Shikoku Part II

I bought a big black felt pen marker from the convenience store, aka the konbini, and went out around back to grab some cardboard boxes ready for recycling. I ripped off one side, and wrote my destination on it. As I did this, a very brief flash of my subconscious surfaced and my eyes darted left and right wondering how strange and out of place I must look—a white guy rummaging through recycled boxes behind a convenience store, ripping them apart, writing on them. Even a trivial act such as this can make you feel leagues apart from the masses of Japanese people, who generally speaking adhere to a certain way of doing things, especially when in public. But, this moment of self-consciousness soon disappeared, and I sat down on the curb and began writing. A lady and her dog walked by. I felt their questioning eyes on me. I had to check my atlas for the correct kanji of my destination (as city names are dreadfully difficult, their readings seemingly decided by the cosmos around the same time that the ancient sun goddess and mother of Japan, Amaterasu, gave birth to this country). I then sat down and scanned my atlas for the best way to get onto the roads, the best launching off point into the grid of traffic ahead. Where would someone most likely stop for me, and where would there be enough space to stop, giving the driver enough time to debate as to what to do after seeing me? I quickly realized I was in a bad spot, caught in the crags of concrete urban sprawl, and would need to walk nearly an hour north and try to get onto the massive highway system, having to abandon the series of fuutsu michi—regular roads—I usually stick to.

A note on hitchhiking: Japan doesn't have a pastime of hitchhiking, and if you stick your thumb out on the road waving it wildly at the oncoming driver you're going to get various reactions. One of them comes in the form of a massive swerve away from you into the oncoming lane, the driver's eyes bulging. It would seem, after having this experience, that someone standing on the side of the road with their thumb does gets the synapses firing in the onlookers brain, but not in the "this guy needs a ride" kind of way. Indeed, in more of a confused and "What in the world is going on here? Has this man been stranded? Is in need of help?” This reaction is usually limited to the elderly man who drives with his wife sitting in the back seat. The younger drivers: well you get a mixed reaction from this lot. You often get a thumbs-up back at you from the youthful driver, as if the hitchhiker doesn't want a ride, but is simply passing on good vibes to the drivers coming his way.

All this being said, you are going to get picked up sooner or later. But, I do recommend making a sign and writing (if you can, in Kanji) your destination on it. It's almost like a right of passage: you got the sign, now you are a man of smarts, with a mission and speaking in a language the driver's can understand. Plus, you can write kanji, which is an element of relief for the Japanese driver whom may not have all the confidence in the world to strike up small talk in English within the confines of the privacy of their car. Furthermore, if you have the backpack slung around your shoulders, have a sign, and invoke the image of a proper “worldly traveler’ it’s going to help you all the more. Things are done here properly, not half-assed. If you want to go hiking, rain or shine you need to be “a hiker”, donning the gators, the bear bell, the vest, and flannel top, the energy bars and boots—no matter the weather, the hike, nor the climate. This transcends jogging, working, club-going, and anything else. It’s good to keep this in mind when hiking. If you simply look like the average bloke, disheveled, in need of the ride and hanging out on the side of the street you’re less likely to be picked up.

I've hitchhiked, like many other foreigners do in this country, all over the damn place and I've been picked up by the very first car, and although sometimes have had to wait for quite some time, but never longer than an hour and a bit. I'd say, generally speaking, out of the four years I've been hitchhiking here, I've been picked up on average within about twenty minutes.

Now, as I hung out behind this convenience store planning my route of attack, I realized I had to make it on the highway system in order to get onto the island of Shikoku. And for those of you who don't know, Japan has a two-tier highway system. The word "highway" here means the toll highway, akin to the expressway in The West. While the highway, which in Canada usually means the roads which connect one city to another, is simply a "city road" as it is rare to ever truly "leave" a city before arriving at another one; partly, this is due to massive urban sprawl, but also do to geography. 80% of Japan's mountains are undeveloped, volcanic spires which shoot into the air, undeveloped for city life (but at times still deforested and replanted and paved now in the most ridiculous manner, but I won't get into that). Which means, the 120,000,000 inhabitants of this country can only build in between these rocky folds (or must simply bulldoze them to the ground to create more livable space, which of course is not unheard of. eg, Tokyo, Osaka, et al). If you ever have the chance to look at Japan from a high altitude, you will see that the floor of the island--the land in between the mountains--is a spidery web of roads, lights, and buildings. That western road which leaves one city, brings you into a land of animals, nature and darkness is unheard of on the main routes of Honshu. On must go to Hokkaido, or head to the mountains to experience such a thing in Japan.

So it was the express way for me. It costs a high price to get on this network of roads. The highway system was made during the bubble years where yen was flowing freely on par with pork barrel politics, and was such an expensive and major undertaking the government still hasn't paid it off to this day (or so I hear). These expressways can be jaw-droppingly amazing sites at times: the bridges more than five stories high with shock absorbers for earthquakes and which rise above you, completely dwarfing the town underneath; the tunnels last more than twenty km long, blasted through dozens of km of mountain with massive fans bolted to the ceiling to recycle the air and get out the exhaust from its depths. To the eyes of a Canadian, it's a truly massive undertaking of a project that spans nearly the entire country.

All feats of engineering aside, it's harder to hitchhike on the expressway. First of all because it's illegal, and secondly because people are driving so fast it’s dangerous (not to mention shockingly strange) to see a person standing on the side of one of these roads. To get on to them you must pick up a ride before the toll gates, not in sight of the attendant (you'll get kicked off) and at a place where the car isn't going so fast. You then must leapfrog from rest area to rest area. If you do snag a ride on here, you can cover a vast amount of distance in one fell swoop, as the highways by pass cities and their gridlocks (although the scenery is not nearly as interesting on here as it is on the lower, usual roads).

I did make it onto the island, with the help of two cars and their drivers. The first helped me get to the highway itself. With old style clothes, disheveled hair and crooked teeth, he was young fellow buying canned coffee from a vending machine when I approached him. I didn’t ask him for a ride, but for directions. He then simply said it’d be faster for him to drive me to my destination than give directions. A stroke of good luck on this chilly March morning.

Out of the two people in the second, it was the girl in the passenger seat, half enthralled with and half scared for my well-being, who I had to thank. She got her boyfriend—someone twenty years or more her senior-to stop for me. I ran up to the window of the sleek, sports car, met the eyes of a cute girl in her twenties who didn’t say hop-in but rather, dai jyoubu?—are you okay? We exchanged formalities, I assured her I was traveling according to plan, and finally got on my way, bag on lap and eyes on me.

She kept peering back from the front seat, while her boyfriend looked at me through the review mirror. They were both kind, and beyond the innocent questions most people have in this country about foreigners, conversation was easy. The girl was indeed worried for my safety and took it upon herself as responsibility to be sure I go to where I was going, as if she didn’t, someone would have been along the way to hinder my further efforts. We stopped and looked at some flowers together on route.

That’s when I made it into the first city on Shikoku - and got stuck. One’s got to avoid cities at all costs when hitchhiking in Japan (probably anywhere for that matter), for stopping not only becomes a task, but stopping on a busy street, in front of dozens of other people, like anywhere else, reduces your chances of being picked up. I had but no choice, and decided to walk along the main city road with my sign wavering until I snagged a ride. It took about an hour or so, but I got one, the driver doing his bit for karma as he had hitchhiked throughout Europe as a teenager, “giving back to all those people who helped him then”, but he could only drop me off on the other side of town. So I found myself dancing, waving, and smiling at all cars on the main road again—the cars going so slow making eye contact was an easy task. Some shying away, others waving you away like an annoying fly, most bowing apologetically, others giggling and staring at you even as the cars passed, and others, stopping for you, and ordering you to get in the car in almost a lecturing manner, chuckling among themselves.

The latter happened to me, and I snagged the ride which would steer me too the doorstep of Mount. Tsurugi-san. Who did I have to thank? Two obasan. Obasan, meaning Grandma or old lady, also pertains to one of the many archetypes which make up the world of fashion and living of Japan. Like any country, archetypes can be seen, some adhered to by people, some completely blown out of the water by others. My two benefactors this time around, driving an ordinary family sedan of Japanese proportions, encompassed what image my students would conjure up in their minds of the word "obasan" when I did I class on stereotypes. Dyed blue hair, strong personalities; a full-deal package, cracking jokes they laugh at more themselves than their listerners do. Plump, direct, to the point. Their dialect thick, their questioning tone strong—not the meek, skinny and cute image most people have of Japanese women. Although these two picked me up, they grilled me the whole duration of the ride. I felt like I shrunk one foot in size and turned back into an adolescent boy during the span of this ride. Something out of a Alice in Wonderland tale, where the two women sitting in the front seats were giants, laughing, speaking in some indiscernible dialect, poking fun and sharing some secret I could not access.

They were not rude, but the series of questions they had, truly shed the light that they viewed whatever I was doing to not only be completely alien and ridiculous, but quite immature. “So you stand on the side of the rode and ask for rides? Do you expect people to pick you up? Do you often do this? Where do you sleep?” and so on. Of course, with their many years of experience on this earth, they said, they not only had the responsibility to pick me up, but to try to feed me along the way (handing me sweets, oranges, and the like). This was nothing new to me, and instead of causing a stink, after denying their offers I humbly accepted (although I had no where to store any of them).

An hour or so later I was bowing outside of the car, not only in thanks to my two benefactors, but also now to one of the woman's husbands who came out to see what all the commotion was about--a wolf in the chicken coop, too many feathers were being ruffled for the master of the house not to come out and see what was up. I was standing outside of the house, the driver of the car now gone, leaving me saying goodbye to the obasan with the husband. I peered into the house: it was a simple one, but one that told a story of families and tradition. You could tell kids had been raised here, and the house spoke of years of undisturbed domestic living--years of proper marriages, reared children, salaries, oranges on tables, five o'clock news, and tucked in sheets on nicely made beds awaiting for the return of the moved-on children.

I looked down the road the house was on, more of a paved mountain road then a city one. I had already began to leave the city areas of Shikoku and was on the outskirts of the valleys which lay ahead. This road was my next route ahead, the mountain folds of Shikoku becoming more enclosed the closer I made my way to the mountains. The river on the right which paralleled the road getting that much bigger, rugged. The houses becoming scarcer, and as it had been almost 8 hours since I first made my cardboard signs behind the convenience store, the skies had become darker.

The husband asked me exactly how I was planning on getting to the door step of Mt. Tsurugi, the second tallest mountain on Shikoku. A mountain which was still about two hours away, in an area where traffic was unlikely.

I looked at him, and replied, "Plan?"

Travels: Shikok Part I

It's one of the four main islands which make up Japan and for some reason, is the least popular among them. To add to this mystique, it is also one of the most pristine (if that's an adjective someone can use to describe Japan) with the only undammed river in the entire country, the site of one of the last stands between the samurai of old and the modernized Meiji army and an ancient 88 temple circuit founded by a now renowned Buddhist monk. So, after scouring a map of Shikoku, in a deep breath which resembled more of a huff and a puff, I gathered my-could-be-last-amount-of-Japan-traveling energy and made it down there for my spring break which was about a month ago.

It was my fifth time to hit the railroad tracks, the hills, the roads and the mountains on a cross-country mission here in Japan. I've been to a lot of places in this country, from Okinawa to Hokkaido, Ise Shrine to Tottori Sand Dunes, from A-bomb domes to Anime museums, Kabuki theatres to mangrove forests and to be honest, this time it took more than the usual motivation to get my backpack packed and my butt out the door. The winds which before had filled my Japan-exploring sails as it were has been dying due to the phenomena of becoming "familiar with", "used to" and "assimilated"--that, and as I had to catch the 5:30 train from Sendai to Himeji City in one day; it's the furthest one can go on regular trains in a single day and it would put my all-you-can-ride jyuu-hachi kippu train ticket to the test.

The seishyun jyuuhachi kippu (literally the "18 year old youth ticket") goes on sale every spring here in Japan for anyone who wants to use it. It was conceived for all the university students out there who go on break come March and April. But, the random traveler is free to use it as well, and so I dished out the 8000 yen (80 bucks) and that was that. One of the most rewarding aspects of traveling for more than 18 hours on the local train lines from the northern town of Sendai to Himeji was the perspective it gives you on Japan as a nation. Sendai, the metropolis of the northern Tohoku region finds itself situated in the boonies, the countryside, Japan's "granary". It's more of a town slumbering, set apart from the concrete jungles that give the country its urban image (and therefore one of the reasons Sendai is a great place to live). So, the first train I got on had a backdrop of rice fields, with the odd passenger getting on here and there. Trees whizzed by, an odd temple or two, and many unmanned rural stations. But slowly and surely enough, after around four hours of riding in this picturesque manner, the train started to get more crowded, greenery turned to concrete, the blue sky donned a hazy light, and signboards, office buildings, the zig zag of bridges, streets, and telephone lines littered the landscape--not a single earth tone in sight. I had arrived in Tokyo.

This is where things turned into a balancing act for me and my backpack. There was to be no sitting, unless I was lucky. I had no choice but to go with the ebb and flow of the Tokyo passenger tide; for around two hours I felt like I was at the mercy of the some urban sea--when it flowed left, so did I, when it tried sucking me out I had to hold on to the vinyl handle above me until the surge passed. The more limp I was, the easier it was to sift through the train stops, transfers, and two step commute shuffle.

Then, just as quickly as it appeared, soon high rises began to be etched out from the horizon, then the concrete, then the advertisements, and soon everything vanished and I was traveling along the coast, ducking in and out of tunnels, with rice fields on my right and the vast expanse of the pacific ocean on my left. A moment's reprieve before another concrete slap in the face: for within an hour or so I had arrived in Nagoya, Japan's third biggest city. Again: suits, briefcases, black and gray cookie cutter people packed the sardine can train. Then, poof, they vanished and I was traveling through the green mountains, brown and silent pre-spring forest to my right and left, no people except beautiful farm houses and the odd town.

But just as the tide comes and goes, the next urban wave came to shore. The train stopped and as if signaling my arrival at Japan's notorious and famous town of comedic personalities, the city with an edge and a flare for life out of the ordinary, a man hopped on the train. He wore striped socks pulled up to his knees, dark bug-eyes sunglasses, and a tight long sleeve t-shirt and shorts. He did a sort of pirouette, looking for a seat and skipped on past like a urban faerie of modernity. I was in Osaka.

People talk about Osaka like it's in a league of its own, its people strong, outspoken, a little mad. It is overshadowed by Tokyo, with a bit of a rivalry going on there, as Osaka is has been casted as "number two". But as most rivalries have, there is the element of the underdog boasting something that even the biggest city cannot touch--an element of culture, of originality and intrigue that no other city offers. It's dubbed as "Japan's Kitchen" for its renowned food, and one of Japan's playgrounds, with a rowdy nightlife scene. Most of Japan's famous comedians hail from Osaka, which adds to its image of extroverted quirkiness. At any rate, as the train filled up once again, this time with party-goers (as it was nearly 10:00 PM by this time) the thought that I should try to spend more time in the cities struck me. But my brain was too tired to pursue the thought by this point and I soon drifted off to sleep as the train took me out of Japan's second largest city.

After twelve transfers (some which merely consisted of a meander from one boarding gate to another, and others which were a mad dash through hoards of people, bag-straps flying and with only a couple seconds to spare) and 18 hours and one novel later, I made it to Himeji City (well just outside of it actually).

I walked off the nearly empty train, my massive back pack full (as I was to live out of it for the next week or so) and a telling sign to any onlookers that I was not heading home. My knees felt weak, kind of like the rust which had formed on my bones during all the hours sitting down at work was in the process flaking off but not yet gone. My eyes had that sunken-in feeling like they had been drilled by a fluorescent light bulb, then dried out with a hair dryer. I wondered if my contacts were part of my eyeball at this point.


I flashed my ticket to the attendant who gave a grunt in acknowle- dgment that I was able to leave and with that, I walked out into the crisp March night air, past a convenience store, and down a dark street towards the harbor. I had no idea where I was going (in fact I wasn't even sure there was a harbor), but my goal was simple: to find a patch of grass and pitch my tent. The more concealed the better as I still feel like a bum every time I camp in the middle of a city. But this is where Japanese's Shinto shrines come into play... find one of them and you'll most definitely find a few trees, probably even a wooded area and some privacy. I stumbled upon one, half-assedly put up my tent, set my alarm for five and passed out dreaming of mobile house parties on wheels and train crashes where Astro Boy was the resounding hero.

The next morning I woke up, jumepd out of my tent to see an old man in a jumper- of-a- jogging suit power walking by and doing his best not to stare. I quickly ate some peanut butter and jam sandwiches and wondered if I could make it to the mountains by nightfall.

I took up mountain hiking and camping on an almost ridiculous level since I moved to Japan. Why? For three reasons:

1) I was raised in Nelson BC, on camping, hiking and the outdoors
2) It is ridiculously easy to access any railhead in this country
3) I would go mental if I couldn't at least sometimes get away from the concrete and power lines which enclose every single sight from any single spot in any single city

And hence Shikoku. It not only has two renowned mountains, but it, as I mentioned earlier, has some of the most remote mountain villages and valleys in the country and is, well, just not a tourist destination (there's no Kyoto, no Nara, no Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Fukuoka or Osaka on it). I flipped open my atlas, its pages wrinkled from four years of hitchhiking journeys, its pages awash with faded phone numbers, station names, and timetables written in ink, and I double checked my destination: Tsurigi-san mountain, or "Sword/Katana Mountain" in English. Another day's travel if all went smoothly. But it is impossible to plan, for from here on out there would be no trains or schedules to prop myself up on: it was to be all hitching. I just needed to find a good place for someone to pick my unshaven and white ass up, a place to buy a piece of cardboard to write my destination on it, and a flashy smile. I also needed to figure out which direction to head to get onto one of the three renowned bridges leading to Shikoku--bridges which have a past linked with dodgy politicians, bubble-economy hubris, and environmentally devastating public works construction projects.

I packed up my stuff, put on my house of a back pack with a little hop to get it resting properly on my shoulders, and put my fate into the hands of... of... it turned out to be a used clothing store owner with a lisp and a milk truck of a car. He also had funky clothes on.

Irreversible

It's hard to recommend something that makes you recoil, that sickens you to your stomach, that pains you to watch. But, what happens when that which makes you grimace is the same thing which shows you a perspective on beauty--a perspective you've never seen before in film? What happens when, the very same thing which made you cringe and put your hand to your chest, leaves you with a message that so many other directors have failed to create?

Just as how the camera floats around, hovers, twists and turns as it does between edits, the emotions summoned within while watching Irreversible do the same. A teeter-totter of disgust and beauty, dread and life, horror and love. I grimaced as I sympathized, I shuddered as my sympathy even morphed in and out of empathy.

Some art, whether it be in the written form or on the screen, speak of stories that need to be told no matter how tough, and are told in a manner which plays nobody's fool, rounds no corners, does not add a "soft filter" to beautify its content. Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark , Murakami Ryu's Almost Transparent Blue come to mind--a dissection of the grotesque yet tangible reality of how savagely unsympathetic life can be, humans can be, society can be. And in the case of Irreversible, how brutal the passage of time can be. Yet, somewhere during the process of experiencing these crippling stories of tragedy, by the end, the theme you're left with is unexpectedly one of life. Mixed in that lump of sadness and brutality which remains lodged in your throat are the small things that which make up life itself; the moments which most of us fail to ever appreciate, to notice and understand, have been laid out before us--have been shown to us with such a new and fierce light all but none can fail to recognize them.

After watching this film it's as if the viewer has been imparted with some rare wisdom, has been given the chance to look back on what it means to live, to make every moment worth its value. Irreversible's director, Gaspar Noe, has taken you into the void, to the underworld and shown you how dark it can be, and has thereafter returned you, unscathed back to present day, plopped back down in your living room in front of your now black TV screen, the credits finished rolling. Now, the question that is being begged is this: what have you learned? What are you going to do with this new wisdom, this proverbial elixir, which you have been given?

Irreversible is just that, a movie which takes you on one of the most brutal journeys, but takes you backwards, starting with the last scene of the day first, and the first scene, last. The movie begins in hell, and ends by showing us the opposite of what hell is. And it is within this technique of moving "backwards", of knowing the end of the tale, of knowing who the characters are before you know their story, is what provides you with an uncanny insight into how humans work, and of course, makes you simultaneously aware of how you--the viewer--works. For, as you react to each scene, you are now casting judgments based on information you shouldn't already know. This movie is not only an insight, but an experiment on action/reaction, cause/effect, perhaps even what "fate" means to us--and you're the petri dish.

Now, this film has received plenty of mixed reactions, and as it should. Called everything from gratuitous, unskilled, amateur, thoughtlessly shocking, to distasteful. Yet these are not simple critiques but are reasons alone to watch the film. For, Irreversible is, above everything else, challenging. It would be hard for me to watch every scene in its entirety once again, but then again the images have been burnt into my mind along with its message and linger there, so perhaps I need not watch it again. It is a rare thing when such a movie comes along, one which questions the audience, ones which goes a step further than the rest-- whether mistakingly or not.

I debated turning off the movie after ten minutes into it, indeed I covered half the screen at times (and this is coming from someone who has never done such a thing before). I asked my self "why do I need to see this? What's the point?" And, in a funny way, in the end that's the exact reason which kept me watching. For, this movie is all about "its point", and it can only come to you by the last scene of the movie, which is also the first scene of the day in the life of the characters.

The question is whether you can make it to the end of this movie or not.

What the critics have said:
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"Likely the worst movie of the year, Irreversible exhibits fascist, gay-bashing tendencies, goes backwards for no reason, dizzies you with aimless camera work, and covers its banality with a veneer of pseudo intellectual bull."

"Irredeemable...just a pointlessly nasty violence-and-vengeance tale told backwards for 'effect.'"

"Excruciating exercise in voyeurism, provocation and pretentiousness."

"I hope people who go to see this don't walk out in the first ten minutes or after that scene, because I think you have to experience the entire film. And then you can decide whether or not you're offended by it."

"At once overwhelming and inconsequential, harrowing and banal, gimmicky and humourless, overheated and undercooked, this mega-hyped French movie may represent the ultimate triumph of cynicism in the global trade in non-English-language movies."

Plot Outline taken from IMDB:
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Events over the course of one traumatic night in Paris unfold in reverse-chronological order as the beautiful Alex (Monica Bellucci) is brutally raped and beaten by a stranger in the underpass. Her boyfriend and ex-lover take matters into their own hands by hiring two criminals to help them find the rapist so that they can exact revenge. A simultaneously beautiful and terrible examination of the destructive nature of cause and effect, and how time destroys everything.