Nikkō, Tochigi Prefecture, in the arms of the mountains. I saw a man in a dark suit following this river with a silver trumpet in his hand, looking for a place to fill his lungs with bracing mountain air and send blast after piercing trumpet blast rocketing into the snowy mountains... Good way to live.
The tomb of Tokugawa Ieyasu, founder of the Tokugawa Shogunate (Tōshō-gū, Nikkō). Nikkō is also home to the tomb of Tokugawa Iemitsu (Ieyasu's son and successor).
Shrine gate to a path lined with jizō, near Kanmangafuchi Abyss. The Kanmangafuchi "Abyss" is a shallow gully weaving between the shoulders of the mountains on either side of the Daiya River. Jizō are statues of the Buddhist divinity Ksitigarbha, guardian of the souls of children- particularly those who have died before their parents. Beyond this gate, in the shade of a dense row of cedar trees, stretches a long line of jizō clothed in red bibs and caps. Some of them are little more than stacks of stones and shreds of red cloth left by grieving parents.
The Sacred Bridge (Shinkyō) to Futarasan Shrine, crossing the Daiya River.
Kegon Falls, in the mountains of Nikkō. A high school student named Fujimura Misao came here to die in 1903. After carving a farewell poem into a tree with his knife, he jumped to his death. I found a loose translation of the poem:"Delicate line between heaven and earth...
The calm of the ages, all the world's worth.
Such minuscule measure, while we think it so grand...
Just five specks of smallness, This soft quiet land.
So frail and so fleeting, in the end you will see
Simple dreams were Horatio's philosophy.
For all the truth, all creation, all secrets of yore
Can be told in an instant, by then they're no more.
Ah, The Unexplainable
All worries unsettled, heartache unresolved...
All questions unanswered, with death, shall be solved.
We already teeter, this sheer cliff so high.
When we fall to corruption, insecurities die.
To end is to start; to surrender is to know.
Despair and depression, together they grow.
Hope shall meet hopeless when there's nowhere to go."
Lake Chūzenji, which drains into the nearby Kegon Falls. It's really up in the mountains- at an elevation of 4,124 ft.
A man prepares another batch of kurotamago (black eggs) in the sulphur springs at Ōwakudani Springs in Hakone. Something about the water turns the shells an ominous jet black, but eating one of these eggs is said to increase one's lifespan by 7 years (eat too many and you'll just get a stomachache, though).
At Shinagawa Station in mid-April. I arrived at the tail end of a suicide cleanup: the officers are folding up the tarp which was obscuring the scene from onlookers. One of my friends was on the train that hit the man- they were stopped for about half an hour.
An old lady brushing and feeding cats by the Yagami River on a Wednesday morning in April.When she saw me taking her picture, I waved at her and she waved back and smiled.
Yes, snow in April... : /-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hello all, it's been a while.
All is well with me, and Spring has come to Kawasaki. The steep banks of the Yagami River are traced with patches of pink and white flowers, and beneath the water's glassy surface small bands of black carp have been making their ponderous way upstream since mid-March.
I met an old man one bright afternoon a few days ago. The sun had re-emerged after a prolonged downpour, and the air was permeated with the smell of wet earth. He was gazing intently across the rain-swollen river at a small hole in the muddy bank, with one hand on an old tripod-mounted film camera. Just out of curiosity, I asked him what he was shooting. His eyes nearly vanished behind his wrinkles when he smiled. He pointed across the river.
"See that hole there, in the mud? That's a kingfisher's nest. It's been coming and going all day bringing things back to that nest."
"What's a kingfisher?"
"It's a little bird, a pretty little blue bird. You don't see them often around here."
"Ah... thanks." I stood with him for a little while, hoping to catch sight of the elusive little bird. His camera was slightly scuffed and chipped from long use. He had probably already focused the long telephoto lens on the nest. After a few minutes, I wished him luck and jogged off, leaving him standing placidly next to his camera. His eyes barely left the riverbank.
I've had a head-cold for the past day or so. Well, mum always says the best way to beat a cold is to outrun it, so this morning I jogged down to the Tsurumi River and alongside it towards the bay.
In the intervals between cold rainstorms, in the early mornings, the elderly emerge in force to tread the gravelly riverbank and chat and offer food to the growing colony of feral cats living beside the water treatment plant. In the afternoons children learn to ride bikes or fight with sticks, and sports teams from the nearby Hiyoshi campus of Keio University jog in jagged formation beside the river. The weather has been chaotic- it is raining now, and suddenly cold, and I am inside failing to be productive.
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Classes are shaping up to be quite challenging, which is fine, since I knew what I was doing when I got myself promoted beyond my abilities (to level 12). I think my original level coordinator, Misaki-sensei, really went out of her way behind the scenes to make sure I was placed where I wanted to go... just a hunch.
My new coordinator (the man in charge of level 12's core classes) is named Kimura. Kimura-sensei's head is rather squarish and his eyebrows are thick- traces, he suggests, of long-forgotten Ainu ancestry (his family comes from far northern Honshū, which the Ainu people once inhabited). At first glance he is a typical dry academic: tweed suit, an office overflowing with ancient books (some of them four hundred years old), and a vaguely awkward manner emphasized by his tendency to dra-aw ou-ut... the last... uh... syllable-les... when he spea-eaks... which he does very slowly-y... unless he's on a particularly interesting tangent in class. He abandons the thread of his lectures at the drop of a hat, and gleefully pursues any side-avenue of knowledge that even loosely correlates with the topic at hand.
He makes subtle jokes in class, and he's fond of using strange Japlish terms casually in the course of his lectures- like "Hungry精神" (Hungry spirit) and "楽しみのPeak" (the peak of pleasure) and "退廃的なMood" (decadent mood).
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As you may have gathered from the photos above, I had a chance a while back to visit Nikkō, in the company of Maya, Fabien (from France), and their mutual friend Valeny (from Indonesia). Unfortunately I don't have much time to write about the experience (I'm leaving in an hour to go clubbing in Shibuya with some of my fellows)... We stayed at a cozy mountaintop hostel with a wood-burning fireplace, in an attic-style room with a sloped ceiling. There were guitars resting by the television, soft couches deeply saturated with wood-smoke, and hot showers; I won't say anything about the food, though. All in all a lovely place to return to after a day of traipsing from one shrine to another to another.
Nikkō and its many temples, shrines, and gardens, are blessed by that particular serenity that only crisp mountain air can provide. Nikkō is also famous for yuba- sheets of sweet dried tofu- which its restaurants have worked into an abundance of delicious local dishes (highly recommended, of course). I'll be honest- I'm not a connoisseur of Japanese shrines and temples, and everything I saw that first day has pretty much blended into one long smear of forested paths and torii gates and altars. One great discovery, though, I remember clearly: at Tōshō-gū, we happened across a painted carving of three monkeys- one with his hands over his ears, one with his hands over his mouth, and the third with his hands over his eyes. Those monkeys are named Kikazaru, Iwazaru, and Mizaru: the original pictorial representation of the three wise monkeys ("Hear no Evil, Speak no Evil, See no Evil"). Their names are actually puns: the archaic negative verb ending "zaru" used to be written the same way the word "monkey" ("saru") is written in Japanese. Hilarious :D
Anyway, must be off. I'll try to write more tomorrow, and post more pictures- I have nearly 400 which I've saved up over the past couple months. Apologies if they don't correspond directly with what I write about- I don't think I have time to write about everything that's happened... : ( Anyway, all my love to my friends and family~
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