Wow has it really been since X-Mas since I wrote last? I guess that means I am having fun. Last time I wrote I was of two minds about how I felt about Japan. I think I just had to get over the culture shock and re normalize my economic sense. Since then I have come to like the country much better. It seems to be feeling the same way about me. For example I just had the girls soccer team of a local high school escort me everywhere in Kagoshima but te hostel I was trying to go to. But I get ahead of myself.
Nara is a cool town with tons of character, amazing temples and most important of all, awesome couch surfers. I went there and stayed at a hostel the first night. Same deal with curfew and all of that. But they did have free WiFi, which I used to check out the area for CS. I happened to notice that a local CSer named Mayumi owns a cafe and is hosting a NYE party. So I decided to stop in to say hi and she ended up inviting me to stay for dinner.
Needless to say dinner was awesome and I met a ton of other cool Nara locals there. I stayed with her another night before I hopped down to meet a CSers in Kyoto for dinner, Jun. She showed me around that night but sadly I had to get back to my hotel for curfew. We ate sushi which was awesome but unfortunatly it seems to have made her sick, not awesome. The next day I met up with another CSer in Kyoto, Jerry. He helped me make good use of my JR pass that day and showed me all the major temples and shrines. I even got to see my first Zen rock garden. I crashed at his place, it was an excellent day.
The next day was even more excellent. It was NYE day and Jerry was going to take me to a place that served Whale for lunch. Unfortunately it was closed for the holiday so we went a sushi place instead. This was the most adventursome meal I have had in Japan. Not only did I defy death and eat the potentially deadly Fugu, I tried raw horse stomach smoked horse bacon and raw horse back fat too. It was quite yummy, with the exception of the back fat. They told me to keep chewing it until it was sweet. They sounded quite sincere but now I wonder if they just wanted to see a Gaijin make funny faces while chewing horse back fat.
That night we went back to Nara for NYE with Mayumi and friends. For dinner we had the traditional Japanese NYE dinner of tacos with guacamole. Ok so it’s not tradition but it was quite good, just like home cookin! After dinner we all went to a famous shrine for the “countdown” which was just hanging out in a line with hundreds of people until they start playing drums at midnight. It’s a big holiday for the Japanese and they all go to the shrine to make their first wish of the new year. Then we hopped over to the temple to make the first prayer to Buddha for the new year. I stopped to get my fortune, here is a summary of what it said. (There is a photo in the gallery if you would like to see it.)
No Luck:
Someone will betray you. Beware of fire and theft. You will become sick. I will lose a legal case. It is a bad time to make a trade. It is not a good time for me to travel. A person I have been waiting for will not come. I will not find a thing I lost. I will lose a competition.
Great.. Fortunately the Japanese believe that if you do not want the fortune you can tie it to this special rack and leave it behind so it will not affect you. Needless to say, I did so.
There were tons of other great CSers there. One cool cat in particular I met this night is Rushyan. I will let her blog speak for her at http://www.pathsofmoltenwax.blogspot.com/
The next day I took my hangover and left, Nara that is. I headed down to Hiroshima. This city is intense. I visited the peace park, A-Bomb dome, Nuclear museum and memorial. There is some amazing and hear wrenching stuff there. I did the museum last and by the end of it I had watery eyes. Nuclear weapons are seriously bad news. 340,000 people died in Hiroshima from the bomb that year, and they estimate that many more died from cancers and other effects of radiation in the following years. The largest hydrogen bomb ever tested was over 3,000 times as strong as the one dropped in Hiroshima. There are over 30,000 nuclar weapons in the world today, all ready to be used. What could the USA possible need 10,000 nuclear weapons for? (Russia has 15,000)
I highly recommend Hiroshima to everyone. The museum and memorial are not happy places but very powerful and worth the trip. The rest of the city on the other hand is a very happy. First off it’s amazing how this city has recovered from being totally destroyed sixty years ago. If not for the memorial I would not have any idea it had happened by looking at the city. The people are very nice and apparently hold no ill will towards Americans. They were in fact significantly nicer then in Tokyo. I really like Hiroshima and if I was not in a hurry to get maximum use out of my rail pass, I would spend a lot more time here.
I met a cool guy named Tarro in Hiroshima. He taught me a great new Japanese word, hitogomi. In Japanese hito means people and gomi means trash. They use this word to describe crowded places. The museum was hard to read the exhibits and I can see over everyone, every wall was three people deep. Hitogomi-people trash what a great description. That’s what I get for going on a big holiday.
After that cheery experience I headed down to Fukuoka. Unfortunatly every hotel in Fukuoka was full. No problem, internet cafes right? My friend Mark lived here for several years and he hooked me up with a friend of his who owned a bar. I hung out there until 3 dancing and having a grand old time. After I left it took two hour of walking around to five different cafes until I found one with one cubicle with an upright chair open. As far as I could tell this was the only place in all of Fukuoka I could sleep at, I took it. Earlier that night I went to a famous Yakatori place and ate all kinds of weird food. The weirdest one that I knew what it was is pig foot. It was not horrible but I can’t say I recommend it. The rest of the food was quite good, the first time.
Sitting in an internet cafe, totally exhausted, tasting my dinner again as I deposit it into the trash I think will be the low point of my Japan trip. I did manage to curl up on the floor and get a few hours of sleep. There were no hotels again the next night so I just left.
Nagasaki was my next stop and by the time I got there my stomach was back in shape. Not only did they have a room, they had a single room with a bathroom for amazingly cheap. Nagasaki and the people in it are also amazingly friendly. The museum and memorial were way less crowded, though not as powerful either.
Today I hopped from Nagasaki to Kagoshima. Along the way I had four people offer their help. The thing is for the first three I knew exactly where I was going. I was just walking along and people wanted to make sure the orange hair Gaijin was happy and I was.
The last time I was offered help I did have my map out. It was a girl in a soccer uniform that came up to me to ask if I needed help. I said I did and handed her the flier to the hostel I was looking for. She took it over to the rest of the team, they passed it around, giggled, made lots of high pitched noises I can only assume were some form of communication. eventually one looked at me and yelled “Lets go!” and lead the team out of the train station. As you can imagine, I was greatly amused. Giggling girls in Japan crack me up. They really make the funniest noises and they vocalize more then anyone on the planet that I am aware of.
The leader of the moment only lead us out the door before it was time for a team conference on where the place was. After about a minute a different girl would look at me and yell “Lets go!” and take off in a direction. This would happen at every intersection. There would be chatter for about a minute until a different one would look at me with the inevitable “Lets go!”.
Along the way one of the girls gave me this strange up full of snack sticks. I don’t know how to describe them but I ate one, looked at her and said very loudly “Very good!” and gave her a thumbs up. All the girls laughed and suddenly it became to be the thing to feed the Gaijin strange snacks. I tried to refuse but they would look at me and pout for about five seconds before I would give in. They even stopped at one point at a Lawsons to buy strange things to see if the Gaijin would eat them. Of course I did and gave them their “Very good!”.
I should note that there was maybe ten English words they understood between them and very, good, lets and go were four of them. Fortunately I have learned to count in Japanese so I could answer the rest of the standard one word questions like “Tall?” “Heavy?” and “Age?”. Apparently height and weight and age are public record here and are almost always asked right after “Where?” which is often the first word spoken to me. They did however know where on a map Arizona is. Some how all Japanese know exactly where Arizona is, it amazes me. The other question that is standard in all of Asia is “Wife?” or “Married?” and Japan is no exception.
I have not bothered to learn how to say no in Japanese yet because I love their hand expression for it. To indicate no in Japan without speaking you don’t shake your head, you hold up your arms or hands in an X. I don’t know why it amuses me so much but every chance I get I do the X. Just like I say “Hai” every change I get, which means yes or I understand.
Four different times one of the girls asked me if I had a wife. I would give them the X, they would giggle and run back to the middle of the group. The last time one asked she finally pointed at me and said “You wife” and then pointing at the ground saying “Kagoshoma” as if to indicate I should find a wife there. I just looked at her and said sarcastically “You are a bit young to be asking to marry me”. (I had previously determined they were all 16) Her eyes just got big and she just stood there stunned staring at me. Apparently she understood me. Then we all broke out laughing. Much to my relief, that was the end of the talking about wives.
It was clear to me the girls had no idea where to go in the first 5 minutes but we did this for nearly an hour before I was more annoyed by the heavy backpack then amused by the girls. I finally talked one of them into using her phone to call the hostel, several times. They guy from the hostel finally just gave up on giving them directions and told us to say put, walked ten minutes to us and guided me to the hostel. I said “Sayanora and Arigato Goziamas” to the girls got a rather boisterous “Sayanora!” in response. The hostel was a two minute walk from the train station that the girls offered to help me at.
This is so different from my initial impression of Japan. In Tokyo people would run away rather then be asked a question. Here people will skip a tram stop to make sure you get off at the right one then walk ten minutes to show you to a museum, all without you asking. That happened in Hiroshima. I don’t know if it’s the difference between big cities and small, or north/east vs. south/west japan or just people responding to my state of mind but Japan is really warming up to me, as I am to it.
Tomorrow I catch the ferry south to the magical Yakushima Island. This is supposed to be the most beautiful forest in Japan. The forest in Princess Mononoke was inspired by and modeled after this island. If you don’t know my love for that movie, my DJ name is Kodama which is stolen from it. I am more excited to be heading there then anywhere I have been in Japan yet.