Checking In from the Road

July 27, 2010 Yakushima 4 Comments

Writing from a net cafe in the middle of Kyoto. A private room with a recliner, all the internet, comics, and melon soda I can drink until 8:00 am, for the same price as a hostel dormitory. They even have showers. The warped logic of urban Japan.

I don’t want to go into too much detail about the actual trip at this point. There’s a top 5 reel coming at the end, and since there have already been at least 5 things which could warrant their own post I’m willing to bet the hardest part is going to be choosing.

But I do want to talk a little bit about something I was thinking about after dinner while Dan and I were waiting for the bus, a little about the spirit of winging it, the ups and downs of setting out with literally no plans and seeing what happens.

Winging It

At the outset of this trip, I had the following trip-related documents and pieces of information:

Boat ticket from Kikai to Kagoshima
Plane ticket from Tokyo to Kikai
Fuji Rock tickets, temple visitation permission
Lonely Planet: Japan, guidebook, circa 2000
And the knowledge that in 30 days (give or take), I’m going to need to be in Tokyo to catch that flight home

(Item 4 was a concession to sane traveling, but it became readily apparent that unless we were also time traveling, item 4 was not particularly useful, which left us properly winging it. No happy little Lonely Planet fallback list of hostels and guest houses. Ultimately though, it was fantastic that the LP guide turned out to be nothing more than a hefty paperweight or emergency bludgeoning tool. We have since picked up the updated one, but with a very different attitude towards its usage)

The entire rest of the trip: where we were staying, eating, what the hell we were going to be doing, and aside from “in Japan” even the question of where was left entirely open at the outset. To some people this is already sounding crazy, and to the people currently walking around the world for 5 years, not nearly crazy enough, but I’m glad to get the opportunity to test drive this truly odd and wonderful travel philosophy in the shallow end before diving into the Mariana Trench.

The idea is to let the adventure develop as it may. To follow the path as it evolves in front of you, even if that path is steeper, rockier, and has a lot more scary jungle-bits than the one you could have hammered out ahead of yourself. For me, it took me a while to stop fighting the journey. This is part of why we did 3 cities in 3 days at the outset of our trip (ouch, brain fatigue). When you have a solid plan you can get away with that kind of stuff. Tonight we’re in Hiroshima to see the bomb memorial, tomorrow we’re eating ramen in Fukuoka, and here are the places we’re staying and the exact times the trains depart. When you’re winging it, this kind of stuff just does not work. You will want to die.

I honestly don’t think you can impose that much structure on a trip like this. It resists it. Adventures are kind of shy, and if you’re stopping into town for 24 hours swinging a stick and calling out for them you’ll probably just end up tired and frustrated and wholly adventureless. Don’t fore-go structuring a trip just to freak out and try to make one enroute. If you feel like you’re moving too fast, you are.

And it’s totally ok to have to learn that lesson en-route.

There is plenty more to say about winging it, about this trip, about Japan. But I’m due for a long nap. We set out towards Fuji Rock tomorrow.

The Island

Kikai-jima, Now With Two Times the White Folks, For a Limited Time Only

July 16, 2010 Yakushima 3 Comments

Despite my best efforts to remain an object of singular rarity and therefore capture maximum sexy-foreigner cool points, from time to time people manage to make their way down to this island for one reason or another. Sometimes they are here entirely of their own volition, and their decision to come here is in no way related to my presence on this island. I hate these people, because often I do not even know they were on the island, until everyone else on the island is telling me my brother sure drinks a lot, or my sister is really pretty.

More often than not though, if other gaijin (oh snap, take that political correctness!) show up on this island it is entirely because of me. Two such gaijin showed up over the last week, and another is coming in on the 4:30 am ferry tomorrow morning. In exchange for getting up and meeting him at the ferry port at this god-forsaken hour, he is acting as a Western-camping-goods equivalent of a drug mule. The regional licensing and distribution agreements we’re breaking could easily get us killed by a powerful cabal of backwoods suppliers, but there is no way I’m running around the country for 3 weeks without really fancy underwear.

Anyway, since I am in kind of a “not really doing anything particularly blog worthy” stretch right now, and may very well not bother posting anything until I’m done looking at temples, drinking with salary-men, and trying to find a minor Japanese noble who can get me into the imperial palace for the next 3-4 weeks, I figured you might like to see a few of the photos from the adventures here on Kikai. Be forewarned, they involve puns in Japanese.

Let’s get started.

In Which Old Friends Visit

For those of you not in my immediate circle of family members and friends I have known since I was six, the gentleman agreeing emphatically with the signage is Eli. In Japanese we would be what is called osananajimi (幼馴染) which we can clearly see from the kanji means childhood-experienced-dye. Sometimes kanji do not translate well. You could call it “childhood friends” in English, or just “guys you cannot seem to get rid of, even when you move to the opposite side of the globe, and then hide on a tiny island in the middle of nowhere”. Eli lives in Kagoshima, a short 13-hour boat ride away, doing more or less the exact same thing I am. Or at least he does for another few days. Before he returns to America-land he just had to see the weird little chunk of land I was living on these days.

We went diving about 4 hours after he stepped off the ferry, but since I am a total waste of bottled air, I do not yet have a camera which works underwater so you will have to take my word that Eli performed admirably.

Also, for those of you who are curious as to what exactly the giant finger sign is pointing to, it is in fact this tree:

Now depending on which Board of Tourism you ask, this is either the 2nd largest Banyan tree in Japan, the largest Banyan tree in Japan, or the largest tree in the world. There were some translation issues in some of the tourism literature. Enough said.

Aside from looking at particularly large flora, (and fauna, the Kikai giant spiders are back with a vengeance this summer) we also managed to make our way up to Hyakunoudai which is a park/vantage point up near the highest point on the island. Here is a picture of Eli looking pensive and contemplating the deep mysteries of the sea, as well as the transitory nature of human life, and the ephemeral beauty of clouds:

And here is a picture of me pretending to be Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic:

Why yes, those are in fact bright orange shorts that come down to the middle of my calf. Thank you for noticing.

After climbing up to the top of the island, and checking out the weird little cave system on the island (not particularly photo-worthy) we drove over to Butterfly Road, which actually has a lot more giant spiders than butterflies right now (and now we know why the spiders are so giant), but also has one of the weirdest “careful, ______ crossing” signs on the world:

The five characters of the sign read: Cho ni Cho Chui. The Japanese word for butterfly is Cho, the 2nd Cho is a word meaning “totally, extremely, very” which is particularly popular among high-school girls, and Chui means “careful”. But since the little kid version of Butterfly is Cho-Cho, the sign is in fact an elaborate pun in Japanese, which we all find just hilarious. You can’t really explain puns in foreign languages, so you will have to trust my words and Yoda-san’s smiling face. Does he not look amused!?

We also managed to make it out to Suigira beach for a little bit of swimming and snorkeling, but Eli was only on the island for a day and a half, so it was pretty brief unfortunately. Here’s a photo of the beach though.

All of the middle school boys were diving off of those coral islands on the right, as part of an elaborate island ritual of manhood. For some reason when they were scared they jumped in really really close to the jagged wall of coral , which made for some harrowing “oh god, there’s going to be blood everywhere” moments. Fortunately, nothing actually went awry.

We also made it out to my favorite little live-house (bar + music) where one of the island kids who grew up and moved to Kobe happened to be playing. Unfortunately one of the guys she was touring with was just god-awful, and she was really nervous for some reason. She has an odd quirk of laughing uncontrollably and breaking into spontaneous sing-conversation in the middle of songs when she gets nervous. It was funny for the first half, then it got kind of painful.

Still, good times had all around, during Eli’s brief taste of island life.

In Which a Couchsurfer Somehow Makes Her Way to Kikai

Kerry is a couchsurfer, a generally fantastic group of people I have been associated with to varying degrees for about 2 years now. Here is the customary successful couch surf “actually surfing on the couch” photo:

Kerry for some reason, on her first trip outside of Europe, on her first time in Japan, decided to come down to Kikai and hang out for 3 or 4 days. I’ll write more about couchsurfing at some point I’m sure, but for now go check the website out and poke around. It’s a very cool idea, and so far I have had nothing but amazing luck with it. Everyone I meet through the site has been amazing and weird in the best way possible. I mean take Kerry. She’s from England, has lived up north on the Shetland Islands, and currently lives in the Canary Islands. There is nothing in her history which would suggest an unhealthy attraction to small islands, it’s just how things developed in her life.

We had a blast hanging out with all the island weirdos, and I got to practice interpreting which was actually a lot of fun. If would consider doing it professionally, if doing it professionally didn’t include wearing suits, and not saying “Oh hell, what do you call that in English?” every time I can’t think of a word.

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Some day I’ll have to start writing about the island in earnest, but for now hopefully this gives you some small idea of the weird world in which I find myself. Seeing as how I have to be up and at least questionably lucid in a very short number of hours, I think I might go pass out on something. Talk to you all again in about a month, unless I get ambitious from the road.

Experiments, Japan

30 Days of Natto: The Aftermath

July 5, 2010 Yakushima 1 Comment

A package of natto contains just about 40 grams. Doing some quick math the sum total amount of natto I have consumed over the last 30 days comes to 1200 grams which, for those of you who find that touching the metric system causes you physical pain and blisters your flesh, is over 2 and a half pounds. 2 and a half pounds of beans and slime. I have eaten it with mustard, with soy sauce, with mayonnaise and kim chee. I have consumed it for breakfast, as workout fuel, as dinner and as bedtime snacks. I have tried almost every single brand of natto they stock at 3 different supermarkets and can tell you the differences between them. Let no one question my natto credentials. I have earned my wings.

So what have I learned?

1) Natto is gross, but then so are a lot of things when you really think about them. One of the things which constantly eating natto did was get me thinking about a lot of the other things we routinely consume, and how they’re just as gross and weird. Is “beans + bacteria = natto” really any weirder than “milk + bacteria = yogurt”? What about the myriad range of cheeses with molds that are not only present, but desirable and indeed an integral part of the flavor. Let us not even broach mechanically separated meat and the other myriad forms of strange processed foods. Hell, give me a description of natto and mech-meat side-by-side and I’ll take the natto every day.

2) Natto does not give you superpowers. It’s damn healthy, don’t get me wrong. But if you’re looking for a magic bullet to help you lose 40 pounds of fat, put on 50 pounds of muscle, quit smoking, learn French, build a rocket and then perform brain surgery on it, well then I’m afraid you’re SOL. Now it can certainly help with at least…2 of those things (maybe 3? correlation to smoking or French learning abilities untested), but I’ve got something of a pet peeve for the magic food mentality which has become increasingly common. “It has 10 times the vitamin C of an orange!” Great, maybe if you eat enough of it it will equal a negative cheeseburger.

3) Natto + any other food = Natto. Ad infinitum. Inclusion in the same meal can produce this effect, even if strict segregation protocols are maintained. For a food which is not honestly all that strong tasting, it has the uncanny ability to make everything taste like it. You have been warned.

4) We’re mostly bad at things because we think we are. It’s a recurring theme throughout my time in Japan so far. I couldn’t eat natto mostly because, well, I assumed I couldn’t eat natto. But the reality was I couldn’t eat natto, and didn’t even try to eat it, because I assumed I would throw up all over whatever kindly Japanese host was thoughtful enough to give it to me, which would be rude, and embarrassing for everyone involved. Someone would probably have to kill themselves to make up for the shame of it all. A bad scene all around. Assumptions beget reality. The implications are staggering.

Meta-implication: Next time there is something you want or need to get done, try ceaselessly drilling the idea that you are absolutely awesome at X, born to do X, and the only way you could fail at X is if the laws of physics themselves changed to spite your birthright. Now it’s possible that I’m just way better at lying to myself than anyone else who has ever lived, ever, but I do not think this is an isolated phenomenon. I have always had the vague sense that my subconscious is toiling away at secret machinations, but shoves them under the bed or something whenever I come by for a visit. I think that constantly bombarding your subconscious with this kind of positive reinforcement will eventually always start to affect your actual success with that project. If for no other reason that you aren’t wasting untold hours and days building your own walls with a lousy attitude.

In Conclusion

The mission was by and large, a success. We’ll see over the coming weeks if I continue to consume natto in any form. I’m keeping a few packs around for snacks, since it really shines as an appetite killer when you get hungry at odd times.

All in all, a pretty fun way to spend a month, albeit it wasn’t like every waking hour of my time needed to be devoted to natto related activities (now that would be a challenge). I’ll be spending the next few weeks entertaining random guests to the island while paradoxically trying to avoid spending any money outside these guests so I can make the most of my Summer vacation and the Japannanigans I have planned. Stay tuned.

Kikaicastaway

Monthly Archives: July 2010