A Drive

A friend and I both had a free Saturday and were debating what to do when he suggested heading up to the North of Gifu to see Shirokawa village. It’s a world heritage site in the North of the prefecture that preserves old Japanese houses. Supposed to be very beautiful, neither of us had gone yet, so we decided to go check it out.

The only problem was that neither of us knew how to get there, and we didn’t have a map. “It shouldn’t be a big problem,” my friend said. “Whenever I go north I always see signs for it. If we can just get far enough north we should see all sorts of signs.”

So we decided to just get in the car and head North.

Actually that works a lot better back home than it does in Japan. In Japan there are a lot of mountains and valleys and rivers and other topography that makes it a lot harder to just pick a direction and go in it.

Also the roads in Japan very seldom go where you think they will. They don’t go in straight lines, but wind all over the place. You can start heading North on a road, and then very easily end up going south.
(Oh, and well I’m on the subject, you know what else doesn’t work too well in Japan? When you’re driving, and you miss a turn, and you’re still thinking like you’re on a grid system, so you say to yourself: “That’s okay, I’ll just turn on the next street and then double back.” Man, the number of times that’s gotten me lost…)

Anyway, we set out heading into the North from Gifu city. We left from a pretty congested area, but gradually the stores got more and more farther apart from each other, and we saw more and more rice fields, and soon we were deep into the countryside.

Because of my 3 years in the countryside in Kyushu, I have the (probably annoying) habit of always playing one-upsmanship when it comes to the countryside. For instance when my friend said “Wow, we’re really in the countryside now. I bet these people aren’t used to seeing foreigners,” I said…

“This isn’t really the countryside. I mean it looks like the countryside, but we’re only 30 minutes outside of Gifu city. And barely an hour away from Nagoya. These people probably see foreigners all the time. Now in Kyushu where I lived I was in a small country town surrounded by other small country towns. There wasn’t even a train station in my town. Or in the neighboring town. To get to the nearest train station was a 30 minute drive…” My friend put up with this rather well.

We didn’t really have a clear idea of where we were going, so we just stopped at everywhere that looked interesting. We stopped by scenic points overlooking the river, saw a few temples and a 300 year old cherry tree. We did a bit of hiking, but neither of us were in hiking gear (or in that good shape), so we always just went a little up the trail and then turned around and headed back towards the car when it started getting too steep.

We stopped for lunch at a small restaurant by the river. Despite my earlier prediction, it was quickly evident that this place was not used to having foreigners. The old ladies who ran the place at first didn’t seem to know what to do with us, but then after discovering that we spoke some Japanese they were relieved and became very friendly. They sat down at our table and started talking to us.

Not only did they give us all sorts of free food, as we were leaving one of them said, “Please, take this as a gift from all of us,” and gave us some bread from their bakery to take home. Ah, countryside hospitality.

“It’s nice to be so popular,” my friend said to me after we left.

“Just think,” I said, “We could go home and spend our whole lives working for fame and recognition, and never be as popular as we are right now just for being here.”

After lunch, we continued heading up in the direction of what we thought was north. Pretty soon we were climbing up the mountain, and the road narrowed from a wide road into a small and curvy road. It was a scenic drive through the mountains, but we began to wonder if this was going to lead to anywhere we wanted to go. We kept going under the hope that around the next bend the road would straighten out and widen and we would be once again cruising north. After a while we kept going up the road just because we hated the idea of turning around and back tracking all the land we had already covered.

“It’s got to lead somewhere,” my friend said. “They wouldn’t go through all the trouble of building a road like this unless it led somewhere.”

I, being somewhat more familiar with Japanese roads, began to consider the possibility that it indeed might not go anywhere. “Sometimes in Japan they do build roads that go nowhere,” I explained.

We kept up the road until we round our way blocked by construction. We talked briefly with the construction workers who confirmed our suspicion that the road, in fact, really didn’t go anywhere. Then we turned around and headed back.

On the way back down we stopped at a temple with a huge statue of Buddha. The statue was pretty impressive, but we had both seen so many temples during our stay in Japan that this wasn’t anything exciting anymore.

We headed East for a bit, and then made another stab at trying to get North. We never made it to Shirokawa village, but we did find a nice spot by the river to grab dinner. We also a small zoo with the animals being kept in what seemed like horrible conditions. (The animal rights movement never really made it to Japan). I remembered a quote someone had said to me once: “I hope we never get in another war with Japan within my lifetime, because the way they treat their animals, I can’t imagine how they would treat their prisoners of war.”

My friend countered that this would disturb him a lot more, except he had been to plenty of countries where the conditions animals were kept in were even worse, and so Japan didn’t seem too bad by comparison.