During Golden Week, two friends came down from Gifu to visit Kyushu, and I hosted them at Shoko’s place. Or, perhaps more accurately, Shoko graciously agreed to host all three of us during this time.
These two Gifu friends have probably been my best friends during my time in Gifu, at least during the second year I was there. They’ve appeared numerous times on this blog before under various aliases. (Since they don’t know I have this blog, I thought it would be unfair to use real names.) I’ll refer to them as “John” and “Mary” in this post. Anyway, I was really glad they were able to come down. Shoko enjoyed meeting them, and they enjoyed meeting Shoko, although they did wonder why I hadn’t mentioned more about Shoko during my time in Gifu.
Anyway, now that the week is over, I’ll try and summarize all our misadventures, hopefully without getting too long winded or confusing. I suppose I should start by simply explaining what Golden Week is.
What Golden Week Is
Golden Week (or “gouruden uiiku” as it’s known in Japanese) is a series of 4 almost consecutive holidays all in the space of a week. These are all minor holidays, much like the equivalent of Labor Day or memorial weekend. The original meanings have been long forgotten, and the only real purpose is just to get a day off work.
One of the bizarre things about Golden Week is the Japanese just take the holidays as they come, so every year is a little bit like “Golden Week Roulette” to see how nicely these holidays line up with the weekend. In the US obviously we’ve moved memorial day to a permanent Monday to make sure we always get a nice 3 day weekend out of it, but they don’t go for that in Japan. For example last year two days of Golden week fell on Saturday and Sunday, so it wasn’t much of a holiday.
The other bizarre thing is that Golden Week is often the only vacation time a Japanese employee gets. We Assistant English Teachers lead rather privileged lives in Japan, but the average Japanese employee is not allotted private vacation time during the year. Or more accurately, they’re allotted vacation time, but prevented from actually using it because of social obligations to their company and co-workers. So there are no Spring break trips or summer holidays. Golden Week is the only chance to go anywhere. It’s like the whole nation is on Spring break at once.
And, as you would expect given this scenario, prices for everything go sky-high, trains, boats, airplanes and hotels fill up months in advance, and all of Japan turns into one giant traffic jam from the North to the South. Regular tourist places like Kyoto become an absolute nightmare, but even the usual tranquil waterfall spots in Kyushu are suddenly filled with Bus tours and photograph snapping tourists.
Personally I think it would make a lot more sense to just give employees some personal discretionary leave during the year and avoid these Golden week traffic jams, but that’s just me. I’ve long ago discovered there are a lot of things in Japan that don’t make sense to me.
Anyway, enough complaining about Japan. Let’s get onto the actual week:
Day 1 Wednesday
The first day we decided to stay off the roads and just do a walking tour of Hita. As this is what I spend a lot of my normal days doing, it wasn’t so exciting, but it was a nice opportunity for me to show my friends all the cool places I discovered, and it was nice to have the company.
Hita has a number of beautiful rivers, and we spent a lot of time walking alongside a couple of them. We went up to a temple on a hill to get a good view of the city, and then walked along a little creek that was stocked with carp, and the banks lined with cherry trees. We cut across the main part of the city to get to the main river, and walked around this for a while. At one point we skipped across a line of rocks to get to a small island of grass, and had our picnic there while dangling our feet in the river. Then we followed a different river back home to Shoko’s place.
Although this was our simplest day, in many ways it was the highlight of the trip. As I’ve mentioned on this blog before, Kyushu is much more beautiful than Gifu, and although we didn’t go anywhere special on the first day, my friends were astonished at the countryside beauty of Kyushu, and couldn’t stop talking about how green the mountains were, how beautiful the river was, and how lucky I was to be in a place like this.
(Although it is interesting to note how the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. When I lived in Kyushu, many of the JET program participants complained about being stuck out in the countryside. It was often a half hour drive to find another native English speaker. Young Japanese people left the countryside at 18 to go to University, and most never came back, so it was hard to find many people between the ages of 19 and 40. Many JETs complained about being surrounded by rice paddies and hick farmers, and wanted desperately to get into the “real Japan” in Honshu, with the big city lights, wild nightlife, loose women, and modern culture.)
Day 2 Thursday
We tried to go see “Daikanbo” (great view spot) and Mount Aso, but instead got stuck in traffic jams and spent most of the day just in the car.
This of course was a rookie mistake. After 5 years in Japan I should have known better than to try and see a popular tourist spot during Golden Week, but Shoko planned the trip and I just assumed she knew what she was doing.
After spending all morning in traffic, we got to “Daikanbo” which is a high point in the mountains of Kumamoto prefecture, from which we can view the basin below. It is ordinarily a great view, but the look out point was overflowing with people. Nevertheless a couple pictures here of me and Shoko.
We decided to turn back before we got to Mount Aso, which I’m sure would have been more crowded. We tried to find a nice Onsen (hot bath) on the way back, but all the places were so crowded we couldn’t even get into the parking lot. In the end we just headed back. We did eat at an “Old Japanese country style cooking” restaurant on the way back, which everyone enjoyed.
Day 3 Friday
John and Mary really wanted to see Fukuoka city. Shoko and I tried to talk them out of it, saying that Fukuoka was just another big city, and big cities are pretty much the same all over Japan. Fukuoka was just the same as Nagoya city up near Gifu. When you come to Kyushu, you should try and see the countryside.
But John and Mary wanted to see what Fukuoka had to offer, and to be honest if I were in their shoes I would have wanted to see what the big city had to offer as well.
In the afternoon we did the usual big city stuff. We took advantage of the big city to go to a bookstore with an English section, and we went to Starbucks not once, but twice.
John noticed that girls in Kyushu seemed to be a lot more interested in foreigners than girls up near Nagoya, and was pleasantly surprised by the amount of girls he noticed were starring at us or even trying to initiate conversation. Once evening came on, he thought if we could only find where all the pretty young girls were hanging out, everything would be ours for the asking.
Unfortunately I proved to be a terrible guide. Although I had heard many second and third hand stories from other JETs about sleazy pick up bars and club scenes in Fukuoka, I had always avoided these places myself because of my reserved personality. I didn’t have a clue about where these places even were. We bar hopped for a little while, but without too much success.
Also it’s hard to do too much debauchery when you’re planning on catching the last train back. And when Mary made it clear we she was unwilling to extend the night, a heart broken John reluctantly threw in the towel and came back with us.
Day 4 Saturday
This is a bit anti-climatic, but John had to work on Sunday, so on Saturday we had a lazy breakfast, and then I just saw Mary and John off to the train station.
Useless Wikipedia Fact
The mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of Pope John Paul I have led to a number of conspiracy theories.
Link(s) of the Day
In my blogging absence this Calvin/Chimes controversy has been growing bigger and bigger in the blogging world, just like last year's blog explosion around George Bush's visit. It makes me wonder what things would have been like if Blogs had been popular when we were Calvin students.
I imagine that either you have already been following this controversy, or you don't care, and in that respect my linking to it is superflous. But just for the sake of completeness, here's a few blogs that caught my eye:
Phil has really been continuing the attack since the last time I linked to him, with this open letter to Calvin, and this post with further thoughts of his.
Former Chimes Editor Erin Miller wrote this.
And Dave Blakeslee of West Michigan Committee for Peace and Justice (on which listserve the controversy is also being discussed) wrote this on his blog.
Here's my two cents on the whole thing:
The Calvin administration apparently forgot the first rule of censorship: If you don't want people to read something, the worst thing you can do is try and ban it. (Has history taught them nothing?) A quick search of the internet will show that this spoof issue, which would ordinary have only been distributed among current students, is now getting attention from all sorts of diverse groups. In that respect the ban can almost be looked at as a blessing in disguise.
While I agree with much of what Phil has to say on the issue (it is ridiculous that the administration imposed this process on Chimes, and then complained how hurt they were that "our process" was subverted), I think it is important to keep things in perspective.
In my opinion, the time to roll out the big guns and threaten to with hold funding was last year when Calvin rolled out the red carpet for a war criminal. I hope that doesn't come off as sour grapes because my own Lysistrata proposal last year never took off any further than this blog. But the fact that a supposedly Christian institution prostituted itself infront of the temporal power of the kings and leaders of this world was a breaking point.
This time around it's just Calvin being Calvin. I'm not saying they're right, but this is what they do. Remember Dialogue 2001? If we threaten to withhold funding everytime there is an issue of censorship on campus, we might as well just give up on Calvin entirely, or we're going to be writing these letters every 5 five years.
The college has a weak point for satire, because it obviously hits below the belt. But the fact that Chimes was allowed to criticize the decision in their last issue, and include this excellent article by Professor Dale Brown, indicates that Chimes is still allowed a lot more freedom than most Christan college newspapers. Charges of Stalinism on Calvin's campus are a bit premature.
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