Countryside Retreat

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Countryside Retreat

I almost didn't go. It was a long week - we started doing in-vivo imaging, which regretfully means the mouse has to be alive. Like, really alive, intact alive - not the sort-of-alive of the happily-floating brain samples. So that means that we have to peek at their brains (some disassembly required) using as little anesthesia as possible (otherwise they either overdose and die or freak out, speed up the metabolism of the anesthesia, and die). It was less than pleasant.

So when work was finally done for the week, I just wanted to go home and retreat. I would cook a quiet dinner, read a book, and then sleep for as many hours as my brain could handle. I'm enough of an introvert that going out with friends is an effort; traveling to a Japanese acquaintance's house (!) alone in the country (!) and staying with his family (!) would hardly be relaxing. Still, I came to this country to experience things, and somehow sleeping in my apartment for days didn't seem to qualify.

There's a commercial on TV here that says "Lasting regret comes from the things that we don't do, not the things we do" and, as much as I am disinclined to absorb life philosophies from a corporate message, it has the feel of truth about it.

So I decided to go.

But first I had to have dinner with my professor. I eat lunch with him almost every day, now, and I spend between 8 and 12 hours in a lab with him. The last thing I want to do on a Friday evening is have dinner with him, but I could hardly refuse. So I met his wife and we went to a sushi restaurant, where we met up with his rather attractive and interesting daughter for what turned out to be a surprisingly enjoyable dinner. The sushi was most excellent - the freshest I've had in recent memory (a step above what I'm usually willing to subject myself to in order to save money), and the company was both kind and enjoyable. After the dinner, they dropped me off at Kyoto's big train station, where I was quite early for the departure. So I picked up an omiyage (like souvenir gift except less kitschy, and more foody - usually given when you travel to meet someone, or in my case, stay at their house). Usually as a foreigner I'm exempt from such cultural expectations, but I enjoy both surprising them with politeness and blending in as much as possible.

Afterwards, I spent an hour in a nearby coffeeshop listening to music, drinking a macha cappuccino (ridiculously tasty and exquisitely prepared) and delighting in the hedonism of a cheesecake (one food I've strangely begun to crave over here. I even had a dream about cheesecake once. Why? I don't usually even eat it in the U.S. ... prolly vitamin-deficiency cravings or something). I also finished the book of minimalist Japanese poetry that was in the background of one of the pictures, which turned out to be a surprisingly personal collection of poetry from a Kyotonian.

Eventually, Uki and Tanaka arrived and we departed. But wait! Who are Uki and Tanaka? Well, they are two guys in Bessho-sensei's physics class. I met them one time when they came to the lab to perform an experiment; I met them again when I had to give a 25-minute presentation in Japanese on my major. I mean, I don't even really know in English what SymSys is other than an interdisciplinary major that has all the subjects I want to study. Having to do a 25-minute presentation was practically impossible. Blech. Thankfully, though, I was allowed to drop into English any time I wanted, so when I needed to kill time and extend it I just yakked in English. Anyway, we had lunch that day and occasionally afterwards. They proved to be quite understanding about my unfortunate level of Japanese and have the kindness and the extroversion to invite me to lunches when they can. Additionally, they are both easy to remember: Uki has dyed his hair blonde while Tanaka has hair dyed red. It makes spotting them easy and helps me keep track of who they are (quite useful if you meet a lot of people, shallowly).

So one day at lunch, Tanaka mentioned that his hometown was having a fireworks festival the day after Sandai exams ended, and he invited both Uki and I to go. Near the ocean plus fireworks always means a good time can be had.

In any case, at last we boarded the train and had an interesting train ride. I'm always a little nervous when put in one-on-one situations with Japanese people, especially for long periods of time (the ride was 2 and a half hours) - the language barrier permanently surrounds me. Conversing requires wading through this thick mud - at times, with effort, it's possible, but *so* much effort.

We learned a lot about each other on the trains, and ended it with Tanaka's dad picking us up. In his car with an embedded LCD TV. Even in the countryside, Japan is still Japan.

We drove through the countryside briefly, at which point I became aware of where I was - precisely, nowhere. There were no lights, cars, sirens, or the unending city noise. Kyoto is hardly a noisy city by Japanese standards, but there seems to universally be a lot of noise pollution. Random cars drive through the neighborhoods blaring messages of recycling, picking stuff up, newspaper corrections, or wares to be sold. All trucks larger than your average pickup actually announce that they are turning *every* time they go right or left. It's like that beep-beep-backing-up noise except ten times worse because it is actually words, talking to you. It's was a bit surreal once I finally understood it - all these big trucks lumbering by were actually yakking at me...

In any case, Fukichiyama, Tanaka's hometown, was truly quiet (population 16,000), beautiful (completely surrounded by mountains), and a great place to relax. I muddled through an introduction to his parents that speak some sort of rural variation on Japanese which has a little funkiness in the pronunciation and ridiculous amounts of slurring.

His house, however, was gorgeous: in the countryside where land is actually affordable, people can have normal sized houses, and his was beautiful with elaborate tatami rooms, gorgeous artwork, and a scenic yard. His parents were travelers, and had an excellent collection of artwork from around the world. I recognized a print of Nefertiti from my Art History class and had a really fun time explaining what I remembered about Egyptian art and architecture to them - they apparently liked the print in Egypt, but didn't know what it was. They also had a map room with maps of everywhere in the world - and lots of highlighter indicating places they'd gone to. They were curious where my home was, and where Stanford is, so I added a couple of points on their map. They are just real good people, and kind. I tried to figure out what they did for a living, but was assaulted by a torrent of Japanese, slurred together, and it was all I could do to keep up with the "Oh really?"s and the "Wow"s - I didn't catch a word of it. Alas.

In any case, we were exhausted, arriving after midnight, and unrolled the futons on the tatami mats and sacked out. Oh, and they had the snazzy traditional Japanese pillows that are filled with soybeans or something, though more comfortable than you might imagine. The Japanese are pretty solid with the beans - here, beans can become anything from a dessert item to furniture stuffing. The Native Americans might've figured out how to use every part of the buffalo, but the Japanese really got the leg-up on the legumes, yo.

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I awoke to a soft breeze blowing between the rice paper doors, and the sound of the cicadas in the trees. That was a delightful sentence to say. It was also quite a nice experience, especially since the fibrillation-inducing scream of my cell alarm was notably absent.

I quietly got dressed alone, and was soon joined by Uki and Tanaka who arose before me. Plopping myself down in front of the breakfast table, I was greeted by an extremely large and inviting breakfast. Not one bit of it was processed, all very natural (lots of veggies), and very Japanese (= includes fish). The smoked salmon at breakfast was unusual, but I've long left my usual food preferences behind, and it is quite tasty.

We filled a day-pack with our lunch, and headed out in the family's car. It's been a while since I went driving with friends, and cruising along the highways, blasting Japanese reggae was Good Times.

Unfortunately, after driving for about an hour to pass through the mountains and emerge at the beach, we were met by an unexpected storm of unholy magnitude. Within seconds, our car was engulfed in the mouth of a river falling from the sky. It was absurd. We drove the remaining two (2) kilometers (so close!), and arrived at the beach - which people were fleeing as fast as they could. It was a little dangerous to go in the water, because of lightning (I think that's what they said), so we waited around for a few minutes, then hung out in a snack shack by the ocean. The shack had a large wooden stage covered with mats, presumably for purposes of sitting, which I decided to investigate.

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I awoke to the sound of a typhoon on the tin roof above and the rhythm of ocean waves beside. A deep breath, and I tasted the air of the ocean. I guess I had fallen asleep - we went to bed at 2 a.m. the night before, and I had woken up at 8 a.m. I lose sleep all week, so I try to recover on the weekends, but six hours isn't much of a recovery. Waking up on the seashore was a pleasant experience, though.

We had waited for about an hour and a half apparently, and the sky remained the color of Armageddon. Realizing it probably would not let up, we needed to formulate a plan that would occupy the hours until the hanabi festival that evening, so we evaluated the options of Fun Things to Do in Japan.

We went to the onsen.

Steam room? Oh yes. Pool-sized bubble bath? Indeed. Floor to ceiling windows looking down from the mountains into the valley, so your nekkid butt can see for miles? Mmm, yes. Interestingly, they also had a balcony that you can wander out onto and enjoy the nice breeze, soft rain, and warm sun on aforementioned nekkid butt.

After literally hours of trying out the three floors of baths, we had a final showdown in the sauna. I wasn't entirely sure what to expect, never having been to one before, but it was, um, hot. Loser, the first person to come out, had to buy the rest of us drinks afterwards. I'm a pretty stubborn guy and willing to endure some pretty ridiculous things in order to not lose, so I felt failure could be eschewed if victory could not be assured. We stepped into the 50-Celsius room, and began our battle. Twenty-minutes later, dizzily stumbling out, unable to even touch my own hair because of the heat, I fell into the cold-pool desperately trying to see if my body could, in fact, recover homeostasis.

Again, that random fact from ninth-grade biology floated through my loosely-connected neurons, something about oxygen being unable to bind to hemoglobin above 104 degrees Fahrenheit. I churned on that for a couple of seconds, but the millstone ground no answer for that question. Fahrenheit-Celsius conversion was gone. Worse still, I had lost the challenge. Shameful. I made a mental note to work out more, and attempted to create as little heat as possible while transferring away as much as I could, lying lifeless in the cold pool.

They emerged shortly after me, confident in their victory if not in their coordination and mental processes. We spent thirty minutes recovering, and then, exhausted, showered and headed upstairs to the relaxation space.

Which also was ridiculous in its effort to produce relaxation. There was an array of unbelievably comfortable chairs designed to be relaxed in, there was a small cafe where you can get all manner of tasty treats and delicious drinks, there was a tatami-mat room of Epic Size. It was a massive space, more akin to a gymnasium than a dojo, covered with rice-paper artwork and walled on one side with exceedingly large plasma TVs. Mmm, yes.

I, um, decided to treat the guys to drinks, and we all attempted to recover the fluids that had been steamed out of us by that inferno downstairs. I lay back ("Oh, there's a recliner lever here .... Mmm, delightful") in one of the chairs, relaxed, and drifted off...

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I'll have to stop here. In order to　keep trying new things, I decided to head up to climb Mt. Fuji this weekend, so you'll get the second half of this and the Fuji story sometime next week. Eventually we will actually get to the kickass fireworks festival. In any case, adieu, and fare thee well, kind reader!

-Danny

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Photos

Fukichiyama, and Ocean
The ocean inlet next to Fukichiyama.

My bed
Wow, this house was gorgeous. My bed.

The living room
With a giant print of Buddha on the table. Straight from India.

The driveway
And lo! An empty lot. In Japan, no less. Beautiful mountains in the background, though.

Uki and Tanaka
Post-onsen. We chill in the recliners.

Uki and Tanaka again
Check the hair. We made a good bunch - me with green hair, Uki with blonde, and Tanaka with red.

Driving
Beautiful and wide Fukichiyama.

Comments

[james]

freaking incredible entry. that was an awesome read. (i know that sounds superficial, but i really did like it.) esp the language barrier stuff. because i feel like that all the freaking time. and it's nice to have people to empathize with.