At some point this winter I was struggling to figure out what to do with myself once the snow ran out and deprived my main reason for being in Lake Tahoe, California: snowboarding. My good friend Daiki Hirano mentioned to me at some point that he was thinking about visiting his extended relatives in Japan. Daiki grew up in Mount Kisko, Westchester, New York, USA. But his parents grew up in Japan. Then they flew over here at a youngish age, and boy were their arms tired....sorry.
"So...Can I come?"
"Really? Well yea, of course."
"Um...awesome."
So gradually we solidified the fact that yes, we would be doing this. Me and him. Oh goodie. Daiki and I had lived together my senior year at UVM (his sophmore year), and general consensus was we brought out ample amounts of goodness and goofiness in eachother.
Right Daiki
san?
A lovely human being, Daiki Hirano. And his whole family, from his mother helping to plan our trip and find preposterously good prices for our transit, to his father contacting friends in Japan to show us a good time, to his grandparents, ma and pa-ternal, shacking us up, feeding us, showing us their hometowns....too good to be true.
Anyway, time and money directed that we fly there late May. So we flew there, late May, and spent just over a month gallavanting around that Pacific archipelago nation with the population equivalent of all our major cities squished into California. Just under 130 million heads. If the Japanese had our manners riots would break out in their sardine packed trains everyday.
Top 3 Constants:
1. Laughter (laughter that had anyone else been around to see the origins of would question our mental states, and capabilites)
2. Hospitality (anyone in Daiki's family, or that we had the remotest connection to, treated us like their own and wined and dined us to a preposterous degree)
3. Beautiful new sights.
PHOTOS: The pictures above were taken during the last week of our trip. We spent said week in the Ogasawara island chain, about 600 miles south of Tokyo. Daiki's great aunt and uncle own a youth hostel on the main island, Chichijima. Ogasawara Youth Hostel, check it out if you're in the neighborhood. It's one of the buildings in the top of the two skinny pictures, right by the beach. That week was the highlight of our whole trip. Here is a bad poem I wrote about it:
Eardrum splitting flips off docks.
Gleefully smashing
rocks on rocks.
Guffawing like half-retarded jocks.
Sequestering and wandering
These pirate-myth isles
carrying naught but
heavy bags and fat smiles.
Each day somehow tops the last.
Be it hundred-egg turtle births
new friends
sun, salt and
beer induced mirth
mind boggling 'round earth
blue views.
Burnt ass feet from lack
of two shoes.
Daikifest conga concerts
synchonicity abounds
Somehow tapped into
the new
island Green Flash Underground.
To clarify:
- Daiki and I were tards all month, and it was wonderful.
- On our first night on the island we met half a dozen lovely Americans; English teachers on nearby islands. Rachel, Paulette, Alan, Tyler, Rob, Kate - We love you.
- Second night on the island, along with some of our new friends, we saw a turtle poop out one hundred and two semi-squishy mini-miracles.
- Earlier that night we had gone to an open mike jam thing at a bar called Yankee Town with a tree growing up through the middle of it. Daiki, percussion stuff extraordinaire, played set along with a steel drum player and caught the attention of some local musicians. Guitar player, flautist, djembe player; a band called Green Flash. (You know about the green flash?) They invited him to come play congas with them at their studio the next day, which he did. It sounded beautiful, (I was there) and he ended up playing a half hour set with them in front of 2,500 people (basically every soul on Chichijima) 5 days later, our last night on the island. That night happened to be the fourtieth anniversary of when the U.S. handed control of the island over to Japan. They sounded even better that night, background sound of little kids running around added something special. I filmed all this, so at some point I'll have proof, edited nicely for all to see.
- About a half hour hike uphill from our hostel was a weather tower with a complementary viewing gazebo. You could see so far the earth's curve was obvious.
So yes, that was swell.
Osaka Castle
Osaka Castle
Fushimi Inari Taisha (Kyoto)
Miyajima Taisha
Tokyo
Tokyo
Fushimi Inari Taisha (Kyoto)
Miyajima Taisha
Tokyo
Tokyo
