Surfing

In case you’ve never heard of CouchSurfing, I’ll give a quick summary.

You use the website to connect with potential hosts (if you are traveling) or guests (if you are hosting), offer them a place to sleep at night, and ideally you both gain something from the encounter such as a fresh perspective or perhaps a new friend. If the idea of contacting someone you’ve never met with an aim to crash at their place sounds like a positively terrible idea, then you’re probably from the net generation that was raised to recall the possibility that whoever you are talking to may in fact be an overweight balding 40-year-old in his parents’ basement rather than the hip 24-year-old musician he says he is. You probably also think hitchhiking/picking up hitchhikers is a terrible idea.

I tend to agree with you. As a young lone-traveling female, couchsurfing seems on the surface to be the opposite of something I should try.

However, there is appeal. My favorite type of tourism, if you recall, was what I termed “tomodachi tourism,” or the kind where you go somewhere that you know someone, because then not only do you have a free place to stay, you also have someone to hang out with, and even better, someone who knows something about the area, even if it’s not a great deal. At the very least, someone to explore with (and if they don’t have time to explore with you, then hopefully they can leave you a copy of the bus schedule and tell you which corners to avoid after dark).

And as sketchy as the idea itself may sound, the website for CouchSurfing does a lot to make sure the people you are talking to are what they say they are (or at least to provide you with information regarding how much they check out). People get vetted and approved in various ways through their system, which sets some people on a level of being much more trustworthy, in theory.

Now, as a cheapskate, and a traveler, and at times a pilgrim on the trail, I liked the idea of finding a cool Japanese lady (or girl, some of them were college aged) to crash with. Bangarang ryokan like the one I stayed in for Hasedera are really nice, but especially post-contract I was living on savings. I signed myself up as a host just as an afterthought, and so as not to appear to be a total deadbeat. (Actually, when I think about it, some people don’t have the time to travel like I did then, so although at the time I thought surfing was ‘where it’s at’ and hosting was just the chore you did to pay it forward, many hosts really enjoy getting to know their worldly visitors and learning about their experiences!) I figured no one would ever want to stay in my middle of nowhere living room in no-trainsville, Japan.

Welp, wrong there too.

I actually got a request just in the short time I was signed up before leaving, and proceeded to host a Japanese guy for two nights. Hosting, I realized on the precipice of doing it, is safer than surfing because you are where you are, with your community around you, which is not the same as venturing forth and disappearing into the wild blue. I notified all the JETs in town that I had a surfer coming because I wanted us to all have dinner together, and because I wanted everyone to know I was about to have a stranger in my house. Again, this was all fine. He was pretty cool, and we got lost together going up the mountain on our way to Chikusa for dinner on day two. Since this was during July, I was already pretty busy all the time, but taking a moment out to just spend a moment with this guy was a nice reminder of how to enjoy Shiso. He spoke enthusiastically about how great of a town it was, and it was nice for me to see it, right there at the end, through the eyes of a first-time comer.

This.. this is the end of the road, right here.

Back on the right track; I brake for misty mountains.

He showed me a little drum circle and I showed him the mountains, and brought him to my adult English class (which confused them to no end because—he’s not your boyfriend? But he’s..staying.. in your house..?!), and I also felt like I was not at all a deadbeat in the world of CouchSurfing.

So anyway, fast forward to my own travel period, in August. I sent out a lot of requests to various people in areas near temples on my route, trying to get together a sort of schedule or setup to build travel around. I only ended up staying with one family, down in Wakayama. They appealed to me partly because of location, just a few stops from one of the temples I’d been looking forward to visiting since I began, and also because it was a family, not one person as a host. They had two kids, one in middle school and one in late elementary, and were very foreigner friendly. The 4th grader, their daughter, seemed to think my proper duty at their home was to play Doraemon games with her. She was not fully wrong in this.

They also had the coolest house, and were delighted that I could speak some Japanese (this made it possible for me to talk with the lady of the house, not just her husband all the time). They cooked for me; we talked about all kinds of things. I tried to show them pictures of my house, but we had to settle for google earth. They invited me to go with them to Shirahama, one of the best beaches in Wakayama later in the summer and I had to decline because my schedule by that late in August was getting pretty tight. In the morning, after father (school teacher and soccer coach) and big brother (JHS students have to report all the time, even in summer, for club activities, just like dad) had gone, mom and daughter walked me to the train station to send me off on my temple visits for the day. I was just delighted that these people I didn’t know at all and who had no need to take me in and be so good to me had done so, and all I could pay them with was conversation (which was all they wanted, I suppose).

Forgot to take this photo before brother was gone to basketball practice.

I only have limited experience with CouchSurfing, but they’ve always been positive. It isn’t something I’m sure I’m comfy with in the US (nor is it perhaps something I need here, as I tend to only go where I have people, these days), but it is something I recommend looking into, if you’re into that. 

Osaka Temples: Soji-ji and Fujii-dera

August 22nd and undaunted by the previous day's trials, I rolled out to make my way from Kyoto down south to Wakayama, stopping at two Osaka-area temples along the way. There were two in particular that were reported to be very convenient to get to by public transportation (and from non-JR stations, thus I could use the heck out of my Kansai Thru-Pass), so I planned my route around them.

First stop, Soji-ji, Temple 22 of the Pilgrimage and the one from which the walking trail still leads to Katsuo-ji (visited the day before). Soji-ji is the size of an unassuming city temple.

There were some old ladies chatting in the shade of the garden near the pond, and I could feel them watching me.

I was proud that I was able to read the sign. It said you were permitted to ring the bell, but to please do so gently, as it's really freakin' old. I did.

Not all temples offer prayers, services, or amulets for pets, but Soji-ji does. It's principal image is a thousand-armed eleven-faced Kannon riding on the back of a turtle. The legend about this is that a nobleman was going about his daily business and saw some kids tormenting a turtle. He made them stop, and released the turtle into the sea. Later on, Kannon sent the same turtle saved this nobleman's son from drowning.

So I took a photo of a poster.

This turtle tale, combined with the story of the sandalwood of which the Kannon image is carved (said to have been dedicated to Kannon, ordered for the carving of the statue, then lost into the water along the way, but it washed up again in Japan), gave me the impression that this temple has something to do with being in the right place at the right time. The message is that things go where they are supposed to be.

Since it also had to do with pets, I had been looking forward to getting a couple of charms for the family's dogs along the way.

Buddhist Pet Cemetery.

Soji-ji is also famous for a dedication of knives that takes place on April 18th of each year. There is a fish-slicing ceremony related perhaps to a tradition that . There's also a statue of the Bokefuji Kannon we saw at temple fifteen. I said a prayer but didn't take a photo of her.

Stop two was Fujii-dera, in the town of the same name, another city temple (as opposed to sprawling mountain complex) filled with the wisteria (fuji) plants that would make it absolutely gorgeous (and crowded, I'm sure) come early May. Fujii-dera is temple number 5 of the 33, and was the first for me of that opening sequence of temples that wraps around the peninsula of Wakayama Prefecture.

It was a nice little oasis of space, mostly empty when I was there at the end of the afternoon, with gates on all sides leading into the city's streets.

Can you imagine this fuji in May?

The Kannon image at Fujii-dera (I didn't happen to pass a poster with the image printed) is another thousand-armed Kannon, but this one actually has a thousand arms. Most of the representations of senju-Kannon have a good many arms, but most of them don't actually bear the full thousand.

A few blossoms persist through the August heat!

The image is put on display on the 18th of each month, and on August 9th for sen-nichi mairi, which conveys the benefits in one day of prayer that you would expect of a thousand (normal) days of prayer.

I love the fabric in this portrayal of the wind.

Fujii-dera was beautiful, but I didn't have a lot of time there, as it was getting on toward closing time. What made it peaceful also made it kind of lonely. Plus I'd seen a lot of temples in a few days, two per day for as long as I could walk it.
I was headed for Wakayama City and the end of my Pilgrim Trail....

(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.

start recalculating

Hi there Eastern Edge-rs.

Welp, I've gone and started a new blog. You knew I had to. I live nowhere near the eastern edge of anything anymore, and all that fraudulence was making me feel a bit uneasy.

I do intend to post stories about my last few adventures here, once the JLPT is over. Look forward to my how-to on maintaining personal space even in a crowded bus!

But until then, check out the next best thing (or two):

A Postcard Problem is the tumblr I started when I began having blog withdrawals. I'll be posting... post cards, until I run out of them anyway. That will take me a while, as I had a tendency to buy more than I sent, and I tried to buy them everywhere. It's a habit!

Recalculating is the new blog. Not much there yet, but you know how these things go. See you all over the place!

directions

I know I've been away! I've been busy. If you believe that. There's all kinds of sorting still happening, and of course, albeit in parts and phases, the Repatriation Roadtrip is also at hand.

I'm also at a bit of a loss as to whether to continue with this blog beyond the Japan adventures I naturally need to get around to writing about. I mean, should I go on into the Reptatriation Roadtrip saga, and beyond that into the Next Adventure that is Life in This, The Wide Country? Or should I start another blog for that (my interest is partly archival, in preserving the look of this blog despite wanting to keep its image current, as it has been changing little by little to reflect my surroundings there in Japan)? I mean, I don't really live on the eastern edge anymore.. I kind of never did..! Though that's neither here nor there. And I no longer teach English in Japan... I fight the urge to correct the inaccuracies of this blog in my current situation, but as you can see, I already removed the time/date thingy because that isn't what the time/date is for me anymore..!

 But in the meantime, studying for the JLPT is attempting to consume me and sapping most of my mental energy. There's a limit to how much Japanese you can cram into your head in a given day, and this week, I intend to find out what mine is.

Maybe after I'm caught up (lies. we are never caught up), I will be free again to... to..

Don't worry. I can't not write for long.

Kagoshima and Ibusuki

It seems like every town in Japan worth a dot on the map has its own special thing. Ibusuki, down at the bottom of Kagoshima prefecture, has a couple.

Ibusuki is about an hour south of Kagoshima city, so when we went in August, we decided to make it a daytrip. I have a driver's license, so we decided to rent a car to go tooling around. I appreciate my fellow American's perspective, that roads and driving are not, in fact, scarier or in some way worse than doing battle with a small town bus schedule.

This was pretty much the nicest car I had driven in years.

I had looked up the tides the night before, and it turned out we were there during a spring tide (those are full or new moon tides, stronger than other times) and that low tide was to be at 11:45 or so. This meant we could walk out along this sandbar to Chiringa-jima, an island described as one of the most fragrant islands in Japan.

There's the island! 

All we have to do is walk across this little isthmus.

 It was a beautiful day to be at the beach, if you had like a swimsuit or that kind of stuff. Unfortunately, the sunny heat of a beach day makes for a pretty sad sand-hike if you only have 'real shoes' and clothes on. I seriously considered going for a dip clothes and all because I figured I was going to be approximately as soaked with my own sweat. The fact that the little fish looked like puffer fish and no one else was touching the water (not even the kids) is all that kept me out.

It's a beautiful scorching near-noon here on the hot sands.

We never made it to Chiringa-jima. It was too hot and we had plans to be bathed in sweat later. We moved on toward another of Ibusuki's wonders, the swirling somen restaurant.

Naturally, being around lunchtime, we were not the only people with this idea. There was a long line to get in to the restaurant which kept us waiting about 15 or 20 minutes despite the massive number of tables the restaurant seemed to contain.

The place is called Tosenkyo, and it's built in a valley blessed with a cold spring. Using the flow of cool water, every table has a water flow where the noodles swirl around so you can snag them and eat them. It also keeps the air down there relatively cool under the shade of the trees.

There are also lots of fish in the water. These fish are on the menu; always fresh!

After lunch, we headed toward Mt. Kaimon and Ikeda Lake. Ikeda is a caldera lake, and is home to giant eels. Mt. Kaimon is a volcanic peak.

The giant eels on display were just sad. 

Lake and Kaimon!

From there we drove down to Nagasakibana, where there is a shrine and a lighthouse.

The Ryugu shrine is connected to the legend of Urashima Taro. 

Urashima Taro is the turtle dude who opened the gift box containing "the span of a life." If that doesn't sound familiar, check it out here. 

Aaaand there's the lighthouse.

The lighthouse area was really beautiful, and is the southernmost point of... this part.. of this prefecture. Or something.

This is the pamphlet we were using to figure out where to go; there's no way we could have gone to as many things without driving. But the main draw of Ibusuki is its hot sand baths, which are famous as a beauty treatment and for cleaning the blood. It's also supposed to help with circulation and various other maladies, basically whatever is helped by being buried in hot sand (and the subsequent sweating you tend to do). Also it's just really fun -- who doesn't like being buried in sand?

The sand is hot because it's heated from below by the volcanic powers of the island which in this particular area tend to come up just under the beach.

I don't have any photos from our actual burial because you strip down as for any public bath/hot springs experience and emerge clad only in the provided cotton cloth yukata. Then you lie down in a shallow pit with your minitowel wrapped around your head so the staff can throw sand over you with their shovels. They were very no-nonsense about it; I felt like a giddy little kid.

We were up underneath that wooden thing in the background.  (photo cred)

As soon as you are buried, you can feel your heartbeat in you whole body. You're just throbbing from head to foot under the weight of hot sand. It's awesome. The other thing I tried was digging down just a little bit with my hands. Like a centimeter. The sand felt way hotter underneath.

Afterward you feel totally refreshed and look totally beautiful. (photo)

Just kidding. After ten minutes, maybe fifteen if you want extra baking, your yukata is sticking to you with sweat and you emerge, dust off, and go back up to the building for a regular water-type onsen bathing experience.

The hot sand is pretty much the main reason we went to Ibusuki, so once we were done there, we pretty much returned the car and took the train home to Mandi's house.

This is the view from her apartment of Sakurajima. And there it goes.

The next day, we were joined by Laureno just before I had to leave, so we used that time to visit a cat cafe (for my first time) and eat pastries for dinner (which was one of the worst decisions of that month).

I still maintain I would prefer a dog cafe. It would be way more relaxing (for me)!

Dinner.

How I felt on the train and for the next couple days.