Having seen six airports in the last twenty-four hours, I’m now back from vacation.
I took this picture on Sunday morning just after 6:00am as I was walking through the snow on the runway at Eagle County Airport. From this tiny regional airport, I flew to Denver, then Seattle, then Narita (Tokyo’s international airport). I took a bus from Narita to Haneda (Tokyo’s domestic airport), then flew the last leg to Matsuyama. And boy, are my arms tired.
Taking a page out of Claudia’s book, I’m leaving this brief. I plan to give you all the details of my fabulous time in the US in the next couple of days.
Preface:
I wrote this about a trip I took in August over summer break from school. I started writing it just after I got back to Matsuyama, but the process of arranging all the detail in this post exhausted me, and I still haven’t written about the last two thirds of the trip. I think this is my longest post to date, and it only covers the first part of my trip. I hope to get to the rest very soon.
I don’t remember when I first heard about Bunny Island, but I think it was about a year ago. Then earlier this year, I read a blog post written by a JET ALT who went there in February. A month and a half later, I was happily accepting a position in Matsuyama, pretty close to the island.
Its actual name is Ohkunoshima (with the accent on the first elongated “O”). It was once home to a secret weapons plant (where they actually hid WMDs!). Many Japanese people, even from the cities nearest the island, have never heard of it.
The site itself fascinated me from the first moment I heard about it (A super secret island in the Seto Inland Sea that still has ruins of an illegal WWII-era gas plant? Oh, heck yeah!), so when I learned our school’s summer vacation was two weeks long, I figured that would be the perfect time to go.
This (excessively long) post is about the good luck, good people, and good experiences I was fortunate enough to encounter on that brief two day trip.
***
8/8/08
When I woke up late two days ago, I knew I’d have to rush to make the 10am bus. I’d already skipped a day in my plans to go to Ohkunoshima because I wasn’t yet ready to leave. (I wanted to buy a book for the trip, but the bookstore was closed by the time I decided. A lame excuse, especially since I didn’t end up reading it, but I wanted an extra day to relax anyway.) So I scrambled to get ready and get out the door at about 9:40 for the fifteen minute ride to the city station.
I added my bike to the hordes of bicycles already gathered and concentrated like so many lengths of tangled Christmas tree lights, and briskly walked back to the empty platform where my bus would soon be. Relieved that I’d made it in time, I used my five minute buffer to go inside the station and ask again whether or not I needed to buy a ticket before boarding the bus. As you might imagine, I don’t always know if I’m getting good information when I speak to people in Japan. Usually we speak in a mixed form of “Japanglish,” so I’m never sure if my takeaway message is exactly what they meant, and I wanted to be absolutely certain that I could get on the bus without a ticket. I got confirmation that the fare was determined and payment collected upon leaving the bus.
Relieved, I went back outside to see that my bus had just divested its passengers and was boarding to leave in about thirty seconds. I stepped on with a confused look on my face and the driver smiled and pointed to the ticket dispenser on my right. “Take ticket,” he said, his meaning already clear. I took a ticket labeled “0,” and wondered what it meant.
I’m not sure what I expected, but I think I was the fourth person to get on the full size touring coach at that terminus, and I was surprised to see the bus as empty as it was. The bus was pretty nice, with deep red velour seats, and actual curtains on the windows. Another thing that surprised me was the fifth foldaway “jumper” seat in the aisle of every row, whose use would completely block the exit for passengers behind that row. Different safety standards for different countries, I suppose.
The bus left as soon as I sat down. We had one more stop in Matsuyama, where I realized that oncoming passengers were collecting tickets labeled “1.” At that point I figured out the price board above the driver’s head and the pricing based on how far you’d ridden, and understood why my ticket was labeled “0.”
I took a few moments to finally relax and let some of the dampness evaporate out of my shirt. Even though it was still early morning, I’d ridden pretty hard to get to the station on time, stopping once to put the chain back on Rusty’s rear sprocket. He gets crotchety when I ride in a spirited manner. The air conditioner on the bus was adequate, but nothing spectacular. A nice touch was the adjustable automobile-style vents placed above each seat, which I directed at my back. This was my first long-distance trip since I started working in Japan, and I saw some of Matsuyama that I hadn’t seen before, so I took a few pictures of the city as we passed.
Every time I mention wanting to go to a beach in Matsuyama, people tell me to go to Hojo (a town on the northern outskirts of Matsuyama) instead of Matuyama’s beaches, so I was delighted to see the bus stop right at a beach complex in Hojo. After that, civilization thinned out until it was just a highway rest stop / beach restaurant every mile or two. Even that held my interest though, as I think Japan has some very interesting geometric artificial breakwater blocks, and the restaurants and small populated coves are fascinating.
Civilization started picking back up as we approached Imabari, a small city on the northern tip of Shikoku (the Japanese island on which Matsuyama is located). The outskirts seem very depressed, and reminded me a lot of the images you see when the US evening news talks about Detroit. Downtown Imabari was another story though, and reminded me very much of a small California coastal city. There was a rest stop and driver change in Imabari, and with the bus door left open for a few minutes, you could smell the sea air and see the boats slowly bobbing in the docks, only a hundred yards away from the bus station. Even passing through for as short a time as we did, I got the impression that life travels a little slower there.
We were back on the road in short order, heading northeast toward the series of bridges and islands that connect Shikoku with Honshu (the biggest of the four main islands). There was a lot to see on the way, and I felt like a total tourist, snapping pictures of anything that caught my eye. I gave myself permission to play tourist for a while, disregarding the mild amount of attention it brought the only gaikokujin on a slowly-filling bus. I half expected someone to remind me that I wasn’t on a tour bus.
At each stop, I checked the kanji on my bus schedule with the kanji on the board at the front announcing the next stop, and (when I could understand it) the “next stop is …” announcements from the speakers in the bus. I felt a little tension growing as my stop approached, because I really didn’t have a plan for what to do once I got off the bus, but I tried to relax and enjoy my first trip through the real Japanese countryside.
When it came up though, it was easy to spot, letting off in a large bus turnaround area with a few bus stops around the perimeter.
From my bus stop, I didn’t know where to go for the ferry I needed, or how I would get there if it was too far to walk. Just looking at a map, the bus stop seemed to be a tiny outpost next to one of the bridges, and that turned out to be about right. The area around the bus stop has a highway rest stop and a small collection of highway trap businesses, including a restaurant, a gift shop, a small convenience store, and (thank the gods) a bicycle rental shop.
I took a few pictures of the scenery, ate a lunch of octopus tempura and udon at the restaurant, and set about finding information on the ferry I needed to catch. I first asked the waitress at the restaurant where I needed to go to catch the ferry, and she told me the name of the town I needed to get to. Having never heard the name and finding it quite a mouthful, I promptly forgot it, but she walked me next door to the convenience store and handed me a ferry schedule with the town’s name on it. She exchanged a few words with the convenience store clerk, and both ladies said something to me in Japanese I didn’t understand at all. Through a few iterations of smiles and language retries, they told me I should go next door and rent a bicycle.
I later learned the bicycle rental shop caters to people who rent bikes to ride across all the bridges between Honshu and Shikoku- an understandably popular attraction in that gorgeous countryside, especially for someone who likes bridges as much as I do. The area is a mix of different types of classical Japanese scenery, with little wooded rocky island hills popping up out of the sea and Japanese people wearing classic kasa (those stereotypical wide, flat, cone-shaped hats) while working terraced rice paddies alongside the most modern and impressive of bridges. If you have any interest in bridges or modern architecture, it seems like riding the island highway would be a fantastic way to spend a few days, as most of the bridges are constructed in different styles, and the sea breezes are refreshing even on the early August days I was there.
The young lady at the bicycle shop was quite helpful, providing me with a map of the island we were on (Ohmishima) and a brochure for the bridges-by-bicycle tour I mentioned. I plunked down my ¥1500 (~$15.00), signed on the line, and rode away on one of their cruisers.
I had about an hour to ride the three miles from the bicycle rental shop to the ferry landing, an easy cruise up the coast of the island. It’s been so long since I’ve been to the beach, I just wanted to take big heaping lungfuls the sea air. I could feel my lungs thanking me.
Now, as near as I could understand her, the woman told me to ride up the main road until I got to the ferry port. I hit a bit of a snag though, when the main road veered away from the coast. Straight ahead was a small road, barely wide enough for two cars to slowly pass each other. Thinking that couldn’t be the way I needed to go, and that the road must just be temporarily veering around some coastal feature I couldn’t see, I followed the main road as it turned inland, not suspecting I’d just turned away from the road I needed.
I passed a very small local beach and made it to the ferry dock with only a few minutes to spare. Looking around, I realized that I didn’t see another bicycle rental shop to which I should return my bike, so I stopped to ask a man if there was a bicycle rental shop in the dock area. He was already getting out the paperwork to check my bike back in when I realized this guy had been working in the office where I had just rented the bike an hour ago. He gave me back a ¥1000 (~$10.00) deposit I hadn’t even realized was two thirds of the cost of the rental and collected a copy of my rental form. He loaded the bicycle in the back of a small van, and turned on the road to go back to the main office. This guy had just driven from the main office specifically to collect my bike at this small town.
Smiling and amazed at their “system” for collecting bicycles (so that’s why she asked where I was going), I went inside to buy a ticket for the ferry. It was at this point that I realized I was really moving down the food chain of Japanese cities. Matsuyama is not a metropolis, but it’s definitely a medium-sized city. The bus passed through smaller Imabari to drop me at the tiny tourist-driven whistle-stop where I rented the bike. Then I turned off that main road and ended up at the ferry dock that was supposed to take me to Ohkunoshima. I didn’t even see anything that I’d call a town- it was just a dozen buildings lining the waterfront across the street from the dock. I presume the town’s handful of employees all live in one of the rice farms and small orchards I passed along the road.
On the upside, the bike path that parallels that highway is absolutely gorgeous. That’s one thing I’ll say for Japanese civil engineers- they build a killer bike path. A few hundred yards away from the coast, I realized the highway was heading into the foothills, and didn’t seem likely to turn back and follow the coast. I stopped and asked a road construction worker where we were. As I feared, he pointed to the highway I was hoping he wouldn’t say we were on. I checked my watch and turned around, careful to choose the driveway I’d previously avoided.
As soon as I got back outside, the ferry started loading passengers. I was surprised to see that it was a full size ferry with space for cars on the lower deck and a couple hundred seats on the upper level. The trip to the actual island was basically an uneventful ferry ride, which gave me time to enjoy the Engrish on display. I got a little concerned when I started thinking about the fact that I didn’t have a reservation at the only hotel on the island. I figured the worst case scenario would be me spending a night on the beach leaned up against my backpack.
But hey, I brought a towel (thank you, Douglas Adams), so I was prepared for just about anything.
I recently read a sentence in Japanese and fully understood every word.
It was no big deal, just a piece of labeling on a pamphlet accompanying some classy souvenir sweets, but I realized after reading it that it was the first sentence in Japanese (standard kanji and hiragana mix not simplified or intended for learners) that I’d read and understood. It was one of those slow motion realizations that only hits you a minute or two afterward. I was particularly proud of myself because I just learned most of the kanji in the last few weeks running up to the JLPT.
I don’t think I’ve mentioned it before, but I’m sitting for a national Japanese test this Sunday. It’s called the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT for short), and it’s the national certification method used to gauge one’s Japanese ability. There are four levels (4-kyu through 1-kyu), and I’m taking the lowest one, level four.
I had my last Japanese lesson before the exam this morning, and it went reasonably well. For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been taking practice exams in my lessons, and steadily improving my scores. I think I’ll pass the test with a decent margin.
In other news, I came to the realization that unless I blog more often than I do interesting things, I’ll never catch up. It’s in that vein that I’m making this post right now. I have a huge backlog of pictures and potentially interesting things to describe, but they’ll have to wait until at least next week.
When I was working for Silver State Helicopters, there was a young woman working as the administrative assistant for the IT department named Kristin. Kristin had (and presumably still has) a tattoo on the back of her neck of two kanji. She requested the kanji because the shop told her they meant “angel.”
Many Americans seem to be fascinated with the idea of getting something ancient tattooed on themselves, adding history and significance by association with indelibly-marked symbols and ideas. Many people get tribal tattoos from tribes they’ve never met (or that never existed), military symbols from armies of which they’ve never been a part, and writing in languages they don’t speak.
The problem with this of course, is that if you’re not actually in the group with which you’re associating yourself, you can’t really be sure of all the baggage that comes with the symbology- or worse, that the symbols you’ve chosen to mark your skin for life mean something wholly different than what your tattoo artist told you they mean.
Kristin thought she was getting a tattoo of the Japanese kanji for “angel,” and I’m happy to report that she basically got what she paid for. I asked my school’s office manager to look at the photo Kristin kindly let me take of her tattoo, and she said that while the kanji certainly says “angel,” it doesn’t look Japanese, but likely a script form of older Chinese kanji. The modern Japanese print form is on the left.
If you’re interested, the first symbol is 天, often pronounced “ten,” and is the symbol for “heaven” and “sky.” It’s also the first part of the word “tempura.” The second symbol is 使, with many different readings, most of which are a derivation of “messenger” or “envoy.” Thus 天使 means “heaven’s messenger,” or “angel.”
I just finished playing through Portal. (If you’ve played it, you probably figured that out from the title of the post.) It’s a fun game, and certainly deserving of most of the hype it’s received. A friend of mine recently said that it was nice to see a good 3D engine used for something other than a First Person Shooter, and I agree.
It’s a great puzzle game that consistently reminded me of Zelda (Ocarina of Time, specifically). It has a good learning curve right up until the last two levels, each of whose difficulty easily dwarfs all previous levels combined.
Like many good puzzle games, it’s strangely addictive. I get simulator sickness from playing most 3D games, and Portal was no exception. I have a headache and an upset stomach as I write this, in fact. It was a mild effect though, unlike some other games I’ve played. Anyway, my point is that the game was good enough to play through the slight dizziness.
If you’re at all interested in Portal, go play it.
Since there’s no way I’m going to let a whole month go by without a blog post, I thought I’d toss up a quick post about clothes here in Japan. Specifically, clothes that have Engrish on them. There seems to be no market for clothing with correctly written English, as it’s used almost exclusively as a design element rather than a method of conveying meaning. That, combined with the facts that English is “cool” and that the vast majority of Japanese people can only derive a rude meaning from a string of English words, means that there are a lot of Japanese people showing off their “English” (and very often pseudo-American) clothes without knowing what abuses of the English language are actually written on them.
When I see English in Japan, I’m genuinely surprised if it isn’t rife with errors. I couldn’t possibly hope to document it all, but when I have my camera, I try to capture the gems. The first few pictures you see are pictures of my students I took in my classroom. You can’t really read all of them in the scaled down versions, so I typed out the contents. I tried to help as much as I could through punctuation, though it didn’t often help.
LEFT: Surf riding goodstream, Professing skilled profession
RIGHT: Stinson Beach, California: The Wave is Forever
From left to right: Individual For Pleasure Only Guaranteed to fit better D.O.Daddy 65 Twist frontside [Remainder illegible due to shirt fold] It takes a little more to make a Champion. Champion authentic athletic apparel
STAYING, you are on the verge of salvation! You are on the verge of salvation! When it is made to revive vividly, ground at a sense beyond the word stands up and appears that shaft line the world.
LEFT: [New York Yankees logo on polo shirt breast] RIGHT: SAMURAI Japan
LEFT: Wask 22 RIGHT: Pour les enfants hushush Avoir le coeur leger
Included just because they’re goofballs.
Long and [obscured] condition (?) PARADISE for the sake of attaining SUNSET BEACH, surfing least much comes
The Eastboy go in the future begin to walk. The words that give me hope. A friend in need is a friend indeed. When I was troubled, I encourage it. As for you, how many “friends” are there?
Engrish isn’t limited to clothing, as this bag proves. I love the American Nutrition Facts label.
IT’S NEW, Honey sweet. Would you like a NATIONAL BISCUIT? You will be crazy about Rich Flavor! Special Value
Burger Special
GLUTTONS Special mega burger
From left: [top illegible] 1970 GRATEFUL ROSES: It’a [sic] Beautiful In Black Pia angel 08 [upper French obscured] esprit de paris 1998, TRÈS BON!!
GRATEFUL ROSES: It’a [sic] Beautiful In Black
I certainly can’t fault my students for wearing clothes with broken English. Here’s what they have to choose from when they go shopping: CRESCENT- Full of energy, Galaxy Grobal [sic] Universe, Starry night, Catch your dream Cleared up, it is fine today. THE SKY CLEARED UP BEAUTIFULLY. The tree leaves glistened after the rain. Lustrous Cherry lips from you WIND PURSUE lack of ability Excellent Clear Sight, Magnificent Scenes I MADE A PROMISE WITH HER ON THURSDAY Artlessness & Fleckle
Delight smile and friendly competing with each other
Let me take a moment to give you an example of the “height” of fashion in Matsuyama. Note the “man bag” clipped to a belt loop, embroidered jeans (with bonus sewn-up hole) tucked into cowboy boots, and poofy, bleached “Lion King” hairdo.
Rock the World with you [the text is from a song of this name]
We gotta know we’re on the run I just grab your stuff, and in a minute we’ll be gone We’re gonna pull away like strangers, but soon the world will know How far this kinda love could ever go Remember what I say Baby don’t matter what they do
There’s always more Engrish to be had, so I’m sure I’ll post plenty of it in the future. I need to get some sleep though, so I’m going to pull away like a stranger.
Do you know how a sumo match works? Basically, the loser is the first one thrown out of the ring or the first one to touch the ground inside the circle with anything other than the soles of his feet. Now imagine for a moment that you’re watching a sumo match; except instead of a pair of 350 lb men, the competitors are 350 lb shrines carried on the shoulders of forty men. Now imagine that there are men standing on top of these shrines taunting the other team as they crash into each other at a full run. Does what you’re imagining look about like this?
This is a picture I took yesterday at the Matsuyama Mikoshi festival, just before impact. A mikoshi is a portable shrine, a spiritual vessel used to carry around the patron god of a normal Shinto shrine once a year when it’s paraded through the streets of the surrounding neighborhood to bring its inhabitants and businesses good luck.
Speaking of good luck, the chosen route for my neighborhood’s shrine took it right past my apartment on Monday night. I took this picture and video leaning out the window by my stove.
They’re louder than I expected, but I still have no idea what they’re saying.
The men’s shrine was followed shortly by these two teams of cute (kawaii!) kids carrying their smaller versions.
Surprisingly, they left the shrine in the empty lot next to my apartment overnight before the matches Tuesday morning. Here’s the team about to maneuver the shrine into the place.
Here’s the team actually setting it down.
And there it sat until morning.
So I took some more pictures.
Most of the actual matches took place early in the morning on Tuesday. The crowds were thick on every available viewing place.
What does it actually look like in action, you ask? Here’s a video I took of an actual bout taking place. You can see the initial charge with the whole team pushing on the backs of the men in front of them, the initial impact when the shrines hit each other, the teams slowly turning while each team is trying to push the other backwards (100 men in a giant disorganized pirouette…), and the shrines and teams pulling apart when the match is over.
The winners were happy enough to do some crowdsurfing from the top of their shrine.
After the bouts were all over, there was a closing ceremony with all eight of the shrines that were in the day’s competition.
There were also some food vendors set up to catch the foot traffic.
I bought a frankfurter on a stick and fresh french fries from two of the stands. Then, feeling rather weighed down by the grease, I stopped by a Lawson’s convenience store (it’s so much easier to just say “conbini”) and grabbed an onigiri rice ball and a drinkable carton of active-cultured yogurt. Walking away from the site, I was surprised to see some of the contestants and other event participants leaving in the backs of open-bed trucks.
Overall, a highly enjoyable and exciting festival.
Last night I ate at a new restaurant with some JET folk. Like most restaurants in Matsuyama, the menu was in Japanese. Some restaurants have pictures, and luckily, this one had many.
One of the things I try to do when I eat out is try many different kinds of food. If I’m eating out and can’t decide between two dishes, 99% of the time I’ll choose the one I haven’t had before. In fact, it was just recently that I had to start relaxing that guideline, as I ran out of untried dishes in the restaurants in my neighborhood. I like takoyaki, I’ve eaten whale sushi, I eat raw eggs over my gyudon, and I do actually eat plenty of squid, despite my earlier experience with squid heads. I’ve even had natto recently that I didn’t mind at all. (For the record, the only thing I refuse to eat is shrimp in the shell. I don’t mean “peel and eat,” I mean “eat the shell with the shrimp”— unlike Ms. Semba, who sees it as another opportunity to get Calcium.) I’m an active and avid explorer of the culinary landscape of Japan.
Anyway, we went to a yakitori restaurant in the Okaido shopping arcade I’ve mentioned a number of times. I couldn’t read much of the kanji on the menu, so I just ordered by picture. I wanted a sushi dish to go with my chicken skewers and gyoza, so I ordered what looked like a deep red fatty tuna.
When it came, I was a little surprised at how much more it looked like beef than the picture. Not the squeamish one though, I plunged in after a brief moment to consider whether I trusted the restaurant’s preparation. I was interested to see what beef sushi tasted like.
It tastes exactly like you think it does. You know when you open a plastic tray of (fresh) raw beef from the supermarket, and you can smell the beef? It tasted about like that. Not really all that appetizing, but not enough of a turn off to not finish the three pieces I got.
After the meal, I was flipping through the menu to see how much I owed for my three small dishes; and relaxing after my meal, I realized I could read more of the kanji than I originally thought. Looking up at my beef sushi, I couldn’t find the character for “beef.” After a few puzzled seconds, I realized what it did have though, was the character for “horse.”
Yes, I ate horse sushi. My stomach turned just a little bit at the realization.
I’m happy to report that I’m feeling no ill effects of last night’s meal- not that I really anticipated any. Overall, I’d say it’s worth trying just to do; maybe order one dish between a couple friends so everyone gets just one piece, though. I was piling on the wasabi when I thought it was beef. I think I would have needed twice as much had I known it was horse.
Tonight was a fun night. It started at Katrina’s apartment (where I was quite late due to the fact that I get off work at 9pm and everyone else had been partying for three hours already), then went to a little dive bar with karaoke, then ended at a gaikokujin bar near Okaido.
This may make very little sense to you, and that’s okay, because here are my takeaway lessons:
Japanese bars have the coolest karaoke machines. The tiny place we went had a WiFi remote for their karaoke machine. The remote had a touchscreen that let you search by song name or artist name, and the microphones were also wireless.
As much as I may like (or not like, depending on my mood) my apartment, Katrina’s is better. She has three (albeit smaller) rooms to my one larger one, with a full-size couch (it’s a pullout!) and a regular western-style bed.
Japanese people really know how to cut loose. At Sola Sol (the gaikokujin bar near Okaido), I saw a number of Japanese businessmen that were totally plastered. It was a little surprising, because although I’d heard of the stereotype, I’d only seen Japanese people during the daytime with their professional faces on. I was introduced to a whole new part of town, with a multitude of watering holes and stumbling suits.
I discovered that there really is a foreigner contingent in this town outside of the JET ALTs. In Sola Sol, I met a number of native English speakers who have nothing to do with JET (okay, two, but that’s independently surprising just the same).
Anyway, it was a fun night (morning!). It was my first real night out on the town since coming to Japan, and I was so very glad to have it (even if it did involve fixing Katrina’s computer).
Having seen six airports in the last twenty-four hours, I’m now back from vacation.
