This is Kamakura

Part two of the Great Tokyo Tour To Heather's Former Haunts!

Kamakura and Kita Kamakura make up a collection of shrines and temples a short train ride out of Tokyo. When she lived in Tokyo three years ago, Heather used to come out to Kamakura all the time. She thought I'd like the place, and with the combination of old-school Japanese architecture and TREES, she was absolutely right.

Once the snow starts...

Our first board of 2011 went down in the Niseko area (because we're unoriginal like that) on Grand Hirafu Saturday and Monday, as well as on An'nupuri Sunday. It started snowing on the Thursday before the long weekend, and it hadn't really let up by the time we finished up on the Monday afternoon, with more than two meters having fallen in that timespan.

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It was a good welcome for fellow Torontonian JET Dani Guo, who came out to Japan with us in 2009:

However, the conditions made driving a pretty major pain in the ass for Mark and Lindsay, who ferried Dani and I around all weekend.

The worst of it had to be the Friday night, when Mark (with me as his co-pilot) attempted to drive to Sapporo New Chitose airport to pick up Dani, but was only able to make it as far as Teine, just outside Sapporo, as the conditions were so bad that they shut down the expressway. That was a harrowing drive that left us, at times, completely unable to see the road in front of us. There were points where the blizzard outside seemed to continue far deeper into the coastal tunnels than it had any right to.

We were staying at Mark's place on the Friday and Saturday night, so on Sunday morning we took a run at Iwanai-dake, his local ski-jo. It was a short, very powdery thing, and the best part was being able to snowboard down past the chalet, down the hill into the parking lot, and right to the rear of Mark's car without unstrapping.

Sunday night, Ross let us crash at he and Risa's fantastic log cabin in Hirafu village, and he also let me amateur around with his 10-24mm lens.

2010-2011 Mountain Days 5, 6, and 7

Service Interruptions Likely

Well, I can't exactly say that service on here has been regular since that whole Epic Four Points Deally, but this is just a post to say that the month of November will, likely, be a write-off as far as blogging is concerned. I'll still be doing stuff, but when I'm not off and doing it, I should really be off writing.

After years of putting it off, I finally signed up for National Novel Writing Month. I'm now engaged in the process (well, I'm currently behind in the process, if you want to be accurate) of attempting to write 50,000 words--a novel-length work of fiction--in 30 days. I had thought that with all of the prep time afforded to JETs teaching in Japan, the process would be a breeze, but of late I keep getting distracted by work and volunteer responsibilities for HAJET, and, of course, The Doctor.

But, even if it's a little behind where it should be right now, the work is coming along well. It's a still-fragmented something about gods and monsters and buildings, and the hapless, very human tenants tasked with making sense of it all. There are libraries and lions and men who just might be turning into stars. There are gods above and below on undeniable collision courses. There is fiction, and there is experiential fact, and despite the many threads of story I'm trying to weave separately, there is already a terminus: a nice, convenient domino of persistent plot elements that will, hopefully, tie it all up in the end.

So, with that explained, I should probably be getting back to it, but here's an introduction to the idea behind the book:

Tenants in apartment buildings live, more or less, in a community with hundreds of complete strangers. Neighbours only ever see each other for so short a time, and the relationships that develop are one-dimensional: phatic. From the few points of contact with these people, guesses can be made to extrapolate the shape of their lives, but, what is the truth of the other 98% of the time when they go unseen? Are they just people, just as boring and quotidian as us all, or could they be gods and monsters.

Oh, and there's still no snow in Hokkaido--well, at least not in the low parts. That being said, the weather is odd today, and there seems to be hope in the high places. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for the possibility of boarding to celebrate the national holiday and the birth of The Season on November 23rd.

The Yotei-zan Climb

Despite numerous people having cautioning me that Yotei, as a mountain, was hard and steep and tall, I underestimated it a bit. I based my expectations on Rishiri from last fall: a mountain that we hiked a month later, several hundred kilometers further to the north, and which we never actually summited because we were losing light.

In short, though both were sunny and glorious, they were very different climbs.

Mark, Lindsay, Perry and I all met up at Kutchan station at 9:30 on Saturday morning, picked up some food and drink, and then drove over to the Makkari trail head to start our climb at about 10:30.

We broke for lunch at about 1pm at the Fourth Station, which was at an elevation of 930 meters and, I reasoned, about half way up the 1898 meters of Yotei.

However, it only got steeper from there, making Fourth Station feel like it was only a third of the way up the mountain.

The weather was utterly glorious--pretty much perfect--which meant that there was LOTS of sun to make the exertion of the climb EVEN SWEATIER. My current Japananotebook, which had been packed into the pocket closest to my sweaty, sweaty back was irreversibly scarred by the experience and needed a day or two to fully dry out.

That being said, all of the exhaustion and water rationing were definitely worth it:

(that's meant to be a panorama, but the blog munches it. Best to click it and check it out on Flickr proper.)

We reached our destination, the Yotei mountain hut or Yotei hikers cabin (I'm not sure what it's actually called) above ninth station somewhere around 4:30pm. This was where we were planning to spend Saturday night. It's the only building on the mountain, and for the very cheap 900円 you can have a blanket and a piece of floor to sleep on at an elevation of something like 1600 meters. All four of us bunked on the second floor of the cabin, along with 20-30 other Japanese folks. Mark had been told that the two floors of the cabin could hold as many as 100 people, but, having seen the cabin, that number seemed like the product of optimistic creativity. I would have guessed 75 souls at a tight squeeze.

Such fanciful capacities would also have to worry about overflowing the long-drop toilets provided in the cabin. You were meant to click the counters hanging on the walls to give the cabin manager an idea of how full the tanks were getting (0ne click for Number 1, two clicks for Number 2), but a quick peek into the squatters to see how short the drop was getting told me that there weren't many clicks left in the tanks. The whole thing was presided over by one fat old fly who would lazily hover up out of the toilet when you lifted the lid. He'd buzz annoyingly around your head while you did your business, like a particularly malicious and disease-ridden washroom attendant, only to return to his moist, warm cave when you closed the lid on it once again.

Despite the facilities and the lack of drinking water for anything other than emergencies, the mountain cabin was fantastic--particularly when we got to eat our modest dinners (dried sausage, onigiri, soyjoy bars, caloriemate, and an apple for me) outside on a slapped-together picnic table, overlooking the most ridiculous, clouded-over setting sun.

Once the sun had gone down, the mist had rolled up, and a chill was starting to set in on the shoulders of Yotei, we headed inside and made a poor attempt at playing the world's highest game of Settlers of Catan by headlamp light (the board of which was another of my sweat-damaged items).

However, we all joined the chorus of snorers around us before it had gotten much later than 7pm. Between the blanket-padded floor, our rudimentary pillows, and the ever-changing collection of night ruminations around us (seriously. I heard more types of snores in that one night than I have in my lifetime. I should have been recording them), the sleep that came was fitful, and it wasn't long before my alarm was going off at 4am, beckoning us to start our climb to the peak for sunrise.

We achieved the peak somewhere around 5:30am on Sunday, but, sadly, there wasn't much to see:

The conditions for our climb down were much the same, but all of the clouds and fog made for a much less sweaty descent.

Also, there are certain other-worldly benefits to climbing down through the grey.

The Four Points Tour Mk2: Four Points RETURNS!

…or Rebooted, or Reloaded, or Re-energized. Or some other REhash permutation that Yahtzee may have touched on here. Whatever we’re calling it, the Four Points Tour is back and going strong. If you were keeping up last year, you may have heard my mad blather about wanting to drag Mark and Lindsay around Hokkaido on a road trip meant to circumnavigate the island. Fortunately, I’ve still got a map kicking around:

View Larger Map

That’s about 2,200km of coastal road. It was madness last year when we planned to do it in the nine days of vacation we managed to rangle out of the Japanese National Holiday known as Silver Week. Unfortunately, the car I was meant to be getting from my predecessor in Furubira turned out to be a junker, and we were forced to scrap the Four Points Tour along with the car, resorting to the far-more-modest, rental-car-enabled Substantial Yet Notably Diminished (Due to Logistical Concerns of Space and Time) Two Point Five Points Tour of Fun.

She was a good roadtrip, taking us to previously-unexplored corners of the island like Onuma, Hakodate, Wakkanai, Rishiri, and Tomamae. However, the promise of what could have been lingered in Mark, Lindsay, and I like a hungry void (okay, so maybe it only lingered in me like a hungry void).
It wanted adventure, space, and the open road.
It wanted to explore the far-flung corners of our new home.
It wanted ridiculously spicy, volcano-ring chips and delicious Seicomart fried chicken.

Now, with Silver Week once again approaching, and with the open road around this island lying before us, more pregnant with possibility than any strip of asphalt has the right to be, The Four Points Tour has been REBORN! Watch this space for more information on how we intend to bring this island to its knees with the mother of all road trips!

Or, you know, something a little less highfalutin’.