Time Flies, Flowers Fly Faster

These are a few pictures from a glorious spring day, April 17th.  There are only a few days when the sakura are in relatively full bloom before they begin to fall and change to leaves.  That ephemeral nature takes on a pretty huge role in Japanese culture and the sakura season took on an added poignancy this year because of the earthquake and tsunami.  

These pictures are all from a couple of my typical biking routes near my apartment.  I am going to miss this next year, no question.

The petals already start to fall and accumulate in the river.

The next few pictures are from one of my favorite places in the neighborhood, an often overlooked riverside park and picnic area.  It's difficult to describe how suspended, dreamlike, and lovely it was that day.

My lunch.

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Kyushu Spring Vacation Post-Script

Here are a few pictures from my trip to Kyushu that didn't really fit in the main posts.

This is a thing that really exists.  It's called Cat Cafe, and you pay by the half hour to sit in there and play with cats.  Your first drink is free, and Nate told me there's even some alcoholic drinks.  This is a strange picture because I didn't want to go fully in front to take a picture as there were patrons inside at the time.... 

The sleepy town of Omachi, Saga Prefecture, early in the morning before one of the Nagasaki trips.

Sup, Leo.  You must really like tires.

The morning I left, Omachi and the surrounding fields and hills. 

"Retrotic & Romantic".  Sign me up.

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Kyushu Spring Vacation Part 3: Transcendence in Nagasaki

Originally I was going to visit Kumamoto City in the middle of Kyushu to check off the third famous castle of Japan from my list, but the more I thought about it I realized I wasn't done with Nagasaki and I've been trying to move away from checklist travel.  I didn't "do" very much, but I will remember that day for a long time.

I had read and heard that the view from the top of Mount Inasa was one of the best in Japan, especially at night.  I wouldn't get a chance to see it at night, but I figured it was still worth a look during the day.  I got to the mountain basically by pointing myself in its direction and walking until I got there and onto the winding road to the top.  There was a cable car, but it cost money, and doing it my way meant I got to wander through neighborhoods, one of my favorite pastimes in a new city.  The slope of the hills makes them especially dramatic in Nagasaki.

I managed to hit the sakura season pretty dead-on, and incredibly there was almost no one else walking the road.  It was an incline, of course, but there was a sidewalk all the way up to the top and it was lined with cherry trees the whole way.  Absolutely gorgeous.

At the top I had my pick of three peaks, with their own observatories and park areas.  Of course, and very unfortunately, there was a gigantic parking lot as well

The highest peak is of course the famous Mount Inasa, and while I didn't experience it at night, it was breathtaking.  And I think I got a pretty good idea about the night view from this plaque:

Only in Japan.

A quick note about this picture.  This is facing up into the hills, the harbor is to the right.  The picture is centered more or less on where the atomic bomb was dropped.  The location was picked because of these same distinctive steep hills: they focused the blast and produced more damage.  Nagasaki was picked because it was and is an industrial city--however, I don't know what it was like then, but now all of the industry is centered around the harbor, in a significantly different area.  This is just residential. 

A famous torii gate that was only 800 meters from the hypocenter but remained half-standing.  It has been structurally reinforced for safety but otherwise remains as it was.

The other torii pieces.  They reminded me very much of the ruins I saw in Rome, interestingly enough.

Nuclear scars.

I saw this plaque after taking the picture above, and it floored me, because I took mine from almost the exact same spot.

As I turned away from reading the plaque, I caught sight of an old man on the adjacent busy street.  He was in the process of taking off his cap and bowing towards the torii gate, and I was directly in line with his bow.  Because of the timing of my turn, I couldn't tell whether he saw me turning and was bowing to me in appreciation of my visit to this spot or if the bow was a consistent ritual for him.  Either interpretation, and perhaps also that ambiguity, is powerful enough to move me to tears now as I write this.  He was old enough to have been alive during the war.  There is often so much dignity and restrained but fully-felt emotion and respect in the people I meet and see here, and it is extremely humbling.

"Peace is more precious than a piece of land...let there be no more wars."

- Anwar Al-Sadat

On the way back from a beautiful and powerful day.

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Kyushu Spring Vacation Part 2: Sailing and a Dutch Twilight Zone in Japan

Sorry about that month in between updates, the weeks have started to slip by with alarming rapidity as I approach the end of my time in Japan.

On my second full day in Kyushu, I went with Nate and a few friends to Sasebo, the northwest corner of Kyushu, to do some sailing.  We participated in an amateur, just-for-fun race and then cruised around a little on a slightly chilly day.  It was great to be out on a boat again, it's been a couple years for me.

I asked what these strange towers were and learned that, amazingly, they are the now-defunct mainland origination of the "Tora Tora Tora" signal.  That was the signal for the Imperial fleet to attack Pearl Harbor.  Without modern communications, the Japanese had to bounce radio signals between stations throughout the Pacific to reach the fleet.  The fact that I was able to just calmly sail by this place and talk about it with a Japanese man is pretty stunning in some ways.

Coming back to the Huis Ten Bosch whirlwind...

Afterwards we ventured into Huis Ten Bosch, the massive reconstruction and imitation of a Dutch city that the harbor was attached to.  Part theme park, part shopping mall/entertainment center, part actual resort town for the super wealthy, Huis Ten Bosch was incredibly strange. 

The whole place was built to scale to imitate an 18th century Dutch town, in honor of Kyushu's centuries-old connections to the Dutch.  There's not a whole lot else I can say about it, except that there was random musical theater and a man in a mouse costume popped out of a door, bowed respectfully and unironically, and continued on his way while we were walking around.  Normal rules of reality were suspended for the afternoon.  All I could think of was that the Japanese had gone back in time, dropped a neutron bomb, and replaced all the Dutch inhabitants with nice Japanese families.  Funny but more than a little unsettling.

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