Departures: Land of the Rising Sun: Part E

Thursday

Thu Apr 20 2000

Thursday, I was ambivalent about my plan. I'd decided to stay in Takamatsu, to go to an attraction called Shikoku-mura. It sounded like a mostly-inside activity, and I was considering rain potential. However, Shikoku-mura sounded like a tourist trap, and I was still reeling from the horror of Tokushima Taikenkan.

First photo: boats tied up at Takamatsu port; in the background is the Yashima plain. Second photo: on the walk to Shikoku-mura, going through a less-dense part of town, I saw this pretty veggie garden.

Because it wasn't raining right then, I decided to walk instead of taking the train. I walked through the ferry dock area, snapping pictures of boats. I walked through the outskirts of town, amongst walled yards and vegetable gardens, hopping over ditches. I walked until I reached the general area of Shikoku-mura, which I never found. My travel guide said it was "at the bottom of Yashima Hill," "around seven minutes north of Yashima station." Yashima Hill isn't just some little hillock. It's this big plateau. Its base must be tens of clicks around. In ancient days, samurai went riding horses across the top of the plateau to beat up on one another. So this place was at the bottom of this hill; that didn't narrow things down a whole lot. "seven minutes north of Yashima station"--did the guide mean the Kotoden line's Yashima station, mentioned in the previous paragraph? Or did they mean the JR Yashima station? Usually if you name a station without mentioning the train line, the default train line is JR.

I didn't know where the JR Yashima train station was. I though it was more than seven minutes' walk from the base of Yashima Hill, but then I never found Shikoku-Mura, so maybe I didn't know the local geography that well. The main local tourist attraction was Yashima itself. I looked for Shikoku-Mura advertisements at the place where tourists could catch overhead-cable-cars to the top of the hill. I found one painted sign, flaked and faded, that could have been such an advertisement, but it was in such bad shape that I couldn't tell what it was saying.

Yes, Shikoku-mura's web site has an access map which would have cleared up at least some ambiguity. If there had been an internet cafe around, maybe I would have found their site instead of just figuring screw it and wandering around back streets along roads lined with fruit trees.

I stuck together these two photos of the orchard area.

They were very pretty trees with happy chirpy birds and a cool breeze and a cool gray sky (which is nice if you're a San Franciscan who likes fog more than sun), and I suspect that I liked them more than I would have liked Shikoku-mura, so I don't regret not having found it.

I also walked through some dockyard areas. I looked at ships and boats and warehouses. I got my first close-up look at one of those barges with a crane on it that looks bigger than the boat itself, and saw how it lowered supports (presumably) to the harbor floor to steady itself. I saw some black buses with loudspeakers which no doubt spent most of their time trundling Takamatsu's streets, spewing brain-dead nationalistic rhetoric.

The Skateboard Park of My Undoing

Friendly dog at the skateboard park.

And then I found the skateboard park. It was named "Asahi Green Park," I think. I feel like I should give directions to get there, though they won't be very good. If you head East from the railroad station along Seto-Ohashi boulevard, you'll intersect a street which is labelled North Nippon Road (in Japanese). Go North on this street. When you find the 5-story Sharp building, look around. You should see a park. But not a park full of trees (though there are some). It's a park with ramps and rails and other things to skateboard on. There was also an area with pavement painted cyan-blue, which was apparently supposed to be some kind of monument. Mostly, I was just pleased to see the skateboard park.

It obviously affected me deeply. A couple of weeks later, back in San Francisco, I ran into my friend Bryan's dad at a cafe. He showed me some photos from his recent trip to Barcelona. It was my first time seeing the works of Antonio Gaudi, and I just blurted out, "This guy should have been designing skateboard parks!"

The declaration goes, "Skateboarding is Not a Crime," but really, in many places, skateboarding is a crime. (Lots of buildings fronted by wide stone staircases will post signs forbidding skateboarders. If some kids want to destroy the stone stairway of a public edifice with their skateboards, I'm in favor of the idea. What are those stone stairways for, anyhow? Are they to impress people? Why do the people inside that edifice want to set themselves apart like that?) To make matters worse, many communities outlaw skateboarding in many areas--and then don't give kids a place to skateboard.

Santa Fe had a little teeny-tiny skateboard park. They maybe had a clue, those Santa Fe people. That little skatepark maybe would have kept two or three skaters busy at a time. Takamatsu's park was much bigger, and seemed to have been reasonably well thought out. There weren't any skaters there when I was there--this was the middle of a school day. But there was someone walking a nice dog. I sat on a bench, rested, pet the dog, sat some more.

Things didn't really get ugly until I left the park. I was at the end of the park furthest from the street. Next to the park was what appeared to be an undeveloped field. I decided to take a shortcut, cutting through the field diagonally. I'd got about halfway through when I saw that this shortcut wouldn't work--there was a wide ditch around most of this field. The wide ditch would prevent me from reaching the street. So I turned around and started walking back to the skatepark. Behind me, I heard barking. I looked back--some dogs had scampered up out of the ditch. Now they were walking behind me, barking and growling, trying to herd me away. I'd been walking away anyhow, but now I got my back up. Who were these dogs to say I couldn't walk into that ditch? I started to walk towards the dogs. They started to back away. Ha! That was better. As long as we were all clear on who was in command of the situation. I once again started to head back towards the skatepark.

Skateboard park facilities included ramps and angled rails.

Having escaped the field, I now started walking through the skatepark Trudge, trudge. Then I heard the barking off to the side. Those dogs had noticed me again. My route through the skatepark was close to that field. The dogs, still in the field, had spotted me and had decided to harass me. Now there was a deep ditch in between me and them. Really, I could have ignored them, just kept walking. I did keep walking, but I didn't ignore them. I looked at them, jutted out my chin, and started to make faces at them. I didn't look down at my feet, and really, what would have been the point? When the pain exploded in my shin, I didn't need to look down to figure out what had happened--I'd slammed my shin into a low rail, a rail low enough for beginning skateboarders to hop onto.

I didn't break anything, but I think I got close. It was a pretty good kick. I didn't dare sit down: I couldn't have willed myself back up to my feet. Instead, I just walked along, teary and sniffling. Fortunately, I already had plenty of hobbling experience this trip, and was able to keep walking. After a while, the pain settled down to a dull throb and I was able to start looking at the world around me again.

There was a guy on a skateboard, perhaps heading to the park. There was a poster for that Chow Yun Fat/Mark Wahlberg movie I'd seen; in Japan they were calling it NYPD 15-minute something. I sat and ate at Cafe Tivoli under the Station Hotel, where they served edamame (soybeans). And then I went back to my room.

Recovery

I spent the rest of the afternoon in my room with my leg up. In my room, I spent some time contemplating the calendar on the wall. It was photos of Route 66. The captions were in Japanese. I didn't understand them, except for those which phonetically spelled out Yo quiero Taco Bell. I tried not to think about how long it had been since I'd had Mexican food. I hobbled out for dinner, again at the bland-but-relatively-excellent Spice Kingdom. As I exited, the Indian staff said "Na-MAST-uh". The ending strange--I always thought that "namaste" rhymed with "fast day". Was this a Japanese accent? I didn't ask.

I was glad to return and lie down and sleep.

Faster than a Ferry

I didn't get any exterior pictures of the Seto-Ohashi Bridge; I was on it. Fortunately, I got this postcard. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if this postcard actually shows the Seto-Ohashi bridge. It's labelled "Iwakurojima Bridge and Hisuishijima Bridge". I'm guessing that those are two parts of the Seto-Ohashi Bridge, but what do I know?

Fri Apr 21 2000

I was awake at 5:00. After washing, I loafed around in my room for a few hours, waiting for the trains to Okayama to start running. (When I actually got to the station, I would get the impression that they'd been running for a while--perhaps my schedule didn't list all trains. Anyhow.)

I caught the Marine Liner to Okayama, going across the Seto-Ohashi bridge. This bridge crosses the inland sea, so you might think I'm going to spend the next couple of paragraphs gushing about the view, but we didn't spend much time over the water and really it was nothing special. Apparently the track-layers were worried that my senses might be overwhelmed by the view, because they made sure that I spent the next few minutes in tunnels. When it wasn't in tunnels, it was boring countryside. Flat countryside. I spotted a golf driving range from 15 klicks away. At the Okayama train station, I put my two bags in perhaps the last two empty coin lockers.

Just another Okayama Tourist

Crane-viewing bridge at Koraku-en, with crane (you can just barely see it). Okayama castle, from far away. (I didn't get any closer; it was raining.)

There's a famous garden in Okayama, Koraku-en. It's plenty pretty. I had a nice time there, though I got rained on. There were cranes in cages, which seemed pointless. There was a water wheel, a waterwheel that wasn't hooked up to anything. It seemed like a case of engineering for engineering's sake. Really, not much happened in the garden. I mean, I can try and make sheltering from the rain sound dramatic, but I think I already tried to do that once this travelogue. I could whine about walking around with a mauled shin, but I've done enough injury whining.

I splashed back to the station area, checked into a hotel, retrieved my bags from the station, dropped them off in my room.

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