Well, today, the real today, was pretty crappy, but I’m going to try to keep that out of this writing. WARNING: This is a pretty long entry.


In this entry, I’m going to talk about my Mount Fuji (mis) adventures. It started on Sunday; Sunday was a day almost as frustrating as today, although it had some saving graces. I was planning on meeting a Japanese friend of mine that I met years ago back in Russian class, a girl named Ai, who’s getting married to a Bulgarian guy (hence why she was studying Russian, which is mutually intelligible with Bulgarian, and actually has classes offered, as opposed to the real deal of Bulgarian). We were going to go to Kamakura, which is a beach town south of Tokyo that’s supposed to be quite lovely, and home to a great big giant bronze Buddha.


Unfortunately, I didn’t rent a cell phone when I entered Japan. After Sunday and today, I’m really regretting that. It’s expensive, but it would have made a variety of things much easier, and I would’ve ended up having more experiences in Japan for it.


The thing is, cell phones from the rest of the world don’t work in Japan. I guess they want to preserve some sort of network monopoly, or something; although personally, my experiences have actually just gone to suggest that Japan really isn’t as technologically forward as everyone likes to think it is, and that in fact it actually obfuscates the process of being technologically integrated with the rest of the world. Aside from the cell phone problem, there’s also like no wireless internet available anywhere, except for some hotels and some hostels. Personally, I see wi-fi as being the basic symbol of how technologically sophisticated a place is; apparently, San Diego and San Francisco are towards the top of the food chain in this department, and I’m incredibly spoiled. Here in Japan, I’ve had multiple instances of wandering for 2 hours or more trying to find a place to get wi-fi. So stupid.


Anyway, so I didn’t have a cell phone, and for a variety of reasons, it would have been useful in trying to meet, as the train station Ai and myself were going to meet at is a gigantic train station. I got there at 11am, and hung around til 1pm (with a lot of walking around at a few points), and ultimately gave up. As I later found out, Ai basically did the same thing, we just weren’t in the same place.


That was pretty disappointing, as I was really looking forward to seeing her, even more than seeing Kamakura itself. But life goes on, right?


So I went to Shinjuku, bypassing Harajuku, a district known for its cosplaying madness. If you don’t know what cosplaying is, as I know many of you reading this don’t, here’s some examples:




These pictures are all taken by me from the recent San Diego Comic Con. If you think its interesting, just do a google image search for cosplay; lecherous old men will have a great time of it, as you'll swiftly find out.


Cos - play is short for Costume play. People dress up as video game characters, anime characters, etc etc, and they’re actually quite often rather talented at it, and Harajuku is world reknowned for its cosplaying community on Sunday afternoons. I wanted to see it, but I was pretty bummed out from not seeing Ai, so I decided I’d just skip town out of Tokyo, and move on to my next destination, Kawaguchi-ko.


Kawaguchi-ko is one of several cities located in the area known as Fuji Five Lakes. As you might’ve astutely deciphered, there’s five large lakes in the vicinity of Mt. Fuji, and they are home to a plethora of little shanty towns that exist for little reason other than for people to hang out around the mountain.


If I was writing a normal piece of expository writing, I’d expand more on the background now. However, I want you guys to learn it the way I did, so the information I include here will be listed in the same chronological order as I experienced it to begin with.


So, I hopped on a bus from Shinjuku (the Westernmost big district in Tokyo, home to the majority of the bigtime shopping for adults in the metropolis) to Kawaguchi-ko. It cost about $20, not too bad, considering it was taking me 2.5 hours away from Tokyo.


Incidentally, as I waited at the station there, I had my first experience of note with a Japanese girl. Imagine for a second the scene: I’m standing next to this rail that borders the street to keep people from walking in front of oncoming buses, with my giant hiking backpack, a messenger bag with my laptop, and a camera bag for my Nikon dSLR, with my skateboard leaning against the fence. This girl steps up next to me, and I think for a second that I’m in her way or something, so I swiftly grabbed my skateboard and retreated a step or two. Then I notice she isn’t going anywhere, but instead has a meek little smile on her face, and it dawns on me what was actually going on. So I tried to make some conversation with her; she was actually fairly cute, for what it was worth, and her English was advanced enough (more so than my Japanese) that we could communicate about stuff, and found out we were basically going in the same direction.


I don’t really know where that conversation was heading, though, as it was still obvious that there was no room for romance, not even transitory romance, in this situation. I was a man on a mission, and that mission was named Fuji. But it never hurts to be nice, so I did what I could. Then my bus approached, and she didn’t get on. Pft. Who knows. Anyway, right before I get on, and right before I stow my stuff beneath it, a guy comes running out of an electronics store across the street, and three Japanese police tackle him and bring him to the ground. I wanted to take a picture, but I still had all my stuff on me, so it was rather inconvenient to attempt to do so. However, after I put my stuff (most of it) in the storage space under the bus, I worked my way to the back of the bus to try to take some pictures out of the back window (it didn’t hurt that a large group of attractive Japanese ladies were sitting back there, either), but then they informed me that I was in one of their seats while I was getting my camera out. Turns out our tickets had assigned seats.


So, I apologized and moved to my proper seat, photos un-taken. As the police car pulled away, and in front of our bus, however, I snapped off a couple real quick. They’re nothing special, but here they are:





The next two and a half hours were hazy, as I did my best to sleep them off. I’m not exactly sure how successful I was, but the time went by pretty fast, so I assume I must’ve slept through a good chunk of it.


Gosh the land is green right now in Japan. I have to take a moment to really emphasize that. Its lush, and absolutely gorgeous, and nothing like the entirety of California.


Part of that is because it rains a huge amount June and July, and a decent amount in August as well. That’s monsoon season, for those who didn’t know, so I was looking at vegetation that had been inundated for the past two months.


The thing is, it was being inundated at this point as well. It wasn’t raining that hard, but hard enough. I had been planning on climbing Mt. Fuji at night, to catch the sunrise. Its kinda what everyone wants to do, but a lot of people don’t get to do it. It’s actually pretty popular, and there’s a lot of people going up the mountains at around midnight.


It just wasn’t happening that night. It was raining too long, and too hard, so I figured that it wouldn’t be a good idea to go up that mountain. Unfortunately, since I was planning on climbing that night, I didn’t have a reservation for any place to stay. Luckily, the hostel in the area that I had a reservation for the next night, anticipating a long day of relaxation after scaling Fuji, had a vacancy for that night. It meant I had to pay another 25 or 30 dollars, but that’s okay.


By the time I got to Kawaguchi-ko, it was about 5pm. Kawaguchi-ko isn’t exactly a huge town anyway, but there certainly isn’t much to do after 5pm. They have one bar. They have a couple 24 hour restaurants, which are universally terrible (more on that later). However, the sun still doesn’t set until about 7-7:30, so I had to find something to do. By this time, it was raining pretty lightly, so I decided to get out my skateboard, and skate around lake Kawaguchi. It was a pretty pleasant ride, and if I had the time, I actually would have gone to visit a couple other sections that I didn’t have the opportunity to check out that evening. I brought my camera with me too, so here’s some pictures from that.







As you can see, it’s pretty murky. In my entire time in the area, I never once got to see a panoramic view of Mt. Fuji. The most of it that I could see was when I was on top of it. If I was back in Kawaguchi-ko, I wouldn’t even be able to tell you what direction the mountain was in (there’s a lot of mountains nearby anyway), it was just too cloudy. That third picture MIGHT be it, but I couldn't swear to it, and I think it probably isn't.


After that, I went to an onsen. Onsens are public baths, and a onsen-ji is the proper name of the building or development where the onsen is. They have baths separated by gender, and they typically use mineral water. Since I was staying at a hostel in the area, I was given a 20% discount, which made it about $8. Not too bad.


So I went in. The thing is, there’s a lot of proper etiquette about onsens. I knew this already, but I didn’t know precisely what those rules are, so I did the only natural thing, and watched the Japanese guys that were already inside, to see what they were doing, so that I could mimic it. Of course, this is every bit as creepy as it sounds; they are naked, and washing themselves, so its an experience I don’t care to repeat. Watching them, anyway. The actual public bath part was fine, but spectating isn’t all that copasetic. Once I figured it out, I forced myself to relegate my fears of being naked around strange men to the back of my mind, and dove right in. And by dove right in, I mean that I sat on a stool and washed myself for ten minutes with a showerhead that’s attached to a hose, because that’s what you do. You have to clean yourself before entering the bath, that’s just part of the protocol; you’re supposed to also wash off all the suds before entering, but I still had a teeny bit on me. Oh well, I’m sure they could deal with it. In all honesty, this was the weirdest part of the experience. Sitting on tiny wooden stools next to a row of Japanese guys, ranging in age from like 10 to 60, with everything hanging out, scrubbing with little towels in one hand and holding the showerhead in the other, was pretty funky. Actually sitting in the bath was pretty chill. They had one bath inside, and another outside; the one outside was much more atmospheric, given that it was still raining, yet the bath water was still steaming. The contrast in sensations made it feel even more cleansing, insofar as I can tell; I’m not much of a omigosh-lets-purge-all-our-toxins kind of guy, so maybe I’m not the best person to ask. I’m pretty sure most people would agree on this assessment, though.


That was pretty much my day on Sunday. Afterwards, I went to Gusuto, which is a Japanification of Gusto, which is a 24 hour crappy restaurant that serves hamburger patties as Salisbury steaks with cheese in the middle. In fact, what I ordered is called a cheezu-iinu hanbaa, which is supposed to say cheese-in hamburg, because if you add the “er” on the end of hamburger, it gains a bun, which they specifically leave out in this little delicacy. The cheese was disgusting, and the meat wasn’t anything to rave about.


Its so Japanese that if you go to Japan, you should check it out once, but then let it stay in your past, for the love of God.


I see now that this transcript of my Sunday has already reached three pages in MS Word, so no Fuji yet. This is already a lot to read. I’m going to keep writing anyway, because I have nothing better to do, but I won’t post the Fuji (mis)adventure for another day.