Re:Creation

as i said, we got up early on tuesday. the sun was just beginning to rise in florida, [sunrise from my driveway] and we drove to the airport. i was looking forward to the flying to japan possibly more than the being there, because we were flying first class on all our domestic flights and business class on our international legs. you see, my dad is executive platinum with american airlines (i happen to be platinum, myself), and so every year he gets a number of free class-of-service upgrade coupons. we were able to use some of these, and let me tell you: flying business class internationally is about 75 billion times as good as flying coach. but we’ll get to that later.

our itinerary took us to chicago, where we would catch our non-stop bird to tokyo. there (once again because of my dad’s status) we were able to use the international first class lounge (a step above the admiral’s club, even), which was absolutely fantastic. we had a half an our to kill before our flight, so i went ahead and started Jonathan’s Day of Most Alcohol Consumption^TM. drinks were free in the lounge, so i kicked things off with a cranberry and vodka, i believe. then we took leave of the smallish high-rolling lounge and made our way to the plane. once boarded and settled happily in business class (where i couldn’t even touch the seat in front of me with my feet no matter how hard i tried), i availed myself of one, then two, glasses of champagne from the helpful flight attendant (drinks are free in business class, too). after takeoff things really get going in business class, with drinks, then the international flagship dinner, then a lunch before landing. i think i had two or three glasses of wine before dinner, which (at my choice) was a traditional japanese-style meal, with sushi appetizers and all sorts odd-looking things in a box for the main course. it was very good. with dinner i had a few more glasses of the white chablis. for dessert i switched to a graham’s port wine, which complemented my chocolate mousse-ish-cum-cheesecake thing very nicely.

before lunch was the japanese snack, consisting of soba noodles. at that point i decided to try something new and ordered some chilled sake. no good–i am not a fan.

then were the long hours of the flight, of which i slept a few, but spent most of which reading my japanese book. thus i whiled away the time until lunch, with the help of a few jack and cokes. lunch was pizza, so i had to switch to the french red wine they were offering. after two glasses of that, i was happily satisfied until landing. thus ended Jonathan’s Day of Most Alcohol Consumption^TM. of course, as you’d imagine, i was up and down going to the lavatory almost constantly. oddly, though, i never felt particularly buzzed.

we landed something like a day and a half later, on the 18th, in tokyo (the whole crossing the international date line thing, remember!), at 2pm. we changed some cash and ordered bus tickets from narita to shinjuku. we didn’t know it then, but shinjuku is one of a few “downtown” areas in tokyo. it’s a pretty big transportation hub and shopping area. anyway, 2 hours on the bus later (narita is far from tokyo proper), we got to shinjuku. we fiddled around with the phones for a bit, trying to figure them out, until a lady was nice enough to let us use her phone card, with which we called takashi fukuda at whose house we planned to stay for much of the week. takashi and his wife aiko work for wycliffe bible translators japan. since my dad is legal counsel for wycliffe usa and wycliffe international, he and takashi had known each other for a while. i myself had met takashi a few years back when he came to urbana with wycliffe.

takashi met us at the station and called a taxi to take us all back to his place. on the drive we began to get to know each other, and soon enough the topic of mt. fuji arose. you see, we had expressed our desire to climb mt. fuji with takashi during the e-mail exchanges of the previous week (wherein we planned on staying with him), but the response from takashi was, in possibly typical japanese fashion, “no, the mountain is closed. you cannot climb now”. out of respect, we pushed the matter no further, and for the moment accepted his advice on the issue. i was decidedly disappointed, however. i knew that we could climb it, and while i appreciated takashi’s care, i hated that our reliance on him might mean we wouldn’t be able to climb the mountain (you see, we had no idea how even to get to fuji, and even if we could find public transportation there, we’d have no way to get back without a car, since trains stop running fairly early). we asked discreetly a few more times that night, but the answer always came back, “no”, meaning, “crazy americans. of course you can’t climb when the mountain is closed!” apparently some canadian missionaries from a friend of takashi’s church had attempted to climb out of season once, and had got lost in the forest surrounding fuji and had died, which probably explained takashi’s reluctance. all the same, i was feeling rebellious. but soon enough the taxi arrived at the fukuda’s house…

the fukudas live west of shinjuku (which is itself rather westerly compared to other things in tokyo), near the soshigaya-okura station of the metro. they have a two story house, which rather surprised me with its size, the number of amenities (you would not believe the number of electronic gadgets that were connected to their toilets!), and the overall niceness of it. you see, my impression of tokyo so far, from the bus ride, was that it was a sprawling metropolis, consisting entirely of old (but clean) buildings built in the reconstruction after wwii, having a rather bland and industrial feel throughout. i was mostly right, and i was even right in thinking that houses were extremely expensive (tokyo is one of the more expensive cities in the world), and that space is a truly coveted commodity. as it was, i had been preparing myself to be sharing a 10 by 10 cubicle with my dad in some nameless monolith of an apartment building. so the fact that we were in a suburb (bustling and crowded though it was), in a house separate from the surrounding buildings, with each a room to himself, a bathroom and shower close by, was a blissful wave of relief to me.
here are some pictures taken in the house: [backyard garden] [long exposure shot of the ceiling light in my room]

takashi’s mother, an old woman of 80 or so years, lives in a house facing the fukuda’s, so they actually spent most of their time over with her, leaving their house to myself and my dad to relax in. we were able to make ourselves breakfast and sit and watch japanese television. i played the yamaha grand piano they had, which was in excellent shape. playing it, i felt as if i were weaving a bubble of my culture and personality, slowly growing it in an unfamiliar environment. i forgot for a moment where i was and the strangeness of being in a strange place. i wondered if the neighbors had ever heard anything but scales and classical etudes drifting in through their windows, and i wondered how the average japanese musical gestalt would interpret the decidedly un-classical sorts of things i was creating.

note 1: i will include links to pictures throughout, enclosed by “[" and "]“. be sure to check these out for the full experience!

note 2: this will be in nine(!) parts, because it is too long to post as one blogger entry (they must have put a new size limit in the new blogger version). but, i will post them backwards, so that part 1 appears first, and part 2 second, and part 3 third, and so on. in other words, read in the order they appear on the page.

note 3: this will be very long. in fact, it is about 7800 words and took me upwards of 5 hours to write. but i haven’t made you read anything in a while anyway, so suck it up. and who knows, maybe it will actually be worth reading!

part i: preparation

on tuesday, june 17th, i woke up early, because that was the day that my dad and i were going to leave for tokyo, japan. the fact that we were going to japan was cool enough, but even more exciting was how fast things had come together. you see, originally i had planned on bringing my beautiful little honda civic (name still pending…i should have called her arwen but i foolishly named my new digital camera arwen instead, and once you have named something you can’t revoke the decision) home for the summer. i was going to do a cross-country road trip! of course, that plan fell through because it turned out to be hard to get someone to drive it with me. the next idea was to ship the car home, but that was going to cost in the neighborhood of $900.

so, i decided that i would just leave the car in california, and find some other way to have an adventure before i started work for the summer. i called up my dad, since we like to go on international trips together, and we made a short list of about 5-10 interesting locations around the world. some other cities/countries on this list, besides tokyo, were moscow, hong kong, peru, new zealand, the cook islands, cameroon, and chile. as it turned out, when we began to price tickets, tokyo turned out to be a far better deal. you see, my dad and i are mile junkies, so the primary consideration for which trip made the most sense was, of course, the miles-per-dollar rating. tokyo’s rating was about 20 miles per dollar. which, if you fly very much, you know is pretty good. at any rate the whole trip would cost much less than shipping my car home, so we felt justified.

anyway, we made the decision and bought our tickets right around the 1st of june, knowing nothing of japan or tokyo or japanese culture or anything. after that i began to research what i could on the internet, learned a smattering of japanese, went through all the .swfs on “how-to-bow.com”, and became enchanted with the idea of climbing mt. fuji. nothing looked so picturesque, mysterious, and yet eminently doable. to that end i read all sorts of guides to climbing the mountain, and other people’s accounts of doing the same. the exhortation from all these texts was: don’t underestimate the mountain. on top of that, i learned that the official climbing season for mt. fuji was july 1 through august 31 (weather, during other times of the year, is apparently extremely unpredictable and dangerous on the mountain). we, as you know, were going to be there during the third week in june, a week and a half before the mountain opened for season. of course, they don’t shut it down or anything (it being rather difficult in principle to shut down a mountain), but every website i visited said: “WARNING: do not climb out of season unless you are an experienced professional climber”.

i was in a bit of a conundrum, then, because i didn’t want to do something stupid in the face of all the warnings (we’ve all heard stories where people die that way), and yet i strongly believed that these websites were exaggerating a little, most likely to save themselves from lawsuits and such. two other factors increased my resolve to climb anyway: (1) i had no idea if i would ever be able to visit japan again, and i wanted to climb mt. fuji, so my date options were limited to ones out of season, and (2) i had read that, in season, the mountain was so crowded, especially on the opening days, that in climbing it you were trudging in a line of thousands and thousands of people. that was not my idea of a fun outing with a natural colossus, to have the noise of thousands of people whining about their blisters following me up the mountain.

so i did what any good outdoorsman should do: bought gear! i won’t go into it too much, but i got plenty of goodies that would enable my dad and i to eat several hearty meals at the high elevation in cold, stay warm, and basically healthy. a stove, headlamps, rain gear, 2 nalgenes + 2 hydration packs apiece…i got us stocked!

but enough of mt. fuji for now.