Expressly Reptilian - Week 48 (April 14 - April 20)

Essentially the start of the hike. Most of the ascent looked like this.

The forest is fairly old-growth-ish. Big trees!

This somewhat beat up shack was our welcome mat for the summit of the mountain. Looks nice in B&W

A Japanese Jack-in-the-Pulpit? You be the judge!

This nature trail section was way quieter than the rest of the trip.

Good luck if your stone lodges in the mouth.

Adventurer...am I right?

Beautiful late April weather.

Traffic jam on the way down. Shin's as disappointed as I am

Wandering our way up to the little secluded shrine

When you walk towards this gap it's almost like the big rock is being aimed at your face. Disconcerting!

The mountain itself on the way out marred by the ubiquitous appearance of telephone lines

Expressly Reptilian

Week 48

Preparation.

Two weeks countdown to the big trip and the longest holiday in Japan, Golden Week.

Yep, pretty much spent the whole week talking to friends and making plans for the coming expedition down the coast of Asia to Malaysia

The week was again unremarkable. Made it through no problem to the weekend. I unexpectedly managed to throw together a hiking expedition for that weekend. I was totally down for it, but also just a bit concerned that I wouldn't have enough time to prep myself for the big trip the weekend after.

Sunday saw me waking up nice and early to head out to Tsukuba-san, the hike that I aborted in early march in favour of Takao redux. Early morning wake up and the 9AM train out of Akihabara to Tsukuba station. Waking up early is about the only aspect of hiking that I really despise.

It was actually a lot more difficult than I was expecting getting out there due to a problem with the publication date of my hiking guide. It was written in 2001. Yep. I didn’t think this would be such a huge problem but as it turns it a lot can happen in eight years. The route described in my book involved a trip on a rather obscure line from Ueno out to a rural train station, followed by two bus rides to the base of Tsukuba mountain.

Fortunately, in addition to Shinsuke coming along on this trip so too did an acquaintance of the fall previous. Rowena, who I saw a few times before Zoey left Japan, joined us in this excursion with some interesting information. She had in fact been to Tsukuba on a previous occasion and saw the wisdom in informing me about the Tsukuba express line, a much faster, much more direct route to the mountain in question.

I therefore ended up starting out my ex-Tokyo journey from Akihabara instead, where I met with the two other hikers on the train. A short 40 minute ride later brought us to Tsukuba station and the bus ride out to the mountain. 30 minutes after that we finally stepped out onto the gentle grade at the bottom of the mountain and started our way out.

Tsukuba is an interesting mountain. It’s located in Ibaraki, near Chiba, which is one of the flatter sections of Japan, at least towards the south of the prefecture anyways. Tsukuba-san is therefore rather unsurprising as a popular hiking destination and possessor of the mantle of holiest mountain in the Kanto region, other than Fuji.

The hike began with a short walk through a small temple before starting up the mountain proper. Shortly after beginning of this section we startled a small snake that slithered off through the grass. The weather was amazing and I guess the little reptile had decided to sun itself in a nice bright spot during the early afternoon.

The trail was pleasant on the way up the mountain. It was heavily forested with some fairly old, good sized Japanese cedar. The path itself wasn’t boring either, which was not what I was expecting. The hike was described as being “easy” in my book, but the terrain was a mix of exposed roots and light rock scrambles. Lots of fun to get up, but not too stressful. There was a good amount of stairs too, but nothing too rough. The heat was a little bit annoying, but nothing we couldn’t get past.

We made it to the top just past 12. No problemo.

Tsukuba has a sort of unusual shape, a double peak. The trail we took to the top deposited us on the saddle between these two peaks, where the ropeway terminates. A short stop for lunch later and we were on our way to the taller of the mountain’s two peaks. It was a bit uninspiring though. The temple at the top was kind of small and a little bit overdeveloped, more concrete than I would like. Unfortunately, the weather was also quite humid so we did not exactly get a good view of the surrounding countryside from up there.

After heading down from there we took a stroll around a little nature path that circled the summit maybe fifty meters down off the summit. We had a few nice views from there and was substantially less busy. Many of the Japanese hikers were there to do flower viewing. Or so I gathered considering the number of elderly couples bent double inspecting undergrowth from about 3 cms away...or aiming expensive digital cameras at the same. I saw some rather interesting flowers myself, including something that really closely resembled a Jack-in-the-Pulpit.

After finishing the loop and coming back to the saddle we grabbed some ice cream to cool off before continuing the journey. Mine was sesame flavoured and quite good. The rest of the hike involved, of course, assailing the lower of the two peaks. On the way there we passed by a very distinctive rock that is shaped somewhat like a toad. There’s a local legend that if you manage to throw a pebble into the toads mouth and have it stay there you will receive good luck. We all tried and failed. It’s actually quite difficult, especially if you limit yourself to one throw. After that we headed to the summit of the lower mountain.

This one was a lot nicer than the first. The temple was better developed, but not overdeveloped, and the rocks that capped the top of the mountain were kind of fun to climb around on and relax for a bit. We snapped a few pictures and enjoyed the rather rewarding view before heading down.

After a little bit of confusion we found the trail off the mountain. The trip down wasn’t so bad, just a little bit long, slightly punishing and heavily crowded.

Traffic jam style

So after queuing for a few minutes I got kind of pissed off and started going down the more difficult sections of the path as fast as possible which was way more exciting. Funnily enough, most of the other hikers just seemed to be amused by the three young people jogging down the mountain.

This trail wound through a rock garden on the way down. It was nice, but the names for some of the rocks were a little bit misleading and/or inappropriate.

We also visited a cool little shrine that was only really accessible through a very narrow, long crevice between two massive rocks. Pretty unique. Whenever I see temples on mountains like this I always imagine the monks hundreds of years ago making lonely pilgrimages up barely trafficked slopes to these incredibly infrequently visited little shrines.

That’s not really the feeling anymore, what with the overwhelming number of hiking enthusiasts in Japan.

We wandered on back to the bus stop from at the beginning of the hike and from there caught the bus back to the station. I arrived home a few hours later and relaxed with some movies and games before hitting the sack, tired as I always am after hiking.

Twice in a row at this point for managing to hike with other people. I gotta say, I much prefer it to hiking alone.

Monday was the usual with a twist. I met Melissa in Shinjuku and we went to a Starbucks near the station in order to finalize plans for the Malaysia trip. That night we went to Ben’s again for the final Rock Band night before Golden Week and all of our vacations.

And so that was it. Prepped and ready to go.

Malaysia bound at this point...

Ian "Mello Yello" Cantello

Ambulatory Finale - Week 47 Part 2 (April 7 - April 13)

This was actually pretty much exactly where we held the GEOS party

They do have tulips in Japan.

Well, I kind of got a shot of cherry petals falling..
.

This is basically where my jog usually starts...

Ambulatory Finale

Week 47 (Part 2)

Well, picking up from my little talk about jogging and the wee hours, the rest of the week was nothing too special. The cherry trees started to lose their leaves, fewer people were in the park every night enjoying hanami parties and, finally, the cherry trees sprouted leaves and finished the business of blooming once again. I was a little worried all weekend because I had informed a student that the trees still had their flowers (mostly) only to discover that there were very few still blooming the next time I was in the park. He told me later on that his party ended up being fine.

As it turned out, this year had been a spectacular year for cherry blossoms. This was due mostly to a cold snap that hit a few days after the trees start blooming. That drew the season out into about two weeks instead of the usual week and a couple days.

Sweet. I wouldn't have known of course, but a student informed me of this fact...

Just to reflect for a moment, let me a share a hard hitting metaphor:

Sakura trees are basically nature's premature ejaculator.

Many other flowers bloom over short periods of time, keeping a rather low profile, especially for plants like the crocus. However, they species or genus usually seems to stagger it's blooming over time, so you may have a few crocusses every few days or so. Sakura trees don't want any of that shit. They just blow their load in one huge display for like a week, if you're lucky. Then that's it. They grow leaves and go about the business of looking like every other tree on the block for the rest of the year.

Hell, I didn't even know which trees in Koganei Park were Sakura trees until they started blooming.

Which is another misnomer actually. We call em' cherry trees in English, but they don't actually produce any fruit. Just like a premature ejaculator. Get it? Huh? Yeah? You know what I'm talking about?

Yeeeeeahhhhhh you do.

Work went fine throughout the week and the weekend involved, of course, Rock Band and Malaysia planning. Other than that though, not too much.

Man, I thought this week was a lot more exciting, hence the two posts. Guess I was wrong. Well, enjoy the end of the Hanami photos! I tried to get the classic Japanese view of cherry petals floating of the trees in a giant cloud, but it just wasn't windy enough. Nuts!

Sad that Hanami is long over when he's writing this...

Ian "Mello Yello" Cantello

Ambulatory Finale - Week 47 Part 1 (April 7 - April 13)

Ambulatory Finale

Week 47 (Part 1)

Really, nothing to report from this week. I was preparing hastily for the upcoming trip to Malaysia and Singapore. I must, however say, that 3 of the most memorable jogs I will ever take happened this week...and one inopportune one on Sunday that turned out to be a bad idea. The weekend was as per usual, with the exception of the above mentioned jog. Rock Band in Shimo.

I'll reiterate once again that I almost always jog at night to avoid the heat and the crowds. I also always jog while listening to music and I've found that what I listen too can vastly affect my mood while I'm jogging. In some cases it makes it more difficult, in most it makes it easier and others it makes me run balls out fast or super giddy. I really get into my music when out running, to the point that I'll even do stupid things like try to match my footfalls to the beat, or run in a stupid gait to match the music's mood. I sometimes joke that I live my life to a soundtrack. My iPod is actually the one thing I probably couldn't survive without.

Let me paint a picture.

You're running on a slightly cool but not uncomfortable April night. The path is covered by a canopy of pale pink blooming cherry trees. The streetlamps highlight the gently swaying boughs in a spectral yet elegantly beautiful way. And so you run. And as you run, the two songs that you hear are the following:

The Arcade Fire - Wake Up

Interpol - PDA

I know that to someone of differing musical taste these songs are contradictory . For me though, they were absolutely perfect, as if every Hollywood composer had sat down and collaborated to create the perfect music for just one scene. Whenever I hear these songs I always think of those two or three nights in April 2009 when I ran beneath the cherry blossoms and just let the music carry me along.

It was one of the most beautiful, peaceful things I've ever done.


Figuring it must have been some sort of zen state...

Ian "Mello Yello" Cantello

Liquid Shack - Week 46 (March 31 - April 6)

Koganei park. This is the entrance I take to get in these days.

Mmm...Sunsets through sakura. This photo and the previous one were actually taken during the last blogs time window. I thought it was better to group these a bit together though.

The morning of the school's Hanami party. Just hanging on my tarp, watching the flowers.

It was a bit busy though...

Sean, towards the end of the party helping us get the tarps ready for transport.

Simon's difficult to locate cell phone store, Vertu.

Genki at the Imperial Palace.

A familiar view from an earlier week. Much better camera now though.

On our way to accidentally discovering awesomeness.

The Imperial Palace's moat.

Starting along the path...

See all the suits? This is Tokyo word, Tokyo city, Tokyo prefecture...

"Yeah, I just dig chilling with cheery blossoms."

The torii gate in front of the Yasu-Kuni shrine. This is reportedly the largest in Japan.

Just a nice shot of a crow...

The shrine itself. There's a good chance that some of these visitors are ultra-nationalists.

Old/New, Nature/Technology

The Yattei area that Melissa and I had dinner at.


Liquid Shack

Week 46

And so it begins.

Perhaps the largest yearly festival in Japan.

Hanami.

Cherry Blossom viewing.

The very first indications of the cherry blossoms had begun popping up a few weeks ago. When Melissa's friend Toni was visiting we saw a few in Yoyogi park. But it wasn't until this week that they really came out with a vengeance. And man, was it ever beautiful to see. Kayoko and I spent a good bit of the week preparing for the school’s Hanami party that was to take place on the weekend. Around about this time the manager that had been working with us temporarily finished off her stint at the school. She was pretty cool. We had a final farewell with her in Kokubunji.

Thursday saw me running in the afternoon.

And that’s really unusual.

Some explanation required. I often have a fairly large break on Thursday afternoon, so I took the opportunity to walk back to my apartment, change into my jogging gear and tear it up through Koganei Park on an absolutely beautiful April day. It was really warm and, more than anything SUPER crowded.

The latter part of the previous statement also requiring further explanation.

My city, Koganei, is INCREDIBLY well renowned for its cherry blossoms. So much so that 30 or 40 years ago, the trains on the Chuo line would only stop in Koganei for two weeks out of the year. Those would be the two weeks of Hanami, when the cherry blossoms were blooming. This may not be so surprising when you consider that my house is on a street called Sakuramachi. That literally means Cherry road.

It follows therefore that the yearly Cherry Blossom festival is an absolute mad house. The close proximity to Tokyo and the quality of the sakura presentation creates the perfect typhoon. So Koganei gets a bit flooded, especially the park section of it.

And this all added up to a very interesting jog for me. I’m used to jogging at night with barely anyone else around during the coolest part of the 24 hour cycle. So yeah, it was a novel to be dodging around kids on bikes and huge numbers of people walking dogs. Not to mention the heat. That stuff wasn’t annoying at all.

Hmmm…sarcasm doesn’t really come through in print.

It all added up to a really exhausting jog that was partially fueled through a song recently recommended to me by Melissa, Flo Rida’s Right Round. I can’t really comment on the intelligence of the lyrics, but damn if music like that doesn’t help with running. He certainly throws together a good rhyme.
It was damn appropriate for the hectic surroundings of that particular run.
Other than that though, a fairly typical week. Sunday saw me up nice and early to partake in a wonderful Japanese tradition. Companies in Japan these days often send the newest members in an office to reserve the spot for the office Hanami party. In many cases this even means that they have to go and stay there overnight.

That was me this year. Minus the overnight bit.

Although, honestly, I think it was probably more due to me being the member of school staff that lived closest to the park, not my junior position.

So I was out nice and early sitting on my school’s tarp, snapping away at the cherry blossoms with my camera and awaiting the nice big group of students that was coming to hang out with us. The spot I picked was pretty good, in that it wasn’t too crowded but still had plenty of sakura trees around. The park was ridiculously busy though, so busy that in some places it was actually difficult to see the ground around the tarps placed down by picnicking families.

We had a pretty decent student turnout. About 20 people. Kayoko and I had also taken advantage of the newly opened Ito Yokada across the street from the school to pick up some authentic western food. Ie. Tortilla chips and salsa. Yeah, yeah, not exactly Canadian, but it’s a bit of a rarity in Japan. I don't think it was wildly popular with the students, but it was nice as something new for them to try. The rest of the afternoon was pretty great. Good conversation, seeing Sean again, tons of cherry blossoms. Does it cause some descriptive dissonance to call the afternoon badass? I mean, there weren’t any awesome guitar solos or anything…

But badass ‘twas.

Things broke up in the late afternoon and we all headed back to our respective places of residence.

Monday was pretty spectacular. I met Melissa in Ebisu early on in the day to go and take care of some medical concerns we had about our upcoming trip to Malaysia. Namely, Malaria and Typhoid.

This led us to the Tokyo British Clinic and a nice meeting with a doctor. He informed us that the risk of contracting either disease was quite low. As a precaution though, we both got Malaria shots at an absolutely exorbitant price, something in the area of $350. I’ll unfortunately have to go back and get the Typhoid shot later this summer for a trip that’s coming up in fall. This was actually kind of a surreal experience. I guess I know what Americans without health care feel like now.

“I’ll take the Malaria but hold the Typhoid.”
“If you buy both now you get a 10% discount…”
“Well…I’ll have to put it on layaway, but okay.”

After the Doctor’s, Melissa and I headed to Ginza for a second time. It was a lot cooler this time out, we wandered around and just took in the sights. I was on a mission to get a few pics for my friend Simon back in Canada of the Vertu store in Ginza. We didn’t actually know where the store was, so we had to wander a bit before we found it. I got some shots of the outside. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t let me shoot inside the store. Guess that’s the curse of being an amateur.

Things then got really interesting. We decided to go to the Imperial Palace because Melissa hadn’t been there before and we were within easy walking distance.

The Palace itself was much like I remembered it. However, we stumbled along a path that runs alongside the moat of the Imperial Palace that is famous as one of the best places in Japan to see Cherry Blossoms. This discovery was completely by accident and COMPLETELY awesome. The path is positively enfolded in Cherry trees. This is bolstered by beautiful views across the moat of the palace walls bedecked with more cherry trees.

We followed the path for about 45 minutes, circling about half of the Palace compound before we split off and crossed the street and arrived at our originally intended destination.

The Yasu-Kuni shrine.

This is a really impressive, very beautiful shrine. Unfortunately it’s also quite infamous. The shrine itself is dedicated to the war dead of the Meiji Restoration. This was later expanded to include any soldier that died in service to the emperor in times of war.

So far so good.

Oh wait…except for a little blimp called World War 2. Japan unfortunately did some not so nice things on continental Asia. Since the shrine is dedicated to soldiers sacrificing themselves during war, a great number of combatant names were enshrined there after World War 2.

Which makes the shrine a public relations nightmare.

Every time a Prime Minister visits the temple China and Korea freak out and make claims about Japanese militarism and attempts to revise their history. Arguably, China and Korea aren’t being that alarmist. There are thousands of shrines in Japan. There’s no real reason why you would choose to go to the one shrine that will piss off the international community.
Conversely, should not Japan be allowed to mourn their dead as well?

It’s a sticky situation.

Anyways, political disaster aside, it is a really beautiful shrine, and was quite busy when we were there. We just kind of waltzed in and wandered around while I made cracks about damaging relations between Japan and its neighbours.

We only stayed for a short time before leaving the shrine to grab some festival food. Mmmm Yattei (food shacks at festivals). After that, it was out of Tokyo and off to Shimo-Kita-Zawa for more rock power with Ben and Co. We’ve actually started building a band in the game at this point. The Hair Blair Bunch will rock on forever! Great fun and a great week!

Sakura’d out

Ian “Mello Yello” Cantello