Sunday Papers: Robert Louis Stevenson

"For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go.  I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.  Alas, as we get up in life, and are more preoccupied with our affairs, even a holiday is a thing that must be worked for. To hold a pack upon a pack-saddle against a gale of the freezing north is no high industry, but it is one that serves to occupy and compose the mind. And when the present is so exacting, who can annoy himself about the future?"


On the turntable:  Bruce Springsteen, "The Wild, the Innocent, and the E. Street Shuffle"
On the nighttable:  Allen S. Weiss, "Zen Landscapes"

A Life in the Day

The wonder we feel in seeing the opposite end of a train on which we are riding is like a baby discovering its own limbs...

...a husband hobbled by his wife's tongue...

...stone grave markers extending from the earth a monument to the death sentence we receive at birth...


On the turntable:  Smashing Pumpkins, "Siamese Dream"

I Read the News Today Oh Boy...

They paved the last patch of green in Japan today. 

In a ceremony this morning,

The Prime Minister took a pair of scissors

And cut through the last blade of grass

With his gloved hand.  

On the turntable:  Moby, "Destroyed"

Sunday Papers: Kit Nagamura

"When REALLY stressed, I play hooky from my own life." 


On the turntable:  CSN+Y, "Four Way Street" 

The Blue and the Grey

I hurried out of town, mainly because I knew weather was coming in later, and I wanted to get as far south as possible.  Breakfast was eaten at the hotel, which consisted of two pieces of bread in a plain white paper bag.  The bags were lined up neatly beside the coffee dispensers, and I imagine their number corresponded exactly to the number of guests.  These were all working men, most in overalls, chewing silently as if in thought about what the day would bring.  Judging from the look of the sky, it would bring cold.

I walk south along a busy road without shoulders.  As if demarcating a boundary, a massive concrete overpass connects the mountains that shaped the valley I was now entering.  Passing beneath I look up at the thing, trying to divine its purpose.  I can understand the need to speed past uninspired cities, but this place wasn't really between anything and anything else.  As I walk, I muse awhile on man's need to keep building, to keep producing.  It is beginning to feel like an end run toward nowhere. Much like, in fact, this overpass.  I will risk sounding naive by saying I wish that man would just finally be satisfied on what he has, and thereafter shift to caring for what he's already got.  Rather than build new useless roads, why not put the same money into repairing the old ones, and the tunnels, and the bridges, and all of those other Bubble Era follies that are beginning to collapse and kill people.  But I also understand that to stop producing means that the world economy will itself collapse and kill people.  Plus that would mean too great a zeitgeist shift in these days of planned obsolescence.   Yet ultimately it will be us that becomes obsolete.  You can plan on it.  

The residents of Hikida do show some pride in what they have.  A pretty lane runs alongside a small stream that gurgles merrily before the well-kept houses.  Just beyond the south end of the village I'm led toward the hills along a well-marked trail, the Fukasaka Kōdō.  Despite this, I don't see any sign that anyone has hiked here in a while.  I follow the water upward, until the stream becomes a brook, and then a creek before disappearing completely when a switchback leads me away.  It isn't a particularly hard hike, but I am quickly gaining  elevation.  The views back down the valley are filled with shadow as the storm keeps rolling in.

I'm up and over the pass.  This, the Shiga side is all sunny and warm.  I sit a bit in front of a Jizo hall, itself ringed with smaller stone Jizo that are laden with flowers and offerings.  A waterfall lowers itself over the lip of the forest floor above me.  A trio of dippers here indicate an offering for myself too.  I eat a Snickers bar, washed down by cold snow melt.  One of hiking's finer moments.  

 

Down the trail,  I meet a lone workman rebuilding a bridge by laying broad slabs of chiseled stone across a gap in the trail.  This whole section since the Pass is pretty wet, the stream beside having been violently thrown from its bed by last month's typhoon.  It now traces the spaces between what had once been cobblestone trail.  Further on still it becomes swamp.  The place seems to be popular with wild boars, for their tracks are simply everywhere.  Kumazasa rises up now, above the ruins of another hamlet, this one only revealing itself by a few stone foundations.  Before entering the forest earlier, I'd passed a few abandoned homes, now just a pile of fallen timber.  Beside one, some of the better pieces of wood have been stacked, reusable perhaps as firewood.  But this place higher up has seen no residents for decades.  The Japanese had always feared the mountains, seen them as the place where the dead reside.  But with the coming of the industrial age, they finally pushed upward.  Now, as the birthrate continues its dramatic fall, the mountains are pushing back.

I pay for my lovely hike by being forced to walk the shoulderless Route 8 again.  An hour on I'll enter the hills again, which rise straight up out of the plain.  It is very hard work ascending to the pass, the switchbacks teasing me with a series of false ridgelines.  Atop one, I startle a clan of deer, perhaps a dozen.  I'm breathless as I watch each of them race by me with magical grace and power.  They remain with me all the way to the top.

It's only noon now, the bulk of my day behind me.  After a short lunch, I'll have an equally steep descent, which I negotiate quickly with trekking poles, mimicking the surety of four feet that the deer demonstrated above.  But what those creatures lack are the thumbs needed to work the latch on the gate at the base of the trail.  Once through it, I find myself on the shore of Lake Yodo.  The sun is very warm here, the water very inviting.  I'll navigate its body clockwise, never far from her glistening surface.  Ducks rise with an incredible roar, as the air around them is displaced by the movement of a hundred wings.  My own footfalls are a sorry substitute as they lead once again onto a busy road for the last few kilometers into Kinomoto.

I find a choice of trains, but decide on a route that follows the way I just came, then along the quieter western shore of Biwa.  There's nothing before me cities, and their trademark bustle.

But the day is brilliant and warm.  No need to hurry.

On the turntable:  Ry Cooder, "The Music of Ry Cooder"
On the nighttable:  Rebecca Otowa, "At Home in Japan"

A Different Kind of Luxury

A deep bow to Andy Couturier for allowing me to guest post on his blog. Please go have a look, and while you're there, keep reading...

http://adifferentkindofluxury.blogspot.jp/2013/12/ordinariness-in-how-they-live-but.html


On the turntable:  Portishead, "Third"

Solitary Man

Now I'm really confused.  I'm standing in front of a sign for the Saba Kaidō, or old mackerel road, the one along which they carried fish down to the Old Capital.  I had thought that there was only one, but this is the third Saba Kaidō that I've walked in this country. 

The transport of seafood means of course that I'm not far from the Sea of Japan.  I'm passing through Imajo once again, a lovely little town that stands at the bottom of a wide valley.  The structures on both sides of the road stand close together, and walking through this canyon of wood I'm shown all the usual features of a post town.  Through the opening at the end of this canyon I can see snow atop some of the hills before me, and I hope that it isn't deep since I'm wearing low top hiking shoes.   

I follow a road that curves along the hillside that it hugs.  A great many figures are carved into the walls of soft rock.  Fudo gets his own clearing, the small waterfall behind him feeding a canal lined with stone.  There are also the graves of dead samurai whose names mean nothing to me.  I remember that Kiso Yoshinaka's men rode through here nearly a millennium ago, and far more passed through over the centuries of civil war that were birthed in the era of his clan.  

I too have walked here, nearly five years ago when I moved southbound along the Hōkuriku-dō, the ancient road which too ran north from then-capital Nara and along the coast.  Though I'd spend the rest of the afternoon walking in and out of small bucolic hamlets, the height of the mountains and the density of this region's forests seem little changed since the 8th Century when this old road was first trod.  This of course could be my own projection, as I've chosen Robert Macfarlane's ironically apt "The Wild Places" as my reading material for this trip.  Yet I had definitely felt this sense of isolation and loneliness back in 2009.

The road leaves the villages as shoots itself like an arrow toward the hills.  There is little up here but a few persimmon orchards and old graves.  I come across the remains of an old post town, which shares the name with the last settlement I walked through, Futatsuya.  There is none of the usual relics of Japan's abandoned places, none of the broken crockery, or the wood fitted loosely to take on a vaguely familiar shape.  All that remains are the old foundation stones, or at least those that hadn't been salvaged to shape the rice terraces further below.  Especially eerie was the old shrine with the roof fallen in.  Most shrines are kept in good stead, and to allow one to rot back into forest was a definitive statement that the people here really wanted to leave.   

The road continues to struggle uphill, switchbacking now as it crosses from one side of the watershed to another.  At one bend a crow shouted down at me, as if warning me away from the Jizo under a stone roof.   Further on, I find two samurai graves beside a tall stele carved with the Lotus sutra.  A wooden sign written with "The Valley of the Slit Neck," goes some length to tell me why those men now lie there.  

And the valley itself continues to cut.  Twice I'm forced up and over the trunks of tree that have come down in landslides.  The latter slide seems only days old, the needles on the cedars moist and green. 

Then the road ends at a broad open space filled with grass cut into perfectly shaped rectangles that directly climb the hillsides.  The ski lifts which bisect these rectangles are silent now, but it is only a matter of weeks before they'll start humming again.  On the way up, I'd mistaken snow for what I thought was some sort of detergent dumped down the shadowy slopes.  The snow is a bit thicker here, but not yet enough for a good run.  I sit on one of the lift chairs and have lunch, but the sky is threatening again.  A light rain has fallen twice today, for only a few minutes each time, but the clouds here at 600 meters look like they mean business.  I eat quickly, then move on.

I walk a concrete path straight up the hillside, until a sign indicates a trail off to my right.  I'd never have found it myself, buried as it is under a few inches of snow.  Atop the ridge, the snow is thicker, less wet.  A sign tells me that Dogen too had walked this trail, back and forth to Eiheiji, which lies a full day's walk to the north.  I have better footwear than he, but still I struggle to the actual top of the ridge.  The trail levels off as it hugs the ridgeline, apparently a busy thoroughfare due to all the deer and bear tracks here. 

I take a short break out of the rain at the Jizo Hall here, the deity within carved into a rock wall behind, looking as if it predates the Hokurikudō itself.  As I sit and write notes, I think of the hands of the man who carved this figure, both of us passing one another on the path to immortality.

Ten minutes up trail, I pass my own self, the one who walked through here previously.  I see the same lovely tea house, the same trio of white dogs, including the aggressive one off his chain.  I again speak to it firmly in English, trusting that it can't be that aggressive precisely because it is unchained.  I forego the climb to the top of Mt. Hachibuse this time and instead plunge down the other side of the pass.

The kumazasa isn't as high this time, probably pressed back by a summersful of hikers.  I arrive at the spot from which I hitched before, but today I carry on downhill into the next village.  The houses here, like those on the other side of the pass, have new glass porches around the older wooden facades, to protect the entrances from the heavy snows here.  There's a small bus shelter standing in the shade of a massive camphor which serves too as protection from the elements. 

From here I'll be the one that needs protection, mainly from myself.  I read the written directions on my map and eager to stay off the busy road, plunge down into the forest.  The trail leads me to a rickety bridge, then stops.  I push onward, along what could be trails, but may simply be the spaces between rows of planted arbors.  The odd footprint beckons me on, but eventually the ever thickening vegetation reveals my error.  Despite having been lost in the snows not a year before, I stubbornly refuse to turn back.  The terrain underfoot is near invisible due to fallen leaves and other debris, and in warmer months I'd never traverse something this snake-y.  I push and pull myself through the thicket, at one time taking a firm grasp of a thorny trunk, which does a fine job of perforating my palms.  I carry this stigma onward until I finally see a concrete bridge that spans the gap that has been ever to my right.  The ground I've fought for over the past thirty minutes would've taken me less than ten by road.  As I sit on a concrete berm and rest, I realize that the direction I'd followed, to stay to the left of the stream, had been written from the perspective of walking from the opposite direction.

I stick to the road from here on.  I'll go through another bigger village that has a stele commemorating the Meiji emperor having a had a "short rest here" (the dude got around more than George Washington),  but also a larger stone for an elementary school, now closed.  The stone has the usual school song, sung from its opening during the first decade of the Meiji period  (whose eponymous emperor may have even heard it sung), until its final students put down their pencils for the last time seven years before.  It strikes me that the oldest of these would have graduated high school just this spring.  I'm further struck by the sight of a school zone sign, its message rusting in the elements.

The rest of the day is spent with one eye on the sky, but the weather holds off.  A pass takes me from one hamlet to another, then a second pass drops me on the outskirts of Tsuruga's suburbs.  It is an unattractive town, in the shared way that all industrial port towns are unattractive.  It doesn't get much more attractive, the closer I get to its heart.  Yet I wonder more at the hearts of its residents, who would allow not only the factories, smokestacks, and oil refineries, but also the nuke plant out at the end of the peninsula.  The sight of all these smothers the excitement I'd felt at the thought of eating local seafood here.

I do like the sidewalks covered as protection against heavy snow, yet these end too soon, as does my enthusiasm.  I walk in and through town, before finding my hotel at its southern edge.  Lodged as I am on the seventh floor, I've got a good view of the city, and unlike most hotels in Japan, the windows aren't locked to protect me if said view makes me want to forlornly toss myself out one of them.  

This cheerful thought in mind, I grab a least common denominator meal at a budget Chinese franchise across the road, rewarding myself with two beers:  one for the walk, and one to distract me from thinking about what may be in the ingredients. 


http://latlonglab.yahoo.co.jp/route/watch?id=8ee33d42f6a239c26722216838bdd550 


On the turntable:  Johnny Cash, "American III" 

Musings on Kodo's "Mystery"

Yesterday I had the opportunity to see "Mystery,"  the newest performance by Kodo.  The experience was made doubly enjoyable since I went with a friend who was a former Kodo apprentice.  It has been five years since I last saw Kodo live,  and was quite looking forward to it. 

I had read that "Mystery" would be a counterpart of sorts to Kodo's previous "Amaterasu,"  which I saw back in 2006.   Besides my love of taiko, I was especially intrigued with the show since it would be dealing with themes that have long interested me, namely the ancient spirituality of Japan.  (That said, the next section is simply my own interpretation, and may be miles away from what Artistic Director Bando Tomasaburo had intended.) 

The show opens with a darkened stage, in the days before there was a "Japan."  A handful of figures come out with lights on their heads, bending occasionally to plant rice.  From this first piece, the female members of Kodo would be featured prominently throughout the first half, perhaps as a nod to a time when the archipelago consisted of little more than loosely connected clans, a time when shamanesses held a pivotal role.  This would become more explicit in the piece "Namahage," in which three women make reverent offerings to the wild deities whom they encounter in the wild.  Up until now the stage had been lit only by other performers carrying had-held lamps.  At some point, a spotlight begins to light the action, perhaps the coming of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu herself.  Then we get more conventional overhead lighting, as the Shinto cult brightens and comes to the fore.  Many of the pieces in this first act have tints of the music of Southeast Asian, a region which may have been the cultural source of these early shamanistic clans of that time. 

The second act begins a similar vein, in dim lighting, with a handful of women at the center of the action.  Suddenly, they encounter a Chinese lion, which begins to shake and dance.  At first, the lion chases the women, but then eventually they begin to run after it, perhaps a reference to the coming of culture from the Asian mainland, embraced to such an extreme that the older ways were eventually subsumed within.  From here, it is all a show of strength, the male Kodo members coming to the fore, blowing us away with their power.  And thus it builds into what my aforementioned friend laughingly refers to as "The Man Show." And due to this power,  Japan's championing of society and culture over darkness is complete. 

Musically, the show is incredible.  The speed on which the performers play Katsugi-Okedo, especially on the closing piece of the first act, is ridiculously fast.  (I've seen my share of taiko performances, but have never seen such rapid stick work.)  The movement and dance choreography has similar perfection.  The performers never cease moving.  Even on the more static numbers, there are a lot of flourishes, a lot of twirling sticks.  I was intrigued too by how much of a foreign element there were to the more recent compositions.  Some of the vocals in the first act sounds almost medieval European.        

Perhaps the biggest surprise was how few of the performers I recognized. (The members of Kodo that I actually know personally were nowhere to be seen, with the exception of Uchida Eri, who happily has grown into a central role in the group.)    Perhaps Bando had hoped to utilize this youth as a means of accentuating a time when the culture and beliefs of this country were still developing.  But the young performers are beyond the development stage, and demonstrate already an air of mastery with every strike of the drum.  Which in itself cuts both ways.  This perfection of both playing and movement demonstrates the strength of Kodo's apprentice program, yet it is dangerously close to creating almost cookie-cutter performers.  Nearly everyone looks the same,  no one member is particularly distinctive.  While Kodo has always been an ensemble, a collective, right down to living communally,  previous members brought something individual to the performances.  Many of those older members are now teaching workshops, or are performing collectively with non-Kodo performers across various cultures and performance styles.  I feel somewhat doubtful that this young generation has the ability to exude enough unique and individual creativity that will help them stand out from the others, and hence go on to pass that creativity to others, as their elders are currently doing.  I hope time proves me wrong.

Kodo's magical "Mystery" tour with continue through the spring, including dates at Kyoto's Minamiza on May 30, 31, and June 1. 



On the turntable: Jefferson Airplane, "Ignition"

Sunday Papers: Charles Bukowski

"There's nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don't live up until their death. They don't honor their own lives ... their minds are full of cotton. They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them.... Most people's deaths are a sham. There's nothing left to die."


On the turntable:  X, "Under the Big Black Sun"

All Together...Now

The mustachioed man puffs out cigarette smoke like a steam locomotive, the stripes of the crosswalk serving as railroad ties.  I sit before him, on the other side of the glass, in a hip little place I found as I walked through Jingu-mae.  I had three hours to kill, so it had been a day spent moving slow, quite a luxury in a city of Tokyo's size, particularly as it was a weekday. 

From this window of San Francisco Peaks,  I spy berets and beards,  Van Dykes and VW Beetles.  A T-shirt bearing the words, "United Arrows" reminds me for a moment of the PM, and I remind myself that sloganeering generally indicates a lack of ideas.  There's more depth in the pop song coming through the speakers.  Despite that, there's definitely an increase in men in uniforms these days.  And I do hope that some of these hipsters I see passing by notice it too.     

I sip IPA from a plastic glass, which rests soundly on a denim coaster perfectly squared.  There are no other customers in here, so the waitress throws a glance every so often as she moves a cloth over metal utensils.  Waitstaff in Japan certainly polish a lot of silverware.  Every sip of my beer adds another ring to the smooth inner curve of the glass, and before long it begins to look like the banded atmosphere of Jupiter. 

Before ordering another pint, I climb the stairs to the toilet.  Along the wall are posters of San Francisco in its hippie heyday, one in particular of a crowd taken from the stage of some outdoor concert.  Psychedelic lettering above their shaggy heads reads, "All Together...Now."   And I'm together with them, the owners downstairs, with the whole chilled out vibe here.  They certainly have created a nice space.  But what they may not realize is that San Francisco Peaks is the name of a mountain range outside Flagstaff.  Unless of course it's an acid reference.  San Francisco peaking.  All together.  Now.

Out on the street, a guy in a beanie bobs his head deferently as he speaks with a tall man in a leather jacket and black pork pie hat.  I imagine them to be a struggling musician talking to a famous record producer, in a casual meeting here on the street.  In Japan, even the hipsters bow...



On the turntable:  Beck, "Mellow Gold"
On the nighttable: "The Ise Stories"

Fuji, Once Around (The Roads)

I leave the comfort of my inn only to be lashed in the face by the cold.  I'm wearing every piece of clothing I've been carrying, yet the cold still find a way through.  The sun isn't yet up, but every step through the dark brings warmth into my body. 

When walking roads, I tend to leave early, so as to get a good two or three hours under my feet before the traffic builds.  But already, the accompaniment of headlights sweeps my front and back, escorting me out of town like a lynch mob.  The road, Rte 469, eventually winds up a hill past a golf club, then becomes a long straightaway which bisects a section of military base.  Olive trucks continue to make up the bulk of the traffic, and here and again a lone soldier stands by the roadside.  They look like actors playing GI's in some WWII film, lean and lanky in a uniform two sizes too big. 

Both sides of the road are low grass, mowed and kept trim by one of these low ranking soldiers probably.  The tips of the grass are white with frost, and as I move along the sun finds me, popping up behind the Hakone range to the south and stretching my shadow toward the great volcano.  

It had been a bitterly cold night, yet despite this Fuji seems to have lost some of her snowy cap.  Nevertheless, it extends well down her shapely shoulders.  I sit awhile on a concrete berm watching her.  She watches me drink coffee.  To my left, Mt. Ashitaka who tries to tempt me away from the road.  I long for another day like yesterday, moving along the peace of mountain trails, and nearly talk myself into temporarily leaving the highway and meeting it again on the other side.  But to do so means adding additional kilometers and I'm facing 37 already.  I'd never make it Shiraito today.  Which means returning to complete the journey sometime in the future.  I stay with the bitumen. 

I leave 469 for another road that looks smaller on my map, yet I find it more heavily trafficked.  Worse, it leads straight uphill.   There are no shoulders here, so I hug the sides, tightrope walking above the gutter beneath high concrete walls.  The exertion brings on sweat beneath all the layers, tempting me to shed one or two, but each passing truck splashes me in its cold wake.  Morning rush hour is the worst time of day to walk, drivers speeding late to work, little expecting the walker coming out of the sun.  More than half are certain to be further distracted by mobile phones.  I dread most the blind curves, anticipating the moment when my body gets its final lesson in physics.  As if a reminder, a surprisingly large deer lies newly dead on the side of the road, light still in its eyes and foam bubbling from slightly parted lips. 

But I make it finally to the top of the low hill, to an open area that looked like pasture.  The Suyama route to the summit is somewhere in the trees behind me.  I warm myself in the sun awhile, then walked past the safari park to take a longer rest at the trail head to Ashitaka.  As I remove a couple layers,  a group of hikers stretches in the parking lot.   

I've swung to the south of Fuji now.  Restaurants, B&B's, and tourist shops have replaced the bases here.  Plus the traffic is much, much lighter.  I walk an actual sidewalk, along a sunny stretch of road.  It's still Rte 469, yet in my mind, I am in the northern limits of New Mexico.  The trees are different, but they frame a distant landscape filled with the snow-capped towering peaks of south Colorado.  I feast on this view until the eyes are overruled by the cravings of the stomach.  Climbing wearily up to a shrine to the yama no kami, I gaze out at Suruga Bay, just visible from this height.  It reminds me of something I once read about the yamabushi, about how their sacred sites are in the mountains because that is where they found the best views of the water.  The Japanese are a seafaring people, and so are their gods.    

Body and mind thus sated, I press on.  I'm quite pleased at my pace, 25 km before noon.  I had many such days in Shikoku, but only after a three week build-up of daily walking.  Today however is only day two.  I take a final rest at an outdoor BBQ place called Jumbo, across the road from a half dozen railway cars converted into karaoke boxes, yet now rusting and sprouting weeds.  The BBQ pits too look unused, if only  since the end of summer.  Yet I am still able to find a working outlet to charge my GPS.   The whinnying of the ponies in the adjacent corral serves as lullaby as I take a quick catnap on a bench in the sun.

I move toward a grove of high ceders to find Murayama Sengen Jinja. Shinto in name, the shrine is filled with Buddhist deities.  Again, the roots of Fuji worship go far back in time.  

But I move forward.  Up Rte 72, a dull walk ever lined by monocultural forest on both sides.  For the first time in two days, I can no longer see Fuji beyond my right shoulder.  With so little here to attract the eyes, I allow my music to take me to other places.  Before long, I'm coming into Shiraito town.  A couple more kilometers to the falls. Just as I'm hoping that there is a craft beer on sale in one of the shops, I notice a small cafe that claims to sell German brew.  In the parking lot is a European man loading crates into the bed of a pickup.  He tells me that he'll be closed until 4 pm, but he can sell me a bottle to go.  As he rings me up, I tell him that I'm planning to toast my walking 7 albeit nonconsecutive days around Mt.  Fuji.  Not only does he not seem at all interested, but he acts as if he hears this kind of thing from every customer.  With a similar lack of chalance, I drift out the door and up the road.

Then I'm standing at the overlook to the falls.  The water is indeed a white thread stretching effortlessly down the face of the rock wall.   Just as they were the first time I'd stood here a year ago, workmen and machines tear into the floor of the river bed, making the future passage easier for high heels and pampered pedigrees pooches.  I think that I'll probably never return, then turn and walk back past the old shops and their perpetual Showa era goods, out to the road in order to follow where my thumb will take me. 



On the turntable:  Wings, "Wings Greatest"
On the nighttable:  Robert Macfarlane, "The Wild Places"

Fuji, Once Around (The Hills)

The bear prints in the mud betray what may be lurking in the  kumazasa that lines both sides of the trail, grown as tall as I am this late in autumn.  But I don't scan the bushes for any dark, black shadows, as the act of holding up my head takes too much effort.  I'm tired.

This morning at 6:30, when I walked toward my bus, I was still a little drunk.  I don't usually drink to the point of drunkenness, but it is no surprise that I love good beer, and my friend Patrick had introduced me to a brewhouse that served loads of it.  As we downed our pints, I could feel them conspiring against me.  I hadn't eaten much that day, and was quite fatigued from a week long tour.  As fun as guiding can be, I usually don't sleep well.  Going for one last pint had seemed like a good idea at the time, but it proved to be a beer too far.  I found an empty seat in the reserved compartment of an express out of Tokyo, and later, rode as far as Fujiyama Station, my inebriated head bobbing along with those of the handful of men who seem to do this long journey every day.  

A bit of bread and coffee had helped ground me by the time I got off the bus at Hirano.  A year ago, I'd hitched a ride from this intersection, after a 6-day tour over the low peaks that frame Fuji's five lakes.  In fact I'd started not far from a sixth, Tanuki-ko, which lies a short flight away from Shiraito Falls by crow, yet what had proven three tough vertical hours on foot for me.  With Fuji serving the center of a clock's face, Shiraito would be at eight, and Hirano at two.  Sixty-five clockwise kilometers lay between, a distance I'd try to cover in two long days.

It was still quiet this early, Lake Yamanaka visible between B&B's and tennis courts.  I found my trailhead after 20 minutes or so, and began to ascend up a narrow ravine carved out by the feet of pilgrims and hikers.  The trail was covered in leaves ankle deep, and in warmer seasons I'd be thinking of snakes.  But the temps this morning had yet to pass zero, so I figured I was safe until March.  

Before long, I came to a viewpoint, to find a film crew setting up.  A couple of black vans parked nearby had "Patagonia" written on their sides.  The day was incredibly clear.  I considered this a reward for my head start.  Fuji loomed majestically on the left, and the crisp blue of Lake Yamanaka offset the brilliance of the snow capped South Alps further out.  The moon too lingered in the sky as if wanting a little more time with this million dollar view.  Myself similarly sated, I pushed upward into the kumazasa.

The top of this mound, Mt. Myojin, is completely bald and a good place for a long rest.  The sign pointing south tells me it is only 20 minutes to Mt. Mikuni, but nearly an hour passes before I arrive at the top, puffing and sweat drenched. As I attempt to catch my breath, I am beset upon by a handful of elderly hikers who ask their usual questions.  We have a pleasant chat before they leave me to my chocolate and the quiet.

I pass them not long after, as I make good time along this flat part of the ridge.  A bit too quick perhaps, as I surprise something large and grey which races through my eyeline and down the ridge.  A deer, based on the way it moved, but the coloring and size suggest a frighteningly large boar.  Yet the day is too nice to ruin with worry, and I move onward beneath the beautiful buna, shorn of all leaf. 

The ridgeline rises and falls over four peaks.  Each climb takes considerable effort, and I wish each time that I had slept more and had drank less.  Atop the last of the peaks I find a sign pointing to an overlook, which I find to be covered by 30 hikers quietly eating their lunch.  They are a friendly hiking club, one member seeming convinced I'm German.  After they leave, I spend a long time here, Fuji sitting just before me.  She tells me stories as I have my lunch.

Then downward, downward.  Toward the bottom, the trail is well cared for, with woodchips lining the earth.  I step from these onto the narrow streets bisecting holiday homes.  Something, the color of the sky perhaps, makes me sing the lyrics to "Tangled Up in Blue" as I follow the hilly roads down to the trailhead for the Subashiri Route.  Here, as at the start of all of Fuji's  trailheads, stands an Asama Shrine.  This one is pretty elaborate, with lots of little stones and stele nestled amidst the cobweb of little paths through the forested grounds.  In one small afterthought of a building, there's even a video about Fuji's World Heritage status.   

When I leave the shrine I find myself in Gotemba's outer suburbs.  As such, the next stretch is not a particularly interesting walk, skirting as it does a military base.  This entire eastern face of Fuji seems to be covered by a chain of bases, on land isolated enough on which to train, yet strategically close to Tokyo.  For the rest of the day, the majority of vehicles that pass are of the same drab shade of green.  As a kind of counterpoint, I find a racetrack, with men wheeling through figure eights and gunning along the straightaways in colorful vehicles not much larger than bumper cars.  I watch them awhile, then leave the main road.  

Gravel crunches beneath my steps as I move quietly through the trees.  The only traffic through here are trucks,  either the military variety, or else dump trucks toting earth somewhere.  I could be in Alaska here.  Midway along I pass a massive works project, which a guardman tells me will be a dam.  But there is simply no water anywhere in sight. 

I make an abrupt left and am back in suburbs, these a little nicer that the last set.  It actually looks a pleasant place to live, with little veggie plots, rustic country architecture, and as always, the mountain looming above.  I'm completely reliant on my GPS through here, zigzagging as I am.  I'm pleased that the plotted course also takes me along dirt paths through sections of forest, rather than sticking simply to the roads.  And I know I'm moving away from the bases when I see traces of the old ways again:   Jizo and stone markers; bamboo groves and tea bushes.  The stones help me imagine centuries of men being drawn toward Fuji like it's a beacon.  

Yet I am different, a man of my own times, being led away from the mountain -- and from the sacred -- by the latest in handheld technology.  


On the turntable:  Rolling Stones, "Let It Bleed"
On the nighttable:  Sarah Bird,  "The Yokota Officer's Club"

Sunday Papers: Jack Kerouac

"In prose you make the paragraph. Every paragraph is a poem."


On the turntable:  English Beat, "Special Beat Service'

 

Nakasendo Waypoints #75

Sky called down to earth,
Greeting it with a caress,
Then a white embrace.

On the turntable:  The Police, "Synchronicity"

Nakasendo Waypoints #74

In the grass withering,
The voice of a semi
Long out of season.

On the turntable:  The Who,  My Generation" 

Nakasendo Waypoints #73

The road leads ever on.
Autumn on the wane;
Winter birthed in snow.

On the turntable:  My Morning Jacket, "At Dawn"

Sunday Papers: Gil Scot-Heron

"Words are important for the mind, but the notes are for the soul."


On the turntable:  バルナギータ, "つなぎあわされた虹の輪を"

Sunday Papers: Patrick Sherriff

Nukes will not save us, leadership will. 


On the turntable:  Pearl Jam, "10"

Ueno in the Rain

It started with an Akamon curry in the rain.  Or out of the rain is more honest, sitting at a counter, my back to the brick wall that once served as a support for the eponymous red gate under which tens of thousands of students aspire to walk.  

I had walked past this gate, and the university it led to, a few weeks before, as the Nakasendo led me past Tokyo University in frighteningly similar weather.  The rain this time too is typhoon driven, and I walk through it away from my nearby ryokan, for my aforementioned curry, then further on toward the pond that serves as the heart of the school, with kiai shouts coming from the kyūdō dōjō above.  The steps down are slippery with wet.  

Beyond the campus, I walk around yet another body of water, nearly choked with lotus plants.  I stop at one point at the tall apartment building that stands as a monument to the fact that Donald Richie is no longer there.   

In one corner I stop at the Shitamachi museum that honors the period that Richie knew best.  The exhibits bring life to the post-war years.  On the first floor is a reproduction of an alley lined with houses, opened up like doll houses. Hanging from the windows of one are dried orange peels strung to keep the mozzies away.  Upstairs, a ground of octogenarians merrily play with the toys of their childhood.  And on a screen behind them, Ueno rises from the ashes of war.

The narrow corridors of Ameyoko-cho was one of the first things to rise, and it could be argued that it was the entrepreneurs of this one-time black market that birthed the eventual Economic Miracle and subsequent Bubble Years.  Today it is somewhat tarted up to resemble more a marketplace of any claustrophobic Asian city, complete with touts of a dozen ethnicities.

Passing through Ueno Station, I notice that there's an exhibition of feudal period Kyoto art, but I don't feel the need to go any further back in time.  Instead, I go gaze awhile at Saigo Takamori and his enormous dog.  Nearby, a half dozen homeless men are sitting beneath the overhanging lip of the public toilets, keeping out of the drizzle.  I'm amused to see that they're all reading books.  

In a similar fashion, Binzuru sits under the eves of the great temple here, keeping dry.  His red wooden belly has been rubbed white from the passing hands of those ailing.  A reminder of the high prevalence of stomach cancer here?  Or perhaps just the anxieties of living in our age, which knot my own stomach on occasion, disturbing sleep.   

Despite the light rain, the buskers hold their usual formation along the promenade.  A Peruvian pipe band, Lon Cheney's Phantom on stilts.  The music stays with me until the Toshogu shrine, then fades as I continue down the hill.  

Passing the galleries and bookstores, I find music again within the walls of an old-timey kissaten, and warm myself with a cup.  The shop has a Showa feel, and a French name, Ronault.  As a I sip, as I listen, the typhoon brings with it a premature darkness.


On the turntable:  The Avett Brothers, "Live, Volume 3" 

Nakasendo Waypoints #73

 At this early hour
Only the water is rushing,
Moving toward empty fields.

On the turntable:  REM, "Reckoning"
On the nighttable:  Shogo Oketani, " J-boys"

Changed Only for a Sight of Sound

It was my fourth visit to Kenrokuen this year, and to my delight I found that I was being guided by my ears. My eyes thus released, the sounds of the park began to dictate the pace of my footfalls, which themselves became an instrument in the symphony. The cry of a heron, the wind sweeping through the reeds, the clack of bamboo, the scratch of branches on stone. All the cry of an autumn newborn.

So I lay back in a quiet corner of the park, the maples above silhouetted against a clear blue sky, each leaf small and delicate and perfect, like a baby's hand. Then with eyes closed, I let one of Japan's most beautiful gardens wash over me...


On the turntable:  Yes, "Close to the Edge"
On the nighttable:  Harold S. Williams, "Tales of the Foreign Settlements in Japan"

Further on Basho's Narrow Road... (Narrow Road Signs II)

Rain soaked willows
Hang limp from weeping  

Second-hand tears.

 Swirling swirling.
For three days the winds,
This morning the birds.

 Children deserve
Better than war;
I can offer only chestnuts.

Its lifts now silent,
The ski hill's only echo
Is the schussing of susuki.

Where the Shogun found wealth
I find far more value
In the gold in the trees.

 On the turntable:  John Coltrane, "The Complete Impulse Studio Sessions"

Sunday Papers: Robert Macfarlane

"To reach a summit is very palpably to have triumphed over adversity: to have conquered something, albeit something utterly useless.  It is the imagined significance of the summit -- which is after all, nothing but a patch of rock or snow raised higher than any other by the contingencies of geology; a set of co-ordinates in space; a figment of geography; a point without a point -- which has largely given rise of the industry of ascent."


On the turntable:  Thelonious Monk:  Live at the It Club"
On the nighttable:  Robert Macfarlane, "Mountains of the Mind"

Background Artists

I recently heard my buddy Deep Mikey L. get interviewed for a podcast on Notebook on Cities and Culture (the name of which never fails to remind me of the second Talking Heads album, though it really should remind me of Wim Wenders).  In the interview, Michael mentioned that the majority of his friends in Kyoto were Japanese.  This saddened me a bit.

I too once had my fair share of Japanese friends.  This was the usual state of affairs in the 'Nog, where amidst a population of over 100,000, a mere twenty or so were westerners.  And even most of that small number revolved in and out every summer.   I felt like I shared equal time on stage with my Japanese friends, as I lived out the performance that was my life there.  

I met my current wife a few months prior to my moving down to Kyoto in 2006.  Upon her return to Japan from a year spent in Canada, she had had the good sense to choose native English speakers as flatmates, in order to keep her language abilities up.  So it was that when I moved here, I joined a pre-made, foreigner heavy friendship base.  

Most of the Japanese people I know are students or teachers from the yoga world, or from my Takeuchi dojo, and I don't really know any of them very well.  We get along fine, and frequently share laughter, but I know next to nothing about them.

A part of this could be the conservative aloofness of the Kyoto native, a status bestowed only after a number of generations here. (Kyoto is the only place I've ever been where a person on a quiet street won't return a friendly greeting.)

And with some profound regret I feel that I am no longer sharing my experiences in this country with the people of this country, and that the Japanese I see rushing around me every day have taken on the part of mere extras.


On the turntable:  Thievery Corporation,  "Lebanese Blonde"
On the nighttable:  Charles R. Scott, "Rising Son"