Land of the Rising Sun: Part 9

Carrying my suitcases, I limped off the ferry, down the ramp, along a seemingly endless wharf to a bus station. I wanted the bus to Takahama. There was a bus at the station, its destination announced by two kanji: 高山 . They looked like they could be "Takahama," if "Taka" was like that of 高 as in "takai" (tall) and "hama" was an alternate pronounciation of 山 "yama" (mountain). That was two assumptions, kind of shaky. Then again, naming something after a tall mountain seemed believable.

I screwed up my courage and asked a sarariman, "Kono basu wa, Takahama desuka?" ("Is this bus Takahama?") He looked at me as if I was insane, and said that it was. So I sat down. The bus driver showed up and drove us perhaps 200m to a train station. It was then that I realized that there was probably only one bus to catch from that bus station, that I'd seemed foolish when I'd asked about the bus' destination. What other bus would it be?

Similarly, there was only one train line from Takahama, so I was sure I was catching the right one. Soon I was at the main Matsuyama train station. I stashed my suitcases in coin lockers.

Still at the train station, I decided to visit the men's room. I wanted to sit down. I was dismayed when I looked into a stall and saw a squat toilet, but there was a Western toilet in the next stall. I suppose that says something important about not giving up and exploring all options but that's really enough about toilets.

Matsuyama-Jo (Matsuyama Castle)

I walked through city streets until I reached the park over which which the castle Matsuyamajo perches. I wandered counter-clockwise around a hill until I found a stairway going up, with a sign nearby which said (in Japanese) that this was a way to the castle. I commenced the long limp up. I walked up a dirt path among tall cool trees. A few times, I encountered Japanese men walking down, presumably tourists. I kept limping. Then, above me, a sound of crashing--not above me on the trail, but above me in a tree. I looked up, saw two crows flying at one another, yelling rude things at one another. It didn't occur to me that any of this might effect me until their struggles started to knock twigs off of the trees, and those twigs started to fall down. One of the twigs looked as thick as my finger. Birds had broken that? I beat a hasty retreat.

The idea behind the secret door.

Because I had walked up the hill instead of walking across the flats to reach a tramway, I entered the castle grounds through the back gate. Because of this, I'll never know if the front gates would have fooled me. Matsuyamajo's grounds have two front gates: one obvious, one concealed around a corner. The hillside forces approachers to come at the gate area from the side, and one of the gates was set back a bit. Thus, the second gate was obscured; the designer figured that castle defenders could use it for a sneak attack.

I couldn't believe that this system could work. Would all attackers go running right at the main gate? Wouldn't any of them wander off to the side, notice the other gate? I stood outside the gates for a while, wondering about this. I noticed that all of the Japanese tourists coming around the corner headed straight for the main gate. None wavered, none hesitated, none of them noticed the second gate.

I waited for a large group to approach and let them see me as I walked around in front of the gates. They went in through the main gate. I went through the second gate, and soon that group of people noticed that I'd somehow got into the castle grounds without walking past them. This seemed to confuse them; they obviously hadn't noticed the other gate, and hadn't thought to look around outside. I guess those castle designers were pretty clever, after all.

Before visiting the museum exhibits in the castle's interior, I was supposed to remove my shoes and put on guest slippers. I didn't fit in the slippers so I went about in my socks. I think I've talked about this problem before. In my previous trip, well-meaning people, seeing me in my socks had tried to explain that I should use the slippers.

I looked at the exhibits, which were a lot like exhibits that I'd seen in other Japanese castles. I wasn't really hoping for anything new. There were decorative scrolls, armor, stirrups, official documents, the usual mish-mash.

There was a man in the courtyard, either a caretaker or a security guard. As I walked through the castle, I occasionally heard strange sounds from the courtyard. I eventually figured out that this man would occasionally pick up a rock and hit it with a hammer. The courtyard was covered with small rocks. I guess this guy was turning those rocks into gravel, one at a time.

Transit

Back in downtown Matsuyama, I lunched on cold soba, watching a TV News report which was maybe saying that mobile phones were interfering with artificial pacemakers. It seemed interesting, and made me wish I understood the words.

I retrieved my luggage from lockers and caught a train to Takamatsu. I had breezed through Matsuyama in less than a day, Mister Super-speedy tourist. This was the pace I'd planned for the whole week, before my injury had slowed me down. Would I be able to keep it up? (No.)

Map of the Northern coast of Shikoku, showing my route[s] over the next few days. Matsuyama's on the West side, the train line goes East from there to Takamatsu. Ignore the white vertical stripe. That's the binding of the atlas I stole this from. (Japan: A Bilingual Atlas, Kodansha Press).

The train trundled along Shikoku's North coast. During the first few minutes, there were views of the Seto Inland Sea, but they didn't last; we soon headed a little inland. There were quarries of green stone. Beyond that, it was the usual stuff: plastic greenhouses, factories, driving ranges, smokestacks, little towns with open sewers, tile-roof houses, low cement flats, roads, walls, hunched-over people, little trucks, gray skies. It's amazing how much sprawl a nation can accumulate in just a few thousand years of civilization.

Welcome to Takamatsu

I exited the Takamatsu train station, looked at my travel guide map, and was confused. The map seemed totally wrong. Later, I would figure out that construction had obscured part of the station. Because the station's boundaries were an important landmark, I had muddled things. Before I figured that out, I was lost. I actually checked the train station sign to confirm I was in the right city. I looked at my compass a lot.

I couldn't find any of the hotels in my travel guide map, so I decided to try a random hotel. Maybe the Hiroshima Business Hotel had been unpleasant, but it hadn't killed me. So, I checked in to Hotel Gekko-en.

When I was checking in, the lady behind the counter told me that a "big bath" was on the first floor, and it closed at 11. I remembered the Hotel Rinkai, where I'd stayed with Jimmy in Sakai. In addition to the usual teeny-tiny business hotel bathroom, the place had had its own public bath for the guests. I hadn't used it--I was a prude and furthermore didn't like hot baths. Jimmy, however, had liked the bath. All this is a long way of explaining that hearing about this bath made me glad. I'd liked the Rinkai, so maybe this was a good sign.

When I was done checking in, a lady who'd been standing beside the counter beckoned me to the elevator--she had my key. What was going on? Was she a bellhop? If so, why didn't she carry my bags? She rode with me in the elevator, walked me to my room, opened the door. Inside, she was pointing out lightswitches, pointing out the thermos of hot water, telling me about the bathroom down the hall. All this was in Japanese, but fortunately thermoses transcend language. Nevertheless, there was something I didn't understand: why was she telling me all this? In the USA, this would have been a sign that she wanted a tip, but there was no tipping in Japan, was there? She talked for a bit while I thought on what she was saying. Waitaminnit, had she said the bathroom was down the hall? She left.

I discovered that the bathroom was down the hall. It had many things, but not a bath nor shower. I'd checked into a ryokan, a hotel modeled after older Japanese inns. Guests were expected to eat together, to bathe together. Japanese people thought it was one of the nice parts of travelling. As with most foreign traditions that never caught on in America, it was a really stupid tradition. Unfortunately, I'd signed up to stay for the next few nights.

Oh no. I'd signed up to stay at a place where I was supposed to use a shared bath. Should I go downstairs, apologize, say I'd made a terrible mistake, check out, and go look for another place? That would mean admitting a mistake. That would mean insulting their facilities. That would mean a complicated conversation in Japanese.

It occurred to me that I'd been waking up at 5AM each morning, that this was pretty early. It occurred to me that this place didn't seem to be very busy. It occurred to me that if I bathed in the morning, I'd probably have the bath to myself.

I'd been somewhat dismayed by my tendency to fall asleep so early. Now that it was part of my bathing strategy, maybe that meant I was being smart to fall asleep so early. Maybe my prudery and jet lag were complementary. Prudery and jet lag--I wasn't exactly a party animal on this trip.

Tuesday

I woke up early, put on a bathrobe, went downstairs. In the bathroom, I turned on the lights, bent my creaky knees so I could sit on the low low stool, hunched over and washed myself at the low low faucet, unobserved. I didn't soak in the big hot tub, and there was no-one there to helpfully tell me that I was supposed to get in the big hot tub after washing.

My guidebook said that the city's big garden, Ritsurin, opened at dawn, but when I got to the North Gate, it was closed and there was a big sign saying that it wouldn't open until 8:30. Great. What was I going to do so early in the morning? Fortunately, I had nothing better to do than stand and fume and read over the sign's Japanese more carefully and figure out that there was another gate, a gate which opened at dawn. So that was all right.

Ritsurin

At the main gate, the security guard helpfully told me, in English, "Three hundred." I looked over at the sign which said "350" in Arabic numerals, smiled at him and thought, Dork. I paid 350 to the lady in the ticket booth, who handed me a ticket and an English pamphlet. Then the security guard started to tell me, in halting English, some information that was on the pamphlet. Before I'd even made it to the main gate, another native had come up and attempted to practice his English on me, so I was running low on patience. I cut him off with a flurry of thank-yous, wriggling past him into the garden and soon I was free to stroll about and contemplate and think how nice it was that my ankle was feeling better.

Ritsurin: twisty branches, exposed roots, and an image which I stole from a postcard.

There were trees, ponds, fish, shrubs, lawns, meandering paths, ducks, lilies, but there were also things I hadn't seen at other gardens. Ritsurin was at the base of a tall wooded hill, and when I looked up at the trees on the sides of that hill, I could see heron in the branches. In the garden, there was a building with lots of crafts for sale; there was probably another building with more crafts, but I didn't realize this until I was long gone. The garden apparently offered live demonstrations of various crafts; but I think those demonstrations were only on weekends.

Then the garden ceased to be a pleasant place of contemplation. I started to notice the squeals of animals. I was on a hill on the border of the park. It took me a while to figure out what was going on, but then I looked at my map--and there was a thin strip of land labelled "zoo". From my hilltop vantage point, I could see over a fence into a separate area that was filled with little shacks, which I suppose were animal cages. On my way to the garden, I'd seen signs advertising the zoo. They'd had pictures of some rather large animals. Those cages looked about big enough to house iguanas comfortably, as long as those iguanas didn't feel an urge to roam. It sounded like the creatures in there were bigger than iguanas, weren't so happy to be there.

Here's a map of the Northeast sector of the island of Shikoku. You can see Takamatsu, Tokushima, Kotohira, places mentioned in this narrative sooner or later. (Original map from Japan: A Bilingual Atlas, Kodansha Press)

I don't really believe in animal rights. I think that there are plenty of valid reasons that animals should suffer for the betterment of humans. But that zoo didn't look like a valid reason. More squalor than valor, really. Maybe if I'd actually gone into the zoo, I would have discovered it was a wonderful animal funland. Instead, I just felt sad and left.

I went to the I-PAL International Exchange center and spent a while there figuring out that it wasn't a tourist information center, but rather a resource center for gaijin living and working in the area. (The city's main Tourist Information Center, as near as I could tell, was a casualty of the construction going on at the train station.) When I'd thought that the place was for tourists, I'd hoped to mav some time on one of their internet-connected computers. But the thought that I might be keeping a terminal away from some struggling gaijin trying to check a jobs board dissuaded me.

I stopped off at my room to get ready for a longer journey, and then caught a train to Kotohira, surprised that I didn't have to transfer trains.

Departures: Land of the Rising Sun: Part 9

Into Matsuyama

Matsuyama-Jo (Matsuyama Castle)

Transit

Welcome to Takamatsu

Tuesday

Ritsurin