Important lesson about zoos: If you go at one o'clock in the afternoon, chances are the animals will be hiding in the shade. Must go earlier.
The okapi, apparently.
My Room 101 would involve insects. If I ever post a cockroach photo here, you know I am confronting my fears.
Bears are very graceful in the water.
And without being too anthropomorphic, these things are as macho as young members of a military on a Saturday night. Good swimmers too.
The red-bricked storehouse in Minato Mirai, Yokohama.
Minato Mirai from Osanbashi Pier, Yokohama. With tripod. I am now a card-carrying Oyaji.
The polar bear shakes off after a swim.
The only place I ever want to see black bears.
And some synchronized penguins.
One thing about having your own blog is you have complete editorial control. That means you can bore your readers senseless for days with your mountain photos. Especially when it's close season in the football and you refuse to indulge in aimless transfer speculation prior to the July 1 start date for signing foreign players. (Nobody mention the words beanpole or six million pounds, please.)
On a related note, I just found out my uncle, with whom I climbed Fuji in 2001, is coming back for more. He's 70 this year. It has to be Kitadake this time round.
"People who don't climb mountains--the great majority of humankind, that is to say--tend to assume that the sport is a reckless, Dionysian pursuit of ever escalating thrills. But the notion that climbers are merely adrenaline junkies chasing a righteous fix is a fallacy, at least in the case of Everest. What I was doing up there had almost nothing in common with bungee jumping or skyriding or riding a motorcycle at 120 miles per hour.
Above the comforts of Base Camp, the expedition in fact became a Calvinistic undertaking. The ratio of misery to pleasure was greater by an order of magnitude than any other mountain I've ever been on; I quickly came to understand that climbing Everest was primarily about enduring pain. And in subjecting ourselves to week after week of toil, tedium, and suffering, it struck me that most of us were probably seeking, above all else, something like a state of grace."
Jon Krakaeur, Into Thin Air
At last. People younger than me in the high mountains.
When tiring of the wide angle lens, there's always telephoto.
Probably the most relaxed fisherman in the world.
Photos in the gallery.
Unzipping my tent at 4.30 on Sunday morning in the campsite at Yumoto I had two thoughts: Birds start singing at three o'clock and I need a better groundsheet. The correlation between the two should be clear.
It was still too dark to properly read the weather signs, but it seemed cloudy. While cooking breakfast, the sun would start to rise from behind the lake and the day's destiny would become clear. Was Oku-Shiranesan, the mother lode of the mountains of Nikko, finally to acquiesce? Or had she already sent word to the weather gods to stop this impertinence in its tracks?
With some difficulty, I'd managed to organize a taxi for 6 a.m. to take me to the Gunma side of the mountain—her gentle side—from where I planned to ascend. As public transport in rural Japan dies out with increased car ownership, this great mountain has fared worse than most. A taxi was the only option. And even that looked highly unlikely for a while.
In an attempt to drum up business for the Shiranesan ropeway and himself, the talkative taxi man showed me pictures of alleged heavy snow on the mountain, which he said had been taken last week. Later, unashamedly, he told me he'd never climbed the mountain. He seemed to see no discrepancy in the two statements. Fair enough. I was grateful to him for getting up at six o'clock on a Sunday morning to take me to the trail.
When I left him at 6.30 at the trailhead in Suganuma, the morning sky was looking surprisingly promising. In rainy season Japan, you're always going to have a few clouds lingering over the mountains, but today they didn't look malicious.
The ascent was standard. My early start must have seemed like late morning compared to the climbers I passed along the way. Old men in flak vests lugging heavy tripods, groups of old ladies nattering up a human storm—there were no surprises there either. A little over two hours later I reached the upper valley and the lake, from which the mother lode finally allows you your first view. It was beautiful. The best mountains never hog the limelight. Tomuraushi taught me that. They feel no need to be seen by every tourist and his camera. Anyone going to Nikko can see Nantai-san, an impressive but ultimately second-rate mountain. Shiranesan probably thinks Nantai-san is a grandstanding, limelight-hogging whore.
In alpine scenery much like the mountains of Oze now visible to the west, I slowly climbed the steep course for the final hour to the top. By now, the morning was pure August-like summer with not a monsoon in sight. The sky was an access-all-areas day pass signed personally by the main woman herself. People started to appear from all routes like Scottie was beaming them in. Bizarrely, the rocky peak was as busy as Shibuya Crossing whenever I have the misfortune of having to go there. A group of students from Utsunomiya University were taking boisterous peak photos. Their cackle put the three o'clock birds to shame.
And it was only getting busier. Groups of 30-40 hikers marched single file up the many trails to the top. I found a piece of ground a comfortable distance away and started to cook a very early lunch. By half-ten in the morning there must have been anywhere between 200 to 500 people on or around the peak. Considering the difficulty I'd had just getting to the trail, I was a little surprised.
One top-notch Indian curry and two hundred photos later (you think I'm exaggerating, don't you?), it was time to descend.
Of the 500 or so people on Shiranesan that morning, 490 either returned to Suganuma or walked two hours to the ropeway. The other nine and brains here descended into Yumoto.
In my defense, I'd done the research. I knew well it was the difficult option, but the only other choice was trying to organize a taxi back from Suganuma, which seemed impractical and costly considering I'd left the tent and my unneccessaries at Yumoto. (I couldn't camp at Suganuma because the campsite there doesn't allow tents. Yes, you did read that sentence correctly.)
For any of you considering Shiranesan, I'll say this much: Yumoto is the most demanding descent I've ever done. It's not technically difficult or massively dangerous. It's just continuous and draining.
It was all pleasant at first. A steep zig-zag descent off the peak, some heel digging through a hard-packed snowfield, and on to Goshiki-Numa, the Five-Coloured Morass according to the official translation. Lake would have been a better choice of word.
Then things started to go imperceptibly off kilter. First, the party in the skies started to wind down, with dark clouds inevitably taking their rightful place in the rainy season sky. As they did, I discovered that the track marked in all the maps from Goshikinuma to Mae-Shiranesan didn't exist. It just wasn't there, no matter what the maps said. The already long course had just become an hour longer.
Retracing the route to the emergency hut, I made for Mae-Shiranesan. I was becoming concerned about time. I know. How can you run out of time on a day when you wake up before the sun?
From Mae-Shiranesan the descent was nothing short of vicious. Loose rocks, mudslides, protruding roots, and implausible steepness. For four solid hours, every step I took was on uncertain ground. I'm careful on difficult descents and my legs are strong, but I still went down four times. There's good reason why most people don't descend Shirane into Yumoto—the course all the English-language Japan hiking books recommend. Unless you're very experienced and super fast, take Lonely Planet's Hiking in Japan and especially Paul Hunt's book with the proverbial salt.
Okay, I'm exaggerating. It wasn't that bad. But ten and a half hours later, when I finally saw the top of the slopes of the Yumoto Ski Resort and the end of the course, I was a happy man. Ten and a half hours is a long time between drinks (and toilets for that matter). If that day was a microcosm of my life, I'll live to be a hundred.
And then, as if on cue, came the storm. As I walked down the ski slopes to my tent at the bottom, I wondered what it must have been like for Lee Trevino, the golfer who was struck by lightning twice. Poor bastard. The thunder rumbled as I found a reserve of hidden energy and completed the last miserable task—packing up and taking down the tent in a storm. For some reason I enjoyed the challenge of sorting everything out, though by the time I'd finished I was exhausted. And I know exhausted is a much overused word. Shiranesan is a beautiful mountain and I'd finally climbed it: I was happy. But happiness means little when you're that tired, and I'd had enough of Nikko for one weekend.
Walking toward the bus terminus, I realized I'd left my spats at the campsite. Running back to get them before the bus left, I spotted my first tanuki, who'd waited patiently until I—the last camper of the weekend—had left before coming out to claim the leftover food. He wasn't pleased to see me coming back and couldn't have cared less how many hours I'd walked.
It was then I heard the rescue helicopter flying overhead. Someone hadn't made it down.
The first in an occasional series:
Saw the worst Japanese film I have ever seen (almost) last night. The French title was Seance and had an actor that I like in it Koji Yakusho.
Brief summary:
Koji is married to Junko.
Marriage is bland.
He is a sound engineer.
She is an unwilling medium and occasionally can talk to the undead.
A young girl gets kidnapped by a predatory type who asks "are your parents rich?" - which fails and then tells her that they are dead so he can ask "can I drive you to the hospital?"
Koji drives to the forest to record the sound of the trees.
The girl is chased through the same forest by the predatory type.
She sees Koji, who has his earphones on, so she hides in his big studio equipment box.
He takes her home unwittingly.
The police come knocking, asking Junko to help search for the girl with her special powers.
When they have gone she goes to the box and there they find the girl.
They contemplate calling the police and for an ambulance but don't.
Koji unwittingly kills the girl when shaking her to be quiet when she startes to cry.
Junko tries to fool the police into finding the girl's body where they eventually bury it.
The girl haunts Koji.
He sees his doppelganger which he then burns.
At the end the police guess all.
So don't watch this shite but do watch Cure, with the same actor.
Two things are fascinating me at the moment: the 1996 Everest summit disaster and the writing of Jon Krakauer. (I've been reading Into the Wild and it's a majestic book.)
So you can imagine my surprise pleasure when I found out yesterday that Krakauer was in one of the 1996 Everest summit teams. And he wrote a book about it. And the book was shortlisted for a Pulitzer.
Into Thin Air is Sagawa-ing its way to me as we speak.
Instead of retreating to the mountains last Sunday, I went out on the bike in central Tokyo. Heading out on the bike with the camera and the day in front of you and no real destination or schedule in mind is a great way of getting to know this city. And whether you've been here a week or a decade, there's plenty to get to know.
Korakuen
Sunday's trip started with a quest for breakfast that led to the Tokyo Dome complex in Korakuen. That, my friends, was a mistake.
It was all happening at the dome. The Keiba Ojisan (horse-racing punters) were on the move, horse-racing papers in hand, swarming the place and smoking it up. They look like a grumpy shower of bastards, the downtrodden Keiba crew, but I bet appearances deceive. And at least they're not playing pachinko.
Beside the old gamblers, people and families were queuing in an orderly fashion around the outside perimeter of the Tokyo Dome for tickets for the day's baseball game. Why anyone would queue to watch baseball I'll never know, but you had to admire them for their preparedness. Picnic sheets, laptop computers, gameboys, English textbooks, fashion magazines—each and every one of them had come prepared with ways to fill the time. It was happy families out queuing on a Sunday morning, a typically Japanese scene.
And the Rod Stewart haircuts and their pastel girls were also out in numbers for a romantic day at the amusement park. Soft cream, a crepe, a shudder in the haunted house and a scream on the roller-coaster—love's destiny was being fulfilled in Suidobashi.
And then there were the families with their lovely screaming kids.
It took a while to find a restaurant and sort out breakfast.
Yasukuni Shrine
Two overpriced but very tasty Danish sandwiches later, it was back on the bike and rolling down into a different world. From Korakuen, down to Iidabashi, across to Kudanshita and up that enormous hill to the huge Torii of Yasukuni Shrine. I've been to Yasukuni many times, but something I only realized that morning is its position and size. It's huge, and it's right in the center of Tokyo. Yasukuni is seated at the right hand of the Imperial Palace and its seat is vast.
Inside the usual crew were doing the usual things. On any given Sunday, Yasukuni will be filled with rightwing crackpots, Japanese Imperial Army vets, Western and Asian tourists and normal-looking Japanese. A curious mix at the one shrine, I think you'll agree.
But there were some real characters under the sun that morning.
A wheelchair-bound lady had dressed her young boys in old Japanese military get-up, right down to the strange hats. The kids ran around oblivious to the insanity of their mother and the path they would surely find it difficult not to take. An old fellow wearing a t-shirt with the Japanese imperial flag on the front was playing even older songs on the shamisen. He looked calm enough, but I doubt they were songs of peace and love. Another old guy, fully dressed in summer military uniform and looking like the oldest boy scout in the village, marched over and formally saluted his shamisen-playing brother in arms. Then another appeared, wearing a t-shirt with a picture of a kamikaze plane and the message "We will never forget" in Japanese. He too clicked his heels and saluted his compatriots. Meanwhile, in the flea market a couple of meters across the way, the fake Japanese swords were attracting more attention than the wonderful two-foot high wooden sculpture of two horses having sex. How could they ignore such a masterpiece? What was the world coming to, at all?
A mere two kilometers from the queuing families, the grumpy gamblers and the star-crossed lovers of the Tokyo Dome, a whole different ecosystem was living out its morning with national pride. It was time for this visitor to leave.
Odaiba
Onwards I went along the greatest road in Tokyo, Uchibori Dori, the road around the inner moat of the Imperial Palace. Did you know you can get from Iidabashi to Hibiya in about five minutes using Uchibori Dori, with time to take a few pictures of the moat swans along the way? En route, the normally healthy Sunday joggers were looking dehydrated and ready to collapse. It was the hottest of days. From Hibiya, I moved down through old Shimbashi and on to Hinode Pier in Hamamatsucho. From Hinode, I would take the water bus to the Shinagawa Aquarium. I hear it's a great aquarium and you can't beat being at sea on a sunny summer day.
Sadly, the next Water Bus to the aquarium wasn't for hours, so a change of destination was required. Five minutes later, I set sail for the dreaded Odaiba.
Reclaiming Odaiba from the bay was a mistake. This land of tacky shopping malls with indoor skies and kind of people they attracted was better off submerged. But for some reason it didn't feel so bad this time, probably because I wasn't shopping.
Strangely enough, the boat arrived on the beach. A crammed city beach with windsurfers and big bridges in the background. There's something nice about that. Reminded me of New York or Chicago. The prepared had brought their UV beach tents, which I didn't even know existed until then. The hardcore Edoko suntanners and their tattoos had been toasting for hours. Kids played catch with their fathers on the sand. Catch, what a boring game. Make it competitive, folks.
And what is it about Odaiba and pedigree dogs? Are you only allowed bring top quality canines onto this reclaimed paradise in the most stinking bay in the world? Check for yourself if you're ever out there. There are no mongrels or half-breeds to be seen in Odaiba. Every single dog is a pure-breed, and there are none of those pug-faced little runts either. Or poodles.
I sat on the beach for a good two hours, thinking seaside thoughts in central Tokyo, until the windsurfers and surfers packed up for the day and the sun began to set over Rainbow Bridge.
It was time to take the water bus back across the bay and cycle home.
Photographing photographers.
Romantic Rainbow Bridge through a polarizing filter.
Suzume.
Fountain photos all round.
Making sure the fountain rules are enforced.
Sweeping inside the fountain.
A surfer on the waveless Odaiba Beach. He's had enough.
As another watery and unwelcome rainy season sluices uninvited into a forlorn but resigned Tokyo, thoughts inevitably move to the controversial topic of umbrellas.
You can tell a lot about people by their umbrellas. And you can tell long-term gaijin because they'll be the ones with the good ones.
Mine is a black hiking umbrella. It's telescopic (about six inches long), so it fits nicely in my bag. (I've never been a fan of full-sized umbrellas because (1) you can't just put them in your bag and carry them around every day, thus eliminating the need to join the National Weather Forecast Obsession Club or get the kousuikakuritsu (percentage chance of rain) piped in by RSS and (2) you have to leave them outside convenience stores, enabling some law-abiding citizen to abscond with them in a savage but beautiful moment of criminal tendency.)
It's fully automatic, so you can put it up and collapse it with one hand while on the trail (or not), and the material is of satisfyingly good quality, especially the cover. It's got a rubber loop coming out of the handle, so you can attach it to your wrist and carry it hands-free (or clap a little). It's quite lightweight, but it doesn't have a compass in the handle like some of the other hiking ones do, not that you or I would have any idea what to do with a compass anyway. It cost 2,700 yen (27 times the cost of a 100 yen umbrella, I think you'll find) and I bought it in Ishi Sports, Okubo, Tokyo about six months ago.
I'm quite attached to the little fellow.
How about yours? Is it ornate? Did you steal it? Does it take USB II?
The new camera is great fun.
For one thing, it can take night shots.
Last Friday, I took it to my old friend Kabukicho for some practice. It was mainly an exercise in learning about things like shutter speed and aperture. Here's one of the results.
Dedicated to Paddy Mac. If you look in the background Paddy, you can see that Tonkatsu place we used to visit. In my book, the best Tonkatsu place in Tokyo, although I've yet to try the famous one in Meguro.
Following on from the Fink-on-a-Foreigner Program, Japan plays the terrorism card to justify its own dark-ages, official xenophobia.
It would seem the Japanese ruling elite (and a good portion of the population--remember Ishihara got 70% of the vote in Tokyo in 2003) view non-Japanese people as suspicious potential criminals. A healthy belief to have when your own population is about to start decreasing.
Kyodo News: Japan to have all foreigners carry IC cards for crime control
The real sky.
(智恵子は東京には空がないと言ふ。
ほんとの空がみたいと言ふ。
〜中略〜
阿多多羅山の山の上に毎日出てゐる青い空が
智恵子のほんとの空だと言ふ)
Photos in the gallery.
Yesterday I visited the Supreme Court of Japan for aisatsu (formal introductions). Amid the usual bowing and card-swapping, which always makes me uncomfortable anyway, the somewhat unorthodox president of my company kept introducing me to important strangers as "the man who went to the same high-school as James Joyce." I was embarrassed for me.
As the real business went on around me, cosmetic me spent the time observing the bureaucrats of Japan's highest court. These are all gifted people, you would hope. But even among them, it was easy to see those who had plateaued and were losing both interest and hair, those who were still on the up, and the ones with the real power, who literally shone. The powerful ones and their heirs smiled and seemed at ease with life, the ones without were sullen and heads down, either dozing off or waiting for an argument.
I met one really big fish—the guy who recently oversaw the revision of one of Japan's main laws, the Civil Code. He just happens to come from the same home town as my company's president, and their families are friends. (My president comes from a big political family in Tokushima. Anyone thinking for a second you can separate the legislature from the executive in a country should remember that people will still come from the same hometown and families will still be friends.)
Japanese government offices are sparse and frugal to the point of being penitentiary. If they could get away with not using tables and chairs, be sure they would. It's not about saving money. There's still plenty of money around. No, it's about toughening people up, something the rural Irish farming side of my family would well understand. Despite all the surface manners, it's a tough world, the working world in Japan. And if you don't know that, you're not really in it. In fact, I'd go as far as to say you're being carried.
But this guy, who interrupted everything for our unexpected visit, had a huge office, a roving office, with big black leather armchairs and teak tables and hatstands and umbrella racks and photos of his kids, and bookshelves and the works. Space was being ostentatiously and flagrantly wasted in this guy's office. You wondered what he had done to earn these trappings. In a world where luxury is scorned, this guy had a presidential suite. And you don't know really know how significant that is unless you've spent time in the Spartan world of the Japanese government.
As we sat down, he showed us an article about himself with a full colour photograph from yesterday's Nihon Keizai Shimbun. It was impressive stuff. We were not to be outdone, however. Oh no, my friends. For the third time that day, my president brought up my close connection with one of the giants of world literature.
With each party suitably awed, the balance of the world reset, and order resumed, they talked about their hometown (Tokushima) and a recent festival neither had been able to attend. They enquired about each other's health. It turns out that this smiling, affable fellow had so much stress from opposition within all branches of Japanese government to his Civil Code revision that his insides collapsed sometime last year and he ended up being treated with steroids. He was okay now he assured us, before moving on to more important matters.
Would she take a copy of the newspaper to show her family in Tokushima? Ah no, she couldn't do that, sure she can buy a copy herself on the way out. And on the wrangling went. The "go on", "but I couldn't", "ah, you could", "no I couldn't", "sure you'll need to keep a few copies for more important people than me", "ah go on, they gave me three free copies", "only three, then I couldn't possibly take one" that seems as important to conversation in Japan as it is in rural Ireland. It was ritualized friendship and beautiful to watch. She giggled like a child as the ritual played itself out to its long decided conclusion. Comfortable in their roles, both were shining now. It really was beautiful to watch. It crossed my mind that maybe these two old warriors had once been more than friends.
And although James Joyce's successor was sitting in the very same room, he could have been a million miles away.
Later that day, back in the reality of our office, I saw her reading the article again.
One of my favorite musicians is also a Liverpool fan and a great writer.
The Japanese government's clever campaign (Jonathan Head, BBC) to encourage all bureaucrats to dress casually this summer to save on air conditioning costs has started rather slowly.
Today saw a general reluctance to dress down in the corridors of Kasumigaseki.
I'm not one to take cheap, unnecessary digs at the much-maligned Japanese working man, but I'll never really get the "wait and then do what everyone else does" approach to life.
Granted, that may be because I usually wait and then do the opposite. Even more ridiculous.
(via Nippon Goro Goro)
Wasn't there some match on last week? Relive it here. Very intelligent and sensible stuff. I agree that Liverpool did not play badly for large parts of the first half.
Here's another thing I bet you didn't know about the Japanese prison system: unlike western prisons, where prison guards only look after safety, in Japan, prison guards also do the counseling work.
Wasn't it Oscar Wilde who said "I can resist everything except new gadgets"?
I did it folks. I upgraded my equipment.
After six months of telling myself I didn't need one, I went out and bought a digital SLR. Went to Akihabara last night after work with the intention of buying the old model Canon EOS Digital Kiss, second-hand. Came home with the new model, new. As you do.
This weekend, I'm going to sleep on a red volcano. Should give me plenty of opportunity to prove that camera doesn't matter.
