Land of the Rising Sun: Part C

I awoke before dawn and washed alone, broke my fast on convenience store food (since restaurants wouldn't be open so early), and went to the train station. I bought a ticket, at which point the ticket seller jabbered at me for a while as I stared at him in slack-jawed non-comprehension. By this time, I'd bought quite a few train tickets and thought I had the vocabulary down pretty well, but I had no idea what this guy was saying. I sheepishly asked him, in Japanese, which platform I should go to. "Namba Fo-wa," he said, showing that his English was better than my Japanese. I slunk away.

Here's a map of central Tokushima, provided by the nice folks at TOPIA. I drew a sailboat on it where there were sailboats. West of there, along that canal, was a nice walk, with pretty stonework in some places.

I was soon on a train to Tokushima, where I arrived before things opened, including the office of TOPIA, where I hoped to get tourist information. I looked around the train station for brochures for boat rides to go see the whirlpools of Naruto, a few klicks out of downtown. I only found one brochure, and it was for a tour boat that departed from close to the whirlpools. I wasn't that interested in the whirlpool, mostly wanted to take a little sightseeing boat trip. This boat wasn't looking right for me.

So I walked around in the mist and drizzle until it was time for the Mount Bizen cable-car started running and then I rode that up to the top of Mount Bizen. There was a little touristy area up there. There were beds of flowers. There was a sakura viewing area advertised, which in an icky multi-use space-saving maneuver, was also a parking lot. There were some corrugated metal shacks; one of them looked like it used to be a concession stand, with an old decrepit ice cream freezer forlornly lying on its back outside; another shack looked like it was still a concession stand, albeit rather run-down, albeit not open this early. A small shrine squatted amidst JRT radio towers. There was a round-looking pagoda, not to be confused with the square N-story pagodas one thinks of when one thinks about Japanese pagodas. This one was commemorating something about Burma. Maybe it was a Burmese pagoda. I looked through dollar binoculars at the city and saw a canal with lots of docked sailboats and started to cheer up. I said "Ohio gozaimasu" ("Good morning") to an old duffer who replied "Gowa", and I had no idea what "Gowa" meant (and still don't). Of course, when Japanese people say "Hi" to me in greeting, I automatically respond "Howdy," which is a terrible thing to say to a non-English speaker, so perhaps I'd earned that "Gowa".

At the TOPIA Office

I came down from the mountain and stumbled around inside the train station for a while until I found my way to the offices of TOPIA. I stumbled in, waited for the nice young Japanese lady behind the counter to walk over, and then asked her, in stumbling Japanese, if she could speak English.

(For the last couple of days, I'd been in places that weren't rich in English. Kotohira's maritime museum had been a full of reminders of my language lameness. I'd got lost the night before. That morning, I'd had the non-understood speech from the train ticket seller. I was tired of trying to understand Japanese. And this TOPIA place probably dealt with a lot of foreigners, so I wimped out and asked if she spoke English.)

She exhaled, "Pff," rolled her eyes and said, "Well, yeah." She had lived in Seattle for a couple of years, sounded reassuringly American. I barely got ahold of myself before asking her to leave her life of TOPIA servitude and become my traveling companion. Someone seeing her might think I was motivated by her cuteness, but really it was so nice to understand what someone was saying to me for a change. Somehow, it was a delight to talk about tourist stuff.

If you want to see the Naruto whirlpools, you don't take a boat all the way from Tokushima. That's just not how it works. You go to Naruto Koen-ji, park near the whirlpools. You look at the whirlpools from the land, from the bridge, or you catch a boat from there. That Saturday, a new whirlpool-viewing platform was opening up under the bridge. I tried to psych myself up for a long bus ride to catch a short boat ride, but it wasn't happening. It was a gray day, so I took notes in case it started looking like better boating weather later.

The other thing I wanted to find out about was aizome, indigo-dyed fabric. My guidebook had said that there were places in Tokushima where you could do your own indigo dying. So I asked. The TOPIA lady said, "Oh, you mean the tie-dye stuff?" Tie-dye? I'd come thousands of klicks from Berkeley for tie-dye? "Is that what it is?" "Yeah." I tried to muster some enthusiasm. Actually, it was easier to get enthused about tie-dye than whirlpools. "I guess that's what I'm interested in, then."

There was a pavilion where lots of local crafts shops had little stands, but apparently that was closed. So she looked up some information on some of the local shops, found one that answered the phone and was open. I started jotting down the directions. They went something like

The directions told me how to get to the bus stop nearest to this place, but didn't really say where to go from there. "5 minutes walk." North? South? Who knows? It's not easy to find a Japanese location by its address. All I knew was the name of the place and "5 minutes walk."

Suppose that a normal person walks 100m per minute. What is the area of the donut shape of a 4-6 minute walk? (600² - 400²) times pi;, that's about 20000m² of tiny twisting streets. Gulp. I remembered Jimmy's party. Japanese people had found the place by getting to the right train station and then asking officers in the little police shack how to reach the restaurant. I wondered if I'd be able to understand directions that would navigate me through twisting streets.

Then someone else behind the counter said that the aforementioned pavilion would be a better place to go. I wasn't sure if I followed the Japanese, but I got the impression that the place wasn't open this early in the morning, but would open soon. It was a big tourist spot, and there was no way I could miss it. The English-speaking lady gave me a brochure, pointed out the place on the map, started to look up public transit information on how to get there.

I remembered something from my time atop Mount Bizen, pointed at a spot on the map between TOPIA and the pavilion, said, "Hey, are there sailboats right here?" Yes, yes there were. "Wow. Okay. I think I'll walk, then. I think I'll check out the sailboats along the way."

The Streets of Tokushima

[Photo collage: Tokushima sailboat, piled high]

The Tokushima boats were often piled high with stuff, as were the occasional floating piers. Most boats didn't tie up to piers; instead there were lines run from their noses to chains and rings on the bank. I suppose they were anchored to keep them from ramming the shore. The photo on the left shows a boat with lots of stuff; actually, that's a scan of two photos. The photo on the right shows how the boats tied up.

And that's what I did. I said good-bye to the nice lady at TOPIA, found my way out of the train station, walked past the remains of Tokushima castle, past a monument of the mast of some ship or other, along some streets, and came to a river in which there were sailboats.

I spent a lot of time wandering amongst the sailboats. They weren't tied up to separate piers. Instead, they were parked perpendicular to the river wall, each tied to cleats on the wall. I watched someone on a boat get on land--he hauled on the boat's nose-line until it was kissing shore, then he hopped off the nose and onto land. It looked okay, unless you had something heavy to bring aboard. A few sailboats had carp-banners flying from their masts. They were pretty boats in a pretty area and I lingered awhile.

Another Mistake

Eventually, I tore myself away from them and kept walking. Eventually I arrived at ASTY Tokushima. Once there, I wandered past some snack shops and knick-knack shops and made my way into Tokushima Taikenkan. This was a mistake.

A couple of those knick-knack shops had been the indigo-dye places. They were deeper than I realized--I'd just seen the few things out front, and had breezed past, looking for the real places. Tokushima Taikenkan had looked like a real place, but basically it was a tourist trap of the worst kind. The premise was that you could get a summary of everything there was to see in Tokushima prefecture by visiting this one attraction. They had a surround-a-vision movie. They had musical instruments you could play, instruments from the Awa Odori. (The area used to be called Awa, and this was the local festival.) There was a fake vine bridge. There were fake bike tours you could take by using an exer-cycle while watching a TV screen. There was an animatronic version of the local puppet shows (horrible, unless you like the wailing singing of Noh). There was nothing about local handicrafts. There were helpful ladies to show you around. However, they didn't speak English. They would drag me over to where a movie was starting. I was sure I didn't want to see the movie, but didn't have language skills to express this in a way that wasn't rude. I tried to say, "Thank you. Now I will just go over here," but they thought I didn't understand their explanation: the poor gaijin doesn't understand he's going to be missing out on this great surround-a-vision movie. He's going to miss out on the animatronic puppet show if we don't chase him in there. He'll never forgive himself for missing these things.

It was a reasonable assumption on their part. The place was such a tourist trap, it made sense that anyone there would be interested in a surround-a-vision movie about some over-hyped local festival...

Anyhow, I eventually escaped. I went stumbling back to the "tourist knick-knack stands" I'd seen earlier, looked at them more closely, and figured out that this was the area I should have gone to in the first place.

Departures: Land of the Rising Sun: Part C

Wednesday

At the TOPIA Office

The Streets of Tokushima

Another Mistake