FAR EAST TRAVELBLOG PART II
If you ignore the Oriental architecture of the shops and houses alongside, the highway we're speeding along could be taking us through North Carolina. Mountains hidden in a spring mist line up to either side of us, grey-green mounds apparently without tops. We're heading north toward Fukuoka, having spent our last days in Amakusa. Near Fukuoka we'll visit more family. In three days, we'll back in America.American Idol
A woman worshipped me the other day. She is my wife's aunt, maybe 80 or so. She'd never met an American before, and my wife's father took us to meet her and drop off some gifts. She has a hard time moving around, and walks with a back permanently bent from decades spent stooping to plant and keep her farm and garden. But the stooped back wasn't the cause of the worship. That happened as we were about to leave. We bowed goodbye, and she returned our bows with her hands together like a prayer. My wife and father-in-law laughed a little--the aunt had never said goodbye like this before, and her mind is still far too sharp for any dimensia to be blamed. She just didn't know what to do to say a proper goodbye to her America-jin nephew. So she worshipped. As the only gaijin in Amakusa I'd gotten used to all kinds of reactions--stares, giggles and whispers, or silent shyness--but worship was certainly a new one. Not one I'd want to repeat, obviously.
Feasts, Fishing & Ferries
The day I wrote the previous travelblog post we had a feast. My wife’s uncle and aunt were paying a visit to see our young un and to meet me, and as the ranking members of the family in the local area they deserved grand treatment. So otosan (my father-in-law) went out and ordered what must have been half a ton of the best sushi around and brought it in. We ate the biggest shrimp I think I’ve ever seen—they were practically steaks, and they hung off the sushi rice balls so far they just looked like flayed shrimp with a slight lump in the middle. Otosan also ordered up so maguro, a fatty tuna, knowing that I like it, and it was melt-in-your-mouth fresh. We ate the sushi until we could barely stand up, and then we ate a little more.
The following day we chartered a boat and headed off onto the bay. Amakusa is a little island chain, separated from the nearby Nagasaki and Unzen area by large turquoise bays. On clear days, we could see all the way to the top of Mt. Unzen, a volcano that erupted from 1990 to 1995. This day was a bit hazy and the seas a bit choppy, so while we couldn’t see Unzen’s summit we could see what we came for, which was the dolphins that swims these seas. Our 35-foot fishing boat was one of about a half-dozen or so that took out this morning to cruise and dolphin-watch, and we weren’t disappointed. Within a few minutes of leaving shore, our captain guided us to a school of dolphins breaking the surface to breathe, and upon seeing us in the boats, they put on little shows. They’d pop up in groups of threes and fours, some with calves in the tow of their mothers, blow out and breathe in, then submerge. If you followed them beneath the waves, you’d see shimmers as they swam in twists as if to show us their light bellies. We watched this for about a half hour, and toward the end I’d become a bit jaded and was watching the sea opposite the dolphins when something caught my eye. It was small, black and shimmered in the morning sunlight, and glided along no more than a foot or so off the surface. I figured it must be some strange type of bird looking for small fish to eat, but then it suddenly found a rising wave, pulled its plastic-like wings forward to slow, and dove straight into the water. The weird wings tipped me that it was no bird at all—I’d see a flying fish. Over the next several days, on the ferries that we took to Nagasaki and elsewhere, we saw a few more of the strange fish pop up out of the waves, take wing and glide for a few seconds or nearly a minute, before finding a wave and dashing headlong back into the sea.
After dolphin watching it was time to fish, so our captain took us away from the dolphins and toward an area near Kamen Jima, or Turtle Island. Kamen Jima is little more than a hill that happens to sit off shore, covered from its rise to its top in evergreens. During low tide it isn’t even an island—the retreating water reveals a land bridge that we once walked across to find a little campground still overgrown with tall weeds. In the summer travel season, the government will mow the island’s small flatland and clear its trails, and campers will use the land bridge to walk out to and camp on the island.
Behind Kamen Jima, on its seaward side, is prime fishing ground. We baited up with a kind of worm that looks like a nightcrawler but is slightly flattened and has little leg-like things on its sides. They felt pretty much like nightcrawlers otherwise, and the local fish definitely seem to like them. We fished for maybe half an hour, and between otosan, myself and the boat’s captain we probably caught nearly 20 fish. It was just a matter of baiting up the three hooks on the line, then dropping in until you felt it hit bottom. A couple of gentle tugs let the fish know the worm was available, and you quickly felt the bite. A quick tug and you had one or more on the line, and reeled in, the fish turned out to be mostly very bright red, big-eyed creatures, no more than a few ounces or so apiece, but everyone assured me that they were all keepers and that they’d taste very good. It struck me that the fish looked very familiar. I remembered the Japanese natural artwork I’d seen, the paintings from the Edo era, in various book and museums. They always depict the fish as bright, almost gaudy, with large lips and big, almost absurd, eyes. The fish we were catching looked exactly like that. I’d always thought the Japanese artists were exaggerating features. They weren’t.
We brought the fish to the house, where otosan and okasan (my mother-in-law) gutted and cleaned and then cooked them. They were small and it took several of them to make a meal, but they were excellent.
The next day, Ikuko and I left the young un in the care of his grandparents and took a ferry to Nagasaki. Nagasaki is probably best known stateside for having been one of the two cities that we (justifiably) hammered with atomic bombs to end World War II. Prior to the war, Nagasaki was one of a handful of cities with longstanding Western contact, dating in its case back to the 1500s. Today it’s a beautiful port city, as hilly as San Francisco, dotted with old churches and old gaslamp-looking streetlights and with streetcars that run in the middle of its wide streets. It’s also known for its grand shopping arcade and its great Chinese cuisine—it has one of the largest and oldest Chinatowns in Japan. Since both of us had been there before—me, with the USS Blue Ridge in 1996 and Ikuko several times during her visits to Kyushu—Nagasaki was nothing new but a nice place to wander around for a day. At the end of the day we caught a cab to take us back to Mogi, the ferry port. This cab ride turned out to be the highlight of the day. The driver took us up the narrowest two-way road that can possibly exist—in places it was no more than about 18 inches wider than our car, and as it was lined on both sides by houses, buildings or walls, there was no room for error. It also went up a rather steep hill, and riding this road gave one the impression that you’d just mistakenly jumped onto an out-of-control roller coaster. The driver managed to avoid accident or incident and got us to the port on time, but not with causing a few heart flutters along the way. I was very glad that he, and not me, was behind the wheel.
A Walk Through Hell
A day or two after Nagasaki, we also took a ferry in the opposite direction, to Unzen. As I’ve mentioned, the region is known best for the volcano that erupted there in 1990, killing 43 and destroying most of a nearby town. They have just finished building a museum to commemorate the events, and this museum is impressive. Its coolest feature is an Imax movie that combines 3D animation with real footage and a room that moves and shakes as the volcano erupts. It’s thrilling and a little scary, and overall very well done. I’m sure I understood all of ten words in the entire movie, yet came away feeling like I’d been on Mt. Unzen’s top the day it exploded. If you ever find yourself in the Shimabara area, do yourself a favor and skip the local castle and just head straight to the Unzen museum. The movie alone is worth the price of admission.
The Unzen area is also known, not coincidentally, for the hot sulphur springs that bubble up from one of the foothills near the volcano. It’s so hot and smelly that the locals call it “jigoku”—hell. It’s fitting—the whole side of the hill is stained yellowish-white, the sound of gurgling and bubbling rises from the ground, and the air reeks of rotten eggs. For a couple hundred yen you can buy an egg that’s been boiled in the springs, its shell turned black in the process. In the persecution era, Christians would be taken to the hottest of the springs and commanded to renounce their faith. When they didn’t, they were thrown into the steaming sulfuric waters and held there until they boiled to death. Halfway up the hill, there’s a monument to the martyrs who were sent to heaven by being thrown into hell.
On the happier side, the sulphur springs serve several onsens—public spas—in the area. We went to one of the more famous, the Unzen Spa House, and bathed in filtered (and cooled) outdoor sulphur baths. It’s supposed to be good for the skin, but we ended up giving off a faint whiff of spoiled eggs for a day or so.
Moji, the Kanmon Strait, and Home
That drive I mentioned at the top of this post took us to Moji, where my wife’s aunt lives. We’d visited her back in 1997, and while we had a good time I’d been less than impressed with the city of Moji. It’s a port city, but other than a great suspension bridge that crosses the historic strait it straddles, there just wasn’t much to do or look at. All that’s changed now, thanks to what must have been a monumental rebuilding of its waterfront areas in the past few years. On one side of the strait sits a museum to the port, trade and history of the region. Sounds boring, but this had to be one of the best museums I’ve seen in a while. Its central feature is a movie that’s projected onto a cylindrical screen hanging from a ring near the ceiling. It’s tough to visualize unless you see it, but the effect of the cylindrical projection is to give the image a kind of depth, almost 3D. The wordless movie traced the history of the region with a dragon motif, and during several sections the dragon was projected onto a whitish globe at the bottom of the screen. They’d rendered the dragon to appear as though it was trapped inside the sphere, but it would occasionally escape and swim up onto the main screen. Obviously the work of an art director given too much freedom, the movie and its wild screens made the museum memorable.
On the other side of the strait is an incredible aquarium. The first section is a walk-through tank that simulates the strait’s conditions—waves, tides, and of course the fish. At one point the aquarium actually forms a glass cave around you, with schools of tiny silvery fish swimming all around and above. The remaining sections include a gigantic sunfish, one of the few complete blue whale skeletons in the world, and a preserved coelacanth. They were thought to have become extinct millions of years ago, until a fisherman caught one off the coast of Africa in the 1920s or 30s. There aren’t many places you can see a real coelacanth, but Moji’s aquarium is one.
After a couple of days in Moji, we flew to Tokyo to fly home. Ironically, I’d been looking forward to the Tokyo part of the trip—the first few days—much more than the Amakusa part, where I expected to be hot and bored most of the time. Instead, I found Tokyo to be pretty much what I’d expected, with good friends and family visits and great food, but Amakusa turned out to be an unexpected paradise. Beautiful, rural, serene—real. Not the cosmopolitan, overgrown Tokyo with its smog and traffic and neon, but more Japanese than the capital. Though signs of Western—American—cultural influence abound in the form of shopping malls and Starbucks, Amakusa has retained its essential Easternness. It’s still full of rice farms. There are probably more snakes and bugs than people, and the mountains and sea dominate life. Amakusa is probably as close as you can get to visiting authentic Japan.