Blessed by the satellite cable TV that Amber's domicile properly purveys, I listen to a Japanese live telecast
of the Giants-Dodgers game, a rivalry many think to be the best in all of baseball. It feels perilously close to naptime, but the
game is good and the teams are both vying for a wild-card playoff spot, and I haven't seen an American baseball game since I have been
in Japan. I didn't even know the Giants traded for Kenny Lofton.
My fatigue has nothing to do with watching the baseball game. Instead, it is large part due to the 800km of driving
I have done in the past 30 hours. Since the previous morning, when I left Mima-cho for Yawatahama, where I caught a ferry to Kyushu, I have been moving consistently. I had taken Joyce's advice that,
"real adventures...do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad."
Having worked both Saturday and Sunday of the past weekend, both preparing for and participating in my Chugakko's teiksaii (Sports Day), I was entitled to two days off this following week.
To take advantage, I planned an eight day jaunt (don't bother asking how I turned 2 days off into a week-long "jaunt") to Kyushu's Amakusa-Shoto (Amakusa Islands), where my friend Amber resides.
Ever since I purchased Napoleon, I have wanted to see what he could muster
on a roadtrip, and Amakusa seemed like a worthy test, though I would have to disregard the beloved Japanese trains to do so.
Yawatahama, a port town on the western coast of Shikoku, is noteworthy only because the Japanese have defiled the hills overlooking the bay with various industrializations.
My stay there was limited, anyway, as I purchased my return ticket, paying for the transport of both my body and my car. I tried to decide whether I prefered the ferry to the train or the car.
I loved both of the latter - that I knew - and I disliked air travel of any kind, but since I had but one long-distance ferry experience under my belt, I couldn't come to any conclusion.
The last time I had been on a ferry was in the UK, when, together with a close friend, the SeaCat Speed ferry had whisked us to Dublin. I recalled that journey being very bumpy, and not being able to concentrate
on the featured movie of the day, Finding Forrester.
But I was hopeful that this ride would be different. For one, the Irish Sea was more menacing a strait than the Bungo-Suido. For another, there seemed to be a lull in the typhoon-assembly line that Japan seemed to be a necessary part of.
In any case, I was ready to give the ferry another try. I was rewarded with a beautiful day, as the sun shone through the mysterious sky, like a mixed salad of gray and white clouds. When we arrived in Beppu, the onsen capital of Kyushu, I had only felt woozy
for a few minutes of the three hour journey.
Beppu would be no more than a pitstop for me on this day, though I was sure I would return when my hygeine was wanting. In just under four hours from my front door in Mima, I could bathe in the arguably the finest hot springs in Japan. As I drove through the city, I
could see why. Steam billowed everywhere, out of potholes, steel cylinders protruding from the ground, and an occasional abandoned building. Everything seemed ready to erupt. It was if I was standing on a covered pot of land, anxiously waiting to boil over. I Knew it was natural
but at first it seemed hellish and strange to me. Not to far below me, I couldn't help but think, a fire rages.
So it did not bother me much that I had to be on my way. If I was to meet Amber near Aso mountain, Japan's only active volcano and yet another example of Japan's geo-instability, I would need to get on my metaphorical horse.
I set off down the Expressway towards Oita, where I would merge onto National Road 57 and hope to make it to Aso by 4PM. But though 57 looked straight and relatively fast on my Japanese map, I
soon realized that I was mistaken. Distances and routes have that deceiving effect in Shikoku, and it seemed like more of the same here in Kyushu. Two towns may look like neighbors, but in the
end will be hours apart. Whether it be road work, cliff-hanging mountain roads, or windy one-laners wishing they were two, Japan was not altogether made for the car traveler.
America, as I had found on a three week road trip some years back - an epic whirlwind to New Orleans, Chicago and back to California with distances upwards of 700 miles per day -
was nicely constructed for the car traveler. Perhaps the wagon trails were well suited for the alteration. But Asia, and to some extent Europe, were built up first for pedestrians, and roads had to be added to these towns after people already set up shop and home.
Road trips are just not the same here.
But I had heard the Japanese chant Ganbatte! (Good luck/Perservere!) so many times practicing for the Teiksaii that I felt parking to catch the next train would be blasphemy to the Japanese religion of hard work. I
carried on in my trusty four door turd. Napoleon seemed to hold up well; gas mileage was good, air conditioning worked when I needed it, and other than a slight shake when idle, the engine purred with catlike horsepower. I couldn't help but worry about
impending car trouble, though. Nothing worse to spoil a sunny day.
By the time I reached Aso-san I was already tired; an enkai (Japanese drinking party) the previous night had left my body reeling and in need of recovery. To top that, I was fasting for Yom Kippur, so I had not the benefit of sustenance to help cure my mild hangover.
Amber met me at a train station and continued the drive, her leg just beginning, mine entering its 7th hour.
I never had minded driving, though. For many, controlling the car is the rationale behind the love of driving, but for me it was a replenishing activity, feeling the open road with the windows down and music blaring.
For me, driving itself was a worthwhile activity.
Yet I had never before driven in a typhoon, so my love of driving was soon to have its heart broken.
The sheets of rain that Amber and I soon were to encounter may not have actually been part of a full fledged typhoon, but it was by far the worst weather I have ever encountered. Bolts of lightning lit up the sky like fireworks, and the rain poured down on us like waves crashing on the shore.
With National Road 266 into Amakusa bearing little in the way of street lighting and roads suitable for a two-seater bicycle, the chances of an accident with an oncoming car, or worse, a windshield-first dive into the ocean to our left, guarded only by thin metal railing the height of a flower pot, seemed high.
I tried not to concentrate on the road.
"Do you think this is a hurricane?" Amber said to me innocently, the way your kid might ask you to read them a bed-time story. I had to laugh, and then pull over, because the rain had become so strong that my windshield-wipers could no longer match its might.
We stopped to take our final phone calls. Mine was a call from a friend in Wales, hers was to her mother. It dissapointed me that my fate would be sealed her, in the far off islands of Amakusa, western Kyushu. I would have liked to have been bungy-jumping or sky-diving or doing some dangerous drug.
We soon realized that the downpour was not about to stop for us or anything else, and if we were to survive this entropy, we would have to carry on before the roads flooded over. Slowly, carefully, I inched Napoleon out into the road, hoping that I had seen all oncoming traffic through my windshield, covered in a inch-think layer of liquid.
We were spared then and for the rest of the drive, though we paced along at hare-like speed. It was two seemingly endless nail-biting hours before we made it to Hondo-shi, the largest city of the Amakusa islands and Amber's home. Neither one of cared what time it was; we had arrived, safe and relatively sound.
So when I woke up in the morning, drained and bewildered by a day driving as many hours as an investment banker works, I picked my guidebook and decided to do it again. Amber had to teach English grammar to 18 year old boys while they stared at her breasts, so I needed something to keep myself occupied. A shower and some An-pan (Japanese roll filled with red-
beanpaste) and I was on my way.
I headed south down 266, Shimoshima (Lower Amakusa) Island's only route linking Hondo and the smallest "City" in Japan, Ushibuka. It's just like Japan to label cities and towns so rigidly, calling one a city and another a town, for seemingly irrelevant reasons. I wouldn't know or even care to, but I wouldn't be surprised if the Japanese had a complex rubric more detailed than merely population to determine
whether a community can be labeled a city of not. In any case, Ushibuka is considered Japan's smallest city, but it looked more like a seaside town to me, industrialized yes, but still with a rather homely feel. The city's newly contstruced bridge may also have to do with its acceptance into the elite group of "Japanese city". The bridge was designed by the same man who spent time (mere minutes, perhaps) on Kansai Airport near Osaka,
which is sinking and soon may be a worthless expanse of concrete surrounding the flight control tower. If his work at Kansai is any indication, Ushibuka's future, or at least the future of its bridge, does not look bright. I saw the bridge after a stroll around the town windy alleyways, where my car was a burden to the local fisherman and housewives trading gifts. I got out and walked and was better for it. The water crept so close to the shops and it reminded
me of Venice, though by no means was Ushibuka as memorable. It had a quaintness to be sure, but for some reason I wanted to find a white-sandy beach, not a smoked-fished smelling port town.
To find one, I was told I would have to travel northwest, past Amakusa town (I wondered why a dingy old town like it could bear the namesake of such a beautiful island group) and Kawaura town. Switching to National Road 389 was the first step, and then I was off, passing slow farming flatbeds and burning my tires through dank tunnels and lush green valleys. Much of the journey was next to the sea, offering seascaping views of nearby Nagasaki
prefecture. Sometime long ago, Dutch colonists had washed up on these shores, devirginizing Japan out of the dark ages of homogenaity. Kyushu has always been the most culturally diverse of the Japanese archipelago, and it had been brought to my attention that Amakusa, being furthest west, was often the first line of absorption. I passed a pristinely white Catholic Church and realized the rumor was true.
I stopped whenever I felt like it, to heed nature's call, grab a soda or take a picture. Travelling alone had always appealed to me for this reason; I could come and go as I pleased. I could eat or sleep or fart whenever I wanted to, though the latter was unihibited with a select group of friends.
I scoped out other small fishing villages, photographed the Reihoku capes, bought fresh sushi from a local market, and stumbled upon squid drying like shirts on a clothesline. The rain had subsided for the day, and I enjoyed the most breathtaking landscapes under clear skies.
By 2 O'Clock I was back in Hondo, having circled the small island at my own leisurely pace. It made me happy to have covered so much ground so early in the day, but as I sat down to watch the rest of the baseball game, I knew that fatigue would soon overcome me. It may have been my first chance to watch American baseball in some time, but it wasn't the A's so I missed the game's final pitch.
