Let's Just Pretend That Didn't Happen

Taking the headline from the blog of a friend of mine in Japan, please remove my three/five month absence from your memories and let's just press on, shall we?  I hope there are still some blog readers out there.

This is the account of a trip I took in July with my friend Ari when he came to visit in late July.  (**I'm missing a few pictures here, hopefully I'll have an update after Ari sends me a couple of his.)  He flew into Osaka and I met him there.  We stayed in Osaka for a couple nights, mainly to get one day of seeing the city and going to the Osaka International Beer Festival.

From the top of Osaka Castle.

As a craft beer lover, Japan has proved to be a challenge for me.  There are microbreweries, but their distribution is very small, and 95% of bars and stores are dominated by the major breweries--Asahi, Sapporo, Kirin, and Yebisu.  They primarily make a rice-lightened lager that is better than Budweiser or Miller but pretty thin and poor as far as taste goes.  In fact craft breweries have only been legal in Japan for under 20 years.  For the most part, they focus on the European styles, and that was reflected at the Beer Festival, which pulled from Japanese microbreweries and imported beer mostly from Belgium and Germany.  It's very interesting seeing the different ethos and expectations placed on beer here.  The American style is starting to catch on, though.

The festival was held in the top of the Kyocera Dome, the home of the Orix Buffaloes baseball team.

That night we slept in our capsule hotel (my first) and got up early to go climb Mt. Fuji.  We had to take the train from Osaka, and we tried to get as much sleep as we could on the train because we'd be climbing the mountain at night.

The best climbing season for Fuji is the summer, because that's the only time when the snow on the mountain finally melts.  The problem is that Japan is blazing hot and very humid in the summer, making daytime ascents excruciating, slow, and potentially dangerous because there is zero cover on the mountainside.  Therefore, most climbers start at night.

A hearty local soup made with pumpkin before the climb.

Ari, Fish Head.  Fish Head, Ari.

The task ahead.

We stored our bags at one of the base stations, then took a shuttle bus to the trailhead.  The trailhead was, of course, a huge building and a parking lot.  This was just a taste of the on-mountain development we'd see on our way up.  As the holiest mountain in Japan, Fuji gets an enormous amount of traffic every year, and they've done everything they can to cater to that traffic.  This ranges from periodic huts and food stations (with pay restrooms) to canisters of oxygen to prevent altitude sickness.  And that's before what's at the top.  But first, the climb.

We met a JET friend of mine who I had heard was climbing at the same time, and we set off around 10 PM.  The climb ended up taking us about 5.5 hours, with some rest breaks included.  Something that became apparent is that the mountain is basically a desert at a 40 degree incline.  Rocks, rocks, and more rocks.  The only real vegetation disappeared maybe 15 or 20 minutes after we started.

There didn't seem to be too many climbers at first, but as we progressed the density grew.  Each way-station was, to me, a bit of a miracle of human stubbornness.  Fully developed huts and decks cling to the mountainside and come fully stocked with Snickers bars, hot noodles, and even beer.  The prices climb along with you up the mountain, of course, but the idea that they exist at all is fairly stunning given the amount of energy it must take to maintain.  We added layers as we climbed, because even with our exertion it became colder and colder.

Near the top the path narrowed and we suddenly found ourselves in a long single-file line of people with headlamps.  A good percentage of the climbers were traveling in tour groups, all wearing bright new climbing jumpsuits.  The leaders held glowing red wands and would periodically engage in a call and answer yell with the group.  I imagine that for many of them Fuji is the only mountain they'll ever climb.

Around 3:30 we reached the summit...to find hot food, beer, a full gift shop, a couple vending machines (yes, this means they run electricity up to the top of the highest mountain in Japan) and the most expensive pay toilets yet.  We moved past that and set up on the hillside to huddle in the cold and watch the sunrise.

The sun rose on Fuji on the morning of my 25th birthday, and it's something I'll never forget.  We were lucky, because often heavy clouds cloak the top of the mountain in the morning and prevent sight of the sunrise.

After soaking in the sun, we made our way around the awe-inspiring crater past the Shinto shrine and post office to the old weather station perched on the lip of the crater straight out of a Bond movie.  It's not used anymore except as a location for digital sensors, but it was built in the 50s and used to have a huge radar dish on the top.  It also housed one attendant year-round.  To imagine the solitude and brutality of that life still renders me a little speechless.

As it crept up to 6 AM, it was time to head down as it was already beginning to get warm.  Ari and I took a side route down because of where we had stored our bags, and it turned out to be one of the best decisions we've ever made.

That side of the mountain was almost completely empty of people, and the volcanic ash and gravel form a loose path down.  The gravel was deep and forgiving on our tired knees, and then we started to realize that because of the incline we could take bigger and bigger steps, turning into leaps that sometimes spanned 10 feet.  Yelling and whooping and laughing, we ran down half of Mt. Fuji.

Exhausted and half-delirious from more than 24 hours awake, we caught the train to the nearby town of Numazu, where we wanted to have dinner at Baird Brewing Company, an American style microbrewery.  We found an onsen/bath house and had a rather incredible soak before passing out in the sleeping room there for a few hours.

The dinner and the beer at Baird was beyond excellent, and we crashed to sleep, because we had to get up to catch the train to Matsumoto the next day.

We only stayed in Matsumoto for one night in order to see the famous castle.  It's one of the three most famous castles in Japan, and its nickname is the Black Crow.  Matsumoto is in Nagano prefecture, and as such is up in the mountains.  It's a really nice city, with a less hectic feel than some of the lowland cities.

Japanese castles have lost a bit of their luster for me, because of the similarity of their interiors, but Matsumoto was still wonderfully picturesque.  That night we tried a recommended restaurant and had a delicacy I'd never tried before: bee larvae.  They look and taste more or less like crispy rice, except that Ari noticed a half-formed leg coming from one of them.

Another successful trip out into Japan, with an especially memorable birthday included.  A week later I was on a plane bound for the United States for a visit home for the summer.