Old Friends, New Places Part 2

I suppose being in your 20s in general is a time in your life when people are moving around and your circle of friends is never to stable. This is especially true in an expatriate community. Over the four years I’ve been here I’ve seen a lot of people come and go.

And a lot of them, oddly enough, end up coming back again. I guess for all the complaining we do about Japan, none of us can stay away too long. Eoin’s back in Nakatsu teaching English again. Good old Johnny was back at the expo. Greg was back to visit this summer. And now Heather is in Tokyo for an internship.

Heather is an old friend from the days in Oita. She left after two years. I didn’t start this blog up until my 3rd year in Oita, so Heather was already gone by that time. Although once and a while she does pop up retrospectively, like in this post here.

Anyway, she’s back in Japan, and a mutual friend put us back in touch.

Despite my four years in Japan, I have yet to fully explore Tokyo. I’ve changed planes there. Greg and I rode through there on our hitchhiking trip. I was there for orientation when first arriving, and during my 3rd year, I made a brief foray into Shibuya to get some of the world’s most expensive Ramen. But I’ve never explored Tokyo sightseeing. I was tentatively thinking Heather could show me around, but she e-mailed back saying she wasn’t in a position to host at her place, so she came down to visit me.

That actually suited me just fine, since I’m a lazy bastard and hate making preparations for travel. But I did warn Heather in advance that the sightseeing in Gifu was limited. She was okay with that. I got out my guidebook and tried to find places of interest. There were a few outdoor places that might be fun to visit.

And wouldn’t you know it? Pouring rain on Saturday.

It was mass chaos picking Heather up from the train station. No parking anywhere. No one wanted to get out of their cars. 3 woman were so concerned about not getting wet that they weren’t looking where they were going as they ran into the street. I slammed on the brakes. A girl in a high school uniform was racing on her bike trying to get out of the rain. As she took the turn the bike slipped on the wet pavement. She hit the ground hard, scattering her books all over. It was a nasty fall, and I felt like someone should go over and see if she was all right, but I was in my car in the middle of the road. The girl appeared to be more embarrassed than hurt. She tried to pick herself up with dignity, seeming to be very aware that the whole street had just seen her wipe out.

And then I met Heather. We had a great time catching up, reminiscing about Oita, and exchanging stories about the people we used to know back there. It’s exactly the same kind of conversation you have when you run into someone from high school or college. “So and so’s doing well, so and so’s not doing very well, so and so never left the place and is still in Japan, and so and so completely dropped off the face of the earth, and no one has so much as gotten an e-mail from him since he left Japan.

After catching some lunch, we decided to try and make the best of the rainy afternoon. We went to check out the air force museum in Kakamigahara.

Kagamigahara, just slightly east of Gifu city, is the sight of an old air force base. During the war it was heavily bombed by American planes. Because the planes carried more bombs than they could possibly drop at once, their commanders told them to start the bombing once they reached Gifu city. By the end of war Gifu city, despite the fact that it had no military targets, was completely demolished. Which is why anti-war activists sometimes refer to Gifu city as “the forgotten Hiroshima.”

But by the time we got our act together and made our way into Kagamigahara, and then found the museum, it was already closed. And it was back to the drawing board.

A friend of mine called to tell me about a Japanese Lantern Festival in the town of Mino. We decided to check it out. I didn’t have a good idea of where Mino was, but we got out the map and followed the street signs. Once we got to Mino it was already dark, and we drove around the dark streets trying to find where this festival was. Once we finally found it, it was a major disappointment. There was hardly anyone there at all. Maybe the rain kept people away. In the end we ended up at a party at someone’s house that we didn’t even know. A friend of a friend of a friend.

I apologized for the way the day turned out, but Heather said that it reminded her of the weekends in Oita Prefecture: driving all around these obscure country roads looking for the party, winding up at someone’s house that we didn’t even know, these were all part of the English teacher experience.

At the party, another friend gave us recommendations for Sunday. “Check out Yoro park and Yoro waterfall,” she said. “And then while you’re there, be sure and check out ‘The Park of Reversible Destiny’. That was created by a bunch of artists who got cancer and then recovered, and wanted to make a park that makes people examine their relationship to destiny.”

“Wait, they collectively got cancer, and then collectively recovered?” I asked.

“I don’t know; it was hard to tell because the explanation was all in Japanese. But it’s a really bizarre park. It’s just like Alice in Wonderland. You wander through all these mazes, and you go into a house where the furniture is on the ceiling or stuck halfway through the wall. It’s really amazing.”

And so we went to Yoro the following day. The waterfall is apparently very famous in Japan because of the legend that the water can turn into sake. But I thought as a waterfall it was only so-so. “I guess having lived in Oita, we’re pretty spoiled for nice waterfalls,” I remarked. “There’s beautiful waterfalls in just about every town.”

“Still, I haven’t been to Oita in a long time, so this is nice for me,” Heather said. I of course was just back to Oita during the summer, so the memories of the Oita waterfalls are still fresh in my mind.

“The Park of Reversible Destiny” was very interesting. I had suspected my friend was exaggerating, but it was very much as she described it. We wandered through mazes, saw houses with furniture stuck into the walls halfway up. We wandered around some mazes in the dark, keeping our hands on the wall and walking slowly so that we wouldn’t bump into anyone. I accidentally put my hands all over some one’s face when trying to figure out where I was.

We went through a long tunnel only to find that at the end it turned around, and we had to head back the same way. It was a very narrow tunnel, so whenever we met people coming the other way, it was always a squeeze to get past them. Especially for someone like me, who’s probably a little bit bigger than most of the Japanese customers who frequent the place.

In the end it was a very interesting afternoon, although I’m still not sure what it all means, or what my relationship to destiny is.

Link of the Day
Anyone who's been to Japan can attest to the strange obsession Japanese people have with "Rock, Paper, Scissors." It is used at any time and at any opportunity. Divide sports teams, decide who gets the first kick off, decide which student goes first in a speech competition...Everything is decided by Rock Paper Scissors. There are also numerous games, pop songs, ect, based around Rock, Paper, Scissors.

It is so popular here I began to wonder if the game actually originated in Japan or in Asia. Also, interestingly enough, my Peruvian friends here in Japan tell me that in Peru the Japanese words are used, indicating in Peru at least the game was imported from Japan.

I did a quick yahoo search and, according to these internet sites on the History of Rock, Paper, Scissors, it is Chinese/Japanese in origin.