Nihon News Part XIV

No, this is not one of the long-lost chapters I never completed. Despite all my good intentions, those will likely never see the light of day. What you are about to read is an account of my recent visit to Japan, February 12 to March 12, 2005, but before I begin, let me recap the interim for those who last heard from me when I sent out Nihon News XIII.

The impatient folks out there can just skip to the pictures. They are chronologically ordered.

I had applied for the permission to do civil service instead of the mandatory military service while still in Japan. During the wait for the civil service commission to decide on my eligibility I worked for what was then Stratec Medical and now is part of Synthes, Inc., dividing my time between research on resorbable polymers and the other random work that temps do. In November 2003 the folks in Thun decided I was eligible for civil service; in December they refused to allow me to fulfill my obligation in a children's home in India with Inter-Mission, citing a lack of experience and training on my part. I had counted on this assignment enough to forego applying for a JET position, which would have brought me back to Japan in an Assistant Language Teacher position in mid-2004. With both those doors closed, I began my civil service in the Adullam old people's home in January and never looked back. I began with some apprehension but soon extended my service to the maximum length as I gained appreciation for the residents and experienced the joy of serving them and even meeting them on Sundays, when I'd help wheel them out of church before our service began. At that time I moved from Liestal to Basel, close to the old people's home, and closer to most of my friends. As my service drew to a close, I began to look for a job and found it challenging, because no advert ever looked for a materials scientist. I had to guess which ones might be looking for someone with my qualifications, finally finding two interested companies in Magnetische Prüfanlagen GmbH, located in Reutlingen, Germany, and Nanosurf AG, located in Liestal. If you type my name into Google these days, the Nanosurf website will show up first, and there you will find that I'm employed there as an Area Sales Manager, which means it is my job to stay in touch with a selection of our distributors and to keep an eye on sales and promotion efforts, supporting them where needed. I also get to write texts for brochures and other publications and do some of the layout work on leaflets. At nearly twenty employees the company is small, which affords me insight into many different aspects of operating a business, and cultivates a familial atmosphere. The scanning probe microscopes we manufacture and sell ensure I stay reasonably up to date in the materials field and give me a close view of what is happening in nanotechnology. I was originally hired to work with our European distributors, but as a result of some internal changes I have been assigned responsibility for Japan, which brought about this year's visit, where I combined two weeks of business with two weeks of vacation.

So gather round me, everybody, as I tell my tale.

The first heralds of the coming trip were my attempts to follow the anti-jet lag diet, which friends of mine strongly recommended, and consists of dividing the day into protein (breakfast and lunch) and carbs (dinner). I ate without regard to caloric intake on Wednesday and Friday, and tried to stay below 800 calories on Thursday, though I have no idea how I'm supposed to count. The most significant result was that Dad probably spent most of the next week finishing up my protein-rich casserole – the diet didn't affect me much. But I blame the little jet lag I experienced on my failure to sleep on the plane, watching the second half of “Shall We Dance” instead.

By the time Lukas Howald and I reached the Choyokan Honke, our ryokan for the first two nights, my arm was sore from pulling my suitcase around Tokyo, but the sprawling two-story tiled inn amidst highrises made up for the effort. In order to ward off sleep, we headed to the Tokyo Dome city nearby and ate yakitori (grilled meat on a small bamboo spear) and oden (cooked – uh, stuff). The yakitori guy was a young whippersnapper drinking coke he'd bought at the neighboring KFC, the oden vendor an aging smoker drinking his own sake to keep warm. During the whole meal, traffic raced by and two men competed for the attention of passersby with their megaphones. We returned via a restaurant where we had tea and dessert and spent the rest of the afternoon resting. For dinner, we bypassed the establishment advertising “Coffee & Booze” and entered the Takanoya, where the staff seemed to have fun trying to explain the menu to us. I ended up with a fish head and a potato salad and ordered a glass of Nigorishu at the end of the meal, a type of sake with leftover rice particles floating within, giving it a strong, earthy, almost bitter flavor. They served it in a slender glass they filled until it overflowed into the high-rimmed saucer. It looks stylish, but nets you sticky fingers.

Monday began with a traditional Japanese breakfast at Choyokan Honke and continued with a fax from our distributor, Matsuda-san from Tec Corporation, telling us we wouldn't meet until 1:30pm, so Lukas and I headed past the Tokyo Dome to the Koishikawa Korakuen garden, where a variety of birds like the mejiro, a green sparrow-sized bird with a ring of white around its eyes, flew back and forth among the blossoming plum trees. The formal garden design and the reigning quiet provided a stark contrast to the noisy chaos of the surrounding metropolis. Even the highrises look serene when viewed from the small hill where vestiges of an old fortune-telling hall slumber in the shade of the surrounding pines, and the only outside noise penetrating into the garden was that of the roller coaster racing down its tracks.

I won't bore you with details of our business that afternoon. Suffice to say that we visited two labs at Tokyo University and admired Matsuda-san's kaanabi, the GPS car-navigation system that even announced the highway toll as we passed through the ETC lane.

We boarded the 11:13 Shinkansen to Nagoya the next day and changed to a train to Gifu, where Matsuda-san searched until he found a Hinomaru taxi that took us to the Nagase Integrex works off in the Muge river valley. The Nanosurf-Nagase relationship began several years ago, when Nanosurf attempted to register the Nanosurf name in Japan and found that Nagase had already registered it, albeit for another product. The only way to obtain rights to our name was with the kind assistance of President Nagase, who welcomed us together with his secretary Kaiden-san and his chief engineer Itazu-san. We briefly presented our latest microscope and a coming prototype and then were led on a tour through the halls where Nagase's high-precision grinding machines are designed, developed, and built. A taxi brought us back to Gifu, where we checked into our hotel before Nagase-shacho picked us up for an entertaining regal dinner at a traditional Japanese restaurant, complete with tasty but offbeat delicacies like sake drunk from a crabshell and edible flowers. From there, he took us to a snack-bar, where shochu, a liquor usually made from sweet potatoes, and karaoke awaited us. Nagase-shacho had bought yakiimo, hot sweet potatoes, from a street vendor on the way after I had mentioned I liked them, and Lukas's mention of okonomiyaki meant Nagase-shacho had some delivered to the snack-bar – true Japanese hospitality. After Nagase-shacho and our hostess had sung a few songs, I gave a stirring rendition of Tears in Heaven – think Barry White meets William Hung – but Lukas managed to avoid singing by claiming that he only played the cello. I'll have to remember that one. I wonder if “I only play the kazoo” works.

The next day we headed back to Nagoya, where we installed our Mobile S microscope at the Nagoya Institute of Technology. Every move I made, every installation step and every step toward obtaining a measurement, was diligently recorded with a video camera that looked like someone had pinched it from a film studio. Because of having to return to Tokyo that afternoon, we declined Professor Tanaka's suggestion of visiting a sake bar, but we did eat lunch with him and Professor Kamiya at the university.

Thursday Lukas and I strolled through Asakusa, where an intoxicated ojisan (middle-aged guy) serenaded the carp from a bridge in the temple garden, before joining Matsuda-san to visit our customers at Riken, a large national physics and chemistry research institute, showed what we had developed since our last visit and saw what they were working on. The two of us ate halfway home at Ikebukuro and sent pictures home to Nanosurf from a cubicle in a manga and internet café. Back at the Sakura Ryokan Lukas had been transferred to a room with breathable air, and so we decided against looking for another accommodation.

The next day we headed to Shinagawa, where we demonstrated atomic force microscopy and scanning tunneling microscopy at a seminar that Professor Yoshimura from the Toyota Technological Institute was holding at the curiously named Curian Center. We had arrived a bit early and stopped for a hot drink at Starbucks, where the Tazo chai tea was cheaper than in Switzerland, but they wouldn't give you a large cup with only one teabag for the price of a small cup. Yes, even in Japan Starbucks has spread like the red weed, despite their adherence to a non-smoking atmosphere and the Japanese propensity for smoking. Matsuda-san invited Yoshimura-sensei and the two of us for a dinner of varied shrimp, sashimi, and hot sake, after which Lukas and I headed to the Independence bar in Ikebukuro to listen to the Quadra saxophone quartet play standards and original compositions and, finally, for a woman in the audience, the most deliciously out-of-tune version of “Happy Birthday to You” I have ever heard.

Saturday was a day off, and we met up with Mrs. Kaori Terashima, whom Lukas knew from when her husband was a researcher at the University of Basel. She took us on a tour of the Yokohama harbor, which looked dreary in the rainy cold that soon drove us inside a restaurant in Chinatown. From there we walked to Motomachi, the local shopping district, and on up to the hill overlooking the harbor, which still looked dreary. Had the weather been more inviting, we would have probably spent more time in Yokohama, but we'd had enough of the rain and headed back to Tokyo. I stopped to buy J-pop CDs in Shibuya and met Lukas back at the ryokan. We had dinner at an inconspicuous nearby shop that served cheap grilled nishin fish that flaked off the bones at the touch of a chopstick, free refills on the green tea. Looking back, I am glad I didn't know at the time that nishin meant herring, or the meal might have lost some of its exotic goodness.

The next morning I rose early and caught the train to Honda, where the new, spacious, and inviting church building of the congregation I used to worship with at the Oyumino chapel now stood. It was my first meeting with old friends during this trip, meeting the Sonedas, two of the Miyashitas, Sachiko-san, Dedachi-san, Mizuho, and many I only remembered by sight. How encouraging to meet and talk after so long an absence and realize that though time and distance separate us, the friendship remains!

I had lunch at a small restaurant in Honda, where the slow service meant I caught most of a karaoke show on TV and heard an imitation of the uguisu bird, a type of nightingale, that gave our JR station its name, Uguisudani, or nightingale valley. (They play uguisu sounds on the platform because no self-respecting uguisu goes there anymore.) I got off in Chiba to look for the eighty one jazz club. It was closed, so I thought I'd get home quickly and be able to write cards and prepare for the next day, but on the way to the station I saw three pairs of people reading something aloud. Stopped by the traffic light, I caught some of the words and realized they were talking about Jesus. I snapped a photo of the rare sight and walked past just as the one finished, then I figured that buying them a drink from one of the twenty-six vending machines along the train line might be the nice thing to do. I brought an oolong tea to the one who had read to their obvious surprise, upon which they suggested we go to their meeting room for a snack and conversation. I acquiesced, and it wasn't until we arrived that I found out theirs was the unification church. Pictures of the Reverend Moon and his wife, a mass wedding, and a congregation waving flames beneath a tree full of "angel lights" adorned the staircase. That's what I got for being nice. They gave me a questionnaire to fill out and a self-introduction sheet and asked me questions, first about Switzerland, then about heaven and hell. It was hard to understand and harder to make myself understood, and I'm ashamed to admit their sincerity dwarfs mine. I ended up explaining sin and grace and forgiveness as I understood it as best I could, but don't know what came across. It was 9pm by the time I boarded the train back to Tokyo – they kept asking questions. They were very friendly throughout, but I wish I could have somehow managed to leave at six, when I first signalled my intent to leave. They were good at ignoring it, tag-team style. However, had I left, I would not have been able to explain my beliefs. Trouble is, it got me home late.

Matsuda-san picked us up at eight for the visit I had most anticipated, the one to Nippon Steel Corporation (NSC) and the NSC subsidiary, Nippon Steel Techno Research (NSTR), which Nihon News readers would be most familiar with had I been more consistent in writing. Ohashi-san had reserved a room for a presentation of both Nanosurf AG and our Mobile S microscope, an exciting prospect, but I was more excited to see all the familiar faces attending, my supervisor Sasai-san and Yamamura-san, both from the Steelmaking Research lab like Ohashi-san, and Asai-san, Mizuno-san, Ohta-san, and Suzuki-san, all from NSTR. Tanaka-san from Materials Characterization was the only person present I had not previously met. After a nostalgic kareeraisu – curry rice – at the cafeteria we measured on some samples at the NSTR electron microscope group sample preparation room, which despite some ventilation noise and draft went well. Every now and then another familiar face would pass, some stopping to briefly chat, some, like the ever diligent Komatsu-san, simply smiling and greeting before continuing with their work. After the demo, we brought the microscope to Matsuda-san's car and bid him farewell; Lukas and I stayed to have a look at Suzuki-san's JET Resonance Enhanced Multi-Photon Ionization Time-Of-Flight Mass Spectrometer, a piece of equipment as large and impressive as the name suggests. JET REMPI TOF MS for dummies: It can analyse exhaust gases real-time for specific noxious compounds. I hope I at least remembered that correctly!

We joined Oe-san, Asai-san, Mizuno-san, Takahama-san, and Suzuki-san for dinner at the Futtsu Club, the restaurant on the NSC premises, where we progressed from the first beer, which was free because it was but Monday, to a richer, heavier ginka kogen beer, white wine, red wine, and finally sake. Of course, the alcohol was accompanied by food of the aquatic variety. We attempted to invite the NSTR folks, but considered it a success to be able to settle for paying half the bill in an amiable compromise. Mizuno-san, who hadn't touched the alcohol, was kind enough to drive us to the Aqualine bus stop at Kaneda.

On Tuesday, we packed and headed to the hotel near the BigSight exhibition site to prepare for the nano tech 2005. We met Matsuda-san at the booth and set it up, using decorations that we bought at the 100 yen-shop. The most extraordinary of these was a ceramic manekineko, a cat waving a welcoming paw, which made Matsuda-san laugh when he saw it the next day. I doubt it did much good, though, considering that over 10'000 visitors showed that day, but we always had enough staff to handle those interested in our booth. The standout moment was when Monsieur Baumgartner, directed to our booth by David Ziltener from NanoEurope, the European equivalent to the nano tech, interviewed me for what was to be a news snippet for the télévision suisse romande. Unfortunately for Nanosurf (but fortunately for me), his contribution was apparently never aired. The day ended with an Executive Reception, which meant we ate a bunch and talked to the two representatives from Koyo Precision Instruments and to the other Swiss, David Ziltener and Felix Moesner, the Science and Technology Attaché of the Swiss Embassy in Tokyo.

Thursday was another typical exhibition day, welcoming visitors and visiting other booths. In the evening I took a train north to Saitama, where I visited Professor Mizuno, who organizes the postgraduate internships for EPFL graduates like myself. I presented Nanosurf and our products, and he presented his mechatronic research interests, of which the antivibration systems and the tactile simulations were most memorable to me, the former because we use antivibration equipment for our microscopes, and the latter because of the strange sensation of feeling not the actual smooth surface of a plastic tape but an electronically generated roughness. Huxley's feelies suddenly seemed much closer to reality, but I wonder how long it will take to simulate the taste of something like the tofu Mizuno-sensei and I shared at the restaurant near the Kita-Urawa station.

With its over 15'000 visitors, Friday topped the Thursday tally even as the exhibition began winding down. I still visited booth upon booth and still tried to welcome visitors in Japanese, though I shied away from shouting “Irasshaimase!” at the top of my lungs. Toward the end of the day I won a white lab coat from wdb, a Japanese recruiting company, which I passed on to David Ziltener for his four-year-old, who apparently took to playing ghost with it. Scary ghost indeed, clad in a recruiting company lab coat! After taking down the booth, I picked up my baggage at the hotel and boarded the Yurikamome (“seagull”), the driverless commuter train connecting the reclaimed land of Ariake to mainland Shinbashi. By nine thirty, I had arrived at the NSC dorm in Futtsu, where I talked with Yamada-san, Suzuki-san, and Mizuo-san before unpacking my gear, doing laundry, and relaxing in the common bath.

I was up early on Saturday to pack my suitcase to be sent to the youth hostel I'd stay at before flying out two weeks later. The Japanese takkyubin companies allow the sender to indicate the day and time of delivery, a kind of poste restante without a post office. I also had a parcel to send with the regular mail, but just before leaving for the post office, Tomosada-san from the dorm staff called up and came to visit. He chauffeured me to the post office and to the mall, where he invited me for lunch. After returning to the dorm, I cycled over to the Katos with one of the dorm bikes, arriving later than I had told them, relieved to see they had not waited with eating. There was food left, though, and I had a second tasty lunch – salmon, rice, seaweed, and sashimi. Yoshiko played “Sakura, sakura” on the shamisen and then let me have a try. The notation is a mimicry of the three strings of the instrument and gives the finger position on each string, but not the length of the note, which reveals how artificial notation is for traditional instruments, where songs are learnt by imitation of the previous generation. Hiromi was down with bronchitis, so she kept her distance. Her mother told me to drink a lot of green tea in order to not catch a cold myself.

In the evening a good dozen gathered in the dorm lounge for an old-time gaijin party like the ones Anna and I used to host. Some, like Yamada-san, were gaijin party veterans; some had arrived at Nippon Steel after I had left, and some, like Sato-san and Tsuri-san, were friends that had come out because I had invited them. Everyone brought food or drinks. Tomosada-san brought “hors d'oeuvres” that lasted the whole party, Mizuno-san brought a fondue mix and a baguette, Yoshino-san brought beer, and there was more I can't remember. If I have one regret, it is that I could not spend more time talking with individual friends, but even so, after hours of talking, jesting, eating, musical performances, and Yoshino-san ragging the first and only Nippon Steel music club performance he ever attended, I dropped on my bed satisfied with how the party had gone.

The next morning Koji Hirano and Yamada-san met me and Yamada-san gave me a ride to the Aohori train station. The MP3-player in his car played a steady stream of 1980's J-pop, superior to English-language 80's pop only in one aspect: I couldn't understand the lyrics. I boarded the train with my camera bag and my backpack, stuffed with all the gear I thought I might need in the coming two weeks, and headed to the Honda chapel once more. The new chapel also meant there would be room to dump my backpack in the entrance without it getting in the way. I arrived just as a wave of children was leaving after their Sunday school, their parents coming only to pick them up. Even without these families attendance at this chapel reaches about 100 on Sunday mornings, a gigantic number for Japanese churches. Although Nagata-san, the pastor who had e-mailed me a map to Honda and had been preaching at another church the previous Sunday, was present, Daniel Lee, a Korean guest preacher, spoke, which meant the Japanese was simpler and easier for me to grasp. I struggled more with understanding the four volunteers that had helped out at the Niigata earthquake and told of their experiences. Singing is easier: you just sing the syllables and try not to think about not knowing what you're singing.

The afternoon I spent shopping in Tokyo. In Kappabashi I even found me a pair of split-toed flexible rubber boots that I had been looking for, and when the size turned out to be just a bit too small, I convinced myself they fit anyway and bought them. Back in Switzerland I found they were too uncomfortable to fit anyway, but I am consoled by being able to pass them on to Kathryn, who will start a new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles footwear trend in New York for me. And I'll just buy a new pair next time I'm in Japan. Ninja-Turtledom can wait.

I carried all my belongings across the city to Shinjuku, where I checked into the Shinjuku Green Plaza. First, I received a key for a shoe locker and deposited my Swiss military boots there – the worst shoes for Japan because it takes five minutes to tie and untie them, but polyvalent enough to still merit being the only shoes for the next two weeks. Then, I paid in advance for the night and received a key for a locker for the rest of my belongings that fit around my wrist in an adjustable rubber strap. I found my locker, number 3005, opened it, and retrieved the bath towel, boxer shorts, and linen tiestring robe. After undressing and changing into the provided garb, I shut the locker. There was still the problem of neither my camera bag nor my backpack fitting into the locker, the ample height of which was countered by its meager width of fifteen centimeters. I handed the backpack to a receptionist against a numbered tag, but since they didn't accept responsibility for valuables, I took my camera bag to my cot and set it next to my pillow. Then I set out for the bathing area, comprising a large hot bath, three saunas, a cold bath, and an open-air hot bath with TV. Just before wandering out to steal a glance at nighttime Tokyo from the sixth floor you pass the lone women in the bath complex, busy working the tired muscles of their two customers, but I figured if I lazed around long enough in the baths and the saunas – and I ended up spending over ninety minutes there – I'd be beyond mellow and fall asleep in no time. So I returned to cot 3005, still toasty warm, crawled in, and closed the woven blind behind me. This was my empire for the night, two cubic meters of molded polyurethane or PVC in a 70's design with a minuscule TV protruding from the top and an alarm console to the right. The next guy would sleep one meter above me, or next to me, separated from my snores only by two flimsy sheets of coarse woven fabric.

I don't know if I had a neighbor, nor if he snored, because I did indeed fall asleep quickly, but that didn't prevent my back from waking up in a bad state. The walk to the train station took me past eerie side alleys that had been bustling with thrill-seekers the night before, a line of players in front of the pachinko parlor the only evidence that the lull would soon end. The Yamanote line that circles Tokyo took me to Harajuku, where I headed straight for the Hiestand Swiss bakery for some overpriced whole wheat rolls and Silserli. Outside, beside the pedestrian overpass, two guys were directing a shoot with three girls dressed in school uniforms, or rather, their fashion-savvy adaptations thereof. On the other side, in front of Yoyogi park, a group of youths dawdled about, half of them also carrying sizable video cameras. Maybe they were waiting for some outrageous goth tart fashion to trip by on platform shoes. I'd seen that before and entered the park, passing beneath the largest wooden torii gate in Japan. After a long stop reading Les Misérables by a pond in the Meiji garden, pausing time and again to try and take a better picture of the birds alighting on branches around me, I made for the Meiji shrine. Everyone approaching it ritually washed their hands, so I took the dipper and poured some of the water over mine. It was cold. I waited until nobody was looking to wipe my hands on the seat of my pants, a triumph of personal comfort over cultural sensitivity. Few visitors peopled the wide open enclosure paved with light grey flagstones. The Japanese visitors walked up to the main hall, tossed a coin into the offering box, and clapped their hands twice. The others snapped photos and posed with the two kimono-clad girls. On my way out I paused, because three Japanese ladies stood beneath the torii, hands together in front of their inclined torso, paying reverence to the late emperor Meiji who lies enshrined there, deified posthumously. It made me wonder if the current royal family ever ponders the possibility of their corpse being worshiped in a few decades and what it might be like to live with the weight of such a future. I left the garden and walked down the crazy real-life catwalk of Takeshita dori, an amused smile on my lips, then over to Omotesando and along that until it crossed the fabled Aoyama dori. I started down Aoyama dori with some anticipation that soon gave way to disappointment – more Starbucks, McDonald's, and useless fashion shops where the prices are proportional to the distance between the displayed items.

The Yamanote line again took me across half its loop to Tokyo main station. I had hoped to visit the imperial gardens, but they were closed already. Tokyo Tower poked its orange zebra finger above the skyline, so I walked in its direction. I came across a foreigner on his cell phone and had to think that going native in Japan no longer means Ninja Turtle boots, straw hats, samurai swords, and home-made sake and natto. It means cycling in a suit on the sidewalk with a screechy bike, smoking and talking on your cell phone, on your way to the pachinko parlor, or clacking along in cowboy boots, a skirt that barely allows a glimpse of your quads, a leather jacket and a Louis Vuitton handbag, oversized glasses with no apparent optical purpose adorning half your face. Or using hairspray on the train station platform – as a guy. Or dressing up in camouflage for photo shoots. Or buying a more lightweight cell phone just to be able to have more lucky charms dangling and jangling on it. Or finding the apparent lack of zoning regulations bearable. Maybe by day I would have been able to distinguish some sort of order from atop the Tower, but at night I saw neither chaos nor order, just a uniform sea of lights stretching to the horizon in all directions, broken only by the black of the Tokyo Bay to the southeast and the brighter lights around Ginza. And every so often I wondered what would happen to that 333-meter tower in an earthquake.

After a night at the Dandy capsule hotel, which differed from the Green Plaza by offering a smaller bath complex, a larger selection of complimentary beauty products, a different cot number, and two free porn channels (they reminded me of elaborate repulsive animatronics and I thought some mechanical vuhTWEEE/click-vuhTWEEE/click soundtrack with faint inanimate wheezing and whumping in the background would have been much more appropriate), I caught the Tohoku Shinkansen and three hours and 600 kilometers later, I was in Hachinohe. My bus was to leave in three hours. On my walk to the waiting room I caught the eye of a Japanese girl who broke into a smile. I kept on, smiling at how life as a sore thumb can be amusing, and found a seat in the waiting room that faced an inflatable ostrich on skis. The ostrich's belly was a stumpy express train and the whole contraption part of the Japan Rail's Japan Snow Project promotion drive. I was thinking how cool it would be to have one of those either for seaside vacations or for a decorative bad-taste-fetish conversation piece in my apartment when something bright white flashed in the corner of my eye. Sure enough, the girl from before had followed me and came over to talk. She had spent a year in Maine (so cold!) and was eager to practice English (“Why did you come here? Where are you from? What are you doing here?”). We talked for a bit until her boyfriend called, and I couldn't help but think that from now on I'd have second thoughts about suggesting someone study abroad in the USA for fear of them coming back sounding, like, oh my God, you know, horrible!

The bus driver seemed relieved to see me and pointed to the only foreign name on his passenger list, smiling when I nodded that he could cross it off. When the time came to leave, he picked up his microphone and began: “This is the bus for Komaki Onsen, Oirase Gorge Onsen, Yachi Onsen, and Towadako Oirase Onsen. Time of departure is 2:15. Please be informed of the schedule: we will arrive at Komaki Onsen within about 40-45 minutes, where we can take a little break and then leave from there at 3:00. It takes about one hour to Oirase Gorge Onsen, where those staying there can descend. Guests of the Yachi Onsen will have a bus there that leaves at 4:10 and takes 30 minutes, arriving at,” he paused to calculate, “well, a good half past four. Those for the Towadako Oirase Onsen can wait in the lobby for a pick-up service. This is the shuttle bus to pick up guests of Komaki Onsen, Oirase Grand Hotel, Yachi Onsen, and Towadako Oirase Onsen. Passengers for these destinationes need not change buses until Oirase Grand Hotel. We will leave at 2:15.” A crooked smile wrinkled his leathery face. “Well, that's everything – but do you have any questions?” Some of the passengers chuckled, and he sat down satisfied. The bus ride took us for a ride through rolling hills and fields of untouched snow, past cities with frozen canals and snowdrifts, to the frightening concrete building of the Komaki Onsen and, after the driver had asked if everyone who'd gone to the toilet had returned, on to the Oirase Gorge Onsen. Up to then the roads had been mostly clear of snow, and the piles on the side not higher than a meter. Then we left Oirase with a smaller bus and the drive turned into something out of a Playstation game, taking us through a two-meter ditch of snow, branches sticking out of the white walls that delimited the roads, road signs often nearly buried or just minimally uncovered, like the mirrors at the curves where only the convex reflector and the upward pointing ATTENTION sign beneath floated in the snow as though mounted with a hook and nail. We passed a snowblower and several closed off roads on our way to the Yachi Onsen, where I was led to my ten-tatami room that had a view of the kind of soft, feminine forms of snow that make you want to hug and embrace it, to snuggle up to its vastness, but only because it's warm inside and because your eyes can't tell your brain that if you laid down to make a snow angel, you would just succeed in burying yourself in a frigid disillusionment of cold wet snow.

The room was five centimeters higher than me and equipped with a TV with eight Japanese channels and a western bed, two items that looked as out of place as a cuckoo clock in a Le Corbusier building. This was after all a place people would visit to escape urban craziness, to soak up traditional Japan in the sulphurous hot bath, pad around in slippers and yukata, eat the shioyaki iwana fish on a stick, and sit in the dining room after dark waiting for the weasel-like ezo-kuroten to poke its head out of the snowdrifts. After everyone left, it finally did appear, its face white and the back of its head indeed the golden orange color that according to the photographs hung up inside the room must cover its entire body. By then it was past ten o'clock and I thought I'd be alone in the bath if I took a dip. Instead, I found two middle-aged men there and a younger man with his wife. They talked to me about the the Mt. Hakkoda death march, because the sake glass they used to drink the spring water bore the image of the soldier who earned his place in history by determining to die standing upright, leaning on his rifle. The lukewarm spring water tasted almost like tap water, except for an indeterminate flat tinge somewhere between salt and acid. It must not have been from the hotter 42-degree bath where you couldn't see your hand unless you stuck it out of the water but from the pipes feeding the less sulphurous 38-degree bath we were sitting in. The man from Saitama, whom I understood best, asked me where I was going next, and why I knew Japanese, and the young woman said things in a rapid-fire dialect I hardly understood to which I nodded and smiled. One by one they left, and after a bit more soaking I, too, retired.

The next morning I found a Japanese TV program that taught the audience English, and obscure cookspeak terms at that such as skillet and sauce pan and sweating vegetables and the differences between dicing and mincing, slicing and chopping, and simmering and boiling. I've called the thing a frying pan all my life, why teach a Japanese to call it a skillet or sauté pan? As soon as I entered the dining room I became a conversation piece. From Switzerland! Spent a year in Japan! Took a picture of the ten-chan! The attention one gets in Japan just from being white (especially outside of the large cities) is at once flattering and embarrassing. It is benign enough to make me think I wouldn't mind being a celebrity for a while and omnipresent enough to illustrate why being a celebrity can be annoying. In the end you get used to it and begin to wonder what's wrong when you're no longer drawing looks, and then think with some shame of the looks foreigners draw in Switzerland.

I left for the Oirase Gorge Grand Hotel, where I boarded the JR bus to Lake Towada. I was the only passenger aboard, but that didn't stop the disembodied female tour guide voice from telling me, in Japanese, about all the waterfalls I could barely see above the walls of snow hemming in the road. She also told me before each stop to tell the driver if I was getting off, except the stop where I wanted to, where she informed me of the ferries that ply the lake in summer, so I assumed the bus was going to stop without my telling it to. The bus rolled out of the gorge and turned left where the road made a T with the road circling the lake, sweeping leisurely past the bus stop. A bit puzzled, I figured it must have been the stop for another bus line, but the bus had left behind the three buildings at the T and was rolling along the lake with no signs of imminent civilization but the road and its signposts. I told the driver to stop at the next station, four kilometers from where I had wanted to get off. That meant a total of 18 kilometers to walk in just under five hours, not a problem under normal circumstances, but a bit of a squeeze considering my inclination to stop and take pictures along the way.

Up to the gorge I made good enough time to stop and eat half of my victuals in the lonely public toilet, the only place to offer protection from the biting gusts of wind coming in over the lake that whirled about the patchy cloud cover. The view of the lake had been restricted by the snow piled up alongside the road, and the situation didn't improve along the road through the gorge. The footpath lay impassable, buried under masses of downy snow, so I couldn't but follow the road, a four-meter swath of packed snow five centimeters deep. Every now and then I could catch a glimpse of the Oirase creek gurgling between snowy banks and around snow-capped boulders that looked like poofy marshmallow mushrooms. Down the first half of the gorge, the going was a bit slow, but safe, but in the lower half, just as I was starting to think that a hike a day of this sort would make my posterior something more like a Michelangelo creation while being loads more fun than liposuction, I slipped and fell smartly, fortunately on my Michelangelo project and not my camera I carried in front of me, but from there on I kept cursing my army boots and the slippery road. As if that was not enough, I had Neil Diamond's Solitary Man running through my head, whether I was walking (I'll be what I am), slipping (boo-doo-doo-wah), checking for cars (A solitary man), or taking pictures (boo-whee-ah, boo-da-woo-ee). It had replaced Blowin' In The Wind, which started after I bumped my head on a doorframe and wondered how many times a man must bump his head before he learns how to duck. I bumped my head twice on the bathroom light that evening, further postponing a conclusive answer to that question, and had to wiggle the naked bulb a bit to get it working again after the second impact.

The next morning, before boarding the bus for Aomori city, I took a final dip. I had just started to relax in the basin when a little old lady joined me, but it could have been a model and I wouldn't have cared any more. Lying naked and drowsy in warm water with a towel on one's head may be the best antidote to voyeuristic urges. Onsen – Japanese hot springs – revolve around relaxation and exude that atmosphere, antithetical to the preening and primping of the average bikini beach. More clothing doesn't always mean more decency.

For the most part of the drive the snow gleamed in the sun beneath a blue sky. My Aomori experience would lead me to conclude that there are only two modes to an Aomori winter: constant driving snow and bright sun. Either way, the snowblowers are out, supported locally by bulldozers. I guess that's one way to keep the people busy and off the bottle during a long winter.

Snow lay everywhere, even in the city of Aomori. Slush covered the square in front of the train station and snow compacted by countless boots paved the sidewalks with ten centimeters of hard and slippery white. I banged up my Michelangelo project yet again in front of the Aomori city post office. High school girls in their fur-lined suede moon boots, men in mackintoshes, and even ladies in high heels were doing better than I, which gave me, the Swiss, the sinking feeling of being beaten at my own game. It didn't help either that I was wearing more layers than the locals.

Another bus took me to the Sukayu ryokan, a large guest house close enough to the Hakkoda ski slopes to accept credit cards. Its main attraction is the Sennin-buro, or Thousand People bath, misnamed in view of the old Japan Rail poster hanging in the entrance hall where at the most 150 men and women had simultaneously squeezed into the basin, but still the largest wooden bath I have seen to date. Usually my first order of business in an onsen ryokan is to check out the tubs, but since my torso had broken out in an itchy rash (sweat, sulphur, laundry detergent, or a combination thereof) I only headed to the smaller bath called Tamanoyu and washed, then read until dinner. A ryokan employee brought a wide variety of traditional dishes, all delicious except for the Sazae, which my dictionary tells me is called “turbo” in English, but since in my world a turbo is an automotive component and in view of its taste of acrid scum I suggest renaming this shellfish “disturbo.” The cypress chopsticks couldn't cover the taste, but they made me feel like I was eating the foods of subtler tastes like the mountain root that can be made into a fluff of egg-white consistency off an onsen floor. I read some more after dinner, substituting the lighter fare of a Brian Palmer novel for Hugo's Les Misérables, and because between eight and nine men are not allowed in the Sennin-buro, it had turned dark by the time I entered the fabled bath. Aside from the main basin, two smaller baths stood closer to the entrances, one for the men and one for the women, separated by a board partition. Troughs, stools and buckets lined the walls near the entrance, ready for the visitor to rinse with hot water, and toward the far end hot water spouted from three bamboo pipes two and a half meters above the ground, offering a soothing massage for tired heads and shoulders. The hall was nearly empty. Only a few middle-aged men and myself moved like sloths from bucket to bath to massage and back to the baths. Once, despite the thick mist, I perceived a humanoid shape on the women's side, but because it never materialized in the large bath, I don't know if it wasn't just my eyes playing tricks on me. Before I left, I drank some of the spring water, which tasted like lemon juice without the citrus taste. Like just about everything in Japan that tastes or smells weird, it is supposed to be good for one's health, though I doubt a dentist would concur. It makes one's teeth feel rough and sticky like after drinking coke or eating an unripe banana.

At breakfast in the common dining hall I ended up opposite an obaasan – little old lady – of a different kind. She looked like sixty but claimed she was eighty and staying at the ryokan for 100 days at 110 Swiss francs a night, skiing every weekday, skipping the weekends when the slopes are crowded. Every May, she said, she went trekking in Hungary, and she had been helicopter skiing in Canada five times, gone trekking in the Pyrenees and in northern Sweden in February and just a few years ago taken the gondola to Piccolo Cervino near the Matterhorn, from where she skied over to the Breithorn and down the Italian side to Cervinia. She couldn't have stood taller than my shoulders, but this octogenarian made me feel like a little wimpy skinflint.

Once again, getting to the next ryokan required passing through Aomori. At least the skies were clear enough to see Mt. Hakkoda from the Sukayu parking lot and Mt. Iwaki from the bus, when the snow on the side of the road dipped enough to allow a brief glimpse of the landscape. The railway line between Aomori and Hirosaki passed through a wide plain, open and free, but bordered by comforting hills and mountains on all sides except for the slice to the north where the sea reaches inland. I could imagine living somewhere like that.

The clean and crisp Hirosaki train station welcomed me with the usual chorus of recorded female voices so ubiquitous you end up ignoring them all, even the important ones, like you would background elevator music. I started wondering whom the voices belonged to. Was I hearing dead people? Or listening to the preserved youth of a voice now ravaged by age and cigarette smoke? How would it feel if my biggest contribution to society was my voice anonymously informing millions each day that they are using the Yamanote line? How humbling to have a wider audience and a more lasting success than Jessica Simpson, but no recognition!

The leg from Hirosaki to the Aoni onsen brought home to me the value of planning my transportation ahead of time. During the last three days, I had been told that no train ran from Hirosaki to Kuroishi this time of the year and that one could only get to Aoni onsen by snowmobile. Proving the internet timetables right, the Konan line took me to Kuroishi, where after a lunch of salmon jerky, peanuts, and Pocari Sweat the Konan bus took me to the Nijinoko stop, where, as promised, a bus from the Aoni onsen picked me up. We did get into a snowcab, a rattlemobile that steered by controlling the speeds of the two caterpillar treads, but only to get to the top of a hill for a view of the surrounding mountains, in particular Mt. Iwaki, reigning over the plain with his laurel wreath of clouds. Aoni onsen lay in the yonder valley, at the end of a road so steep toward the bottom that they piped hot spring water there to melt the snow and allow the bus to safely navigate its way down. As usual, the lady showing me my room went to get an extra large yukata, which again made me wonder what they give those people that wear the XL versions of garments I have in S. Aoni ryokan consists of several disconnected wooden cabins, some of them lodgings and others baths. All of them make do without electric power save what is used in the main building for refrigerating the food. Oil lanterns hung from posts and candles nestled in recesses in the snow lined the walkways between the cabins and lit their interior. My room sat atop the kitchen on the second floor of the main building that contained one small bath, the common dining room, and the entrance hall with its wood fire and adjoining souvenir boutique, but I headed off to the rotenburo or open-air bath across the stream, eager to finally bathe outside in the snow. I was a tad disappointed to see that this was not an uncovered bath, but instead a roughly cubic wooden edifice with an entrance at the rear and the front wall removed, allowing a view of nature in the direction the water flowed out. The hot water splashed out of a bamboo pipe into a fifty-centimetre basin in the center of the rocky pool and overflowed from the basin into the pool, which along with the dripping snow and the gurgling stream nearby formed a lazy natural quatuor, always changing, always soothing. Sitting close to the central basin ensured a toasty warm bathing experience that ended inevitably in having to walk through the rest of the pool, where the melting snow maintained a cool temperature, to the changing room, a doorless annex where even the most vigorous toweling off couldn't prevent violent shivers. A dip in one of the indoor baths was the natural consequence. At dinner the owner of the ryokan came over and started talking, then handing out the sake, and the middle-aged woman next to me also began to joke around with me and the philosophy student Kawamura from Sendai across from me instead of only with her friends. She told me she loved me, holding a towel in front of herself and using her best twelve-year-old voice to say “old face, bad eyes, bad teeth, but cute heart,” then turned around and suggested her daughter for Kawamura, though she later admitted her having a child might be a small problem. She apologized the next morning, but I heard in her loquaciousness a pleasant echo of the stream outside. The dim oil lamps seemed to help everyone slow down and relax, but they smelled, especially in the individual rooms, and the gas heater radiated with such force that I hung my towels to shield myself from its heat, opened the window, and still felt warm as I nodded off.

The next day I took the train down the rugged west coast in a valiant and successful attempt to make it to Kanazawa. From Akita to Niigata the track followed the coast, with dazzling points of light dancing on the sea of Japan on one side and power lines on the other. The houses changed abruptly from the cheap painted sheet metal and vinyl siding in the north to wooden buildings, so prevalent in the town of Fuya I wondered if they had communal restrictions on other architectural types. All along the way, mountains stood like an endless ink painting of salt and pepper cones in a giant's sandbox. During the ride I had to use the train facilities, and found vivid proof of the age of my train in the Japanese style toilets. Undaunted, I squatted above the hole, elevated above the regular floor level by thirty centimeters (for reasons of plumbing, I presume), riding backwards. Just as I finished the train braked. Afraid of toppling off, I stood up and tried to get back to ground level, but I should have pulled up my pants first. They kept me from seeing just how far the porcelain projected into the void and from moving my leg far enough to avoid it. My right shin bashed into the rim at mid-height and scraped along it with the weight of my body on it until I jumped off with my left foot. Seven weeks later I can still see the contusions. Stupid? Yeah. Clumsy? Yeah. Last time I used a J-can on a moving train? Heck yeah!

Between Niigata and Echigo-Yuzawa the sun set behind swirly clouds, suffusing the atmosphere with a gentle orange light. I had boarded a Shinkansen, and because running a high-speed train though a mountainous area means tunnels I spent most my time staring out at a black wall instead of watching the sunset. I made it to Kanazawa after eight o'clock. While waiting for the bus to Izumi-cho I called my friend Ryosuke, whom I wanted to visit, but he was down with the flu. Neither of us felt that not meeting was a tragedy and that we would surely meet again somewhere, sometime. I also called my host family from three years ago, the Takatas, who had offered to let me stay in their house again, and told them I had arrived and was coming by bus. The bus soon rolled to its stop at the new circular bus terminal, where bus stops lined up along one side of a steel tube fantail that leapt from the station front to a torii gate that stood on posts of spiralling wooden beams and faced the street. I had no trouble finding the house and was welcomed by the whole family. The younger the family member, the more the three years showed. Otousan and Okaasan still looked the same, Kenji had filled out a bit, Shingo had grown tall and slimmed down, and Mika had turned from a little girl into a young woman. Mike (MEE-kay), a smart female cat named for the three colors in its fur, had joined Myuu, the tomcat that dislikes me, and Buni, the collie.

Sunday I visited the Samurai house (bukeyashiki ie) that I had cycled past every day during my three months in Kanazawa but never entered. Its sparse esthetics and its quiet made me want to stay longer, but padding around an unheated house in socks grows uncomfortable quickly. Once again the ability of Japanese architects to decorate and incorporate details without disturbing the simplicity of their clear lines fascinated me. If I ever build my own house, I'll want a lot of say its design.

I was to meet Otousan and Okaasan for a late lunch at the Apita department store where Okaasan had started working in a cake shop, but decided there was still time to swing by the Kenrokuen garden beforehand. It had not changed – or, more precisely, it had, because it looks different depending on the time of the year, but its effect on me had not changed. It still felt like a magical elsewhere, a window to the past despite the concession stands and a place of solitude despite the tour groups populating the place.

In the end Okaasan found me instead of me finding Okaasan's cake shop amidst all the other restaurants. Had I not been hungry for savory food her display would have made my mouth water. Their most popular cake at the time was the Baumkuchen, rolled around a birch log and sliced after baking. Otousan came a bit late because he was out looking at cars. As befits an engineer, he likes choosing a new car and does not mind the effort it takes, all the reading up on the topic and visiting Subaru dealerships (if I remember correctly, he was looking at getting a Forester). Okaasan can only understand it as a strange hobby, henna shumi, that means her car gets sold and she gets his old car every three years or so.

After a long lunch at the Chinese place in Apita Otousan took me to the train station, which was on the way to the dealership. I spent some time at BookOff deciding how many used J-pop CDs to buy. Back home we had dinner followed by shochu and amaretto, a cultural exchange of sorts.

Monday morning I headed out to the JAIST (Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) to speak with Dr. Tomitori about the upcoming exhibition in July, the STM'05 in Sapporo. The JAIST is out near Tsurugi, home to the Ishikawa insect museum and the Mt. Haku shrine, Shirayama jinja. Had I finished Nihon News 9, those would be familiar places to Nihon News regulars. The Hokuriku line rattles and rumbles there from Kanazawa, and at Tsurugi a shuttle bus takes visitors to the JAIST, which is off in the hills of Asahidai, perfect for single-minded study and research. After our STM'05 discussion, Dr. Tomitori's wife, Dr. Arai, took me on a brief tour of their labs and to her ultra high vacuum atomic force microscope, where one of our easyPLL plus boxes was not working with her IBM ThinkPad. Some comparing with other computers that were running with the easyPLL plus and many, many restarts finally got it working, though I am far from understanding what we really did. Even so, I savored the sweet victory over a stubborn computer. After lunch, Dr. Tomitori gave me the tour of their facilities, from the extensive analytical instrument collection to the library, where marble furnishings and a touch of classicism in the architecture showed that someone cared deeply about books. Though rather small, the library felt inviting and lent credence to its motto “Respect the Old, Discover the New” with a choice collection of original works.

Back in Kanazawa I visited the Ishikawa Foundation for International Exchange, where I had taken my Japanese lessons many years back. Only one of my three teachers still worked there, one having switched to another school and the other having taken a temporary leave to look after her ailing parents. So I spent some time talking with Tanaka-sensei and other teachers who remembered my class because they remembered Stefan Gächter constantly wearing his scarf. Of the regular employees, only Misato Takumi still worked there, and I only now found out she was Otousan's cousin's daughter. When I duly passed on her greetings to Okaasan, she said Takumi-san was always one of the most popular employees at IFIE among the exchange students because of her cute looks. Considering how limited interaction was with IFIE employees, it must have been popularity supermodel style – everybody knows her but nobody has ever talked to her.

The next morning I got up early and took the train to Kyoto. I bought a Pocari Sweat and asked the in-train bento saleslady why she kept changing her uniform. It had something to do with the concession company changing during the trip. I later asked her if riding the same stretch several times a day wasn't boring, but she immediately protested that meeting many different people was fun.

In Kyoto I stuffed my backpack into a coin locker and took the subway to the stop nearest the Notre Dame Women's College, from where I walked past a nature reserve to the Entsuji temple that Lukas Howald had recommended. I sat in the pavilion overlooking its garden for at least half an hour, just discovering new details beyond its famous borrowed landscape and soaking up the silence, broken only by the song of the uguisu, unrecorded this time, and, unfortunately, some construction noises in the distance. The temple is so far from the beaten path that few tourists venture there, the perfect choice for a slow day.

From there I walked to the Kiyomizudera, famous for its stilts supporting it on its hillside perch. The distance between the two temples was about 10 kilometers, much of it along the river, where middle-aged women walked their dogs and high school kids practised brass band music, interrupted periodically by the wind blowing their music stands down. The walk up the hill to Kiyomizudera soon turned into a walk between competing souvenir and food shops, a stark contrast to the unheralded Entsuji. The Kiyomizudera surprised me by incorporating Shinto structures – red gates, painted pagodas, and charm vendors – and even two rocks that were supposed to tell your marital future by whether you could walk from one to the other with your eyes closed. I didn’t even try. The main hall, the one on stilts, looked Buddhist: unpainted and dark inside. But I’m not enough of an expert to say if this is an unusual building complex overtly expressing Japanese syncretism or just a Shinto shrine labeled a temple. It feels more Shinto than Buddhist, and the Kiyomizu – clear water – in the name seems to support that. Whatever its nature, it offers a great view of the sunset over Kyoto and a splendid collection of wooden structures. (If you got this far, ask me for a bar of chocolate.)

I called Joël Kuster next. He had interned at Nippon Steel two years after me and had found a job at Koyo Seiko in the Nara prefecture, and had offered to put me up in the flat he and his girlfriend Yoko lived in. They were about to eat, so I had myself an Omraisu – yes, an omelet wrapped around rice – in the Kyoto train station before retrieving my backpack and following Joël’s directions to Kashihara. There, the officers at the Koban (police box) gave me directions to his apartment. We talked until it was so late that Yoko absolutely had to go to bed.

Joël had taken the next day off, so the two of us slept in. We took J-pop CDs he had inherited from another foreigner and listened to them on our drive to Akameshijuhachitaki. (I can understand the “shijuhachitaki” bit, which means “forty-eight waterfalls,” but the “Akame” – “red eyes” – is beyond me.) We first visited the dreary salamander museum, then walked about two kilometers up the valley alongside the stream that cascaded down waterfall upon waterfall. The mountains, though not high, rose steeply on either side, already green with vegetation. However, March is obviously not the top season. We hardly met anyone, the refreshment stands along the way were closed, and the souvenir vendors were particularly aggressive when we returned to the car. We may have been the only ones to buy Ninja-shaped cinnamon potato patties that day.

Yoko was a bit disappointed that Joël hadn’t brought any souvenir, but there really was nothing worth buying (apart from the edible Ninjas). The three of us went out for Okonomiyaki, sometimes termed “Japanese pizza,” or literally translated “fry what you like.” Batter is required, but beyond that anything goes: meat, cabbage, onions, garlic, noodles, ginger. Before eating out, we had looked at some of the answers Yoko’s English students had offered. I wish I had copies. I can only remember that the boy is wearing a tree – all the other gems I’ve forgotten. The trouble then was that I wanted to suggest good, meaningful phrases, which often conflicted by Yoko’s need to stay within what the kids had learned. Also, these were preparatory questions for a test to come, and passing the test was more important than trying to get the intricacies of the English language right. I’m glad I’m not a language teacher.

I got up at five the next day. Joël and Yoko were kind enough to drive me to the Yagi train station. In Kyoto I boarded the Shinkansen to Nagoya, where I changed onto the express to Nagano. The electronic display in the carriage not only announced the stops, but also explained local legends involving dragons and rocks in the river. I couldn’t understand the details, but I could understand that one of the stops was called Shiojiri, which, if I’ve got my characters straight, means salty butt. Is that because they have a relic of Lot’s wife? I’m not sure I want to know.

I finally finished “Les Misérables” on that train, and continued with Haruki Murakami’s “A Wild Sheep Chase.” It’s hard to imagine a starker contrast than that between Hugo’s romantic, idealized love without spoken communication and Murakami’s harsh realities of “I want you.” But then, Les Misérables is not about a girl with perfect ears and the quest for a sheep that may be ruling the world.

In Nagano I boarded the rickety Dentetsu train to Yudanaka, which first rolls along a valley and then up a large sloping plain in lazy serpentines. The bus took me up the alpine valley which on my last visit had been mostly covered in snow but now revealed copious amounts of ugly concrete reinforcing the sides. (My last visit here was to have been recounted in Nihon News IX.) I got off the bus and walked the remaining 30 minutes to the Korakukan onsen. Some spots the sun had touched, making them slippery, but as soon as the path left the road and went off into the forest, the going got easier. The hot water piped beneath melts the snow and makes for sure footing. Repairs meant that for parts of the way the path was replaced by metal sheets on scaffolding that snapped and banged under my weight. I checked into the ryokan and, after having been showed to my room, took my camera and headed for the monkey park. Here the Japanese snow macaques eat, climb on the webcam, chase each other, take hot baths, and generally frolic pretty much like humans. Screeches, mostly of the monkeys, sometimes of young female tourists, punctuate the quiet. Park wardens shovel the dung away from where humans walk and feed the monkeys at given times. I watched the monkeys and took pictures until closure time. After that, I walked back to the Korakukan, where I followed the monkeys’ example and took a hot bath in the waning sunlight. Across the valley I could see the monkey park employees head home.

Quiet descended on the valley. Actually, that’s not true – this valley is always quiet, since only very few motorized vehicles ever make it here, a park warden’s motorbike and some transport vehicles belonging to the inn. It’s more accurate to say that with dusk coming on I felt myself settling for the night, finally absorbing the quietness of this remote place.

Even though I was the only guest that night (the last time there must have been a dozen or more), I was treated to a large meal of local iwana fish and duck nabe, a type of pot stew. Side dishes included carp sashimi and a small helping of inago, grilled crickets. I was served by a wiry old man with a buzz cut and a towel wrapped around his head. After dinner I had another bath under the stars, alone with my FUKUCUP sake. I made the mistake of using the massage chair afterwards, which did more damage than good to my back.

I began the morning with another bath outside. Like every morning, the monkeys had come down from the mountainside and were skirting the bath, even sipping from the sulphurous water. Unlike the afternoon before, they didn’t run off, lying instead on the warm piping and even stealing the egg the old towelhead had been cooking in the spring water. Bathing amidst the monkeys sounds romantic, but loses a lot of that atmosphere if you have to watch out for their guano. I don’t remember that from the last time.

I paid Takefushi-san, whose family owns the inn. The last time I had interacted mostly with his younger sister Mariko Takefushi who had since moved to the US because of her husband’s business. The other sister, who had formerly run the Bonne Bouche bakery at the Kambayashi onsen, had moved to Shikoku. The people change, Korakukan doesn’t. I hope that continues. It would be an awful shame if it turned into another noisy ceramic tile wasteland.

March is dreary in Nagano. Aomori had been deep winter, Kyoto spring, but Nagano was caught in the desolate transition where the world is dead grass and concrete. I ate a 500-yen apple there but gave the 48 cherries for 12’000 yen a miss.

I was in a hurry to get to Tokyo, so I boarded a Shinkansen. Its trash cans were disused for fear of terrorists. Passengers were asked to use the trash cans on the platform, as though blowing up the platform was less dangerous. All it did to me was make me wonder how to blow up a Shinkansen most effectively. My reason for hurrying to Tokyo was my reservation at the Blue Note for a Crusaders concert, the first time for me at a top-level jazz club. I had romantic notions of intimate atmosphere and relaxed jazz, worth the 9500 yen to me. Inside, though, the Perrier glass cost 800 yen and the atmosphere was dominated by the iron girders supporting a hall seating around 200. I did the math and came up with close to $30’000 a night. That’s an industry, not a club. I took notes all throughout the set, which I’ll just copy down here. Skip them if you like.

The Crusaders walk in from the back – I guess the curtain behind the stage is one big fake. Joe Sample counts off “Free as the Wind” and the bass explodes against my sternum. Good old solid tenor-trombone richness with guitar and piano behind them. The trombonist has a red metallic instrument that matches his face when he soloed. Next, “Creepin,” off the Rural Renewal CD. (The two words rhyme in Joe Sample’s mouth, Rural Renural.) The trombonist is clearly better than Henderson: faster, more inventive, with a better grasp on the melody line. Wilton Felder manages the same bullhorn sound even on the soprano sax. I keep smelling either food or body odor, and for the first time I can think of, I wish a non-smoking establishment wasn’t. Joe Sample is soloing – Felder is gaping, the trombonist has sat down. The guitarist has a good interplay going with Sample. The next piece is one I recognize from my best-of-ish CD – either Spiral or Buck Stomp and Dance. I hope the guitar, bass, and drums get a solo sometime, too! They seem too good to be wasted on nothing but accompaniment. The Perrier, despite the 800 yen, tastes just like any other fizzy water. There are 200 folks here, but in my anonymity there’s just me, the Crusaders, my Perrier, pen and notebook, and my throbbing sternum. The trombonist begins a one-minute frrlllbbbb series that gets the crowd excited and me bored – he’s much better when he sticks to melodies, but I guess they dig that wild frrrlllbbbb intensity. After his solo Sample solos and all four sit down (it was “I Felt the Love,” neither of the two I’d thought) with the guitarist and bassman playing on. Next, “A Ballad for Joe (Louis),” and still that salty, fishy, honey smell wafting about. The horns walk off as Sample lets go – will the others solo? It’s nice to have mostly familiar tunes. Another 40-yen sip. Gotta make it last. Guitar solo in another tempo, another song probably. He plays primarily with his thumb alone. Ok – back to the old ballad. The bassist leads off to one of the Rural Renewal songs with a bass riff, shoveling the air with his goatee and lower lip. He comes close to what international hairdressers (one of the career dreams of Yoko’s students) know as the “Beerli-Blitz” in his sideburn styling. I want to get rid of some of the ingested Perrier but I want to hear the end more. The transition bit of this piece lets the drummer show a bit of fancywork. Sample’s piano is groovy, but piercing. He has some fun messing with the different feel of a swinging piece and a 6/8 meter. I’m tired. The flight will be a killer. But going on the diet on three successive days of vacation is just too disruptive. Oh, one off the Scratch album! The one where Felder holds a note for a minute. This time Felder puts in a brilliant solo, but the soft, wistful trombone is even better. Too bad he feels the need to get fast every now and then! His melodies, when he lets them, mourn with a heartbreaking melancholy, somewhere between pleading and wailing. Now they’re both on circular respiration demonstration, thirty seconds of fat musical blast. The melody is nice and anthemic. It’ll for sure be the last of the set. Oh, wrong, they’re giving us “Way Back Home,” or whatever the last Scratch song is called, cool! At a slow 80 bpm, the kind of chord sequence that could last for hours, with endless cascades of solos. Oh, by the way, in my jeans and black “Physics – we look for the door” sweater I am hopelessly underdressed, like a stray the rain drove in. The room is about two to three stories underground. The bassist just showed a nice touch on a fill-in. He reminds me somehow of my friend Charles Morello – the goatee and the way he takes pleasure in doing something clever. The guitar’s “doo-dee-ee-um-dee-duh” on this next one sounds familiar, the crowd is clapping in rhythm, on two and four, who says the Japanese don’t get Jazz! A bit of a showoff, the guitarist, but playing the Ghostbusters riff in his solo was a cool idea. It helps that this song only has two chords to deal with. Sometimes, the simpler, the better. Oh, and this time, he’s soloing with a pick, and an icky golden guitar. Ah, introductions. Ray Parker’s the guitarist, Nils Landgren the trombonist. And they play Ghostbusters as an encore – it seems Parker wrote the tune. Then they file out, with Japanese left and right shaking their hands in thanks and appreciation. I don’t – I’d feel like a poser, and besides I paid good money for them to be just that, good.

On the way out to the Skycourt Koiwa Hotel I wonder again about the voices used for train announcements. Does the woman who thanks Yamanote passengers with exuberance and enthusiasm occasionally board the train to cheer herself up? Has she died and her grieving family avoids the Yamanote? How does she feel about lending something as personal as her voice to create a certain mood for a company she doesn’t care about, saying something repeatedly to millions per day that she no longer means, if she ever did? Certainly one of those millions is hunting her down because he’s been smitten by her voice and wants to hear it speak to him, personally – does she use a pseudonym to protect her identity? It is strange how easily voices can elicit emotions. Sometimes it’s enough for me to hear an American accent to feel homesick.

Hiromi and Yoshiko Kato came to see me off at Narita – apparently Hiromi had already come the day before because she’d mistaken the date. It was good to hear her voice again, without the rasp the bronchitis had given her.

Sometimes you win in Airplane Roulette and don’t get seated next to the 500-pound gorilla. My neighbor was Ishikawa Akiko, my age, on her way to London for four weeks of fun and language study. She’s just quit her job at the same hotel in which “Lost in Translation” was set. We chatted for most the way, though I also watched two and a half movies. She told me “Shall We Dance” is a remake of a Japanese movie. I wonder what the Japanese version of Jennifer Lopez and Richard Gere looked like! During the landing approach the plane rained on me. A leak, condensate, or a broken duty-free hooch bottle? I was glad it didn’t do that until the end of the flight.

Home. It’s nice. One Japanese woman was heading to Lugano with little knowledge of English and none of Italian. I admire her courage, especially when compared to the typical all-Japanese tour groups. To celebrate my arrival, I had a burrito and Rivella for a whopping 14.50. Home indeed – but it’s still nice.

If after reading all this and looking at the pictures there are more pictures of places or people you would like to see, feel free to ask me and I'll send them to you if I took those pictures.