A day out: Mount Kinpō.

As I've learned the past six months, the life of a J-3 is busy. On Sundays I'm often at church until past 2:00 (and then again till past 7:00 at the International Service), and on weekdays I'm often at school till past 6:00. My Saturdays are technically my free day but they're often filled with church or school events. I enjoy it--I really do--but it means that I do things like post blog accounts of my summer vacation two months after the fact.

But one nice thing about Japan: they love their national holidays. There's nary a month when I don't have at least one Monday off for things like "Respect for the Aged Day" or "Culture Day" or "Marine Day." Monday was "Health and Sports Day," and I spent it climbing a mountain with my pastor, two of his kids, and a member of my church, Mr. Nakamura.*

Mr. Nakamura is the "principal" of the Kuwamizu Sunday school and also the spryest 71-year-old I've ever met. He also often sits next to me in church and is one of the most enthusiastic members of the newly-formed 5-to-7-member (depending on the Sunday) church choir. "Next Monday," he told me last week after choir practice in his limited English, "Let's climb Mount Kinpō!" He mimed hiking vigorously and told me he loved mountain climbing.

I was hesitant at first (I'm terrible at hiking up mountains; see this year's Golden Week entry about climbing Kishima-dake in Aso with Caroline), but our climbing party would also include an 8-year-old, so I figured it wouldn't be too hard. Plus I do enjoy spending time with members of my church.

We got on a bus at the city's main terminal and rode through the old part of town, then out to the mountains where everything was green and fresh. (I love that Kumamoto City's a place where it only takes a 15-minute bus ride to be in the middle of nature... can't do that in Tokyo!) We disembarked at a rural little crossing with a few houses, shops, and vegetable stands, where Mr. Nakamura bought some mugwort-flavored rice cake dumplings filled with sweet red bean paste. Treats for when we finally got up the mountain.

Mt. Kinpō from the bus stop.

Mr. Nakamura came out of the shop and pointed to a distant verdant mountain topped with broadcast towers. "There it is!" he said. My jaw dropped. All the way up there? Pastor Sumimoto laughed and asked if I was going to be all right. "I'll do my best," I said meekly, prompting more good-natured laughs. "If at any point you're having trouble, let us know," said Pastor Sumimoto.

We walked along a street that ran steeply uphill, reflecting on how quiet and peaceful it was and how nice it would be to live there, except for the giant spiders who had webs every five feet or so. Many houses had large yards (a rarity in Japan!) that had pear orchards and big vegetable gardens. Some set up unmanned makeshift fruit stands with pears and potatoes for sale, and a little open tin to collect the money. Honor system. I quietly lamented the fact that there was no way that would fly in America and made a mental note to purchase something on my way back down.

Finally we got to a little rest area near a forested shrine gate. "Koko wa start point!" declared Mr. Nakamura. Start point? I was already winded by the street hike!

Start point.

The two kids (boys, ages 8 and 13) ran ahead, and Mr. Nakamura and Pastor Sumimoto kept a good pace, but I brought up the rear, breathing heavily. The steep slope, log steps, and fallen leaves made me thing of some of the more strenuous hikes back at my old summer camp. If I could hike to the highest point of Westminster Woods with a bunch of middle schoolers, I could hike up a mountain in Kyushu.

View from a resting place halfway up.

Our rest breaks became more frequent, but Mr. Nakamura would always look at me and go, "Mō sukoshi dakara!" with an encouraging smile. "Just a little further!" Then we turned to start up the steepest staircase yet when a couple of hikers came down and told us the peak was at the top of those stairs.

And there it was. The top of the mountain. There were probably twenty or thirty people up there already, enjoying their picnic lunches. So we settled in to enjoy our own. I hadn't had time to get a lunch beforehand, but Mr. Nakamura had me covered. He handed me a bottle of green tea and standard Japanese snack fare: two onigiri rice balls. One was filled with kishū ume, pickled plum paste, and one with karashi mentaiko, spicy marinated fish eggs. Both were delicious, though pickled plum is my favorite.

Then it was obligatory picture-taking time before we headed back down the mountain. If there's one thing Japan has in abundance, it's good views.

Toward the ocean. To the left is the mouth of the Shirakawa River that
runs through Kumamoto City. Straight ahead (hidden by the haze) is Shimabara, site
of the 1637-38 Shimabara Rebellion. More about the Shimabara Rebellion here.

The journey down was much easier than the journey up, and took probably only a little over half the time. Finally, we reached the quiet street that led back down to the bus stop. Along the way, we nearly bought out this tiny fruit stand:

Akebia fruit and Asian pears, 300 yen (about $3) for a bundle or a bag.

I put my newly-purchased Asian pears in my backpack as we continued back toward the bus stop. "Have you ever heard of akebia?" Mr. Nakamura asked, handing me a hollow, rough, brownish-red fruit. I said no. Pastor Sumimoto added that many Japanese didn't know what it was, either. I looked it up in my phone's dictionary to find its English name was "chocolate vine," to our collective bewilderment. "Like chocolate grapevine?" asked Pastor Sumimoto. We puzzled over the etymology until we reached our destination, two shady benches across from the stop where our bus wouldn't arrive for another 20 minutes. Mr. Nakamura and I sat on a bench and talked about Japanese history while Pastor Sumimoto and his kids relaxed on another one. "America seemed like the best country when I was a kid," Mr. Nakamura told me. "Everyone wanted to go there because it was so rich while Japan was so poor." I looked around at the freshly paved roads and watched shiny new cars whoosh by modern houses. A few weeks ago over Sunday lunch, Mr. Nakamura handed me a piece of chocolate and told me about how during the Allied occupation of Japan, an American soldier gave him chocolate and he thought it was the greatest thing he'd ever tasted. Japan's come a long way in the past 65 years. And yet, there's a spiritual poverty, too, as evidenced in the country's high suicide rate and the fact that in terms of satisfaction with life Japan ranks extraordinarily low, especially for a developed country. It's a unique mission field.

As our bus rolled into town, Pastor Sumimoto, who was sitting next to me, remarked, "It was good to spend a holiday surrounded by so much nature, wasn't it?" It was, indeed. Arigatou gozaimasu, Mr. Nakamura.

The climbing party: from left to right, Mr. Nakamura, the 12-year-old, the 8-year-old, and Pastor Sumimoto.

*Names have been changed.

Your love, Lord, reaches to the heavens,
your faithfulness to the skies.
Your righteousness is like the highest mountains,
your justice like the great deep.
You, Lord, preserve both people and animals.
How priceless is your unfailing love, O God!
People take refuge in the shadow of your wings.
They feast on the abundance of your house;
you give them drink from your river of delights.
For with you is the fountain of life;
in your light we see light.
Psalm 36:5-9 (NIV)

Summer travels.

Between regular classes, extra classes, extracurriculars, sports, and other events, Luther is open most of the year, but there are a couple of occasions when it closes completely. Obon, the annual late-summer Buddhist commemoration of the dead, is one of those times. During Obon, most Japanese people return to their hometowns to clean their family gravesite and pay respects to their ancestors, whose spirits are said to revisit the household altar every year. Many Obon customs are rooted in guiding spirits back home. Obon is also peak travel season, but Caroline and I decided to brave the crowds and make our way back to Tokyo for a few days and then up to northern Honshu to visit some less frequented parts of Japan (and beat the brutal Kumamoto heat). Armed with a special train ticket that allowed us cheap travel on local trains around the country, we stuffed all our supplies into our smallest carry-on suitcases and flew into Tokyo on a budget flight on August 7 to start our journey.

Erik and Tauna, the missionary couple in Tokyo that came to Japan at the same time we did, graciously hosted us as we reunited with old friends from Hongo Student Center and our respective Tokyo churches that we have been missing dearly. It was good to see everyone again, enjoy delicious meals, and hear what's new in that crazy old metropolis. We also had the chance to check off a couple tourist activities we didn't get to when we lived in Tokyo last year:

Number one was a rickshaw ride through Asakusa. (Tokyo Skytree in the background.)

Number two was Tokyo DisneySea, the neighboring Disney park to Tokyo Disneyland.

Then it was on to the north. After ten hours on and off local trains, we arrived in the rural city of Yamagata. After a good night's sleep we woke up the next morning and took a scenic train journey to the temple complex of Yamadera, built into a mountainside.

Bashō and Sora. Photo by Caroline.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, we were (sort of) following part of the path the famous Japanese haiku poet Matsuo Bashō took as documented in his 1689 travel journal The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a book I read (and greatly enjoyed) years ago for a college class. I didn't realize it until we passed commemorative statues of him and his traveling companion Kawai Sora on our way up the mountain. We sweated and climbed up and down countless stairs, and I had to stop and drink water after every flight, but the views were breathtaking.

Bashō wrote of Yamadera almost 450 years ago, but little has changed since then:

Boulders piled on boulders had created this mountain, and the pines and cedars on its slopes were old... Circling around the cliffs and crawling over the rocks, we reached the main temple building. In the splendor of the scene and the silence I felt a wonderful peace penetrate my heart.
Matsuo Bashō, trans. Donald Keene, The Narrow Road to Oku (Kodansha, 1996) 99.

Then we headed up to Matsushima, a bay dotted with hundreds of little pine-covered islands, renowned for being one of the "Three Views of Japan." We took an hour-long "Bashō Cruise." Once again, Bashō is much better at describing things than I am:

There are countless islands. Some rise up and point to the sky; the low-lying ones crawl into the waves. There are island piled double or even stacked three high... Some look as if they carried little islands on their backs, others as if they held the islands in their arms, evoking a mother's love of her children. The green of the pines is of a wonderful darkness, and their branches are constantly bent by winds from the sea, so that their crookedness seems to belong to the nature of the trees... What man could capture in a painting or a poem the wonder of this masterpiece of nature?
Matsuo Bashō, trans. Donald Keene, The Narrow Road to Oku (Kodansha, 1996) 79.

After Matsushima we deviated from Bashō's path and journeyed to the historical samurai town of Aizu-Wakamatsu, our last stop on our trip. Unfortunately, we missed our train, so the journey took a lot longer than we expected, and by the time we stumbled into our ryokan, a traditional Japanese inn, I was suffering from heat exhaustion pretty badly. Thankfully the very hospitable staff let us check in early so I could rest in the room while Caroline went out and explored the town. I gotta say, if you have to have heat exhaustion, a ryokan's not a half-bad place to recover from it.

Exterior of the ryokan. (Photo by Caroline.)

Our room. On the table are the remains of the next morning's breakfast.

Sitting area in our room, facing the garden.

Yukata at a festival--a Japanese summer tradition.

After a bath and delicious local-specialty dinner of fish (both cooked and raw), vegetables, pickles, rice, soup, and tomato jelly for dessert, I felt much better and Caroline and I ventured out in our ryokan-issued yukata (light summer kimono) to see the Bon odori, or Obon dance, going on right in front of the river. A singer and instrumentalists stood on a platform over the river while a procession of people young and old, yukata- and Western-clad, Japanese and foreigner, slowly made their way around the platform, crossing bridges over the river and moving their arms in time with the beat.

Performers on the platform over the river.
(The banner says the festival is sponsored by the local newspaper.)

Here's a short video I took of the dance procession:

When we got back inside, our futon beds were already laid out on the tatami-mat floor for us. So we settled in for our last vacation night, happy but exhausted. It was a great ten days, though we both learned quite a few hard lessons about traveling. (Plan a rest day! Always plan a rest day! Also, count the number of clean pairs of underwear in your suitcase before you hop in the shower.) It was a wonderful opportunity to experience some other parts of Japan, but it also was nice to return to Kumamoto and get back into the swing of things at church and school. An Obon well-spent, I think.

The Lord will watch over your coming and going both now and forevermore.
Psalm 121:8 (NIV)