Pre-Hokkaido Business

Early August 2009

From Friday August 7th until Saturday August 15, I will be on vacation in Northern Japan. My first stop is Hokkaido, which is the second largest and northernmost of Japan’s four main islands. In the old days, it was a rough and wild land, and even now, Hokkaido is known chiefly for its agriculture and delicious food. I will spend one day in the main city of Sapporo (famous for beer and ramen), and then move down to Hakodate, which was the site of a famous battle, for two days.

After that, I will move to the Tohoku region, which is the northern area of the main island of Honshu. My first stop will be Sendai, which is one of the larger cities in the region. Then I will move down to Aizu-Wakamatsu, the site of a famous rebellion and suicide tragedy, for two nights. Finally, I will end in Tokyo, where I will do some research at one of the museums for a short story I’d like to get published.

So, that will be my summer trip. Naturally, I will give you more details once I actually do my traveling.

But in the days before my vacation, I find myself unexpectedly busy. On paper, it looks like I should be winding down with the arrival of summer. Not so. Classes ended at the third week of July, and I found myself just getting busier. Technically, these days are filled with “office days” which usually means going to the Board of Education, sitting in an air conditioned room, and doing whatever they can find for us to do. Usually that’s nothing. Usually.

Except, that with the end of July comes a change in ALTs. The old Assistant Language Teachers go home and the new ones arrive. And this year, the two other ALTs in my office, Rachelle and Vickie, were both leaving. And, in fact, I was changing schools so I had my share of goodbyes.

Someone decided that rather than having us waste time going to the office, it would be better for each of us ALTs to report to a “base” school, which could relay information to us. These base schools would be Kanoya High, Kanoya Kogyo (Technical), and Kanoya Nogyo (Agricultural)—in short the three Kanoya schools. All well and logical—except two of those schools were mine. To make a long story short, I had to switch Kanoya Kogyo (technical) for Koyama High, a smaller school further from my house.

So, in the last few weeks, I cleaned out my desk, wrote instructions for my successor, and prepared a goodbye speech (in Japanese). Every time I went to Kogyo (admittedly only three times in July), I was struck with a heavy emotion, a mix of sadness and stress. I really hadn’t expected to leave any of my schools, and I had a special affection for Kogyo, my nearly all-boys school. I had started off having almost no classes and ended up averaging four classes a day and actually preparing lessons. Kogyo was the only school where I felt like a real teacher. And that was the school I had to leave.

So, after I said goodbye to Kogyo, I had about a week and a half to say goodbye to Rachelle and Vickie. The two of them were even busier than I was. They had to clean, pack, and say goodbye to everyone. Still, we found some time to spend together. We went to see Harry Potter and I took them out to dinner. The Kanoya girls met one last time for Shirokuma: shaved ice with condensed milk and fruit. Of the six girls present, I was the only one staying.

Yesterday (was it really only yesterday?), Rachelle and Vickie left Japan. I woke up early that day, not only because I had to be at the office before 8:00, but I was also a little restless. July 29th had been wedged in my mind like a splinter. The day my friends were leaving. The day the new ALTs were arriving.

Rachelle brought some friends with her to the airport, including Noriko, a teacher from her school, and Masako, a friend who was a volunteer English guide. They reminisced while we waited in the airport. Before long, Rachelle and Vickie were waiting in line to go through security. All this time, I had been with my two friends, wondering why I didn’t feel sadder… or really anything at all. It didn’t really hit me, until I saw Noriko with tears streaming down her face and Masako wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. And then I just felt heavy.

But this tender moment was broken by a bit of comedy—well, to me it seemed as such. Jinnouchi-sensei—a teacher Kushira Shogyo, my school, and her daughter Yuana were coming to say goodbye to Rachelle. But they hadn’t told anyone until Rachelle and Vickie had given everyone hugs and were about to pass through security.

What made this event funny to me was that Jinnouchi-sensei had only spent time with Rachelle maybe four or five times—she was more my friend than Rachelle’s. But if you knew Jinnouchi-sensei at all, you would know she’s a hyper-social butterfly and she really loves making friends with people. Plus, she’d had Yuana call me and ask me about Rachelle’s departure time a few days earlier, and so I suspected something like this would happen.

Anyway, this had a happy ending, because Jinnouchi-sensei and Yuana got there just in time. They appeared right before Rachelle was about to disappear through the metal detector and had about three seconds to say goodbye. For this they had driven two hours to the airport and would drive two hours back.

Rachelle and Vickie passed through security. We all—in true Japanese fashion—stood by the glass window, waving, until we could no longer see them at all.

By now it was about 11:30. Everyone but Noriko decided to go to lunch. Now, the silent figure in all of this drama—the person I haven’t even mentioned yet—was our supervisor, Shibahara-sensei. As the only male and the person with the least English, that really wasn’t surprising. But this is how much of a social butterfly Jinnouchi-sensei is. She had never met Shibahara-sensei before, so she immediately set about getting acquainted. We went out to lunch, and the restaurant was busy, so we had to break into two groups. Jinnouchi-sensei volunteered to sit with Shibahara-sensei.

Volunteered nothing. More like, she told us how it was going to be. They sat chatting, while Yuana, Masako, and I talked about castles in Saga prefecture. Of course, Jinnouchi-sensei paid for our lunch. This did not surprise me in the least; whenever we go out, she pounces on the bill. I don’t even try to stop her anymore; just make a note in my head and try to get her a treat later on.

After lunch, Jinnouchi-sensei, Yuana, and Masako left, but Shibahara-sensei and I stayed at the airport. The new ALTs arrived at 1:30. I had the laminated signs Rachelle and Vickie had made. I was anxious. I was waiting for people I had never seen before who I would hopefully make friends with. It wasn’t just me either. Half of all ALTs coming to Kanoya were on this same flight, so the people from the Boards of Educations from all over the prefecture were gathered together with signs of their own.

The flight emptied out, and out came all the foreigners. Matt, Vickie’s replacement, was the first one we saw. He was tall, with reddish brown hair and glasses. Since he was getting Kogyo, I had emailed him a couple times before. I knew he was a year older than Vickie, from New Jersey, and liked taking photographs and sports.

Andie, Rachelle’s replacement, took a lot longer to come out. Andie was short, petite, and black. I can’t say African American, because she’s from Jamaica. All I knew about her at the time was where she was from and her age (one year older than Rachelle).

So, there we were. As soon as I saw them, most of my anxiety left. I don’t know why, but knowing what they looked like was a big relief. They were both nice and polite and wanted to know a lot about Japan. So I told them. Whatever I could think of. About halfway through the car ride, we stopped at a convenience store for drinks. I remembered how my boss had bought us ice cream the first day, so I decided to do the same.

We went to the office and the ALTs made their self-introduction speeches in Japanese. Both Matt and Andie had, oh I’d say maybe a year’s worth of Japanese, and so they could manage that just fine. But when the boss made the speech in Japanese, I was the one to translate it into English. In my two years I’ve risen into the position as the unofficial translator, a post I hold with some pride.

I offered to take the new ALTs grocery shopping after work. Then we went out to dinner and I showed them around Rina City, a shopping center near our house. By the time I got home it was 8:00. For all intents and purposes, it was a 12-hour day. And by no means was I finished.

Today, in the afternoon, we went to the bank and city hall, while I explained the two hundred ways Japan makes us sort garbage (I’m only slightly exaggerating), helped fill out forms, and did more translation in general. I don’t begrudge the extra work or the enormous amount of information that must be passed down. I actually like feeling helpful, like an older sister. At the same time, I know these are adults (both of whom are older than me) who want to be independent as soon as possible. I feel like in a few weeks I’ll be obsolete and they’ll know more about Kanoya than I will. There are already so many things I don’t know, questions I can’t answer.

They both seem nice, but I haven’t had much of a chance to get to know each other. We’re still on polite, information gathering mode. I’ve been talking and talking, but all of it practical: how to tell soy milk from normal milk, where the coin laundry is, the way ATM cards work in Japan….

Besides all this saying goodbye and saying hello, I’ve been keeping busy with other tasks, which include studying Japanese (from 1-4 hours a day), finishing a chapter (and trying to write another one), taking a medical exam (but first translating the questionnaire into English), making dinner (hoping the food doesn’t spoil too quickly in this heat), fighting insects (they’re winning), reading reviews from fans of my fanfiction (some are threatening to kill me if I don’t write another chapter), and viewing a rare once in a lifetime eclipse (which I couldn’t see at all because it was cloudy). I might go see fireworks on Saturday. I definitely have to clean my house by Sunday.

To put it succinctly, lately I’ve been just a little stressed.

So, I’m looking forward to this vacation. A break from studying Japanese. Long train rides to read in. Beautiful scenery and good food with no cooking and no washing dishes.

Post From a Tired Becky (Yakushima)

June 4, 2009



I’m a bit tired right now. I’ve been getting ready for my trip back to America to see my brother’s graduation. I’ve cleaned a bit and sorted through my books, trying to decide which ones to take home now, which to take home later, and which to leave in Japan. In less than a week I’ll be on American soil, but in the meantime, I have a bunch of chores to get caught up on.

The main culprit has been a sudden and very thorough obsession with fanfiction. If my novel is my wife, then fanfiction is my mistress and whenever I’m frustrated with the former, it’s so easy to turn to the latter to relieve my stress.

But the problem is that my “mistress” often exhausts me. Apparently, I don’t just write fanfiction, I become obsessed with it and spend my every free moment in the throes of passion, writing, writing, writing, until I get completely burned out. My “simple” fanfiction ended up being about 25 pages per draft and went through about five drafts, which meant in the space of two weeks, I probably wrote something like 100 pages, most of which got deleted. How did I do this? By neglecting everything else. Chores. Letters. Japanese. That pesky problem with my sink…

Oh, yes, my kitchen sink was having some problems draining. I would do the dishes and it would take a few minutes for the water to drain away. I discovered a bottle of some kind of Japanese drain-o left by my predecessor and kept pouring it in, bit by bit, with limited results. In the end, I got frustrated and dumped the whole bottle in. I ran the water and foam came out. Then, suddenly, with a giant belching sound, the sink sucked up the water. I thought that solved my problem. If only.

Anyway, my fanfiction didn’t quite get completed before I ran out of time. I’d told Vickie I’d go to Yakushima with her in the last weekend of May. Friday night, I put my fanfiction aside and tried to get some things done. Packing. Cleaning. Laundry.



Ah, yes, laundry. That was when the incident with the drain reared its ugly head with a vengeance. I stepped into my bathroom to collect my wet clothes and found the floor was completely flooded. The washing machine had drained right onto my floor. I had to mop it up with my dirty towels.

Now, what did that have to do with my sink? Well, when I emptied my kitchen sink of dish water, I heard a familiar belching from the bathroom. I looked and sure enough there was a new puddle of water floating around my washing machine. Apparently, the drain to my kitchen sink connects to my washing machine as well (though not, thank heaven, to the toilet or the shower). This drain had gotten clogged with thick muck, and every time it had to drain too much water too quickly, it would vomit it back out via my washing machine’s drain. Then it would try to suck the water back in, but not before leaving a residue of foul-smelling muck all around the area near my washing machine.

Well this was a nice thing to discover the night before a trip. And this same day, I found out the back tire of my bike was flat. Besides which, two weeks of spending hours without rest writing and writing left me suddenly mentally exhausted. I couldn’t even deal with packing that night, let alone all these unexpected problems.

Saturday morning, I woke up at 6:00, packed, tidied my house, and waited for Vickie. She arrived at 7:30. Yakushima is an island, and it takes about four hours to get there by ferry from Kagoshima City, which is maybe two and a half hours from our city of Kanoya, when timing is going our way. Poor Vickie. She gets a bit seasick. I managed just fine, blasting my iPod and focusing on the music. But I did feel a little wobbly on land.



Yakushima is World Heritage Sight. It’s a mountain on an island, and it’s famous for a particular type of cedar tree called Yakusugi. This tree is a highly fragrant, light-weight wood, similar to the redwoods of California (but not quite so red). Yakushima is also one of the few places where sea turtles lay their eggs. It’s a very unique place and I’m not going to do it justice with my quick summary of what happened.



We got to shore, paid way too much to rent a car, and headed off on a forty minute drive to Yakusugi Land. While on the twisty mountain road, I had to make reservations in Japanese on Vickie’s cell phone to see the sea turtles while the reception kept cutting out. It nearly made me car sick. We went hiking for about an hour at Yakusugi Land and then drove to the other side of the island (an hour and a half) to make camp. Yes, we went camping. Vickie borrowed a tent and some sleeping bags from another ALT. After that, we went zipping down the winding coast as wild deer and monkeys popped out onto the road. Made for nice pictures. We hunted down dinner, which was no easy task; we were on the half of the island where we couldn’t even find a convenience store, let alone a restaurant. We finally found a nice little izakaya (a Japanese tavern) run by a friendly lady and ate there.



By now, we were at Nagata Beach, where sea turtles lay their eggs from May to July. Okay, I’m going to stop my break-neck pace and actually spend a few minutes describing the sea turtles, because that was cool.



They told us to come at about 8:30 at night, and while we waited, a couple of tourists showed us some fireflies near the river. There was a lecture about the sea turtles in Japanese and I could understand about half of it. To be honest, we really didn’t know what we were going to see when they walked us on the beach. But there was a turtle, sitting in a self-dug hole, laying eggs. We could see the eggs shudder out of her, in little bursts of one or two. So many soft, slimy eggs. We were transfixed.



When the turtle finished, she tried to bury her eggs. At this point our guides measured her shell and stuck a tracking device in her leg. She didn’t like that, and started slapping sand into the air and snuffing. The guides said she was a small turtle, but her shell was still as big as a breastplate, and her face looked like a dinosaur. She made her way back into the ocean and as she did, she crossed paths with another turtle, just coming out of the ocean.

You know, I can’t help but feel like our turtle somehow conveyed to the turtle just coming out of the water that there was a crazy group of people who would stare at you and poke at you—because it wasn’t very long before the second turtle turned and returned to the water as well. The turtles, as you can imagine, were very slow, and by the time we got back to the car, it was 10:00.



The next day, we went to a fruit garden and they let up sample the fruit: bananas, passion fruit, papaya, and several kinds of oranges, all naturally grown and delicious. We saw two waterfalls, did some shopping, and went to a museum. We made chopsticks. Our instructor gave up two rough sticks of cedar wood and had us carve it and sand it. The curls of wood gave off a strong, fresh smell. I felt like such an amateur and my chopsticks came out weird, but when he added a thin strip of decorative paper and put it in plastic, it ended up looking nice. The last thing Vickie and I did was take a drive, where we discovered a shrine hidden in the back of a cave. Vickie said that the cave went further back than the shrine. Who knows what could have been hidden there?



By 4:20, we were on the ferry back. While Vickie zoned out, I started reading my latest book, World War Z: an Oral History of the Zombie War. We got to Kagoshima and—I swear this always happens on my way back—we just missed the Terumizu ferry, which goes across the bay to our side of the prefecture. So, we had to wait another hour to catch the next one. I ate dinner on the ferry; Vickie didn’t. We got home at about 10:00. I dumped my stuff on the floor, took a shower, and went to bed.

Monday, I still had to deal with a clogged drain, a flat tire, and a load of dirty towels that needed to be washed ASAP. Plus, I had to pick up my tickets to America. I couldn’t do much about the drain, but I did fix my tire and go to the coin laundry.

The weather lately has been humid and cloudy. I know that tsuyu, or the Japanese rainy season, is going to break on us any day now. Truth be told, the rain should have burst on our heads that weekend we went to Yakushima, but we got lucky that weekend: not a cloud in the sky. The rain won’t hold out much longer though. The ajisai (hydrangea) bushes look thirsty for water.

Ibusuki

November 3, 2008




My life in Japan has normalized. I’m not fluent in Japanese, but I make my way around. I don’t know every nook in my town, but I know how to navigate my way around the area. And while Japan does sometimes surprise me, it’s not exotic anymore.

In August, the new ALTs arrived, including Victoria, who’s from Canada. Watching Victoria, it’s sort of a revelation on how much we’ve learned in a year. When she remarks about the foot deep open gutters at the side of the road or can’t find her way from the library to the supermarket or asks me for help on how to transfer money using the ATM, I remember (fondly) how I had to adjust to Japan only one month ago.

Enough nostalgia. Since August, nothing big has happened to me. The weather has, of course, cooled down, to the point where I’ve had to close my windows and wear gloves when I ride my bike to school in the mornings. But it’s not cold enough for the teachers to bring out the kerosene stoves.

In the meantime I had a few enkais (drinking parties) with teachers from my school, I’ve taught lessons on grammar and holiday and writing postcards, I’ve been to a Vietnamese concert. In October Vickie hosted a Canadian Thanksgiving party (apparently they have it a month earlier than we do). I made mashed potatoes. We didn’t have turkey, but we did have stuffing and a sweet potato casserole and cute little pumpkin pies. Oh, and an actual, normal-sized, homemade apple pie. It was absolutely delicious. I ate it with vanilla ice cream and thought of my grandpa.

But recently the most exciting news I’ve had is going to Ibusuki over a three day weekend. Ibusuki is a small town in my prefecture. Imagine Kagoshima Prefecture as a pair of pants straddling the Kinko Bay. My town of Kanoya is on the right pant leg, what is called the Osumi Peninsula. Ibusuki is on the left pant leg, called the Satsuma Peninsula. I had wanted to explore the Satsuma Peninsula, but, being that there’s a large body of water blocking my way, it did take a little planning.

The trip was a little unusual for me in that this time I didn’t go alone. I mentioned my trip to Victoria and asked her if she wanted to go. To my surprise, she said yes. Apparently she wants to do as much traveling as she could in Japan, but she does have a little problem: she speaks almost no Japanese. I do, but, as you know, I don’t have a car and that makes it hard to get around in the…ahem…more rural areas (such as Ibusuki and the Satsuma peninsula). Vickie has a car, so it was a good trade-off—I handled the translation and she handled the driving.

On Saturday, November 1st, we left the house at 9:00 and drove south along the coast until we came to the ferry. It was a scenic drive and a nice boat ride. We arrived at the Satsuma Peninsula at around noon and drove to Ibusuki. After a café lunch of soy-sauce flavored rice with chicken and mushrooms, we walked down to the beach, where the major attraction of Ibusuki was. What Ibusuki is known for—it’s reason for being—is the sand baths.

Sand baths. We paid a fee, changed into yukatas (light Japanese kimonos), and walked down to the beach. Under a covered tarp, many workers were scooping out shallows for people to lie in and covering them with sand. They showed us how to wrap our small towel around our head so as not to get sand in our hair. Then, quickly and efficiently, they shoveled sand onto us, until everything but our heads were buried.

The first thing I noticed about the sand was that it felt heavy. It felt as if my body had been sucked into one of those air-tight containers and I couldn’t freely move. I wiggled my toes just to assure myself I could move.

Although the sand had been only lukewarm, it started to feel very hot before long. My body began to sweat. We weren’t supposed to stay in the sand baths longer than fifteen minutes, but to be honest, I don’t think we stayed longer than ten. Time seemed to expand. I was a bit uncomfortable, but in a meditative sort of way. I felt my pulse through my body, pounding within the sand. It was very strange.

We rose from the sand like Frankenstein’s monster rising from the grave and then we went to the public baths. It was Victoria’s first time in a public bath, which, as you know, is segregated by sex, but everyone is naked. Vickie adjusted quickly, even washing her hair before entering the bath. The public bath was actually the opposite of the sand bath—it starts off scorching hot, but if you sit in it a while, eventually you get used to it.

We were very refreshed after our baths. I have to say one thing about Japanese baths—it may seem strange, but man it makes you feel good—very healthy and relaxed. We hunted down our ryokan—our Japanese hotel. Do you know, I had no map, no instructions and had to call the ryokan the day of to get directions (in Japanese)? But it turned out to be surprisingly easy to find; it was right next to the sand baths.

After that, we pretty much called it a night.

The next day was our big travel day. We drove to Chiran, another small town, about 40 minutes away. I was so glad we had a car. After a year and a half of getting by on public transportation, it was a revelation to drive wherever we wanted, whatever time we wanted, no worrying about bus schedules, stopping whenever we felt like it. The freedom of it! And it was so relaxing—for me, anyway—I wasn’t driving.



The first place we went to was the Peace Museum for “Kamikaze” pilots. Of course, I knew about the “kamikaze” (“divine wind”) pilots who would fly into U.S. ships and blow themselves up—chilling to think about, especially after 9/11—but I had never really thought about where they came from. Somewhere. But little did I know that in my very Peninsula, in this small inconsequential town, these young pilots gathered and were later deployed for their last mission.

The museum had many uniforms, letters, and even full planes. But it was probably the pictures that were saddest. They were so young—in their twenties or their late teens. I saw one picture of a pilot who was 17. There were a few letters translated into English. Those were sad to read. What was interesting was that they talked about everyday things, sort of mundane. If you wrote a last letter, what would you say?

After that, Victoria and I went to a collection of samurai houses, the other major tourist attraction in Chiran. Although “houses” is sort of misleading—they were really more like samurai gardens. The gardens featured many “dry waterfalls,” stones whose shape was supposed to suggest a waterfall. Personally, I would have preferred a real one. The gardens were pleasant, but nothing spectacular.

Lunch was spectacular. The restaurant was in our little samurai village, one of the old houses, with a roof that looked like bundled trees and garden filled with potted bonsai trees. There was an art in that garden of making new things out of old broken ones. Like a tuft of flowers growing on a wave-shaped broken pot. Or the wall made of plastered wavy tiles.

The inside of the restaurant was a tatami mat room. But our table was a giant cobalt vase with a flower growing in it and a sheet glass put over it as a surface. We were charmed, even if we didn’t have enough room to fit both our meals on it at the same time. (They gave Victoria a raised tray that sat on the floor near us.) The food was simple, delicious, and reasonably priced.

We drove back to Ibusuki. On the way back, we dropped by Lake Ikeda. Lake Ikeda is—how should I say it—it’s a very pleasant tourist trap. The lake is inhabited by large eels and supposedly a monster (a la Loch Ness) that they’ve dubbed Isshi. From the edge of the lake, we could see neither eels nor sea monster, but all the souvenir stands provided us with real eels and plaster sea monsters. One also had a waterfall and a family of tanuki statues. I bought a soft serve ice cream cone, sweet potato flavor (the specialty food product of all Kagoshima Prefecture). I prefer the seaweed flavor from Tokushima. Vickie bought some black somen noodles for her mother. I read the kanji. “Baboo charcoal” somen. Weird. But intriguing, like so many things Japanese.

We went to Mount Kaimon, the “Mount Fuji” of Kagoshima Prefecture. Most mountains in Japan are round and sloped, more like glorified hills, really. Mt. Kaimon, like Mt. Fuji, is a triangular mountain off. The contrast is striking, as it sits by itself, rather than as part of a mountain range all. We went to the mountain, but didn’t hike it. We saw some goats on the way back.

Our last trip of the day was to the archeological museum, which somehow got the name COCCO. They had videos that played when we walked past and a recreation of an ancient hut. But my favorite part was a 3D interactive vase puzzle. The vase was broken and the pieces scattered. Press a button and surface was magnetized so that the pieces would stay in place. You had one minute to put it together before the effect ended and the broken pieces would come crashing down. It was fun. Near the museum was a park with reconstructed ruins. In the rain, Vickie and I flitted in and out of the houses and took pictures.

That was our day. If we had wanted to, we could have taken another trip to the sand baths. But once we got settled into our ryokan hotel, we didn’t want to leave.

There is a small island just off the coast of Ibusuki. When the tide is right, a natural sand path appears, connected the island to the mainland. A narrow strip of land with the ocean on either side. Vickie wondered people were allowed to walk across. I pictured everything that could go wrong, from the water rushing back right as you were in the middle of walking the path. Or getting stuck overnight on a deserted island. Who knows what could happen.

Anyway, it was a moot point, because the tide was not right when we got there, early the next morning. We could see a lump of sand in the middle of the sea—part of the path—but that was it. We also saw a fisherman and a couple of Japanese men, who tried talking with us, first in English, then in Japanese.

From there, we went to Nagasakibana and to an animal park. How can I describe this odd little place? It was sort of like a small zoo, with a few monkeys and lemurs and less exotic animals—pigs, donkeys, dogs. There were birds—some exotic, some not—that were allowed to roam freely. Vickie liked it, because she worked in a pet shop and missed all the animals, especially the birds. I liked the view it had of Mt. Kaimon. We took plenty of pictures and saw the rat show.



For lunch we went to a restaurant called “Tosenkyo Floating Noodle” (according to the English pamphlet) or “Tosenkyo Somen Flow” (my own translation). It was mentioned in my guidebook, and mentioned on the blue road signs. Not advertisement billboards. The prefecture signs, which also pointed to Mt. Kaimon, Lake Ikeda, and Chiran.

It was not exactly what we expected. First, we had to climb down a staircase embedded into the hill. The first thing we saw was a small shrine sitting in the water. The water was filled with large fish—not koi. To the left was a path through a series of buildings. On the side of the path was a strip of water filled even more with fish—these ones smaller. When we came to the restaurant, I began to suspect the fish weren’t all just a part of the scenery. On the menu, one of the featured items—was a small salted fish on a stick.

The other prominent feature is, of course, the somen, a very thin white noodle that’s usually eaten chilled. It was 600 yen for a bowl—very reasonable. A man who spoke flawless English met us and explained how it worked. We bought a ticket for our food and chose our table. The eating area was half inside, half outside, with a giant waterfall in the back. We sat next to the waterfall.

The tables were round and in the middle was a ring of water which was flowing round and round. When our noodles came, we dumped them in the water. They flowed round and round, until we stuck in our chopsticks. In a matter of seconds our chopsticks were heaped with thin white noodles, which we then dunked into the sauce. Not only was this incredibly fun, it also made eating extremely easy. The water was crisp and cold; I could taste it in my noodles, and it was delicious.

We did all this and still got home before dinner. Our trip was over.