The Road Not Taken

 

"A dragonfly flitted in front of me and stopped on a fence. I stood up, took my cap in my hands, and was about to catch the dragonfly when…"

 

Day 1:

Hiroshima is now a city of peace. It's a little less than 2 hours by bullet train from Kobe, where the ship was docked. My friend Julie and I made the trip on the first day in port in Japan. Thankfully she had done her research, because I would have had absolutely no idea which train to take, much less how to even get to the bullet train station in the first place. The Japanese rail system is incredible. You can get almost everywhere in the country by public transportation. And at fast speeds too.

 

We arrived in Hiroshima around 2 or 3, just when restaurants were closing up after lunch. This was a problem, because we were both so hungry. We trekked out aimlessly from the station trying to locate a restaurant that was open. We traveled down alleyways and sidestreets looking. On one of the remote side streets we found a marble block sticking out from the sidewalk. Walking closer we saw that there was a plaque on the face of the marble with what looked like paper streamers hung from it. It was literally in a lifeless street, so we thought it was quite strange and out of place. We came to face to face with the strange block, and read the inscription on it's face:

 

"Hypocenter…the first atomic bomb used in the history of human kind exploded approximately 580 meters above this spot."

 

After finishing, both Julie and I just slowly turned our heads to look 580 meters above in the sky where it happened. Hello Hiroshima.

 

An atomic bomb was dropped on the city at 8:15AM August 6^th, 1945, initially killing about 80,000. Radiation lingered on, and is still attributed for many deaths. Outside the museum there is a stone chest that has a list of names of all of the departed inside. Every year the chest is opened and names are added to the list. There is a pond bordering the chest, and on the other side is the flame of peace, a continuously burning fire that will not be extinguished until there are no more atomic bombs in the world. But the aim of all the monuments and the surrounding area is to educate on the horrors of war, not to hold those accountable who dropped the bomb in the first place. The city of Hiroshima is past the blame and shame, and now they long for harmony. At the atomic bomb museum there is very little mention of World War 2, it is clear they're not faulting anyone here. I remember in Viet Nam at the War Remnants Museum there was a whole different tone; that place wanted everyone to know that America painted its walls with Vietnamese blood. But not in Hiroshima. Sure, there was blood on the walls there too, but there was no fingers pointed. It was almost startling. The closest thing I could find to accountability was one plaque that said that Little Boy was dropped by the Enola Gay. Not the United States. Obviously the Enola Gay was a US war plane, but that's beside the point. War and peace are universal, with no one to blame for either except all of us.

 

Day 2:

There was a big journey planned out for Japan. Todd, Dan, and I were heading out on the second day in port for our excursion to Yokohama, where the ship was meeting back with us. Karina ended up tagging along too. We saw her in the terminal as we were leaving with packed bags, but without a place to go. So we invited her to come along, knowing that we were breaking our "only travel with guys" rule. It's a great rule. It has never lead us to frustration, and we have it for a good reason. But travelling with Karina ended up working really well.

 

From the port terminal we had to take a maze of connections on the Japanese transit system. Port Liner from the port terminal to the mono rail. Mono rail to the subway station. Subway to Shin-Kobe, the bullet train station. From there, an hour and a half bullet train ride to Nagoya, where we would be staying that night. We didn't leave the port in Kobe until about 7pm in the evening, so it was getting late by the time we arrived at Nagoya. I had booked a two person room in Nagoya for the four of us that night. Once we got off the bullet train in Nagoya, we had to take a different train to get to the section of the city where the hotel was. You get the point: all those transitions are very confusing. When we arrived at Nagoya, the train station we got off at was completely empty. The streets outside of it were empty too. We walked to the hotel from the train station without seeing a single other person.

 

It was about a 15 minute walk to our hotel, and when we got there Dan and Todd hid outside while Karina and I went inside to the front desk to get the room key. We went in to what we thought was the main lobby and were instructed to take our shoes off. Strange, but okay, it's Japan. The lobby was a nicely furnished two story open room with bright carpets and cozy furniture. We noticed that everyone in the place was walking around in matching robes. Even little children were scurrying across the floors in matching robes. Baby blue for boys and pink for girls. Stranger. I walked to the counter and showed the women working my reservation receipt with my confirmation information. She said a couple things in Japanese I didn't understand, pointed in a couple directions, and then upon seeing our very confused faces went in the back to retrieve someone who knew a little English. The interpreter came out and examined my paper before telling us that this place was not actually the hotel. The hotel was next door. This funky place with the matching robes and bare feet was the spa attached to hotel. And because we were hotel guests, the spa's services were free for us that night. Having traveled for hours with our big bags a free spa sounded like music to our ears. But we still needed to eat, so we eagerly asked what time the spa closed, hoping that it was at least late enough for us to eat and come back to enjoy it in time. "8 o'clock" we were told. Weird, we thought, it was already past 8 and the place was still fully operational by the looks of it. "8 AM," the interpreter clarified. Sweet.

 

Karina and I then crossed the parking lot to the real hotel lobby next door, pulling the same hiding routine with Todd and Dan. We checked in okay, gathered the troops, and were directed to a local Japanese spot for dinner, one of the only two that were still open at that time (the food was amazing). But what we were all really giddy about was to get back to the hotel and check out this spa. After all, from our brief glance in the front room, the place looked amazing. We came back to our room after dinner to find robes for the spa laying on the bed. They weren't the same matching robes I had seen in the spa before, but I think the different pattern was an indicator that we were guests from the hotel rather than members of the spa. Karina and I decided to check out the spa and report back to Dan and Todd on our findings. The spa was connected to the hotel via bridge walkway on the second floor. There was no one on the walkway except for us when we were crossing. A shoe rack and sign prompted us to remove our shoes and go on with bare feet. With a little apprehension, we continued down the walkway, and opened the door to the spa.

 

What we saw was amazing. Talk about culture shock, this was something completely unexpected. The first thing we saw were several Japanese men sprawled out across the floor, out cold in a deep slumber. No pillows or blankets, just robes, in the middle of the walk way, passed out. The lights weren't even dimmed, it would be as if you walked into a supermarket and saw people sleeping in the middle of the dairy aisle. It was that strange. We investigated further into the spa, and found that it's actually a pretty large 2 storey complex with a couple restaurants, massage parlors, salons, arcades, game rooms, and other things. But it wasn't like a mall. It was like play time for adults, with robes as pajamas. They gave you these little arm bands with barcodes on it and you could swipe the barcode at any restaurant, salon, or vending machine and it would automatically charge it to your room. They had vending machines that dispensed beer and hamburgers (with fries). They had entire rooms full of over a hundred personal massage chairs with attached plasmas TVs occupied by passed out Japanese men and women. They had ping pong and a comic book library (you check out a cubby, grab a comic book, and they'll bring you drinks). But the best part was the spa itself. There were dozens of different types of saunas and jacuzzis. One had yellow water that was like aroma therapy, one was literally a whirlpool that you just spun around in, and then there was a whole outdoor section. There were hot saunas, steam saunas, and even an ice sauna (exactly the opposite of a hot sauna). They all had flat screen TVs in them too. It was the most wild thing I had ever seen. And the Japanese there were all about it. Karina and I ran back to collect Todd and Dan to tell them of the wondrous things we had seen. We spent our entire night hanging out and using the facilities at this place. We were up until 4 AM doing everything we could. We didn't even get to it all either.

 

We woke up pretty early the next day, we had big things ahead of us. We took trains and buses to this small remote town called Magome. It is a rustic little place that hasn't been modernized yet and features all traditional Japanese architecture on every building. There is an old post route from Magome to another similarly out of the way town called Tsumago. The route is about 7k long and has small villages, bungalows, creeks, and waterfalls along the way. We came to Magome to hike this post route to Tsumago, and then take a bus to the next major train station and make it to Tokyo by the day's end. We had all of our large camping back packs with us, but conveniently there is a service where you can check your bags off and have them driven to Tsumago for a couple dollars. I was prepared to carry my bag the whole way because I didn't know this service was available until we got there, but because it was so handy we dropped our bags off to pick them up once we were done hiking. Both towns are in the forefront of breathtaking mountains. The spotty cloud cover made the mountains even more beautiful, and because it was fall all of the leaves on the foliage were dazzling red, orange and yellows. The sights were transfixing, we literally stopped for 20 minutes and gawked at some of the scenes as we passed through. The waterfall and creek dazzled, and I just could not get over how vibrant the path was with the fall colors. There were fruit trees along the way we ate from, and a mom teaching her cute son how to use wooden stilts at one of the bungalows. We savored the moment, took our time, and took it in. It wasn't the destination that we were heading for, it was the journey that was paramount.

 

We enjoyed ourselves so much that it was actually getting quite dark on the tail end of our hike. Karina and I lost the path a couple times and made our own. By the time we actually got to Tsumago it was completely dark out. Tsumago is tiny and quaint just like Magome, so the sun setting meant that lights were out, literally. Karina and I had gotten there around 6ish, we fell behind Todd and Dan about 2 hours into the hike. We slid our way into town, and not a single house or store had lights on inside. We found a map of the town posted on a board, and we hurried to the place where we were supposed to pick up our luggage, becoming worried that the luggage people may be gone, just like everyone else there. We got to the tourist building and Todd and Dan were sitting on the steps, the place was closed. But they had made it just in the nick of time, they caught the workers just after they closed and got them to open back up to get our bags. If they had been one minute later we would have been without our things or any idea what to do about that. So step 1 was retrieving our belongings, and we barely made that. Step 2 was finding our way to a train station. As expected, there were no more busses running at that hour. We found a pay phone and called a taxi. Taxis in Japan are just as expensive as they are in the US, so this was absolutely our last resort. The taxi took us to a train station. Step 2: accomplished. Step 3 was to take a train to Tokyo.

 

Something about Japan that no one really realizes until they're in the country is that there are virtually no ATMs that work with US and European debit cards. They have some other sort of banking system that isn't aggregated with our Citis, BofAs, and WaMus. There was one ATM in Kobe that I had grabbed some dough from, but it was nearly gone by the time I needed it to get to Tokyo. Especially after the taxi ride. The same was true for all of us. And we still had a very long trip ahead of us, from Tsumago to Tokyo is about 300 kilometers. And it was getting later by the hour. The closest train station to Tsumago that the taxi took us to was not a big train station, so we had to take the slow train all the way back to Nagoya in order to get on a bullet train to Tokyo. The problem was that we really didn't have all the much money left. So this is when we started free riding. There are two ways to do it. First way is to draft really close behind some random person as they go through the ticket machine so you can try to fit two people by using only fare. This is tricky, but it's not that bad when you get the hang of it. You look a little strange doing it, but if you have no money on you then sillyness doesn't factor into the equation. The second way to do it is more moral. You have a couple options when you buy your train tickets from the machines. You can buy a regular adult pass, or for half off, you can buy a child's pass. The thing is that there is no one checking what kind of ticket you have, so it's totally based on the honor system that you buy the pass designated for your age. We dabbled around Japan using a combination of these methods. We would draft until we felt to immoral about cheating the system so easily, and then buy a child pass for the next couple trains. I think I was able to travel all throughout the Japan for about $12.50. It may be wrong, but I'm not sure what else we were supposed to do. Plus it was fun. Big points. Anyways, because we had to backtrack back to Nagoya before we could get on the bullet train, our journey to Tokyo ended up taking about 3 hours, but exhaustion had us drifting in and out of dreams so we didn't really mind. We arrived at Tokyo around 12ish, took a subway a subway (child's ticket, you can't draft at night because there are no people to draft behind) to the hostel, and retired for the night.

 

(note: the rest of this entry isn't edited because I was racing against the clock to publish it before the cut off our internet, hopefully it makes sense)

 

The next day Karina decided she want to go off shopping on her own so the guys and I had a boys day out. We traveled around Tokyo, hitting up various spots around the city, taking the trains to destinations x, y, and z. Eventually we made it to a section of the city called Shibuya, which was like the downtown. Shibuya has the busiest intersection for foot traffic in the area. I'm sure you've seen it on TV or in the movies, it's that one junction where you just see hundreds and hundreds of Japanese people walking in every direction at once crossing the street. The best part about it is that it happens like clockwork- the light will be green to let the cars go through and then once the lights turn red in all direction the intersection just explodes with movement. Every time, all night and day long. I don't know where the people kept on coming from to make each cross as busy as the last, but sure enough, every time there would be hundreds of people crossing, no matter what. We played in the intersection for about an hour or so and then went to a conveyer belt sushi restaurant (where there are chefs in the middle of an island bar constantly making sushi and they put the dishes the make on a conveyer belt that runs by all the tables and when you see something you like you just grab it and eat) I'm not a huge sushi person, but it was some of the best sushi I've ever had. The fish was all so tasty, and that's a pretty big deal for me because I don't even like fish (unless it has a shell).

 

That night we had two options. The trains from Shibuya to our hostel stop running around midnight. We knew we were going to be out later than that so we resolved to either taking a taxi back to the hostel (about $40USD) or staying out all night until 5AM when the trains start running again. You know where this is going… We started the night thinking that we'd stay out until 1 or 2 and then fork over the cash for a taxi. We cruised around downtown, trying to find a good Karaoke bar or something. We found a lot of Karaoke spots, but they were all just private rooms and were pretty expensive. We didn't want to Karaoke with only the 3 of us, that isn't fun, so we didn't want to pay for a private room. We stopped by some small local pubs, and around 12ish we found some of our fellow SASers walking around aimlessly just like us. We invited them to go Karaoke with us, but again, all we could find were places offering private rooms. Even though our group was bigger by this time, we just wanted to sing and hang around with locals, even though this didn't seem possible.

 

We were about to give up when we went in to one last place. I had a plan in mind. While my whole group stopped at the front desk to talk to the person working about room rates, I walked right past to where all the private rooms were. Following music had never let me down before, so I decided to let the music guide me now. I heard beats coming from the stairwell so I walked towards it. The sound was flooding down the steps. I ascended to the third floor of the building, where the noise factory was. I walked down to the end of the hall and there was a door that was exploding with sound. There was something awesome going on in there. I crept the door open, still by myself at this point, and poked my head in. About 10 Japanese teenagers looked awkwardly my way, just a little more confused than I was. The music from the Karaoke machine beat on, but there was a silence by the blank stares. Then one of them motions me to come in. I give them the "wait just one moment" signal with my hand, and ran back down to the first floor where my friends were (we had about 10 people ourselves) I told them about what I had found, and took them up to the third floor, and to the room with the sound, and the Japanese teenagers cheered as we all entered. We all meshed well, all of our Japanese friends spoke English so we didn't have any trouble communicating. We spent the rest of the night singing both Japanese and American karaoke songs. The time flew by because we were having so much fun, we had that room packed with about 10 more people than it was meant for. Way better than having a private room with just the three of us. It was 5:30 AM before we knew it, and we all left the karaoke place. We took some pictures with our new friends and some other shenanigans went on before we parted ways. The subway was running again by that time, and we took it to our hostel, which was actually further away than I had previously thought. It was about a 30 minute subway ride. We stopped at the 24 hr McDonalds (gross gross gross) next to the subway station we got off at before returning to our hostel for a few hours sleep. This was probably one of, if not the best, night on Semester at Sea for me.

 

We were up by 11 for our check out the next morning. We didn't get that much sleep, but I wasn't that exhausted. It was our last day in Japan. Yokohama is where we ultimately had to be because that is where we had to meet back up with the ship (it had sailed from Kobe to Yokohama while we were traveling Japan). Yokohama is about a 30 minute train ride from Tokyo, so we weren't that rushed or anything like that. We arrived in Yokohama around mid day and spent the rest of the day browsing the city on foot. We stayed close to port, which was a really nice section of the city, reminded me a lot of Los Gatos or something with all the trees lining the sidewalks and such. It was a great easy going day. I watched the sun set at the port terminal before heading back on the ship for the long journey across the pacific.

 

In Japan I did everything I had wanted to do, and it is perhaps one of the only countries where I don't feel like I could have done it any better if I was able to have a second run through. Even getting lost and having no money for the trains was something I ended up enjoying in the end. Best of all, what I did was off the beaten path. I didn't just go to Tokyo and party for 3 nights straight. I spent my one night raging in Tokyo, but each of my other nights were spent in other places, seeing things that everyone stuck in Tokyo didn't get to see. And that's what I realized makes this trip into a journey- breaking from the masses and getting away from structure. Not knowing what's going to happen next is the greatest thing about travelling around the world. It's a big complicated place, so you'd be constraining yourself by trying to always stay in control.

 

"Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."

• Robert Frost
  

 

 

 

Spenser