Kagoshima 5/23-24
Our weekend mission to Kagoshima came together with a surprisingly few puzzle pieces, among them a rental van, 2 guys both named Yusuke, some barbeque-able food, fireworks, and an Ipod full of some really terrible Japanese rock music. We went all loopy on the way down, weaving through the mountains and flat areas of Miyazaki-ken such that our route would have looked like one of those animated maps from Looney Tunes showing all the places that Wil E. Coyote had been chasing the Road Runner. At some points we even followed roads until they just stopped, memorably almost crashing into a river due to one of the Yusukes’ faith in the GPS over the view through the windshield. At another point one of the roads running through the wet rice fields got continually narrower until it was barely wide enough for a moped, at which point we had to drive in reverse for about 15 minutes, teetering on the brink of sliding into a rice paddie. But, aside from the scary parts and the other half of the drive that I slept through, it was a transformingly pretty drive. From the hardcore inaka (countryside/backcountry/back-ass-waters) of Miyazaki where the vending machines sold hard-boiled eggs and soy sauce (see below) into the thick, sticky green mountains of Kagoshima-ken, the versatility of the landscape was totally nuts. The Japanese really seem to love trips to the inaka and the mountains, and it’s easy to see why, given that the cities amount to isolated hamlets surrounded by looming giants, and upon venturing out, you’re immediately confronted with thousands of years of natural growth bearing down on you like a stormy, rolling ocean of green mountains and forests. Much of it looked like the mythic Japan that I had floating around in my head, but further south the emergence of green pastoral hillsides put me in some weird Swiss-Alps cheese commercial. The Japanese clearly get this Euro-vibe too, and played it up hilariously at this bizarre dairy farm/petting store in the foothills in Miyazaki. Between that place and our first night’s lodging, we also stopped at a pretty rad waterfall and an onsen that everyone except me was REALLY stoked about. Ok, we got to this onsen at around 4 in the afternoon, and I was sweating through my shirt just standing in the parking lot, trying to figure out why anyone would want to get into a boiling pool of water when it’s already 80 degrees outside. People here are weird sometimes.
these deer were totally giving it up for the camera. they knew just what we wanted them to do, but it felt kind of weird, like i was shooting them for a deer fashion magazine
Let's today enjoy eggs from a vending machine in the middle of nowhere!
And i mean the middle of nowhere
PS, moments after taking the above photo, I learned the Japanese expression for ‘totally fucking lost’ from the Yusukes. Turns out they were just being dramatic. Or maybe messing with me..
Takachiho farm, Miyazaki. The weird thing here is I had only finished reading A Wild Sheep Chase by Murakami the night before, I dunno, if you've read that book you might understand me having a minor freak-out when I ran into this fuzzy guy
Yatta! or something
The above photo, near Maruo falls, was the last one I took for a while, when everything started to look like this. As evening crept in, the drive got more and more surreal, awesome, whatever. We were officially in the mysterious land of the Satsuma samurai, the land of Princess Mononoke, mountain kami worship and all that, and the thing is, it all felt that way, really it did, rather hard to describe, but! Given the stupendous potential for anachronisms in Japan, we of course found ourselves driving through these ancient forests and crossing ancient bridges listening to Hotel California on Yusuke’s ipod. When I took over the music selection for a bit, we were skirting the mist-shrouded coast listening to The Trooper at full volume, cause everyone was too polite to turn it down. I think someone, maybe me, put on Wonderwall when we were finally getting into town. There are no words to describe the feeling you get in situations like these.
Anyway, we spent the night in a cool bungalow in the woods, which I gathered is a really popular thing to do for college kids in Japan. You see it in J dramas and stuff, manga, usually it involves some romantic mishaps and shit, seems kinda corny, but man we were surrounded by that playing out in real-life when we got there. There were maybe 5 cabins right near ours, and every one of them had handfuls of rambunctious kids outside barbequeing and having halcyon, orenji daizu-type experiences. That comes off kind of cynical, but I don’t mean it like that at all. I mean, I was doing the same thing, besides it really was a pretty heartwarming thing to see. Not to mention the location was spectacular; I woke up early in the morning and found out we had a killer view of Kagoshima-shi and the bay. I felt like a kid in a candy store made out of killer views.
Huge stash of hana-bi that one of the girls just happened to bring along
peace signs like little gremlins follow me everywhere
Later this morning, things got real weird. I know that’s kind of a familiar thing to read on this blog, and in most cases I’m just too lazy to edit out obvious stuff like ‘weird this and that,’ but I really mean it this time, cause I was with 4 Japanese kids, and none of them knew quite what to make of this. After spending about a day not turning anything up on the internet, I suppose I just have to leave you with the pictures and what I managed to piece together. It still seems so odd to me though, since this place we went to stuck out like a theme park on the side of what seemed to be a pretty well-travelled coastal road.
the view from the road, not the best shot, but kinda looked like a religious theme park or something
you got a shinto torii, some mainland china buddhist looking stuff, some hindu-looking gold figures, basically a really goofy looking cult site that felt like it should be selling sno-cones somewhere, until...
you see the dead crow hanging from a pole!
People in Japan generally despise crows, or karasu, as much as pretty much anybody, but I did get a shiver when I saw the dead crow swinging from a pole. Right after seeing that, my friend Alvin walked past a dragon figurine that had a motion-triggered loudspeaker in its mouth, and the craziest music suddenly came blasting out at us. One of the Yusukes was saying that it was very traditional Shinto music, which I kind of recall knowing, but man, it is some terrifying stuff if you’re not completely at ease to begin with; it’s like a high-pitched atonal drone made up of who knows what, really really weird. All of a sudden the place seemed a whole lot like something our of a Jodorowski movie, with the garish, yard sale-assortment of baffling religious iconography, seeming almost perverse, definitely cult-ish, and then you got this dead bird and this ridiculous noise coming out of a dragon’s mouth, shit. Anyway, we walked around for a little longer and decided to get out in a hurry when it occurred to all of us at the same time that maybe someone left the gate open by accident and we were actually about to be in big trouble.
whoever this guy is, he probably doesn't like westerners
I'm still not so good with kanji, but this pillar is something to the effect of the one heart of all the world's people or something.. you see the sekai in there, kokoro, definitely the sort of worldly, pan-Asian name that cults in Japan use a lot
Kind of a weird thing to come across after breakfast, but it did reaffirm the fact that we were in a pretty strange part of the country. Kagoshima is the very end of Japan, the area with historically the most contact with the Ryukyu kingdom and other parts of Asia for that matter, and on top of that so far from Kyoto or Tokyo that you get the real crazies of Japanese history from around here. It’s the home of Saigo Takamori obviously, but also Togo Heihachiro and a lot of old-school mentality in terms of culture, religion, an infamously stubborn dialect, what have you. At the same time, its culture is a result of tons of foreign contact with the east as well as the west. Anyway, my point is that, between the big volcano, all the islands and old forests, it felt like the type of place where dinosaurs still exist.
all this writing suggested that the religion has something to do with the famous local samurai, which is pretty cool. Anybody know more about this?
Sakurajima, the big volcano, rad dudes
This area was like, you know the part in Logan's Run when they've escaped into Washington DC in the future and they meet that guy with the cats?
muppet babies-style Saigo dolls
princess mononoke area
aboard the sakurajima ferry boat, named the cherry queen, with a picture of a cartoon princess with a radish for a head on the side of the boat
So after that we drove back to Fukuoka and I slept almost the whole way. When I woke up, it was like my camera dreamt the whole thing.
I’m going to do part 2 real soon, I promise, like hopefully tomorrow. It’s late right now though and I have to get up for a linguistics class. But for real though, Part 2 is going to be awesome.
