to the school driveway. I managed to coax her to restart while all of Thursday morning traffic waiting, and nudged her down into the gravel parking pit, where she came to rest right next to China, shuddered, and died parked at a funny angle.

I hopped out and looked around. Shit shit shit. Not supposed to even drive to school, having done so for shady reasons, needing a car that afternoon to "go and come back" running errands-- but this time all the way to Himeji, goodness. I thought about procrastinating the phone call to the car people, because they might not be open yet, it's before 8am, and there might be a Scene, and the school will have to openly acknoweldge that I drove, and...

Sucked it up, called them anyway. The car people are kind of personal friends of ours these days, so I told them as best I could what had happened, and about how I needed to use the car later that day to.. do some stuff... "We'll give you a loaner," she explained, "but the only one we have right now is a bigger car than yours. Like one that six people can ride in. Is that okay?" Blink. A real car. No, more than that, a van. They're giving me a van! Question of how I think I'll get China home when I planned to drive both Thursday and Friday? answered.

After school, I walked down to the parking pit and was pretty much flabbergasted to see the van neatly parked between China Downtown and the edge of the gravel area by the wall where Robin had expired at a funny angle. Someone has maneuvering powers. I was delighted; I rarely get to drive a real car here in Japan these days.

I climbed aboard this beast and was instantly rewarded with songs of flight and power. It achieved so effortlessly the speeds which Robin shrieks and whines to attain. China Downtown fit into the back without so much as touching the front seats. And I felt like I had just gained like 600 more badass points, not to mention I was now driving incognito! No one who has seen Robin Red will expect to find me piloting this beast, this boat, this whale of a car, which for the time I have it, I will be calling Diesel (because that, my friends, is the type of fuel it requires). And if anyone is like, "why wasn't Robin parked at your house the other day?" I can be like, "Because she is in the shop!" I only wish I had some kind of party to take all my friends to, because when I drive Diesel, I feel like I'm driving a bus. And I kind of am.

This car is twice the size of Robin. TWICE.

So IS any one part of this a blessing, or a curse? I can't really tell. It's complicated and silly. The icing on this long and nearly pointless tale is, I have developed a sore throat and I might not be able to go to Oita this afternoon after all. And I'm not saying that the sore throat is a result of any particular thing, but in my experience, I only get sick when I get stressed out/unhappy. So, there's that. I would call it irony, but I think irony is more like layering, and this story is more like interlocking pieces. It may be that I can't actually afford to go to Oita (timewise? money?) and am stubborn enough not to care, so the universe is forcing me to reconsider. Still, the event sounds awesome and I if I miss it, I will be very very sad.

Merry Me a Little

Love me just enough.

When I found this, I thought I was hitting the Engrish jackpot, all the Starbucks workers wearin' their red t-shirts, all of them emblazoned with "let's merry" in capital letters.

But, it turns out, it's just an international campaign.

Oh well!

Kagoshima by the Skin of my Teeth

this is the last of the entries I wrote, or mostly wrote, on the train to Tokyo. It's the most fun of them, though! ^_^ Er. The most fun to read, not to experience.

October 7^th, 2011.

It was a three-day-weekend. One should know better.

I began my journey into well-paid-for hedonism by taking off work early. The situation was nearly perfect: with four morning classes, then lunch, I should be basically free to go once lunch was finished on Friday afternoon. I would have been, but for speech contest practice all the damn time. But, begging out of that, and giving my heartfelt yoroshikus to those in charge, I slipped off while the third years took their tests in what would have been, for me, a post-lunch fog of dreadful sleepiness.

Having left work early, I enjoyed enough time to finish packing and preparing my house for departure, distracted only a bit by the re-Japanated Miriam.

She is only a little distracting.

On a good day, it takes 45 minutes to get to Himeji, so I made sure I had at least an hour and 15. I wanted to be on the 4:30 bus to the airport, although since domestic flying in Japan suggests you check in at least 20 (twenty) minutes before your flight is scheduled to leave, I figured that in a pinch, the 5:30 would get me there at 6:50, which was just enough time for my 7:15 flight to Kagoshima City.

Oh, naivety.

  

I made great time until about halfway up the bypass highway, when I met traffic so hideous, it drove me to exit and try my hand at the surface roads instead. Riddled with stoplights, they were not much better. I watched 4:30 arrive but blocks from the bus station, aware that I still had to park and walk to the gate anyway. Shit. Oh well, there was still the 5:30.

I parked in the cheap section and dragged myself and my bag to the bus terminal. 4:48. Fuck it, I thought, I’ll go have a donut and eat this banana I carried along with me for some reason. The donut was subpar. I sat around for a bit, took a call about speech contest skit preparation from my former vice principal, and sat around a bit more before I heard some kind of announcement regarding airport buses. I couldn’t understand enough of it to know what was going on, but I did see that my bag was the only one in the airport bus line. It was 5:15 I poked my head out the door to see if I could see the airport bus, worried that the announcement had said “Well if there isn’t anyone who wants to take the airport bus, we ain’t sendin it!” No, it was far worse than that.

An oldish bald dude appeared as if from nowhere, and asked me where I was going. When I said Itami, he asked me what time my flight would be. He did all this in more than passably good English. I told him 7:15 and he said regretfully, “I don’t think you can take your flight. The highways are very crowded.” Well no shit, I had seen that myself in attempting to make it to Himeji on time. Of course. “You should take the shinkansen,” he said, “that is the best way. Only take shinkansen.” I thanked him and went outside to try to call my Wervs, in distress over the idea of spending 200 bucks on a shink ticket to Kagoshima when I’d already thrown 110 on a flight thinking I was saving money by doing so. At this point I was wondering, should I even go? Was it worth it, after a week like the one I’d had, and before the week I knew was to come? Was this a sign that I should just give in and take a damn rest for goodness sake?

I didn’t have her number in my phone, so I texted her instead with a plea that she give me a call.

But then it dawned on me that the little old man might have been talking not about taking a shink to Kagoshima, but rather to Osaka, and from there getting myself to the airport via train. Trains run at the same speed no matter how road traffic is going. With this revelation, I looked around to ask him, but he had vanished as mysteriously as he had appeared.

I power-walked to the train gate at Himeji station and asked a train guy what the fastest way to Itami was, and how long it might take. He gave me a wishy-washy answer that amounted to, I’m not sure you’ll get there as soon as you want to.

I dithered for exactly one minute more, then thought, fuck it, I will be way more upset if I don’t at least try my best to get my ass on that plane. I can deal with whether or not to take a shink to Kagoshima and spend a ton of extra money once I have really missed my flight, because I haven’t really missed it yet.

And thus began my training for the hit TV show, The Amazing Race.

I bought a nonreserved ticket from a machine and hotfooted it to the platform, taking the first Nozomi to come down the track. I was on my phone’s browser for the entire duration of the half-hour ride, figuring out exactly how to get from Shin-Osaka to the airport. Turns out, you have to take the subway from Shin-O, then connect to the monorail from the subway.

Thing is, connections never mean you hop off one train and onto the other. Usually they involve walking through a station, then through a tunnel or walkway of indeterminate length, then into a new station, where you wait on a platform for the next train to come. It takes way longer than anyone (I) ever reckons because all that time, one is in motion; so while time spent on a train is felt as time passing, time spent moving to a train is less easily felt. 

But I knew, this time, that it would be there, and would make all the difference. So I jogged from the shink/JR area all the way across Shin-O (which I quite thankfully know rather well by now) station and to the red subway line, bound for the outskirts of the city. I never got a seat on any of the trains that came after, but that’s how weekend (especially long weekend) travel is. I texted Wervs to tell her it was giri-giri (going to be close!).. Then I jogged (with all my shit on my shoulders, mind you) from subway station to monorail station, a farther jaunt than I liked. Then I basically bolted down the walkway from the monorail to the airport doors, aware that by then it was 7:00 and my flight was leaving in fifteen minutes, and holy shit.

I ran haplessly past a lit sign that proclaimed the check-in for my flight was officially closed and called out to a woman who looked like she was on her way somewhere. “To Kagoshima!” I whimpered, helpless against the motion of time.

“Do you have a reservation?” she asked, moving toward a check in counter, “Do you have ID?” I basically threw my driver’s license at her as I shifted my bags. “Is this okay for carry-on luggage?” I asked, still panting, still sweating.

“It’s fine,” she confirmed, “gate 23, go!”

The line at security was too long for me to wait in. I showed my “hi, my plane leaves in ten minutes” boarding pass to someone near the line and she pushed me to the front, asking the pardon of people behind me, who nodded sagely, perhaps pitying, perhaps silently tsk-tsking this panting, sweaty foreign girl-child.

Once through security, I jogged the remaining length of the airport (because gate 23 was, for some reason, at the end of the entire thing) to find the tail end of the plane’s boarding line still being processed. I dropped into my airplane seat, wishing I could take off my shirt. Since domestic flying allows you to take along a water bottle (provided they take a smell of it, and why shouldn’t they, when you can take all those things on a train and go to the same place?), I chugged some water and sent a quick text to Wervs to tell her I had made it.

Having no checked baggage let me waltz out of the airport as soon as we landed, and I was one of the first in line awaiting the bus back toward the city center. I stuffed a combini egg-salad-and-ham (yeah, I dunno either, Japan) sandwich into my face because in the mad dash I had had no time for such trivial things as dinner. From there, Wervs met me and we took the bus back to her apartment, where I plopped down onto her couch and passed out into oblivion.

So you would think that at this point, we were done. Wervs had it under control from here. Yeah, we thought that too.

We had reserved tickets on the 10am Toppy speed boat to Yakushima. We figured if we left around 9, that should give us plenty of time to get to the port and sort it all out and settle into our seats before the boat sailed. It was all going to be perfect: our hostel was right next to the port on the island, and we could rent a car just meters from the dock. It was all going to be just. perfect.

So we got out of the house at 9, and we got the 9:10 bus toward the city and the port, and by 9:45 Wervs was getting antsy, but I was old hat at this game by now, and I, without knowing exactly what bus stop we wanted, or exactly how far that bus stop was from our current location, or thereafter exactly how far it was from bus stop to port, was convinced that we would make it. We would make it or… well, we would make it. The bus stop appeared. 9:50. Time to start jogging again.

Wervs said, “there’s always one in a few hours.. and it only takes an hour longer on the water..” I began to jog. “I can’t run!” she insisted, her hiking boots hindering her. I didn’t know what to say to that. I might have said “I’m sorry,” I might have said “I know,” but whatever I said, I kept running, sure that if even just one of us made it to the counter by the water, they would hold the boat long enough for both of us to climb aboard.

I kept glancing at my watch and what I saw there was encouraging. It was only 9:55 and the port was in sight. We would make it to the island in time to spend more than just the night there, today.

At the counter, Wervs presented the paper she’d printed out regarding our reservation. The woman began asking if we’d already paid for the tickets, and we explained we hadn’t, and wanted to pay her now.

If you didn’t pay for them, she explained, they don’t exist. She pointed to a line of kanji-ridden Japanese that must have spelled out what she said next. You have to pay within 4 days of making the reservation, or it gets canceled automatically.

We glanced at each other, then turned back to her. “Okay, that’s fine. Let’s buy new tickets.”

I’m afraid the 10am boat is sold out.

Naturally. Another exchanged glance. “So we’ll be on the 1pm?”

That one is also sold out.

A breath. The 3:15 would get us to the island around sundown, just in time to not do anything outside or see anything interesting. But what else could we do?

The next available opening is the 3:15, she pointed out on the schedule, would you like a reservation there?

We readied our cash. Since we’d been getting round-trip tickets, and our returning boat reservation had also been canceled, we had to settle for the only open boat coming back on Monday, the 7am. If anyone cancels for the 1pm, we will notify you and you can take those seats, she offered helpfully.

“That would be so great!” I enthused, shrugging some of the run-to-the-port sweat off my brow.

We shouldered our shit and began to back away from the counter, but just then she called out to us again. Apparently, something was changing.

There is another possibility, it seemed like breaking news, there are two spots.. they are very narrow and uncomfortable. But these were the faces of two young women who did not give a crap about that, at this point. All we wanted was to be on that boat. Let me perch atop my baggage in the aisle for all I care.

In the spot where they write the seat number on the ticket, she wrote something like “ho 2” and “ho 1” on ours, and an attendant jogged (yes jogged) us out to the dock to catch the boat as it was just about to leave. 

The cabin attendant led us to our seats. One was the jumpseat in front of the back door on the first floor; the other was the jumpseat in the back of the second floor. They were pretty uncomfortable, but I just couldn’t believe our good luck that there were exactly two such fold-out fake chairs on the boat, and someone thought to let us use them. I wondered again if this was what it felt like to be on The Amazing Race.

Add Wervs has a brighter, more open jumpseat; mine was wedged behind the last row of chairs on the first level.

From Kagoshima by the Skin

By 12:45 we were on the island. But… Yakushima has two major port cities (I say that like they are major port cities.. they are the two ports on the island, and perhaps the two largest cities there). One is Miyanoura, location of our hostel and biggest little city on the place. The other is Anbo.

Guess which one we're at.

From Kagoshima by the Skin

There was, however, an Orix up the road from the port, so we began to walk. We passed a small rent-a-car company and paused, considering it, watching the old dude in charge set groups up with little k-cars. We thought maybe the other place might be cheaper, so we began to haul our stuff in that direction. As soon as we came to anything even remotely like a hill, and my phone told us we still had a five minute walk ahead of us, I stopped to question the wisdom of this venture.

“If we rent from here, we can return it right here, next to the port we’re leaving from Monday morning,” I reasoned, “so even if it’s a few bucks more, I don’t mind paying for that kind of convenience.” Not after all we’d been through.

So we went back. But now, most of the cars were gone from the lot. We watched as a group of five dudes too the last white-plate in visible range. The old guy looked us over, a bit wary. “So you got a Japanese license?” he asked. I proudly threw it on the counter, and was rewarded with a “subarashii!”

I pointed out the 48-hour rental rate and asked if that was what we’d get for a k-car. He said, we have no cars left. This was no problem.. we could just go to Orix, although I was a little pissed that by wasting time, we’d let the nearest-to-Anbo-port car rental get away. But before I could regroup, he went on, so we’ll give you a discount! He then yelled to a younger guy walking around the tiny car lot, hey, clean up that car, would you? And thus we were given the company crap car, and at a discounted rate.

At this point, we were so happy to be in the island, and free. We drove to Miyanoura and checked in, then spent the rest of the daylight hours exploring via the one main road that rings the island, about a three-hour drive around, although we also made some stops. We stopped at a few overlooks, a couple beaches, and some waterfalls, and enjoyed the winding forest path portion of this “main” road.

When we got back to the hostel, the dude there assured us that the hike to Jomon-Sugi (the like 7000 year old tree) was indeed possible, if we woke up at about 5 and got our early. We didn’t even have to discuss that: not bloodly likely; we were going to take it easy (at this point that meant sleeping the hell in), because we were on vacation, dammit.

Sunday, we rolled out at our leisure to explore the hiking trails of Shiratani, famed for being an inspiration to Miyazaki’s work Princess Mononoke.

Overall, I’m going to let the photos do most of the talking for me after this point. The island is pretty much amazing, and my only irritations were that, because of that, it’s pretty popular, so the trails were kind of crowded (of course our timing has something to do with this as well). They do take pretty good care of conservation up in there, though, and the sights were totally breathtaking. Everything in that forest was alive. The trees were alive (even the dead ones), the rocks were alive, the moss and river and mud were all alive. I can see why the used to think of it as a forest full of gods.

At some point a guide-type guy told us that in the old days, when the rulers of Kagoshima used to get their cedar planking from Yakushima's forests, the island's forests were barred to women: only men, and I believe he said important men, were allowed in to work in the sacred space. 

There are no photos of the onsen adventure on principal; I feel bad because it was wervs’ first onsen experience, and it was the most crowded naked space I have ever been in. I’m pretty comfy with onsen etiquette by now, but it’s not the kind of place I would have wanted to be a first-timer.

And that's how I did Yakushima!