Two Points Tour of Hokkaido

Note: I'm retconning this one as it really SHOULD HAVE been posted in September, closer to the end of our epic road trip

Well, our Two Points Tour has come and gone, and despite whatever hang-ups we ran into, it all kind of figured itself out in the end. A huge, epic, fluid tour it was not, and it more resembled a bit of a haphazard run from the south to the north of Hokkaido, but I fully believe some old, smiling, Japanese Fox God wanted it to happen. I say that because the whole thing involved a good deal of luck.

The luck of David driving down to the Southwest JET camping party in Onuma Koen, then on to Hakodate, and him offering us all a ride down to both.

The luck of having Wesley the JET put us up in Hakodate and show us around for free, and the luck of having two random Japanese ladies lead us through a labyrinth warren of closed onsen (Japanese hotspring spa) hotels to the one that was still open in the middle of the night—that one onsen that was little more than a large bathtub in a back room and that may go on as the hottest bloody onsen I’ve ever been in.

The luck of us hitting the broad, flat areas of Hokkaido—with its sandy beaches and grasslands that harkened to the Canadian prairies—just as the conical, once-volcano island of Rishiri lay off our left shoulders and the sun was setting over it.

The luck of blindly booking a youth hostel in Wakkanai for a night, only to arrive and discover that our room was a private suite with an impressive view of the town below.

The luck of making it up Rishiri mountain, and then making it back down to the road just as the sun dipped below the horizon and made the wooded trails we’d been walking impassible.

The luck of arbitrarily picking the campsite on Rishiri island that was across the street from a phenomenal onsen spa and restaurant.

The luck of catching a perfect sunset off our right shoulders over the Sea of Japan just before we rolled into Tomamae on the last day of our road trip.

And, on that same day, the luck of, once again, blindly booking into a palace in Tomamae, complete with onsen, full-course Japanese meal, and a bloody treehouse bedroom in our beautiful, seaside lookout suite.

Seriously. The more I think about it, the more I realize that for all our epic plans, we went into this adventure flying by the seat of our pants, and fate or destiny or luck took pretty good care of us. The realization first donned on me as Mark and I lay on cool asphalt in the shadow of trees at our campsite on Rishiri, in our post-onsen state, looking up to the wide spread of stars and talking about the women we’d loved and lost along the way. At that moment the trip was perfect, and as a thanks to whatever clever little Fox God was looking out for us I poured out some of my beer onto the mountain—a toast to our guardian Kami.

Sorry. That’s all rather broken up in terms of an epic chronicling of our road trip adventure, but doing something more coherent seemed forced.

If you’re looking for something like that, though, I did a pretty good job in the captions of the pictures I uploaded along the way to my Japan as it Happens Flickr set. Also, I’ve now uploaded my proper photos to Flickr, and they’re the ones I’ve sampled in this post. More can be found in Points South (Hakodate to Sapporo) and Points North (up to Wakkanai, Rishiri, Cape Soya, and Tomamae).

Next, we'll have to make a trip out to Shiretoko to see the far east of our island, but I don't think that will be for a while yet.

Two Points Tour, As it Happens

Howdy.

Mark, Lindsay, and I have officially kicked off our modified roadtrip in Hakodate at the bottom of Hokkaido. We're now heading to Wakkanai, at the north end of Hokkaido, via Sapporo.

Due to the wonders of the iPhone, we're able to post stuff to the web on the go. Best way to follow our progress if you're bored at work, check out the following album in my Flickr photostream:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jonezer/sets/72157622098804285/

The roadtrip stuff starts at the picture Mark drew me of the two awesome bear-like Tanuki.

More from us later, but I hope all is well with all of you.

Through the fire...

Well, as Lindsay, Mark, and I are varying degrees of both tenacious and optimistic, we're determined to overcome our annoyances and salvage something of the 9-day gift that is Silver Week. We've got us a bit of a plan, and it might just turn into a magical journey from the south to the north of this island we now call home, but I'll keep you advised about how it goes.

In the interim, last weekend was my town's one and only festival: Tengu Matsuri. It's celebrated in honour of this crazy, red-skinned goblin demon who is supposed to help the people of my town to catch fish, and the festival is so bad-ass that it happens twice a year.

Don't believe me? Check this out:

Let's see you do that in 6-inch stilts/sandals and a crazy goblin outfit.

Also, we made it out to Shakotan last weekend when we weren't festivaling it up, and that place is just as gorgeous as everyone makes it out to be. Here is my Shakotan Flickr set, but here' a little something to give you an idea of why you should take a look.

Finally, if you're one of those people who wants to hear more about my adventures at school, be sure to check out the post below that I posted earlier today.

Elementary Afternoons

Here's another reason why I think everyone should spend their Fridays at an elementary school.

When I'm at my elementary school, the most randomness seems to transpire on Friday afternoons in the fifth and sixth periods when I'm not usually booked to teach class.

Today was no different. Just after lunch, the first grade teacher rolled in and asked me if I wanted to participate in some kind of outdoor activity with the first graders. As my Japanese ability is currently resting somewhere around that of a three-year-old, I had no idea what she was asking me to do. However, the first graders are, pretty much, cuteness distilled into a substance so pure that it could probably fuel jet fighters—a substance so intoxicating and contagious that it has even rubbed off on their teacher, making her the cutest thing going in the staff room.

So, when she asked me to spend a period with her and her class, I didn't particularly care what we were doing. She could have been asking me to watch grass grow with her class for the period, and it still would have been the cutest 45 minutes I spent all day.

As she escorted me outside, the English equivalent finally occured to her, and she errupted victoriously with "BUTTERFLY!" "CATCH!". And, sure enough, when I got outside, I was greeted by a whole bunch of midgets, wearing their standard reversible red/white hats, armed with bug nets on poles twice their height. Most of them also had bug cages hanging around their necks, and these whipped around violently as the first of them caught sight of me and errupted in cries of "NIKORASU SENSEI!"

( I don't think I'll ever get tired of that. )

With an ichi-nensei holding each of my hands, and one latched somewhere on my shirt, we wandered around the back of the school and up the old concrete steps to the playing field. This wide staircase was once made of concrete, but it has since fallen into a kind of decrepit equilibrium that makes you wonder if it hadn't been swiped from some south american temple.

Its broad sweep is surrounded by forest, punctuated by plants, and it is pretty much my favourite part of the school yard. The playing fields that the staircase leads up to are in no better shape. What was once an impressive set of tennis courts has been blanketed in creeping vines that make the courts look more like something abandonned by the Dharma Initiative, and what was once a baseball field has had its fences reclaimed by those same vines and its infield grow long with grasses and weeds.

Though this overgrowth makes the fields fairly useless for their intended purposes, it also makes them the perfect place for tracking and trapping all manner of winged bug. In the light of the westerning sun and the shadows of the long grasses, I watched the ichi-nensei scatter, taking off after anything that shot by on the wing in a riot of gleeful giggles. I was dragged to and frow with cries of "SENSEI!" as the task of transfering bugs from net to cage without mashing them had fallen to my careful hands.

And the intrepid little hunters nabbed some real monsters. Aforementioned cute teacher netted one of the biggest grasshoppers I've ever seen, and one of her students managed to get four dragonflies into an impossibly small bug box without any help from me. Every successful catch seemed to egg them on all the more, and it wasn't long before the little bug boxes were abuzz with the sounds of dragonflies that had been forced to share quarters with butterflies and grasshoppers.

So this is where I spent my Friday afternoon: terrorizing bugs in Japanese with a band of first graders.

I still can't come up with something that could have been a more productive use for the time.

Epic Fail

Due to an annoying string of unfortunate events, it's starting to look like our Substantial Yet Notably Diminished (Due to Logistical Concerns of Space and Time) Two Point Five Points Tour of Fun roadtrip around Hokkaido has been shelved indefinitely.

First off, the car I was supposed to inherit from my predecessor has been checked over and been determined to be a rusted-out P.O.S. My only real affordable option now is to lease a car, and there's no way to make that happen before this weekend when we're meant to start our great adventure.

Lindsay tried to save the day by looking into rentals for the road trip, but apparently they're all sold out.

So this is us, target-less for our nine-day vacation. Here's hoping we can find some trouble to get up to.

A Sacrifice of Nines

Preface: This one's a little wordy, but the first half is definitely digestible as a kind of book review. The latter part is more of a contemplation/rant on said book. It touches on some stuff that you might find interesting, but if you're looking for crap on Japan, you're, sadly, not going to find it in this post. Try clicking down to that "Go to Hell" post. It had more Japan in it ;)

That being said, if you stick with this one, and it moves you, please let me know as you'll be my hero.

I thought I’d note that 09-09-09 is just wrapping up in my part of the world right now, which means it’s just starting in yours. If you’re feeling pagan, you might want to throw back a few glasses of mead in honour of his royal norse highness Odin, the all-father (he liked nines). Also, what follows is the story of a real-world sacrifice.

Sorry. That’s the half-assed pagan in me poking out. One of the reasons I have a mild interest in the Japanese Shinto belief system is that some of the only religious ideologies that have ever made sense to me have been the ones that centered on worshiping nature. Venerating and paying tithe to the one thing that can be empirically shown to have given us life—the one thing that sustains us on a daily basis—is something I can believe in. Nature is also one of the sources of wonder that we can rely on to provide miracles on a regular basis. You can study the science of how a Douglas Fir—a tree that can grow to heights of beyond 100 meters—can manage to grow out of something as small as a seed on air, water, and sunlight alone, but the science of it can’t fully explain away the wonder required.

Sorry, once again. I half lifted that last bit from the latest book I finished reading. Though it has little to do with Japan, it’s underlying message aligns fairly well with the Shinto belief that there are spirits present in the land.

The book, published in 2005, was The Golden Spruce by Canadian author John Vaillant, a book that won the Governor General’s Nonfiction prize in 2005. I was put on to the book by Amy, my token Parks/Trees-and-rocks-and-shtuff friend, and she was put on to the book by a field course that she took in Haida Gwaii (once known as the Queen Charlotte Islands) last May. The book was required reading for the course, and, having now read the book, I can understand why. Golden Spruce aims to tell the history of resource exploitation in the Pacific North West (B.C. and Alaska) by arranging the story around a very real and very destructive act of protest that transpired on Haida Gwaii in 1997.

On January 27, 1997, a man named Grant Hadwin who was no stranger to the logging industry took a chainsaw to a unique Sitka spruce tree that was hundreds of years old and roughly 50 meters tall. It was known to local anglo residents of New Masset as “The Golden Spruce” and was a popular tourist attraction of their remote town. It was know to the Haida People of Old Masset as Kiidk’yaas and was a central element in their cultural mythos. And, in the eyes of Grant Hadwin, it was known to Macmillan Blodel, the logging firm who had bought rights to the majority of the timber on Haida Gwaii, as their pet tree and was a shinning gold medal of conservation behind which they could hide their destructive logging practices.

Around the central characters of the Golden Spruce and Grant Hadwin, author John Vaillant is able to weave a complex and informative narrative that is at once a biography of Hadwin, a snapshot of the cultural traditions of the Haida people, an ecological profile of the rainforests of the pacific northwest, a history of northwest logging, and a sobering view of the practices—and abuses—of the modern day logging industry. All of that mixed into one book seems like the perfect recipe for a dry, snore of a narrative, but Vaillant somehow manages to use Grant Hadwin’s story to pace all the facts that he imparts and to lend a sense of crisis—if not out-and-out suspense—to the narrative. By the end of the book, I felt both moved and informed by it. Vaillant had told this expansive, at times rambling, narrative, and in so doing he convinced me to rethink the way I use wood and paper products while also convincing me that I absolutely had to visit Haida Gwaii.

He also convinced me—unintentionally, I’m sure—that Grant Hadwin might have been right. But that’s something for the ramble below. For those of you not interested in the contemplation/rant, I’ll distill The Golden Spruce for you here:

If you love nature and want to believe in wonder, read The Golden Spruce.

If you’re ever been moved by something as simple as a forest or a tree, read The Golden Spruce.

If you’ve ever visited the temperate rainforests of British Columbia and been worried about the prospect of losing them, read The Golden Spruce.

If you’ve ever worried about the rights and legacy of the North American First Nations, read The Golden Spruce.

What was interesting, for me, about Grant Hadwin’s seemingly mad decision to cut down the Golden Spruce is that, from some perspectives, it makes sense. But, if I were to admit that I could agree with what Hadwin did, I would be in the minority. When I finished reading The Golden Spruce and googled “Grant Hadwin” to try to find some other photos of/interviews with the guy, all I could find were angry, opinionated articles about how heinous and dastardly a villain he was for cutting down a beautiful, old growth tree. But none of these articles/posts/blog entries mentioned anything about the thousands of people working in logging in the Pacific Northwest who cut down beautiful, old growth trees on the daily as part of their jobs. These angry posts talked about the salience of the Golden Spruce to the Haida cultural heritage, and they mentioned nothing of the importance of the forests of Haida Gwaii to that same heritage, forests that were appropriated from The People by the Canadian government and sold off to International Lumber. Everyone seemed happy to rally around those calling for Hadwin to be strung up for his crime, but no one seemed to be giving any thought to the message he was trying to communicate.

In the book, John Vaillant dredges up a curious historical factoid, mentioning how as the warriors of the Christian faith conquered Europe they would set fire to the sacred groves and forests where the indigenous peoples (many of them our own Germanic/Norman/Celtic ancestors) practiced their pre-Christian religions. He mentions in other places how it was common for these people to attribute particularly large trees to gods, and he even found a reference to a particular, symbolically grotesque means of disembowelment as the punishment for one who was so crude as to commit the crime of removing the bark of a living tree. These historical factoids, and many more like them referenced in the book, point to the fact that our ancestors once saw nature as holy and the forests as sacred.

But we’ve moved away from that now—we, the enlightened, who worship distant, faceless deities who we have created in our own image. And we worship them in buildings of wood and stone that we have hewn and remade to better serve our purpose. We’ve forgotten that the forests were once holy and that the largest of the trees were once our gods.

This could well have been this was the mysterious “great revelation” that Hadwin experienced (but the details of which he never imparted to another living soul) that set him on the path to the Golden Spruce—this sudden revelation that had been brewing in his subconscious as he worked in the logging industry for most of his life.

Maybe Grant Hadwin thought that this was the only way to make people realize the importance of the forests and the severity of the crimes against them. He elected to slay the most well known and most treasured of the old growth trees on Haida Gwaii to make people realize the wholesale slaughter that was going on, unseen, in old growth forests across British Columbia. In effect, he chose to kill Jesus to make the people realize that all of the other gods were already dead. He saw that our sacred groves had been gutted, and the only way people might start to realize it would be to see that destruction wrought on the only tree they seemed to care about.

As Vaillant reveals through scientific facts in the text, and as Grant Hadwin stated in his all-call fax after he made his attack on the Golden Spruce: the tree was a mutant. Where it was meant to have green needles, it grew yellow needles. This fact earned the tree its name, and it appears to be this fact that spared the tree (as well as some of the forest around it by proximity) from the MacMillan Blodel’s logging operations on Haida Gwaii. Hadwin refered to the tree as a circus freak, which seems apt as this mutant tree was spared while MacBlo was felling trees just as old, just as large, and just as majestic (if not older, larger, and more majestic) elsewhere on the islands. To keep this one tree standing in a token patch of spared forest while these other trees are cut down and sacked is somewhat akin to “preserving” a few token members of a certain species in a zoo while butchering and consuming the rest of their population. What Grant Hadwin’s attack on the Golden Spruce boiled down to was a question of “Why this tree? Why now?”

So that’s where I can agree with what Hadwin did. He staged a violent attack on a tree to prove a point, and it was shocking to all who had invested themselves in the life of that tree, but, in the end, people sat up and paid attention precisely because the tree meant so much to them.

And he was right.

Why this tree? Why does this one get to live while all the others just like it have to die? Because it is recognizable due to its mutation? Because we can’t see the forest: just the trees? Maybe the loss of this mutant could finally convince those who had invested themselves in the tree—maybe it would serve to give them a local frame of reference for the horrors that logging visited on their province regularly and had been doing for some time.

Where it gets a little harder to agree with Hadwin—and an area that I’d pretty much avoided thus far in all of this—is when you take into account the interests of the Haida People in the Golden Spruce. The Haida were the first inhabitants of Haida Gwaii and made the islands their home centuries before the first loggers or Anglo settlers ever arrived. The Golden Spruce had been woven into their myths and beliefs for generations. It was not a tree to them; it was the spirit of an ancestor who had taken the form of a tree. In a way, it was more alive to them than a typical tree is to us, and some believed that when it fell it would signal the end of the Haida nation. One could try to use the same arguments when contemplating the Haida’s investment in the tree: that they only developed their myths because the tree’s unique colouring made it stand out. One could try to rationalize the attack on the Golden Spruce as a wake up call for the Haida, hoping that it would galvanize them, the only people who had any real claim to the land of Haida Gwaii, and inspire them to be more protective of their island ecosystem.

In short, one could try to implicate the Haida as passive participants in all of this madness and try to suggest that the felling of the Golden Spruce was just a shot across the bow to rouse them to action, but it seems wrong. When Vaillant tells of the former height of Haida civilization before smallpox cut a swathe through their villages, when he paints the picture of the clear cutting that took place across the breadth of northern Haida Gwaii, it becomes clear just how much the Haida have lost already. It makes it hard to try to paint the loss of the Golden Spruce—a part of their myth and their culture—as a learning opportunity. Even Hadwin admitted when he was contacted directly by Guujaaw, the President of the Council of the Haida Nation, that if he had known of the Haida legend about the Golden Spruce, he may have thought twice about attacking it.

So, yeah, with the exception of the attack on the Haida people, I can understand what Grant Hadwin did when he cut down the Golden Spruce, and I can almost agree with it. This act of destruction has convinced me that I should look into joining Greenpeace—that when I get to a place where I’m thinking of buying a house, I should consider alternate building materials like bamboo and straw bale. I'll tell anyone who asks that my aforementioned half-assed paganness tends to manifest in a veneration for trees, and, looking at what Hadwin did, I think it takes some pretty big love for trees to have the stones to cut a big, beautiful one down to save the rest. It's the kind of statement/act of protest that I kind of wish I had the stones to do myself. And I hope, even if I do so in vain, that there comes a time when people can look at Grant Hadwin's attack on the Golden Spruce for what it was:

An Alarm Call.

A Necessary Sacrifice.

Not the Golden Spruce, but another Pacific Northwest reason to care about trees from Pacific Rim National Park.

Edit: Here's some supplementary video about the Golden Spruce from CBC's Six String Nation documentary:

"Go to Hell" and some updates

Four Points

Okay, so the Epic Four Points Tour of Awesomeness has been downgraded, slightly, to the Substantial Yet Notably Diminished (Due to Logistical Concerns of Space and Time) Two Point Five Points Tour of Fun. Due to the advice of some individuals with far more sense and far less unbridled optimism than I, Lindsay, Mark, Sonomi, and I have been convinced that making it all the way around the coast of Hokkaido in nine days at the standard posted speed limit of 50km/h would be less of a road trip and more of a drive-all-day marathon. As we have been repeatedly warned that being caught speeding as municipal employees is a huge no-no, and since we rather enjoy the idea of actually being able to stop and check stuff out on our road trip, we yielded and downgraded our epic adventure.

The revised, Substantial Yet Notably Blah blah blah—you get the idea—road trip is still making Japanese people gasp in wonder, though, so I figure it’s still pretty impressive. We are now going to be starting in Hakodate, like before, where we’ll pick up Sonomi from the Aomori Ferry. From there, we’ll head up the pacific coast of Hokkaido to some ruddy old temple Mark’s read about, and then it’s cross-island through Sapporo, and out to the Sea of Japan coast until Wakanai at the extreme northern end of the island. We’ll spend a day or so there, try to take in the even-more-northernly islands of Rebun and Rishi, and then it’s off down the coast of the Sea of Ohtohsk (sp?) to the termination of our mad romp at the Shiretoko Peninsula.

I’m hoping that Shiretoko will make the whole magical adventure worth it as it has been described as “the last piece of untouched wilderness in Japan." I’m expecting J-Pan Algonquin…except with more mountains and more sea, but we’ll see how it goes. Regardless, I’m sure Mark and Lindsay will be entertaining. Sonomi, too, but she can’t get the full 9 days off, so she’ll only be accompanying us as far as Wakanai.

Hell Fest

Only in Japan, the land of such auspicious celebrations as the penis festival, salmon festival, and scarecrow festival, could there be a Hell Festival. And, like any other god-fearing westerner, when I head the name of this festival, the name alone was all the convincing I needed to make attending the festival a priority.

So Mark, Lindsay, and I (sensing a pattern?) headed down to Noboribetsu last weekend for the Jigoku Matsuri! We stayed with fellow JET Steph in Muroran and trained it in to Nobo about midday Saturday.

Noboribetsu, or—to be more accurate—the village of Noboribetsu-onsen is known for being located on the rim of a still-smoking caldera: a once imposing volcanic feature that has since caved in on itself to form a steaming crater. Nobo-onsen makes its living feeding off the stinky hotsprings that flow down from the caldera. As some of this water is up around 90c when it comes flowing out of the rock, it’s the perfect stuff for powering the always popular Japanese baths or onsen.

Afformentioned Steaming Crater was given the apt name Jigokudani (Hell Valley) some years back, and now every year on the last weekend in August, the townsfolk ceremonially throw open the gates to the valley and let all of the demons out for Jigoku Matsuri. Throughout the day, the festival is pretty tame, and we took the opportunity to ride the world’s smallest chair lift up to a bear park (where we promptly decided we would rather spend the $20 entrance fee on demon swag and beer), sample the street vendors’ edible wares, and explore the area in and around the caldera. Though we never made it into an onsen in Noboribetsu {sad face}, we did get to dunk our feet in a hotspring, and it definitely convinced us of the need to go back to Nobo for the real deal.

The caldera was freaking beautiful, and we couldn’t have asked for better weather for taking it in. Once dusk fell, the festival truly began, and it was an uproarious party—the likes of which I’ve never seen on the Canadian side of the Pacific. I feel that I enjoyed it to the best of my abilities, and I’m already scheming for a return trip next year, but the following random contemplation I got into, I think, captures the whole event far better than a dry play-by-play:

In the otherworldly setting of Noboribetsu-onsen, with its surrounding tree-lined mountains and steaming caldera, the twenty-foot-tall, fiberglass red and blue demons—roadside attractions that would seem gaudy and overwrought if placed elsewhere—seem almost at home poking out from trees and commanding tourists to pose with them.

But, when the festival throws open the gates of Jigokudani, perhaps it is not physical demons that are being released but rather a demonic energy that they are meant to embody. Blame it on the nighttime setting, or the red cast of the hanging lanterns, but there does seem to be a certain playfully sinister force bouncing around at the festival.

It empowers the Taiko players to drum harder and faster, driving women and men (and even young children) alike to punish the Taiko with an infernal fury. The energy steels the vast teams that carry the ponderous demon shrines—mikoshi—careening down and then back up the slope of Noboribetsu-onsen’s main street. The energy fires the many costumed groups that turn that same main street into a rotating congo line of dancers for the Oni Odori (demon dance) competition. The energy inspires the dancers and musicians to seek more, causing them to strike up impromptu Taiko dance parties on side streets as other revelers gravitate towards them—being drawn into the dance themselves.

And that daemonic energy possesses we foreigners most of all: we Gaikokujin who have grown lazy on our poor western approximations and imitations of the true occidental festival. The energy tells us to drink. It tells us to dance, and it tells us to join. It tells us, in tones loud and clear, to cast off our oppressive western propriety and embrace the fire and the light; the rhythm and the beat.

And, before we know it, we are volunteering to help should the burden of the heaviest demon shrines, shouting RA-SHAI!* in time with our Japanese brothers. Before we realize the our possession, we are dancing the Oni Odori, flinging ourselves as high in the air as our legs will carry us as the kimonoed dancers take in our madness with wide-eyed wonder. And, before the energy can leave us, we are fighting our way through crowds, leaving our restrictive bags and coats with friends so we can make it into the writhing hearts of the dancing and drumming circles; going down on one knee in reverence as the Taiko drummers begin; springing up with renewed fervor as horns and whistles signal the rebirth of the dance.

As the very last of the energy ebbs from us, we channel the dregs of it into our Oni masks, using it to make our eyes shimmer in the dark so as to better scare the children we pass on the long trudge back down the mountain, away from Jigokudani as its gates swing to for another year.

When we awake the next morning; sweat-stained, sore-shouldered, and weary-legged, we find ourselves at a loss to explain the night before: unable to surmise how the stuff of dreams that still lingers in our minds could ever have actually come to transpire.

* I don’t know what it actually was that we were screaming. I just knew that there was screaming going on, and I had to scream something like it to keep the rhythm.

Today

In other news, today was a bloody bangarang day. I finally got some mail out to Canada (no. not to you. I don’t love you enough.), I got in a swim with half the population of my town looking on, I rolled up on Kendo practice only to find TAIKO DRUMMING!!!!!1!! going on, then I got in some kendo (staring down the blade of a hefty wooden sword at your grade four elementary student can’t be a good thing), and I finished off the night with a stop in at the local Seico Kombini for some bananas and milk.

I swear, man. Throw some chocolate-covered Pocky in there, and I think I could live on that diet for a year.

Milk. Bananas. Pocky.
Repeat.

BANGARANG! Delicious.

The Kombini in my tiny town ain’t got much, but it’s got that, and that is exactly what I was looking for to polish off today.

Beacons

Down by the black waters of the harbour
I try to read beacons that shine in the night
just over the horizon;
Like small, dense, coastal cities
they sit, equidistant and equibright.
Were it not for the knowledge
that these waters flowed out to infinity,
joining the Sea of Japan,
I could believe the points of light brilliant metropolises
dotting the distant shore.

They must be the fishing boats I saw in port
with giant bulbs, strung in lines, from bow to stern.
I wondered at the purpose of those chains of light,
and now I can picture it:
Them burning brightly in the night
Obliterating shadow on deck, for a wide radius
and summoning, from the depths
Fish, scores of fish
mothlike as they flock towards the glow
swirling upwards out of the unfathomable dark.