Chuhi

Damn, I appear to have blown right by the four-month anniversary of our departure from Japan, and still haven’t wrapped this thing up. Oh well, hopefully I’ll be finished before the five month-mark on September 19th.

Anyway, in the previous entry, Sam and I had just taken the train down to Kanazawa, and the view along the way hadn’t exactly been breathtaking (well, the mountains were gorgeous, it was just all the concrete that got in the way). Kanazawa more than made up for it.

The center of the city itself is fairly nondescript as Japanese cities go, but slightly to the east of the built-up area around the train station are the famous gardens of Kenroku-en, and further afield the Higashi Chaya District, famous for it’s well-preserved Edo-era architecture. We visited both on our first full day in the city. There are lots and lots of pictures, however, so I will give you the gardens first. The Chaya photos will have to wait. 

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Looking away from one of the entrances to the gardens, this is Kanazawa Castle, with the sakura in front in full bloom. There was a huge (1000 drunks-plus) drinking party under the trees later at night.

The flowers were stunning. There are ume (plum) blossoms.

White sakura. Our Japanese friends were jealous that we made it to the most famous garden in Japan for the blossoming of the cherry trees.

There were so many cherry trees the blossoms formed tunnels in places.

I like macro settings.

This is a very rainy area, as the moss on the torii (the gate) can attest.

The gardens were on a hilltop. This is looking off the edge, north into the city (though the clouds make that kind of moot).

These trees are old, but they are well-cared for.

Groundskeepers come through frequently to sweep the moss, leaving it in this kind of condition. Hard to find anything similar back home.

A group of kindergarten students were visiting the park as part of their spring field trip (a nationwide tradition). Above, their headmaster is leading them along.

This picture is a good example of the kind of time investment people are willing to make in their gardens over in Japan.

Four months ago:

I’ll tell you all about it later.

I guess I must have meant much later.

OK, here goes. Towards the end of our stay in Japan, we went on a little trip around the country. We visited Matsumoto, then took the Oito-sen through the mountains. The Oito is a brief, single-tracked line that cuts a shortcut through the Hida Mountains from the plains around Matsumoto to the Sea of Japan. The view along the way was quite something.

We were also treated to the all-too-common Japanese view of concrete structures and high-tension power lines intermingling with nature.

Once we got to the Sea of Japan coast, the view changed somewhat. Put bluntly, Itoigawa, where we changed trains, is a rusty garbage dump. It reminded me of a run-down East German city where double-digit unemployment had been a fact of life for ten years-plus. This picture was actually from the nice part of town. The train station was a hellhole.

Once on the coast, we took the Hokuriku Line (Hokuriku being the name of this region of Japan) down the coast to Kanazawa. We were treated to more lovely concrete along the way.

Above is the Hokuriku Expressway, for which there was evidently no room on dry land.

Those clusters of concrete offshore are called tetrapods, an erosion-abatement solution that while not native to Japan is certainly used more there than anywhere else in the world. You can see the lovely results.

Kanazawa itself was much prettier, we promise. There will be pictures of that soon.

OK, so we’ve been home for three months (and a week, if we’re being technical). I haven’t written anything in almost that long. One would think that this page would have been shut down some time ago, and that I’d have moved on to the new blog, but I’m lazy.

Anyway, we still had a few stories to tell when we left Japan. We’d written about the beginning of our trip through the Japanese Alps and onwards towards Kanazawa, but never got around to finishing. Now that we’ve finally unboxed our old computer and gotten around to pulling off our old photos, we can try to finally wrap this thing up

Just give us another few days.

I seem to have been mostly immune from jet lag thus far, probably because Sam and I were so exhausted when we left Narita. My body was probably just happy for whatever downtime it could get.

The cats, on the other hand, seem to have decided that 1am to 5am is their new playtime. This wouldn’t be a big problem if playtime didn’t mandate my involvement, but it apparently does. I’m not sure how much I slept last night, but it wasn’t much. It will be an interesting drive to Eugene and back.

Yes, we are.

We boxed up the big computer the other night, and I just tossed out the wireless router at the dump. All that’s left in the house is a couple blankets to sleep on tonight and the boxes that the movers are picking up tomorrow.

The house is freaking empty. I’ll have to post pictures at some point. Probably after we’re home.

Now we’re off to Tokyo for the last time, to have dinner with some friends and maybe sing an hour or two of karaoke.

I’m just back from a day and a half in Kisarazu, where we lived in 2004 and early 2005. It’s weird being able to go to places in Japan and say “Damn, haven’t been here in years.”

Yesterday Sam and I made our last visit to the orphanage where we’ve been volunteering off and on for the last four years. A lot of the kids we’ve known over the years have completely finished school and have now moved out, so we didn’t get to see them, but we did get to see most of the younger kids. We teased some fifth graders about how we remembered how cute they were as first graders, played a bunch of games, and ate dinner together. At the end they gave us a bunch of pictures and a book of messages from the kids. It was sweet.

Last night I went out with the man who probably has been my best friend over the last four years, who just became a father last Thursday. We both got a kick out of the fact that his daughter was born a day after my birthday. The health care system out here is in good enough shape so that his wife and daughter are staying in the hospital for 12 days of observation before being sent home. We took advantage of the empty house to “wet the baby’s head,” as they apparently say in England.

Today we ran around doing errands, and spent some time at the hospital. Then we said goodbye, promising to see each other again soon.

In the meantime, Sam got an offer of the equivalent of $500 (US) on our car, which is probably about what it’s worth, and much more than we thought we were getting last week. We also got our final paychecks from our former employers, with a year-end completion bonus, which is kind of nice. Now we’re struggling to get our crate packed and the customs information finished by Wednesday afternoon. I think we can manage.

See you Portland people Saturday. It’s kind of hard to believe.

Good things? My Japanese has gone from zero (in the dark days four years ago) to the point where a note like this from a colleague can make me cry.

Bad things? Messages from my colleagues (former colleagues, actually, which doesn’t help any) are making me cry.

We made it back from our trip around 3:30 in the afternoon. The cats were very happy. We’re both tired and sore from all the trains and all the walking, but it was a wonderful little excursion. Monday morning I got up early (yes I know, it’s a shock to us all) and rode my bike up to a big park on a hill, in time to catch the sun rising over the ridge to the east.

The real treat though was the ridge of the northern Japanese Alps (Although they were once - and in schoolbooks still are - called the Hida Mountain Range, everyone now actually refers to them as “alps”, though it’s rendered as arupusu.). Even though the sun had risen at this point, it was having trouble breaking through the cloud-cover. The whole valley had a pretty eerie quality to it in that semi-dusk.

We had hours of close-up views later in the day as we road the mostly rural Oito Line through the mountains and down the other side to Kanazawa. I’ll tell you all about it later.

I am certain that Greg will talk at length about what we have seen in Matsumoto. Instead, I am going to talk about our hotel room. 

I booked it.

It’s great.

We’re at a little Japanese style hotel on the edge of town by the name of Seifuso. Because we are paying extra for a room with a toilet, we were put in the kind of apartments in the “new” building. We are also the only people in this building tonight. So we have a toilet, a shower and a full kitchen to ourselves (normally the shower and kitchen would be shared). This is going to cost us about $100. 

In the main building there are Japanese baths, which I am looking forward to soaking in, and the whole compound is served by a wifi network. We have been assigned bikes and I am pretty sure that any moment Greg is going to kick me out of the door to get on one. 

Yay Matsumoto!