The Young and the Chariotless

When I landed back on Canadian soil in August of 2010, the first thing I did was purchase a bicycle. Having a new bike right away, I hoped, would take away the sting of leaving behind my mama-chari in Osaka, at the very last minute, as I hastily dropped the keys with a Post-It note on my co-worker's desk on the final day. I needed the bike right up until that day, and I didn't have time to deal with boxing it up for transport across the Pacific. I thought that at least if I left it at school, it would be used by someone, and perhaps someday I would see it again. I took the second key home with me, just in case.

The first week home, I bought a cheap Wal-Mart bicycle. I needed to get to work, and I'd become accustomed to the independence of travelling by bike. I also bought a helmet, because unlike in Japan, I was significantly more concerned about being hit by a car. It was a Raleigh five-speed cruiser, and not an expensive one; it did have a partial chain guard, which was the main thing I was missing about my mama-chari at the time, as I remembered ripping up a few pairs of jeans on my mountain bike as a youth. It also had the curved handlebars I liked on cruisers. 

I have to assume the Japanese adapted their bicycles from European ones, as they were trading with the Netherlands as early as the 1600s; Japanese bikes bear strong similarities to Dutch ones. The covered chain guard and skirt guard are very uncommon in North America. Fender mudflaps and rear racks occasionally show up on American-made bikes, but are considered standard in Japan, along with the rear wheel lock and ubiquitous front basket. I would have liked to go for a bike with all the trimmings, but I had to settle for what Wal-Mart had in their inventory at the time. In retrospect, I was actually lucky to get a bike that had two out of the six features I wanted. I installed a rear rack and basket myself.

Eventually, as all Wal-Mart bikes are wont to do, my bike began losing steam in its 4th year, and during a particularly rough trip down into the Nordheimer Ravine one autumn, my jacket bounced out of my rear basket and twirled itself around the derailleur, which fortunately did not end in my dying in the ravine. The bike was never particularly good at switching gears again.

Dutch in action at Casa Loma

But we're going off on a tangent now. As I searched for a replacement to my bike (I had taken that cheap Wal-Mart bike with me on the plane to Toronto, wrapped in a tarp - can you believe it?) I decided that it had to be Dutch or nothing. I wanted a skirt guard; I wanted a proper rear rack. I wanted a mama-chari. I walked down Bloor Street taking photos of bikes I liked and jotting down their make and model to Google later. I never walked by a bike without giving it a once-over. To my surprise, the premium to get such luxuries as full chain guards required paying CAD $600+ for the bike. As I looked at bike shop after bike shop, almost buying a Giant-brand Liv Simple, I realized that I would never be able to tick all the boxes affordably. I finally settled for a step-through Beater Bike, with a partial chain, and a rear rack. What I hadn't bargained on was how much less hill-friendly the Beater was going to be compared to my Raleigh, with its fat tires and five speeds. The Beater, gorgeous though it was, was useless on hills, and the tires were the perfect size for getting caught in streetcar tracks. Riding it was exhausting. So I went back to the drawing board, formulating a plan for my trip to Japan in February to just buy a cheap mama-chari, have them box it up right in the shop, walk it to the post office and pay to have it sent home. I figured I'd be out $150 for the bike, $50 for domestic, $100 for the international shipping. Maybe a bit from customs on the other side. That sounded a lot better than the $600-ish I was pricing for Dutch-style bikes with gears in Toronto.

I think you guys already know this is going to go downhill.

I left the job of actually buying one until the last moments of our trip. I looked at bikes at Asahi Cycle in Rinku Town and Tokyo, but I never spotted one close to a post office (an essential for this plan to work). Eventually, when I was on my own in Tokyo with just one day left in the trip, I realized this wasn't going to work. I went on Rakuten and found a seller that did international shipping for Daiwa bikes, and I bought a cute pink Nana+ bike. No need to drag anything to the post office myself! They shipped to Canada!

...except that they only shipped to Canada through their proxy service. I had used Tenso before, but not in a few years, and the hoops they had me jump through just to get the bike shipped anywhere were out of this world. I waited two weeks without seeing my item appear on the "my page" section, even though the domestic shipping said it'd been delivered. I emailed them, and had no response for days. I started to worry that maybe this company was less reputable than I originally thought. I sent a third help request, which got a response at last, and was informed since it was oversized, they hadn't yet connected the purchase to my account, oh, and also it was too oversized to be shipped abroad. It had arrived fully assembled. I learned later that this is the standard for bike shops in Japan. Tenso said they were unable to downsize it for me by removing the pedals/turning the handlebars, as they weren't trained to do so.

From there we began the lengthy process of finding a solution, any solution. Tenso offered to ship it elsewhere in Japan for me, but in order to do that, I had to verify my address in Canada. Mind you, I'd already done that when I bought things through Tenso in the past, but it had to be done again, including scans of my driver's license and the receipt of a postcard at my mailing address in Canada. That's right, I had to wait for a physical postcard to arrive by postal mail at my apartment. Only when they were satisfied that I really did live at my address in Toronto would they allow me to redirect the bike somewhere else, but obviously, not to Toronto! They urged me to let them courier it to a friend.

I don't have tons of friends in Japan whom I'd be comfortable asking for a favour so large as "can you receive this bike in the mail, bring it to a bike shop to take it apart, and put it back in the mail?" and even fewer that I wouldn't mind being laughed at by. (As genuinely fond as I am of my co-workers at 〇〇 High School, and as much as they already knew I was quirky, I prefer not to be remembered as "that one that asked me to ship a bike to her".) In the end, I asked my friend Nicole, of Irish Chocolate fame. She returned to Japan after leaving 〇〇 University and is now an English teacher in Chiba. She saved me from a separate mishap involving buying Mister Donut cups on Yahoo! Auctions, and so I thought she might be able to intervene again. Luckily for me, Nicole agreed, and some time later my bike appeared, fully formed, at her apartment.

Nicole, bless her, bought a bike-sized cardboard box online and wheeled it all down to her local shop, where they took it apart and packed it up. Then she brought it back to her place (how!?!?) and called Japan Post for an at-home pickup. Except...now it didn't fall within Japan Post's size guidelines. The JP Post guys returned to Nicole's apartment two hours later with the box in tow. It was too big! She told me it would have to be done via a commercial shipping company like FedEx. Now we were getting way, way too expensive, and I wasn't sure what to do next. I'd already sunk more money into the box and the domestic shipping to Nicole, and the losses were too big for me to cut now. We decided to Frankenstein the box to make it smaller, since that approach worked for Emily when she sent her kotatsu home, but after some measuring, it literally needed to be half the size. Nicole promised to look up some options when she got home from her vacation in Europe.

I decided to take a different tactic. My roommate, M, made plans to go to Japan for a concert in October. I decided to ask her if she'd check the bike as her second piece of luggage (oversized). She agreed without too much protest, to my relief, and so I asked Nicole to have the bike couriered to Narita Airport instead. Surprise - the luggage shipping company that we usually use for the airport, doesn't accept bikes. Nothing about the size, never mind that it was in a cardboard box and disassembled, they just don't do bicycles. Nicole had to call JAL ABC, because apparently Sagawa thought we were asking them to ship some expensive French racing bike worth $8,000 and not the little steel mama-chari I bought at Daiwa Cycle for under two hundred bucks. Luckily JAL ABC agreed to take it (after warning me about a COD fee) and it was delivered to Narita on the day M was scheduled to return to Canada.

Ah, but it's not over yet! As I gallivanted through Montreal on a rainy Saturday night, just before midnight, my cell phone alarm went off, reminding me that "M Is At The Airport Right Now." And then there's an email in my inbox dated 30 minutes prior, saying "Does your bike have suspension? Because if it does, I can't take it with me." Followed by, "If you don't answer soon, I have to leave." Oh noooooooo--

I emailed back as quickly as my thumbs would function, NO, NO SUSPENSION

ALSO PLEASE DON'T LEAVE

After all, what was the next step if the bike got stranded at the airport? Call ABC and try to convince them to ship it back to Nicole (I really wanted to stop bugging her) or to another friend? Jes kindly agreed to receive it when I sent a desperate-sounding email asking for her address, but I didn't want to face the phone call where I explained that I, an uninvolved third party, wanted to use a foreign credit card to have this package sent not back to the sender or recipient but to someone else altogether. Also, what was Jes going to do when she got it? It was just too big!

Luckily, M hadn't checked in for her flight just yet, and decided to forge ahead. Air Canada, bless them, accepted the box without complaint, and it was successfully on its way to Canada at last. I waited until 2:30 AM for the inevitable email about something going wrong, before finally dropping off to sleep. In the morning I called for an airport van cab, and then I called The Bike Joint down on Harbord Street to arrange assembly, and then I recruited a friend with a car to drive it down there with me. BIKE BIKE BIKE BIKE BIKE.

It wasn't until she arrived in Calgary and they opened the box for inspection that M realized the extent to which I had thrown her under the bus.

I found this note written on the whiteboard when I got home, after M was safely sleeping off the jet lag:

...but at least I have my bike.

Japanese Music in Concert

For a music fan, I'm not willing to expend a lot of energy or cash to go and see a band - in fact, I'm lucky to go to a concert every 3 years at the most, and usually only shell out for nosebleed seats. However, I've actually seen a few really good Japanese bands while living here in North America. I've seen bands that would be playing sold-out shows in Tokyo, and paid next to nothing for them.

The secret is...anime conventions.

Almost all of the big conventions feature a musical act. Here in Toronto, I hit up Anime North every couple of years when they have a particularly interesting guest. I'm also in Baltimore almost every summer, and been able to see some fantastic acts at Otakon. T.M. Revolution, L'Arc~en~Ciel, JAM Project (including Okui Masami and Kageyama Hironobu, for you anisong fans out there!), Home Made Kazoku...all free with the price of admission to the convention. How good is that? When friends in Japan heard that I'd seen L'Arc, live, they were completely bowled over. 

In Osaka and Tokyo, I saw ZARD and AiM and Wada Kouji - now, those last two are definitely a story for another day - but going to a see a big-name show was pretty unlikely. I just don't have that kind of interest in any one band - plus I've been lucky enough to see T.M.R. in the U.S. not once but twice, and (long after this post was originally written) even ran into him on a flight between Japan and Canada!

Quite a lot of Japanese artists have come to Toronto to perform as well - Kyary Pamyu Pamyu was here a couple of weeks ago, and though someone offered to sell me their tickets at the last minute for cheap, it wasn't enough notice to actually go. Too bad! I also missed out on B'z the year before last, which was really unfortunate. These are fairly big-name artists, though, that it'd be tough to get good tickets for in Tokyo, and here they are performing at the Sound Academy in T.O.!

New York, L.A. and other bigger North American cities also have plenty of Japanese performers who slip under the radar, both at local venues and at cons. The next time you're looking to find some new J-artists, why not check out a convention? You might be surprised at who you can get to see, practically for free!

Nengajou

These traditional mailboxes can still be found around Japan

I've mentioned before how fun and interesting it is to take part in holiday traditions in Japan. During my first year in Osaka, as winter set in and Christmas decorations began to appear, so too did New Year's (oshougatsu) paraphernalia. For those unaware, New Year's is the biggest holiday in the nation, and loaded with customs very interesting to a visitor. Each New Year's, I took in a different type of celebration - once I did it traditionally, with ozouni and a shrine visit on January 1st, once in Tokyo at Aqua City Odaiba's shrine and osechi, and once in my own town with toshikoshi soba, watching the shrine next door burn its old offerings. 

Every year, though, I sent the customary New Year's postcards, called nengajou (年賀状). These cards are mailed to friends, family and co-workers, and as long as you pop them in the mailbox by December 25th, they will arrive in mailboxes everywhere on exactly January 1st. There are markings on the cards signalling to postal workers to hold them until New Year's; in fact, in my city, in December most mailboxes had one of their slots (usually there is a 'domestic' and an 'other' slot) entirely converted into nengajou drop-offs. I bumbled through my first year with some awkward store-bought cards, then moved onto making my own cards with special New Year's stamps.

Before leaving for Japan, I did a Christmas card list, and it was a tedious venture with the amount of friends I included at the time. After moving back to Canada, though, I continued sending nengajou rather than switching back to Christmas cards. I tend to forget about keeping up with communication when you take Facebook and Twitter out of the equation, but I can at least make a commitment during the holidays to remind people I've fallen out of touch with that I'm thinking of them, and sending cards for New Year's is a little more unique than sending Christmas cards...plus, nobody wants to receive a Christmas card after December 25th, but New Year's cards can trickle in a little late with no repercussions during a rough holiday season. It helps when you're sending cards all over the world - my biggest batches go out to the U.S. and Canada, and some to Japan where they'll be held until January 1st as long as I get them in the mail early, but some also go out to the Netherlands, Venezuela, Germany and points beyond, where I can't control when they'll arrive. The time flexibility there is definitely great.

Store-bought nengajou have lottery numbers on them which you can use (if you live in Japan) to win prizes. I never quite caught on to this when I lived abroad (admittedly, I sent far more cards than I ever received) but it's a great concept. Even homemade cards are often made using blanks from the post office with all the lottery information pre-printed. I feel a little bad that the cards I now send to Japanese friends have no lottery opportunities, but living in Canada restricts my opportunities to buy cards. Instead, I pick five or six of the free "make-your-own" templates Japan Post offers every year in November, and I have them printed up with my address and the 年賀 mark on the back, in the more traditional landscape-style design that we see on Western postcards. Looking over the designs each year is a joy and writing out my messages and addresses for Japanese friends is a good way to practice handwriting skills.

My first batch of template cards, in 2011.
Not great examples of my handwriting, but this year's batch looks much better!

Spreading this little bit of Japanese culture that many living outside the country wouldn't normally get to experience is great fun, and I love receiving postcards from my friends in Japan. I also like to think that when my co-workers back in Osaka receive a card from me, they feel a little better about the sort of revolving-door situation that is the unfortunate reality of ALTs in Japan, and know that I am still thinking of them, even years on. 

Photo of the Day - Shinsekai By Night

Note: I don't really recommend going to Shinsekai on your own at night. But it's cool to look at from a distance!

Mount Fuji II: How Not To Climb Fuji, Or Any Mountain, Really

This is the second in a series of posts about Mount Fuji.

Mount Fuji is divided up into stations ranging from the numbers one to nine. Most people consider the proper "climb" to be from the fifth station, as towns and forests occupy the gentle slope that is the bottom of the mountain.

The Kawaguchiko Trail (also known as Fujiyoshida) starts in Yamanashi Prefecture at an altitude of 2,305 metres. The ascent is supposed to take about five hours minimum. If it was only Drew doing this climb, he would have been there in four and a half, easy. However, as he was charged with a bunch of slowpokes, we were looking at a much longer ascent, and not a lot of time to do it in before sunrise.

At the fifth station, once the concerned cab driver had left and we had gotten into our cold-weather gear (by the way, the fifth station is not very far up, and it was July, so this was a bad idea), Alec took an object out of his backpack and told us, "I even brought a hurricane flashlight in case our flashlights run out of batteries!"

We all look at each other.

"Nobody else brought a flashlight!?"

And we were off.

Oh.

Fifth Station - 2,305 metres: The journey between the fifth and sixth stations gave me a false sense of hope and confidence, but poor Gwen was winded and gasping as soon as the trail got hilly. Drew, eager to make good time, loped ahead. I held the flashlight and tried to shine it back behind me to help Gwen and Alec, while Drew and I continued on in the dark. Drew took Gwen's backpack to help her along.

Sixth Station - 2,438 metres: Was a few toilets and nothing more. We started to continue, but a mere fifty metres up, it began to get very steep and we realized that Gwen was not going to be able to make it. She wore brand-new hiking boots and had already developed blisters! We came to the decision that the newlyweds would stay behind at the sixth station until sunrise then go at their own pace while Drew and I continued with the flashlight, and we would meet them at the top or on the way back down. The others set up a little camp in the dark and rain while we pressed on.

Seventh Station - 2,700 metres: In comparison, this station's 262 metre climb seemed to be impossibly far away. It wasn't a difficult ascent, but the rain had soaked through my jeans, long underwear, hoodie and shirt. I was freezing. I ended up buying a rain suit for ¥2,000 at the tiny shop here, but my clothes were already saturated, so once I put them on it became a sauna. Worse, I'd had to take off and stuff my down jacket into Drew's backpack, where it had absorbed enough rainwater to pour into a glass. Sneakers and socks were a total loss as well. The lodge at the seventh station urged us to stay, probably knowing it was only going to get worse. We pressed on, persistent in our belief that we could make it to the sunrise, but light started to appear sometime during the 674-metre distance between Seven and Eight. Drew had aggravated an old foot injury, and so we hunkered down under a rock outcropping to rest, but the moment I stopped moving I began to freeze, so we kept going.

Daunting, isn't it.
Try climbing back down this with the taste of failure in your mouth.

Eighth Station - 3,374 metres: Now the sun was high in the air and we knew we were defeated. I asked at a lodge about staying to rest, but we were turned away. The lodgekeeper said that Station 9.5 had a restaurant we might be able to rest at. I hadn't known there was a half-station on the horizon and imagined that it was probably a few more hours climb. Soon, I was sure I wouldn't get much further. We decided it was time to descend - unbeknownst to us, we were only 402 metres from the summit, less than the distance between Stations 7 and 8. It was a tougher and steeper climb, but we had already passed the longest stretches of the mountain.

My coat was a complete loss - the weather at the eighth station was only just above freezing, and it dripped with rainwater. I continued on in my also-wet but retaining body heat trusty Fangamer Snow Wood hoodie and the flimsy raincoat. Partway down we returned to our rock outcropping to rest; here Drew cracked his skull on the rock after standing up too quickly. To this day, he maintains that Fuji tasted blood.

We drank the only liquid remaining, the grapefruit Chu-Hi that was to be for our mountaintop toast, then moved on before I got hypothermia. We were apparently coming down the super-dangerous Kawaguchiko route (steepest! hooray!) while everyone else was still climbing up it, but since that was where we'd left the others, we couldn't go down one of the easier trails. I had long stopped using the umbrella for its intended purpose and started using it as a cane.

Would have just lain right down here if it'd been flat enough.

At the seventh station we re-encountered Gwen and Alec who had managed to make it another station up. The four of us began to descend, but Drew's ankle was in too poor shape to go at Gwen's speed, so he went on ahead alone. My phone had also died at this point, so we were lucky to find the others when we did. Alec and I helped Gwen down to the sixth station and then the fifth. My legs were numbing from the damp cold.

At the fifth station at last, the shops were finally open and we were able to eat. We grabbed food from a cafeteria and a battery booster for my phone so that I could assure people we were alive. We then got a bus down to Kawaguchiko Station, and from there, a taxi to the ryokan, the Japanese-style inn where we were booked for the night.

None of us had any energy at all, but the ryokan staff prepared green tea and mochi sweets for us, so we ate and drank and were then shown to our room. We hung out all the wet clothes on the balcony, took baths and recharged. Then we went to the special observatory on the roof to look at the accursed mountain; the splendid view of Fuji being one of the key attractions of the inn.

...........

Mount Fuji, the ornery old thing, was completely covered by the clouds.

...Concluded in Part III: Only a Fool Climbs Fuji Twice

Mount Fuji I: It May Want to Kill You

This is the first in a series of posts about Mount Fuji.

Mount Fuji as viewed from Hakone

"Climbing Mount Fuji" was never on my bucket list. I was pretty content to keep to my temples and gardens and electronics when it came to sightseeing in Japan. However, I have a friend named Drew who loves a challenge, and requested on his second visit to Japan that we climb Mount Fuji, the highest mountain in Japan, to watch the sunrise on his birthday.

Congratulations!
Now put on those hiking boots

Now, for a bit of back story, Drew's birthday was on July 29th (therefore we would be climbing on July 28th), and I was standing as maid of honour at a wedding in Los Angeles on July 26th. The honeymooning couple were coming back to Japan with me and staying in my apartment. They were interested in climbing the mountain, too. I was not entirely convinced that this was a great idea. Still, when I told Drew I didn't think the 28th was feasible, he seemed so broken-hearted that I immediately gave in.

That was how I came to be rolling off an airplane in Tokyo at four P.M., fresh from a nine-hour trans-Pacific flight, with the intention of climbing the venerable mountain that very night.

I was so caught up in the wedding that I had neglected to actually plan the mountain part, save for bringing a parka and sneakers in my luggage, and looking up the info on how to get there. I suppose I thought we'd figure it out when we got there. Much much later, I would look up a list of Fuji preparations and cautions one should take. Here they are, courtesy of mountfujiguide.com:

Notes for Climbing Mount Fuji

Mt. Fuji is the highest mountain in Japan. Please climb with enough care.

Do not include a climb as part of a busy travel schedule.

• Make sure to check the weather forecast in advance, and bring proper clothing to protect from rain and cold. Snacks are also helpful.
• To prevent altitude sickness, you should stay at the 5th station for a while to acclimatize yourself to the high altitude before you start climbing.
• The atmospheric pressure of Mt. Fuji is approximately two-thirds of the ground. Ascend as slowly as possible. You may suffer from altitude sickness if you climb quickly.
• Climb at your own pace depending on your physical strength and condition.
  (You may get tired if you try to keep up with others or rest too long.)
• Use only the official routes.
• Take a break if you feel tired. You should also drink water or have snacks to replace lost salt and sugar.
• If you feel ill, give up your climbing and descend the mountain as soon as possible.
• When climbing in a group, be sure to agree on the meeting place. Wait for others if you arrive at the place first.
• The temperature drops about 0.6 degrees Celsius (1.1 degrees Fahrenheit) for every 100 m (328 ft) of ascending. The weather is very changeable, too. Bring rain gear, warm clothing, and spare clothes.
• If thunder approaches and you feel dangerous, take refuge in the nearest mountain hut.
• When climbing in a group, you have a chance of being separated. Try not to lose sight of your companions.
• If you climb at night, you should have a flashlight or a headlight.
• Mountain huts are not open for 24 hours. Please stay quiet when passing by the huts as some people may be resting for the following day's climbing.
• Toilets in the huts and on the summit may be out of service due to overuse or weather conditions.
• Never kick stones. It may cause falling rocks.
• The signposts on each trail are classified by color. When descending, check the color to take the correct trail.
• Travelers checks and credit cards are not accepted at mountain huts. Bring enough cash to cover the expenses of food, lodging, toilets, etc.
• You are not allowed to pitch a tent on the mountain. It is extremely dangerous to sleep outside, too. Always use the mountain huts for sleeping.
• If you are hurt, sick, or in trouble, contact Safety Guidance Centers, First-Aid Stations, or any mountain hut.

....Oh.

Just so you all are aware of what we were getting into.

I should be clear on this before I start the story proper - don't ever attempt climbing Mount Fuji using our methods. This is going to be one of those entries that will make my mother despair every time I go travelling somewhere. Stop reading, Mom! It's not worth it.

The best hotel in Chiba

On the fated day, Drew and I met in Narita Airport and I had my suitcases whisked off by the amazing KuroNeko courier service. (More on that in another post.) Drew had arrived the day before me and spent the night sleeping by a marsh somewhere in Chiba Prefecture. The honeymooning couple, Gwen and Alec, had also arrived the day before. We planned to head to the Kawaguchiko Trail of the mountain as soon as we met the others and start climbing by nine-thirty, to give us plenty of time to reach the peak before sunrise.

In Shinjuku Station, after the 90-minute ride from the airport, we used Drew's laptop and my mobile Internet stick to look up the bus schedule for our journey...only to find that the last bus of the night left at 7:35. I glanced at the clock to see that it was 7:45. We were in trouble.

I started looking up alternate plans, but finally I had to conclude that there was no way we'd be able to get there that night, disappointing as it was. Tokyo was more than 2 hours from Yamanashi. At this point I looked at my phone to call Alec and realized "Huh? It's only 7:30." Turned out Drew's computer clock was still on Newfoundland Standard Time and so it had been showing me 7:45 AM, when it was still just 7:15 PM in Japan. So we missed our second shot at the highway bus. We had to leave the station to meet the honeymooners with all of Drew's luggage in tow.

Meeting them at Starbucks on the Shinjuku Southern Terrace, Alec informed us that Fuji ought to be accessible by the Fujikyu train line, because they had taken it on their last trip to Japan to go to Fujikyu Highland. Drew was looking pretty despondent by this point, so we all agreed to the questionable plan, tossed the luggage in some coin lockers and set out.

Vending machine bunny doesn't give us a choice anymore

To get to the Fujikyu, we had to take the Chuo Line almost all the way to its western terminus, and went to a supermarket there while waiting to change trains. It was a fortunate choice, since this would be the last store we saw for over 12 hours. (I hadn't eaten since the night before I'd boarded that plane.) Stocked up on...sashimi. Foolishly, we thought we'd be able to grab dinner at one of the shops near the station, but when we arrived it was already past midnight and everything around was closed. Thinking the mountain shops would be open late-night (since everyone starts at the fifth station and many people climb through or return through the night), we hailed a taxi and asked him to drive us to the mountain's base. The grooves on the side of the road played the "Fuji Theme Song" as we drove over them.

It began to rain. Eventually I asked our taxi driver (who was charging us over ¥10,000/$100 to go the thirty minutes to the mountain base) if we could hit a convenience store to pick up rain gear. He replied that the only convenience store was the 7-11 we'd passed twenty minutes before.

There was a pregnant pause, and then he had to confirm, "You didn't bring any rain gear?"

Of course we hadn't, but we had no idea yet how woefully unprepared we were, whereas this guy had probably lived in Yamanashi all his life, and offered to turn around and drive us back, before offering us some umbrellas he had in the trunk. Okay. Mountain climbing with umbrellas, great. Drew and I had heard that everyone from grandmas to elementary schoolers could climb Fuji, though, so I thought maybe it'd be all right.

At the base of the mountain we were deposited, and the taxi driver stood nervously by as the rest of us suited up and Drew dressed down in his t-shirt, khakis and bandanna. We laughed because our driver was so obviously concerned about us. (With, apparantly, good reason.) He offered to drive us back to Kawaguchiko Station for free, but we politely declined. Eventually he turned and got back in his cab, against his better judgement, and we began our high-spirited hike through torrential rain!

...I guarantee you that man read the newspapers carefully for the next week. expecting to see something about four foreigners dying from exposure on the mountainside.

... Continued in Part II: How Not To Climb Fuji, Or Any Mountain, Really

Japanese High Schools in the Modern Age

The genkan area.

High school in Japan is so very different from Canada, and not just because I graduated more than ten years (!) ago. The two schools I attended as a teenager were technologically on the cutting edge, and we had a beautiful computer lab where I used to check my email at lunch every day (Yes - it was 1999!), a media room and a modern cafeteria, and LCD displays in the halls so students could read the daily school news. As a student, I learned Microsoft PowerPoint by helping my friend with the daily media broadcast. Of course, students of the 2000s would be hardly shocked by such a level of tech, but for those of us who grew up without Internet-connected computers at home or cell phones, it was the height of modernity.

Japan was a bit of a nudge backward after my arrive in the mid-2000s. I remember my dismay when I took the tour of my school and realized there was no public computer lab, and just two general-use Windows XP laptops for the English department to share between 20 teachers. As an expat excited to document her adventures, and soon enough struggling with homesickness, the Internet had become my lifeline. I needed access. (This was after WiFi hotspots became a thing in Japan, but before they were affordable.) Luckily, the department kept one of the general-use computers on the desk next to mine, so I could pull it over and use it whenever I wanted. Which...was a lot, given that there wasn't a lot of prep work for me to do when the students were on vacation. I spent quite a lot of time on Wikipedia, Canadian news websites, and eventually, teaching myself the sport of basketball from the ground up. One day I came to school and, bless whoever in the IT department allowed this, discovered that laptop had moved permanently to my desk, and a new third one sat in its former home on the public desk. My JTE, my lifeline, had arranged for it.

The department's general-use computers, scanner and printer

My neighbours occasionally indicated that they thought I was a little unsociable, and I realize now that this was a gentle hint, but my sanity was spared. Sorry, everyone.

Anyway, at my school, things worked much like they did when I was in elementary and junior high back home. Most of the time, this was just fine by me; it's not a criticism. We used overhead projectors, analog clocks. 

My biggest problem was, bar none, the lack of insulation and heating. Mind you, this was not an issue unique to school; I battled frozen extremities at home, in the train station, and really most other places as well. I was shocked how unaffected my co-workers and students seemed to be by the temperatures that totally immobilized me! To stave off the cold, I had an enormous gas stove in my classroom, which needed to be hooked up to the gas outlet in the wall and turned on a minimum of twenty minutes before the lesson. On days when my prep work took me right to the bell, myself and the students could hardly function for the first half of the lesson, so I often spent entire mornings in my classroom, reading books and breathing gas because I truly felt it was better to tolerate a gas migraine than be so cold. In the staff room, my desk was also by the window, which we kept open year-round so that the air could circulate...even in February, that window was always open. 

The school was built in the 1960s, and had a definite 60s feel to it that I loved. There was a staff photo pinned to the cabinet behind where I sat that was dated the year Heisei 6 or so (1994: 2012 is Heisei 24) and showed the school exterior painted a vibrant hospital green. We had a chalkboard in the English department that had the names and addresses of JETs long, long gone written there - I wish I had taken a photo of this before I left. My phone number was written there for years, and might even still be, since it had been handed down year after year with the apartment. I was always on the lookout for 'vintage' things at home and away, and school occasionally delivered. I loved the sign in our lounge citing the rules, dated 1984, that hadn't faded or yellowed a bit.

I thought much of the charm in my school lay in its history and when I visited Emily's OO N High School on multiple occasions, a building not even 5 years old, I knew I preferred ours, even though she had air conditioning and heat in the staff room!

A familiar hallway

This entry has turned into a bit of a ramble, but when I think about how high school here in Canada must have evolved since I graduated (I hear my alma mater now auto-emails parents whose children have not shown up for school, and all papers submitted must be typed rather than handwritten) I'm glad that Japan wasn't a shock for me in this way. My students didn't work up any fancy Photoshop projects, and they handed all their homework in hand-written. I kept my grades in a register book, not on my computer. The kids all had cell phones, but rarely did I see any other technology in class - sometimes someone would have an iPod tucked into their blazer as they left, and there was a huge hubbub over a student who got an iPhone when it first launched, but lunchtime was usually for socializing with friends! I knew by name the only girl who brought her Nintendo DS with her to school every day, because she once asked me to bring mine so that we could play together.

Maybe the reason was because the prefecture couldn't afford fancy computers and LCD screens, but I prefer to think they were subscribing to the "we got along perfectly well without those things up until now, so why does it matter?" logic. I'm no technophobe, but I found it refreshing that my school was so down to earth. Even though we have had all these great advancements in tech that have become ubiquitous in the west, they are sometimes still seen as distractions in Japan. In my school, and I suspect this was true of many Japanese schools, we kept things simple. We had rocks, and we liked 'em! 

And when I was your age, I walked 4876234 miles in the snow to school, barefoot and uphill both ways...

Photo of the Day - Shijo-dori during Gion Matsuri

Shijo-dori in Kyoto.
This photo was taken during Gion Matsuri (Gion Festival), so the streets were closed to motorists.

Tsuyu, the Rainy Season

Yosakoi performance in Kyobashi

Rainy here again, today.

The rainy season in Japan is about to start now that it's June, and funnily enough, we're having our own "rainy season" here in Toronto. (Kicked off by the inconvenient, yet fantastically funny, Union Station flood last week.) The rainy season is one of the things that I don't miss about Japan. While I actually love rain and  there's a ton of charm in going for a stroll in it (plus, it always fell straight down, unlike the sideways rain of my hometown on the East Coast), the long rainy season was pretty awful. Laundry never dried right, and I hated going to school by bicycle in the wet, and when I woke up on a rainy tsuyu day I would have to quickly get ready and head out to the train station a full 20 minutes earlier than normal to avoid having to bike. On the bright side, this gave me lots of opportunities to walk back after school with my students or with my co-workers - S and I enjoyed many Friday melon pan runs like this. I also was able to own a contingent of adorable umbrellas that I was forced to leave behind when I returned to Canada. Had I known how expensive umbrellas were here (again, sideways rain, so there was no point in owning one before I came to Toronto), I would have brought them all home.

A family of umbrellas

Another positive to the rainy season was that, with that predictable weather, the underground shopping complexes and shōtengai, covered shopping streets, became a big draw for me - of course, and for hundreds  of thousands of other Osakans! It's likely that tsuyu is one of the reasons that we have such an extensive network of covered areas. There was something pretty fantastic about being able to stroll for kilometres without having to face the elements, but still being outside, in the case of the covered shopping streets. As for the underground, I know I would never have been able to explore the tunnels of Umeda and Namba nearly as thoroughly if the draw of a sunny day was just outside. I wish the PATH system here was even 1/10th as efficient and exciting as the shōtengai of Osaka!

Namba NanNan, one of Osaka's first underground complexes.

Photo of the Day - Washlet

Washlet toilets are often the first awesome/confusing things foreigners experience in Japan - right in Narita Airport.
Luckily, this one is in English!