Oshamanbé – Muroran (長万部 – 室蘭) 101km
Even at sea level the fog was thick, and it made a pea soup look like a fine consommé at the top of the Rebungé Pass, where I encountered this mysterious figure.
Mr Mountain Mouth was walking the length of Japan at a pace of thirty to forty kilometres a day, sleeping rough for the most part and with 15kg of luggage on his back. I thought of telling him to pop in at the in-laws' barbershop on his way through Ibaraki, but realised there would be no point, as he had, so he explained, been cultivating his dreadlocks for five years. (The following March, Mr Mountain Mouth sent me – and presumably everyone else he had met along the way – a postcard from Okinawa to say that he had successfully completed his 2833km trip.)
I stopped for lunch at a Seicomart, where another customer was doing his best to supplement the fog with exhaust fumes, a habit that is known in Japan as 'idling' – ie. leaving the engine running even when one's car is stationary.
It is no exaggeration to say that from when they leave the house to whenever they get back again, no Japanese person ever switches their car engine off under any circumstances. In fact, many turn it on in readiness ten or fifteen minutes in advance, and don't turn it off again until everything and everyone is unloaded and back indoors at the end of their trip. If, therefore, you happen to be a car thief, Japan is very much the place to be, as there is no need to hot-wire the ignition, pick the lock or even break a window, and even top-of-the-range models will be left with the engine ticking over, warmed up and ready to steal.
A reasonable argument for 'idling' is that in winter there is a danger that your car might not start again when you get back in. Even with the temperature below freezing and several metres of snow on the ground, though, Japanese cars are still the most efficient in the world, and five minutes in the cold is hardly likely to damage them beyond repair or necessitate being towed to the nearest garage by an AA van. Conversely, in the heat of summer it can be advantageous to have the cooler on in readiness for when one returns to one's car, but there is rarely a need for this in temperate Hokkaido, and in any case, this particular offender – like so many others I have witnessed – had the windows rolled down.
At another convenience store in another part of Hokkaido on an equally balmy day, I had seen a mother leave her children in the car while she went shopping. One of them – who can't have been more than six or seven years old – climbed into the driver's seat and began revving the accellerator, and having noticed this, rather than switch off the engine like any sensible person, she merely opened the door, told him to stop and went back into the store.
One final incident that sticks in my mind was a family who parked their car next to the beach in Minato-machi and spent the entire evening watching the on-board DVD player, all the while with the engine running and the temperature outside warm enough that I was wearing shorts and a t-shirt. (Did they have the cooler on, I wondered, or the heating? Or perhaps neither? Or even both? Or was the DVD player so power-hungry that with no idling it would run down the car battery?). If nothing else, this reminded me of my fellow Brits, many of whom are fond of going for a day out at the beach and never once setting foot outside their cars, choosing instead to enjoy the view through a misty windscreen, over a flask of tea and some sandwiches.
At Lake Tohya in the Shikotsu-Tohya National Park, I enjoyed this view unobstructed by a misty windscreen and while eating a box of Choco Pie.
Not far from where I sat was Mount Usu, a live volcano which has erupted as recently as 1977 and 2000, although rather than its accompanying Volcano Science Museum, I was more interested in the temporary Eco Gallery next door.
Among other things the Eco Gallery showed how Japan is only 40% calorie self-sufficient, and that partly as a consequence of this, its food miles are the biggest (or should that be the furthest?) in the world – around three times greater than the US and Korea, for example. On average, a house built in Japan remains standing for just thirty years (as opposed to 55 in the US and 77 in the UK), and the Japanese use more than two hundred plastic bags per person per year, making for a total of around thirty billion. They also use around twenty-five billion sets of wari-bashi (割り箸 / disposable chopsticks) annually, which despite the wood and bamboo used to produce them being plentiful in Japan, are almost all imported from China.
At around the time I went on this tour, it was fashionable to carry 'my hashi' – ie. 'my chopsticks' – for use instead of wari-bashi at restaurants and the like. In the manner of a samurai with his sword, I would un-sheath my my hashi from their special scabbard almost every day, but while even now I still carry a set in my man-bag – and despite China having imposed an eco-friendly tax on the wari-bashi it exports – I am quite possibly the only person left in the entire country who does so.
(A note on Japanese usage for those of you who are interested in that kind of thing: the counter for chopsticks is zen / 膳, so one set is ichi-zen / 一膳, two sets are ni-zen / 二膳, and so on.)
Just as I was about to take a roadside pee on my way into Muroran, the driver of a flash-looking sports car pulled over and introduced himself as Mr Crocodile Field.
'Is everything OK?' he asked.
'Of course. I was just, er, taking a quick break. Your English is very good – where did you learn?'
'I've travelled a lot. Europe, India, Vietnam - I spent a year in Thailand and my Thai lessons were in English, which helped.'
Mr Crocodile Field's own man-bag was in the 'ethnic' style, and he told me that he ran a company importing fabrics.
'I'm thinking of moving into antiques, though,' he said, 'so I've just been to a viewing for an auction. European antiques are too expensive, so I'm going to concentrate on Japanese ones instead.'
Upon finding out that Mr Crocodile Field lived in Muroran, I suggested that we meet up for a drink later, but he told me that it would be difficult as he was driving, so we said our farewells and I cycled on through the suburbs.
When I arrived at Muroran Youth Hostel a couple of hours later, however, Mr Crocodile Field was waiting for me in reception.
'You took your time!' he said, and once I had checked in and unpacked, we got into his car and went out for a teetotal evening meal.
Over a succession of exotic seafood dishes, none of which we knew the English translations for, Mr Crocodile Field told me of his fondness for reading Sherlock Holmes, listening to Enya and smoking roll-ups (he imported the Rizlas himself, he said), and of how he modelled his hairstyle on Ewan McGregor's in The Phantom Menace.
On the way back to the youth hostel we crossed the 1380 metre-long Swan Bridge over Muroran Bay, where the road was almost empty.
'This car is good to drive,' said Mr Crocodile Field. 'But it can be dangerous if an old woman is crossing the street.' By way of demonstration he stepped on the accellerator and harangued an imaginary pedestrian. 'Why are you crossing the road, lady? Get out of my way!'
To be honest, Mr Crocodile Field's driving was erratic at best, and even after nearly five weeks of being passed by cars and trucks on narrow roads, in dark tunnels, through high winds and the heavy rain, I can honestly say that I never felt as vulnerable or as concerned for my safety as I did in Mr Crocodile Field's sports car. And that is the fundamental irony of travel, I thought to myself later: the faster the mode of transport we are using, the more impatient we become. Mr Mountain Mouth, for example, probably never found himself in a hurry during his entire eight-month hike from one end of Japan to the other, but how many of us have sat in an airport departure lounge bemoaning the fact that our flight – which will whisk us away to our destination at several hundred kilometres per hour – has been delayed?
Esashi – Fukushima (江差 – 福島) – 88km
The ridge that runs along the centre of the Matsumaé Peninsula rises to a thousand metres above sea level, and mountainsides lush with foliage stretched up and away to my left beside the coast road. As far as I could tell the forest was unmanaged, and it wasn't unreasonable to suppose that no human being had ever set foot even a few metres inland from where I was now riding.
As I sat in a layby eating my mid-morning snack, a young man rode past on the kind of bicycle you might expect a teenager to receive as a birthday present – a small-scale mountain bike with a heavy frame and a garish logo – and I caught up with him at a Seicomart a little further up the road.
From Okayama Prefecture in western Honshu, Mr Warehouse had quit his job as a motorcycle mechanic three years ago and been on various adventures since, including two months spent hiking the 1500km Shikoku-henro (四国遍路) temple pilgrimage.
'When I left Okayama in March there was still snow on the mountains,' he said. 'I've been to Kyushu, Shikoku and all along the Pacific coast to Hokkaido. Now and then I'll stay somewhere for a few weeks and do a part-time job to save some money, and the plan is to make it back home before Christmas.'
'How's your body coping with all of that riding?' I asked him (my saddle sore had been getting steadily worse over the past couple of weeks).
'Fine – no pain, no problems! I've been in football clubs ever since I was at elementary school so I'm used to getting a lot of exercise.'
I suggested to Mr Warehouse that we ride together towards Cape Shirakami – the southernmost point in Hokkaido and the final goal on my circumnavigation – and along the way he mentioned that he had also been on a two-week tour of Holland.
'I wanted to see Ajax and PSV Eindhoven play,' he said. 'It was fantastic – I couldn't speak any Dutch but I got by on a lot of gestures and a few words of English.'
Mr Warehouse was so strong that it soon became apparent we were a mis-match: despite what ought to have been an inefficient riding style – he stood up on the pedals almost the entire time, even when we weren't going uphill – he seemed to sail along with ease while I laboured over every pedal stroke (let's face it, this could also have had something to do with the fact that he was ten years younger than me).
'How do you manage to go so fast?' I asked him when we stopped to look around Matsumaé Castle.
'I've had the same bike since I was fifteen so I guess I'm just used to it,' he said. 'I didn't do any training before I left Okayama and I haven't had a single puncture in about six months. I am on my third set of tyres, mind you.'
Having bowed to his physical superiority I suggested that it might be better if we parted ways, and continued south at a rather more stately pace. Just as it had at Cape Sohya in the far north of the island, a strong wind swirled around Cape Shirakami – or rather, strong winds: when I arrived there the clouds were scudding one way, the flags fluttering another, and the waves breaking in a different direction altogether.
I eventually caught up with Mr Warehouse again in Fukushima Town (not to be confused with Fukushima Prefecture, which is several hundred kilometres to the south east), just as it was beginning to get dark.
On a previous tour of Hokkaido, he told me, he had stayed in rider houses, but this time was restricting himself to a budget of just 300 yen a day, and about to settle in for the night at an – admittedly rather spacious and well-appointed – bus shelter. His routine involved rising at 4am, setting off at 6am, stopping at 4pm and going to sleep at 7pm, and having noticed during the course of the day that his diet consisted almost exclusively of rice balls and dried fish, I treated him to a can of chuh-hai (alcopops) and a box of Pocky before seeking out a place to stay for myself.
'This Saturday,' said Mrs Wisteria Mountain, the proprietor of a nearby ryokan, 'some celebrities are swimming between Hokkaido and Aomori for 24-Hour Television. I've got sixty TV people coming to stay and we'll be chock-a-block - actually it's against the safety regulations so don't tell anyone!'
While I didn't ask – and although, as she explained, she had three children and four grandchildren – I had the feeling Mrs Wisteria Mountain was a widow and would have been lonely without some guests to talk to.
'Everyone likes it here because the food's good and we give you lots of it,' she boasted, and proceeded to ply me with more than I could possibly eat, including kimuchi (spicy, fermented cabbage from Korea) hot-pot, stir-fried asparagus and ooni (sea urchin) omelette.
'We've been in business for thirty years,' she continued. 'We used to run the place as a hostess bar and there were girls from all over the place working here – Filipinos, Brazilians, Czechs. That was when the Seikan Tunnel was being built, but once that was finished there weren't as many customers and we moved over to being an ordinary ryokan instead. The shinkansen (新幹線 / bullet train) should be coming soon, though, so hopefully things will start to pick up again.'
The Seikan Tunnel (青函トンネル) runs beneath the Tsugaru Straits between northern Honshu and Hokkaido, and at just over 53km was for two decades or so the longest tunnel of any kind in the world. Due to its enormous budget and high maintenance costs, however, and along with the fact that in the twenty-seven years it took to complete it was rendered at least partially obsolete by cheaper air travel, the tunnel was seen by many as a white elephant (actually not just a white elephant: a total of thirty-four workers lost their lives during its construction).
While rail passengers may not be plentiful, though, the tunnel has become an essential route for shipping freight to and from Hokkaido, and more to the point, was constructed with a view to one day being able to accommodate the shinkansen. At the time of writing, work is already underway to make the necessary upgrades, and the first shinkansen should pass through the tunnel on its way to Hakodaté in 2015, with a view to extending the service further north to Sapporo by 2035.
(Incidentally, you may or may not be interested to know that the celebrities on 24-Hour Television failed in their attempt to swim across the Tsugaru Straits, although they did raise plenty of money for charity in the process.)
Setana – Esashi (せたな – 江差) 91km
A short ferry ride from Setana lies Okushiri-toh (奥尻島 / literally 'centre buttocks island' – yes, as usual, your guess is as good as mine), which on the night of 12th July 1993 was witness to one of Japan's worst natural disasters of recent times.
Following a 7.8-magnitude earthquake just off the coast, within three minutes the island was hit by the first wave of a tsunami, and just seven minutes after that by a second, even bigger wave. 233 people lost their lives – some as far afield as Aomori in northern Honshu and Russia on the other side of the Japan Sea – and among the dead were 4% of Okushiri's population.
(There's some news footage of the aftermath about a minute and a half into this video - which is in Japanese - and then at various points throughout.)
At the bottom the Wikipedia page about the disaster – which is known officially as the Hokkaido Nansei-oki Earthquake (北海道南西沖地震) and colloquially as the Okushiri Earthquake – there is a section about what was learned as a result, the salient points of which are as follows:
- Even if it were possible to speed up the transmission of tsunami warnings, depending on the location of an earthquake's epicentre, the fact that some warnings will not arrive in time is unavoidable.
- If people who live in coastal areas feel the tremors from a large earthquake, they should evacuate to higher ground or the tops of tall buildings straight away, and without waiting for tsunami warnings.
- Depending on their location, tsunami can be higher than predicted, hit many times over, and subesequent waves from a tsunami are sometimes higher than the initial one.
The tragedy is that despite these lessons having supposedly been 'learned' after the Okushiri Earthquake, by the time of the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, the Japanese people, the authorities and the so-called 'experts' had for a long time been underestimating not just the probability of something similar happening elsewhere in the country, but perhaps more importantly, its scale.
For example, the largest wave from the tsunami caused by the Okushiri Earthquake in 1993 (or to be more specific, the highest point above sea level that was inundated by waves from the tsunami) was thirty metres, while the largest wave from the tsunami caused by the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011 was forty metres.
In both cases, many people died because they either failed to evacuate to higher ground, because they evacuated by car and were caught in traffic jams, because the coming tsunami was estimated in official warnings as being no more than a few metres high, because in some areas, the tsunami arrived within just ten minutes of the earthquake, and because the initial waves from the tsunami were not necessarily its highest.
Much more so than western Hokkaido, the north-east coast of Honshu has a long history of off-shore earthquakes, including some within living memory. For example, the largest wave from the tsunami caused by the Shohwa-sanriku Earthquake (昭和三陸地震) in 1933 was twenty-eight metres high.
In the same way that residential areas are now in the process of being moved to higher ground in Tohoku, laws were introduced after the Sanriku quake in an effort to prevent people from building houses on low-lying ground that might be vulnerable to tsunami. Sadly, though, these laws were never properly enforced, and many of the same communities which had been destroyed in 1933 were destroyed all over again in 2011.
The weather in Setana wasn't at all conducive to boarding a ferry, so instead of going to Okushiri I struggled on down the coast in the wind and rain.
That evening the owner of the Tsuji Ryokan gave me a map of Esashi with all of the town's restaurants and bars marked on it, and I followed a roundabout route through the deserted backstreets on the way to and from my evening meal at a local izakaya.
Mount Yamizo 八溝山
A couple of weeks ago I had a moment of enlightenment, or satori (悟り), as they say in Japanese. At the time I was sitting on a mossy rock, next to a pool of water, in a forest, on a mountaintop, on a cold, damp night, in the pitch dark, and with a plastic bottle in my hand. If you're wondering how such an unlikely set of circumstances led to a transcendental experience, allow me to explain.
Ask most of its residents what is the highest mountain in Ibaraki Prefecture and they are likely to say Tsukuba, when in fact the correct answer is Mount Yamizo (八溝山 / literally 'eight ditches mountain'). Yamizo straddles the border with neighbouring Fukushima in the far north of the prefecture, and while it may lack the attractively pointy profile of Tsukuba – not to mention its cable car – it is 145 metres higher and boasts a paved road all the way to its summit.
Noticing this on my dog-eared old Mapple road map one day, I worked out that it would be possible to cycle to Yamizo from our apartment, camp out for a night, get up early to see the sunrise and then cycle back the following morning.
My cycle tours in Japan have been getting progressively shorter over the years – six weeks in 2005, five weeks in 2008 and ten days in 2011 – and with a one-year-old daughter and a son on the way (apologies if this is the first you've heard – I was going to write a 'Mrs M is pregnant again!' blog post but never got round to it), this seemed like a good idea for a final tour before I become so busy changing nappies and mixing formula that I never have time to leave the house again.
So having negotiated with Mrs M for permission to abandon her and M Jr for the weekend, I set off at 8.30am Saturday 2nd November, when the weather was warm, the autumn colours were just starting to show, and Route 118 between Mito and Daigo Town was busy with sightseers.
As well as the Fukuroda waterfall (袋田の滝), Daigo is famous for its apples, and in the orchards that lined the way the trees were weighed down with large, ripe, red and green ones (in order to make the apples as large, ripe, red and green as possible, silver sheets are placed on the ground to reflect extra sunlight from beneath them).
The woman behind the counter at Daigo tourist information centre said that a campsite marked on the Mapple as being close to the summit of Yamizo had long since closed for business, and I told her that I would probably nojuku (野宿 / sleep rough) instead. While she was a little surprised by this, I reasoned that, in the same way mountaineers do before they set off on a climbing expedition, it would be a good idea to tell someone where I was going in case I got into trouble.
At a crossroads on Route 118 not far north of Daigo there is a road sign showing the way to Yamizo, along with a family-run convenience store the woman at the information centre had said would be my last chance to stock up on supplies for the night ahead. Among other things I purchased their last three onigiri (rice balls), and had a steaming hot bowl of soba at the very small – and very cheap – noodle restaurant next door.
Route 28 winds its way through a succession of small villages in the Yamizo River valley, and past farms whose main crop – where precious little land is level enough to accommodate rice fields – is green tea. A dog out for a walk with its owner barked suddenly as I cycled past, straining on the end of its lead to try and take a bite out of my tyres, and a stooped old lady in Wellington boots, a bonnet and a pinny stopped me for a chat, telling me to 'Ganbarina' (頑張りな / 'Do your best') about five times before she let me carry on up the road.
There were, as it turned out, a couple more places to buy emergency rations, but they were old-style village shops that sold very little in the way of fresh produce. Again I thought it best to let some of the locals know that a strange foreigner would be camping out on the mountain that night, so engaged the shopkeepers in conversation, and came away with two over-ripe bananas, a tomato and a tube of Smarties for my troubles.
Just as one of the shopkeepers had described it, the road up the mountainside was marked by a large wooden torii (鳥居 / shrine gateway).
Along with this little fellow dispensing free spring water.
Knowing that I would have a long time to spend on the summit with nothing to do, I had made a point of dallying on the way, and reached the torii at three in the afternoon. In theory this left me with just about the right amount of time to get to the top before darkness fell, although in practice it is much, much easier to cycle uphill first thing in the morning when one's legs are fresh, and the shape of this two-day tour gave me no alternative but to tackle its most arduous stretch in late afternoon.
From being on the gentle slope of Route 28, I suddenly found myself on a 13.5% incline (that's about 1 in 7 in old money), which aside from a couple of brief interludes where the road levelled off, barely let up for the entire 8km to the top, and around what felt like several hundred hairpin bends.
Actually there were more like twenty-five, but I was constantly weaving back and forth in an effort to find the line of least resistance – ie. the line of least steepness – and to say that my lungs felt as if they were bursting out of my chest would be an understatement: rather, it felt as if all of my major organs were about to explode and splatter themselves across the road in the manner of a zombie film fight scene.
Often on a climb there comes a point where you find a rhythm and forget about the physical exertion, and if that had happened I would have had my moment of satori right there and then. As it was, though, rather than enduring pain and suffering in order to achieve Zen enlightenment, here I never got beyond the pain and suffering part.
I stopped to catch my breath, eat my Smarties and mutter to myself, 'Jesus fecking Christ this is steep!' approximately fifteen times on the way up, and the only thing that prevented me from walking instead of riding was the fact that the last of the day's hikers and sightseers were simultaneously on their way back down the mountain. The indignity of being seen pushing my bike along by its handlebars would have been too much to bear, so I gritted my teeth, fixed my gaze on the road ahead and strained to turn the pedals, in the hope that the procession of passersby would be impressed with my true-grit, true-Brit, never-say-die spirit of empire-building excellence.
Finally, after the best part of an hour and a half of torture, and just as I had switched on my lights to combat the encroaching gloom, first one car park and then another materialised – both now empty – and the road reached a dead end just below two radio transmitters, the Yamizo-miné shrine and this impressively castle-like observation tower.
By now the skies had clouded over and there wasn't much to observe, although at one point a canvas-covered army truck drove up and three members of the jiéitai (自衛隊 / Japan's self-defence force) dressed in full camouflage gear jumped out. They appeared to be looking for something – or perhaps someone – but after couple of minutes of running around and shouting orders at each other, gave up, got back in the truck and drove off again.
There was a patch of grass in the lee of the observation tower where I could have pitched my tent, but after a little more investigating I found that one of the sliding doors to this outbuilding had been left unlocked.
Inside there was a cubby hole at one end stocked with chairs, mattresses and even a heater, although I resolved not to use them as I didn't want to make a nuisance of myself, and in any case, had made a point of bringing as much clothing and bedding as I could stuff into my panniers.
I parked my bike beneath the eaves before unloading it (I made sure to take off my shoes at the door, of course), and soon it was time to settle down for my evening meal – such as it was – of three rice balls, two bananas, a jam-filled bread roll, a bag of peanuts and a tomato.
One rather important thing was missing, though, and that was fluids.
As well as boasting one of the Bando-sanjusan-kasho (板東三十三カ所), thirty-three shrines in the Kanto area that form part of a 1300km pilgrimage, Yamizo is listed among the Meisui-hyakusen (名水百選), one hundred of the most attractive and well-preserved springs in the country. Assuming water would be plentiful, I therefore hadn't bothered to bring any drinks with me, and set off with my water bottle to find Ginshohsui (銀性水 – literally 'silver gender water'), the highest of Yamizo's five springs.
Onii-san had lent me a miner's helmet-style headlight, which illuminated a cone-shaped shaft of misty air before me as I walked, and a wooden sign told me that ginshohsui was just seventy metres away, although having expected to hear the sound of water gushing forth from the ground, I was greeted instead with silence.
There at a bend in the path was a shallow pool of water with a grey plastic drainpipe poking out from the hillside above it. It wasn't so much a mountain spring as a murky puddle, and by the headlight I could see a beetle-like insect scuttle its way through the carpet of rotting leaves at the bottom – in other words, the water in the pool was just that little bit too stagnant to be trusted as drinkable.
Perhaps, I thought, the other four springs would be more gushing and geyser-like, but I didn't fancy hiking even further downhill only to be similarly underwhelmed. More to the point, I didn't fancy hiking all the way back up again on legs already fragile from the climb.
Looking and listening more closely, it became apparent that there was indeed a tiny amount of water trickling from the drainpipe, so if I was to avoid death by dehydration – well, OK, maybe not death, but certainly a further dose of pain and suffering – my only option was to sit here and wait as my water bottle filled.
Having positioned myself on a moss-covered rock at the edge of the pool, I realised that the water was flowing so slowly that rather than fall directly downwards, it was first of all snaking its way around the rim and back along the outside of the pipe, and that the sweet spot – that is to say the ideal position beneath which to hold my water bottle – wasn't fixed, but moved ever so slightly depending on the subtlest variations in the flow of water. This meant that I had to keep as still and as quiet as possible, all the while listening for the dripping sound in the bottle: if the sound stopped I moved the bottle a smidgen one way or the other until it became audible again.
I was still thirsty from the climb, so at the first couple of attempts waited just a few minutes before gulping down whatever water had accumulated. Eventually, though, I decided that one full bottle – about 750ml – ought to be enough to see me through the night. I found a more comfortable position on a different but equally mossy rock, held out my right arm (it was at this point that I was thankful for my over-developed triceps, the result of years spent holding a boom pole with a microphone on the end of it for film and TV shoots), and since I didn't want to waste the batteries, turned off my headlight.
The trees' swaying silhouettes were visible against the night sky, and their leaves rustled in the wind or crackled like crisp packets as they were blown along the forest floor. I listened for any sound that might be regular – the footsteps of a wild boar, for example, or even a domesticated hiker – but there was none. At one point I felt the tiniest movement of air as a bat flew past my face and circled the pool, its wings a blurred flash in the semi-darkness, but to all intents and purposes I was alone, and it occurred to me this was the most isolated I had been in my entire life, with no other human being within a radius of several kilometres.
So why am I here? I thought to myself. Why am I sitting on a rock in the freezing cold with my arm about to fall off from the strain of holding a water bottle beneath the trickle of water from a plastic drainpipe? Why am I about to spend the night on a lonely mountaintop, when I could be spending it in my living room, in front of the telly, before climbing into a hot bath and going to sleep on a fluffy futon beneath a warm duvet?
Why, for a holiday, of course!
OK, so this might not be most people's idea of a holiday, and I had no luxuries to speak of: no bath, no shower, no TV, no heated toilet seat with bidet facility (although there was a small, basic toilet block next to the radio transmitters that despite the isolated location had been stocked with a fresh supply of toilet paper), no hot food, no hot water, and as it turned out, not much in the way of cold water, either.
I was here for the challenge, I suppose, and for the view: as well as the sunrise and the surrounding countryside, with any luck I would get to see Mount Fuji – more than 200km distant – the following morning.
Then as the trees continued to sway in the breeze, the leaves continued to dance around the forest floor and the dripping sound changed in pitch as my water bottle gradually filled, I once more thought to myself, why am I here? Except this time it was in the larger, philosophical, Capital Letters, Why Am I Here and What Is The Meaning Of Life? sense.
In my previous capacity as someone who held a boom pole with a microphone on the end of it for a living, I spent many happy hours driving around the UK in vans full of camera equipment, usually with a fellow technician or two to keep me company, and one particular conversation – which took place, if my memory serves me correctly, on the A13 just outside Southend – stuck in my mind.
Myself and the camera assistant were somewhere in our late twenties, while the cameraman was somewhere in his early forties, and after listening to us talking about our lives for a while, he chipped in.
'I know what it's like,' he said. 'You're working in showbiz, you go to some pretty nice places and meet some pretty glamorous people. You're earning a bit of money, you've got your flat in London, your Ikea furniture, a big TV and a nice stereo system. You go to the pub with your mates and you go to the cinema to watch a movie. You think you're pretty happy, don't you? I mean, you think you've got it sorted.'
The assistant and I looked at each other with smiles of recognition.
'Yep,' I said. 'As it happens you've just described my life.'
'How did you know?' said the camera assistant.
'Because I was like that myself once. But eventually I decided that I needed to settle down. I found someone nice, got married and had kids. And kids,' said the cameraman, 'are the missing piece of the puzzle.'
In actual fact I had always suspected this to be the case, and even when I was young and found the prospect of having children utterly terrifying, deep down I somehow instinctively knew that one day I would change my mind, or perhaps just accidentally start a family and realise that it wasn't such a hideous ordeal after all. It wasn't until I became a father, though, that I truly understood what my colleague was talking about, although this, too, was as much to do with finding someone who was willing to be the mother of my children, rather than with deciding that I wanted to have them in the first place.
Bringing up M Jr is by turns miraculous, and inspiring, and uplifting, not to mention exhausting (a couple of weeks ago all three of us came down with the norovirus, and one particular night turned into a kind of three-person toilet relay of vomiting and diarrhea).
Witnessing one human being's journey practically from conception onwards is akin to witnessing the evolution of the entire human race in microcosm. You see them in the womb when they are barely more than a pixel on a computer screen, and, like some pre-historic sea creature, yet to set foot on dry land (this, incidentally, is one of the most infinitely mysterious things about babies, in that they are first of all amphibious, inhaling amniotic fluid as if through a set of gills, and only transform into air-breathing mammals when they are halfway out of the womb). You hear their heartbeat and watch as their limbs and features develop, and then once they emerge you feel the grip of their hand on your finger, and watch them sleep and eat and pee and poo and cry and smile for the very first time.
In evolutionary terms, M Jr is currently at the caveman stage – or should I say cavegirl – in the sense that she is standing on her hind legs, using rudimentary language, gestures and tools. She hasn't yet started a fire, invented the wheel or written the complete works of Shakespeare, but that will all happen in due course. In the meantime she can already listen, learn, watch, copy, remember, emote, give and receive affection, accept or refuse requests, ask and answer questions. All human life and all of human history has somehow been distilled into this one, tiny being with a wobbly walk and a voice like a slightly less robotic version of R2D2's, and in this sense just one of its members embodies the hopes and fears of the human race as a whole.
All of which contemplation brought me back round to my original, literal, lower-case question, namely, why am I here? If my wife, daughter and unborn son are so important to me, why am I sitting on a mossy rock, on a cold mountaintop, in near darkness, waiting for a water bottle to fill very, very slowly, before sleeping on my own in a bare outbuilding, with not another living soul for miles around? And asking the question like that made it a little more difficult to answer.
I suppose everyone, to coin a phrase, needs a break from time to time, and even though I love being with my family, I also happen to enjoy being on my own. Cycle tours, however long or short, are my way of doing this, what is referred to in Japanese as kibuntenkan (気分転換), a change of scene. Recently, for example, Mrs M has been putting M Jr in a nursery a couple of times a week, not just because she is tired from being pregnant and looking after a one year old, but because she wants to have some time in her life when she is something other than 'just' a mother.
OK, so maybe this is just my excuse for being a good-for-nothing, layabout husband; maybe all of that Meaning Of Life stuff is a bit over the top, and maybe I really was just sitting on a rock waiting for a water bottle to fill, nothing deeper or more meaningful than that. But regardless, there was something meditative about the experience, and by that point any anxiety I had at the prospect of spending the night cold and alone had dissipated.
I couldn't tell you exactly how long I had been there – probably no more than thirty or forty minutes – but eventually I realised that the dripping noise had stopped, and when I poked a finger into the mouth of my water bottle, that it had filled to overflowing.
In exactly the same way that it is possible, on a long climb, to get into such a rhythm that you zone out and forget you are turning the pedals at all, so I had ceased to be concerned about how long it was going to take for the bottle to fill, and ceased to listen for the change in pitch in the sound of the dripping water as it did so. Rested, enlightened and saved from dehydration, I screwed the cap back on my water bottle, switched on my headlight and walked back to the summit of Mount Yamizo to have dinner.
I had planned to call Mrs M and tell her how I was getting on, but there was no signal on my mobile phone and even an email I tried to send didn't make it through the ether, so once I had eaten, all I had to keep me company was a single comic book.
Upon discovering that I was a fan of Japanese manga, a deputy headmaster at one of the schools where I teach suggested that I read one of the classics, namely Hi-no-tori (火の鳥 / The Phoenix) by Osamu Tezuka. Tezuka is described in Wikipedia as the 'god of manga', and Hi-no-tori as his 'life's work', and it tells the story of a phoenix which is said to grant eternal life to anyone who can capture it and drink its blood.
Having read the first of its twelve volumes, I cannot recommend it highly enough, and what follows is my translation of a scene I read that night. In it, the young huntsman Nagi has tracked the Phoenix to the volcano where it nests, and just as he is about to begin firing arrows at it, hears the firebird's voice in his head.
Nagi: Why is it you're the only one that gets to live forever, while all of us humans have to die? That's so unfair!
Phoenix: Unfair, you say? What are you hoping for? The power to avoid death? Or would you rather have good fortune while you're still alive?
Nagi: I don't give a damn about good fortune! But if I can live forever like you, that's good fortune, isn't it?
Phoenix: Look down at your feet, Nagi. Can you see the ants? They're alive, aren't they? And they live for just six months. The life of a mayfly is shorter still. Even if a mayfly reproduces, it lives for just three days. Nobody calls that bad fortune, though.
Nagi: So what does a stupid little insect know that we don't?
Phoenix: The lifetime of an insect may be ordained by nature, but they are brought up properly, they eat, they love each other, they give birth to their young, they are fulfilled, and then they die. Human beings live longer than the insects, longer than the fish in the sea, longer than dogs and cats and monkeys. In the course of a lifetime, if you can find happiness, isn't that good fortune enough?
Nagi: You're not making any sense! And anyway, I'm going to shoot you down.
Phoenix: Whether or not you understand, Nagi, you will still die one day.
Nagi: Before I do, I'll be sure to drink your blood!
I'm not ashamed to say that I went to sleep that night with tears in my eyes, because as I read Hi-no-tori, I realised that I have found happiness in my life, and this is as much as I can ask for. My alarm woke me at five-thirty the next morning, and I packed up my belongings as quickly as I could – the sun was due to rise at six – before stepping outside.
I had been alone for almost exactly twelve hours when an early-morning sightseer joined me in the observation tower, and we lamented the fact that even on such a fine day, this was as close as we would get to seeing Mount Fuji.
Then at about seven-thirty I threw a coin in the collection box at Yamizo-miné shrine and prayed that my children will grow up happy and healthy, before drinking the remainder of my precious spring water and freewheeling my way back down the mountain.
Teshio – Minato-machi (天塩 - 港町) – 91km
Part-way through the morning I saw a young man on an overloaded, single-speed shopping bike - aka mama-chari - cycling towards me on the opposite side of the road, and followed him as he pulled into Shosanbetsu michi-no-éki. His name was Mr Enduring Magnificence, and he was on a six-month circumnavigation of Japan.
'How on earth do you manage on a mama-chari?' I asked him.
'The morning after the first day of the trip,' he said, 'I literally couldn't stand up. It's your quads that hurt the most when you ride one of these, but I'm used to it now.'
'How far are you cycling each day?'
'About eighty kilometres.'
Despite the fact that my own bike weighed several kilos less and had twenty more gears, and that I wasn't, unlike Mr Enduring Magnificence, carrying a rucksack the size of a Marshall stack at a Led Zeppelin concert on my back, this was, I'm embarrassed to admit, the same distance that I was covering.
'I saved some money doing a temporary job on a farm a few weeks ago,' he continued. 'But I'm trying to keep my spending down to three or four hundred yen a day. I never stay on proper campsites, I never go to restaurants and I eat instant curry most of the time - it only costs a hundred yen!'
There was a gas stove, a saucepan and a 2kg bag of rice strapped to Mr Enduring Magnificence's mama-chari, and as we were talking he unpacked and began to prepare his lunch.
'I never go to onsen, either,' he said. 'That would be a whole day's budget gone in one go.'
'Where do you wash, then?'
'I just use the sinks at places like this - in parks and at barbecue areas. Several friends of mine around the country have promised to let me stay, so I'll be able to have a proper bath then.'
'What are you going to do when you're finished?'
'I'd like to stay in London for a while but it's too difficult to get a work visa for the UK, so I'm going back to Australia instead. I lived there for a couple of years and a guy I know in Brisbane has promised me a job.'
We were soon joined at our picnic table by Mr Great One, who had almost completed his own south-to-north trip through the country, and who in contrast to Mr Enduring Magnificence rode a bicycle with gears, wore proper cycling shorts, wasn't carrying a rucksack the size of a Marshall stack at a Led Zeppelin concert on his back, and said that he got up at 4.30 every morning, took a siesta at lunchtime, and bathed at proper onsen in the evening.
Hemmed in between the sea, the road and the mountains, and at the mercy of high winds and heavy snow over the winter months, many of the houses along this stretch of Route 232 are protected by high wooden fences, so that at times it felt as if I was cycling past the set for a cowboy film.
That night, though, I pitched my tent on a beach of soft sand at Minato-machi. Just a short distance back along the coast, white-crested waves were crashing against the rocks, but through some trick of geography (or engineering - I wondered if there wasn't some submerged tsunami protection barrier beyond the harbour walls that flanked the beach) the sea here was as ripple-free as a fish tank. Not only that, but along the west coast of Japan there is practically no change in the water level between high and low tide, so there was little danger of being swept away in the middle of the night.
The showers next to the beach were meant for daytime bathers and already locked by the time I arrived, so the family in the tent next to mine offered to give me a lift to an onsen along the coast, and even shared their dinner with me (a paper plate of curry, as it happened, which may or may not have cost them a hundred yen).
Otoh-san (お父さん / dad - I was never told his real name) was a 42-year-old truck driver; tanned, shaven-headed and a man of few words. His partner was at least ten or fifteen years his junior, and they had a one-year-old daughter with a pudding-bowl haircut who eyed me warily ('She's never met a foreigner before,' her mum explained). They had travelled from Tomakomai for a three-day holiday in what otoh-san called their 'bus': a big pink and purple camper van with faux-velvet-upholstered sofas and a fitted kitchen in the back, and a sound system with an animated computer screen in the front that played a continuous selection of bouncing dance-pop. A friend of theirs from Sapporo had joined them for the trip, and the final member of their party was Kuro, a chihuahua who they claimed was house-trained, and left to his own devices on the bus while we went into the onsen (kuro, you may not be surprised to learn from looking at this photo, means 'black').
Hamatonbetsu – Wakkanai (浜頓別 - 稚内) 95km
Up here in the far north of Hokkaido, Hamatonbetsu was like a frontier town, and in a spooky, slightly Lynchian kind of way, all six sets of traffic lights along its dead straight and practically deserted main street were synchronised to change from red to green and back again at precisely the same time.
'There's no crime around here,' said the manager as I was checking out of his business hotel, 'just car crashes.' And indeed, there was a sign outside the police station detailing the number of days since the last fatal accident, something I had only previously seen on an oil rig in the North Sea.
As I made my way north along Route 238, a bank of black cloud rolled by in the opposite direction, carrying in its wake a brisk headwind that seemed to grow in intensity as the day progressed.
Riding into a high wind is infinitely harder than riding up a steep hill, for while the effort involved is approximately the same, the nature of that effort is different. In both cases, you use a low gear and sometimes have to stand up on the pedals to give yourself extra leverage, but while the meditative quality of a climb makes it pleasurable, working against the wind is supremely frustrating. Why, one thinks as one struggles onwards, head down and teeth gritted, should it be such a challenge to ride along a flat road on a fine day? On a climb, while your muscles may be straining, your surroundings are calm. Against a headwind, however, there is no escape: your ears ring with white noise and your body is pummelled as if by an invisible adversary - it feels, in fact, a little like those nightmares in which you are trying to run away from someone but can't.
Whenever I stopped to eat, to rest or to pee, I had to hide behind the nearest wall or building just to give myself some respite from the onslaught, and as you can see, out in the open I couldn't even keep my camera straight to take a photo.
Simply because they provided some shelter, a line of hills along the way came as blessed relief, but on the downhill stretch of each, the wind was so strong that if I stopped pedalling I would remain - as if on an exercise bike - rooted to the spot.
Cape Sohya - the northernmost point in Japan - was the fourth extremity on my circumnavigation of Hokkaido, and from it the Russian island of Sakhalin is just about visible forty kilometres away.
Instead of being elated at the achievement of having reached Sohya, though, I was almost delirious with exhaustion, and even here - especially here, in fact - the wind was relentless. After taking a couple of commemorative photos and cowering behind a public toilet to eat my lunch, I set off again as soon as I could, and the contrast between cycling north into a headwind and south with a tailwind couldn't have been greater
Having covered the previous sixty kilometres in six hours, it took just an hour to cover the thirty to Wakkanai Town, and along the way I passed - surprise, surprise - the biggest wind farm in Japan.
As the sun set in the west so the moon appeared in the east...
...and I arrived at Midori-no-yu, which at first seemed like just another rider house: a woman at the reception desk sat silently watching the Olympics on TV, there was a bucket full of fag ends in one corner of the common room, and the adjoining sento was even more basic and old fashioned than the one I had been to in Asahikawa.
I was on the verge of heading into Wakkanai for dinner when I got talking to one of the other guests, a student from Kumamoto who had taken five days to get here using his juh-hachi-kippu - ie. by local trains from Kyushu at the opposite end of the country - and had until the end of September to cycle all the way back (his bike and baggage had arrived in Hokkaido by post). As we were talking, the woman at reception - who the other guests referred to as okah-san (mum) - turned off the house lights, started up a mirror ball that hung from the ceiling, picked up a microphone and, her voice drenched in karaoké-style reverb, began to speak.
'Good evening everyone and welcome to Midori-no-yu,' she said. 'Unfortunately, last year our amplifier broke down, so tonight we'll only be able to sing one song together. As usual there is all-you-can-drink shoh-chu (焼酎 / a cheap, vodka-like spirit made from wheat or potatoes), and if you feel sick at any time, there are toilets here' - at this point she gestured with her hands like an air stewardess indicating the emergency exits - 'and here. The ones at closest to reception are better for number ones. For number twos, I would recommend the ones at the far end of the room. Now, if everyone would like to stand up and join hands, let's sing!'
After a rousing - although not altogether tuneful - rendition of a song called Sakura (桜 / cherry blossom - actually there are several famous Japanese songs called Sakura, and I couldn't tell you for sure exactly which one we sang), the microphone was passed around and we introduced ourselves one by one. Due to the loud grinding noise emanating from an ice-making machine in the corner of the room, I didn't catch everything of what was said, but there follows a selection of the more memorable introductions:
'This is my second time in Hokkaido. The first time was with my girlfriend, but she dumped me in April so this time I'm here on my own.'
'I had a crash yesterday and today is my first day on a rental bike.'
'I'm in my fourth year at university and I'll be graduating next March. I've managed to land a job as a trainee newscaster in Nagano Prefecture, so perhaps one day you'll see me on TV.'
'If anyone else would like to join me, I'm getting up at 3.30 tomorrow morning to go and watch the sunrise.'
'Last night I pitched my tent in a park. I was woken by the sound of the morning exercise programme on NHK, and I ended up doing the exercises with an old guy who had brought his radio with him.'
'When I came to Wakkanai I only intended to stay for one day, but it's so much fun that I've already been here for three. I'll definitely leave tomorrow, though.'
At the end of the evening okah-san put down the mic, turned the lights back on and took a Polaroid photo of us all. Quite by coincidence, I now realised, I had found the same rider house that my friend Tokidoki Tokyo had stayed in on his tour of Hokkaido - also riding the Transeo 4.0 GT 7005 City Cross Design - the previous summer, and when I asked okah-san if I could have a look through the Midori-no-yu archives, I found his rosy-cheeked Devonian face among a similar group of guests from almost exactly a year before.
Esashi – Hamatonbetsu (枝幸町 - 浜頓別) 40km
It rained all night and on into the morning, and not long after I set off there was a bolt of lightning and a crack of thunder, the drizzle turned to a deluge and I took refuge in this bus shelter.
During the next couple of hours the only person to join me was picked up ten minutes later by the only bus to pass by, and I wiled away the time sending emails to Mrs M, having a shave, studying Japanese, eating all of my emergency rations, and writing a list of every item of luggage I had with me to compare with a similar list from a previous tour (if you don't happen to be a cycling geek bordering on the obsessive then feel free to skip this next bit. Notations are as follows: L = lighter than previous tour / H = heavier / S = the same / N = new item).
Bicycle – L (my trusty Transeo 4.0 GT 7005 City Cross Design, inherited from Tokidoki Tokyo)
Tent – S (my trusty Snow Peak, which I've written about before)
Foam mattress – L (on the last tour I took an inflatable one, which was a) unnecessarily heavy and b) got a puncture)
T-shirts – H (I brought an extra t-shirt this time to reduce the likelihood of having to 'recycle' the ones I had already worn)
Socks – H (ditto an extra pair or two, because wearing socks more than once can be even more offensive to the nostrils than doing so with a t-shirt)
Shorts – L (perhaps my strictest concession to weight reduction was to remove the drawstrings from the waistbands of both of my pairs of shorts)
Trousers – L (last time - cotton / this time - artificial fibres)
Sun hat – L (ditto)
Waterproofs – S
Riding gloves – N
Bar ends – L (last time - stainless steel / this time - aluminium)
Deodorant – S (Forever Living Aloe Evershield, which I can highly recommend)
Dr Bonner's – S (see Day 12)
Sleeping bag – S
Books – L (lighter in the sense that this tme I didn't bring any books at all, having realised that it's actually rather impractical - not to say dangerous - to read a book while riding a bicycle)
Diary – L (last time - A5 / this time - A6)
Hammer – S (for banging in tent pegs, in case you were wondering)
Spare inner tube – S
Tools – L (the wheels on the Transeo 4.0 GT 7005 City Cross Design were quick-release, thus dispensing with the need for a spanner)
Pump – S
Lights – H
Water bottle – N
Mapple – S
Mobile phone and charger – S
Digital camera and charger – L (technology being what it is, the camera that I used on this tour weighed far fewer grammes and had many more megapixels than its predecessor)
Electric shaver and charger – S (I felt very pleased with myself when I found the super-lightweight National / Panasonic ES8815 electric shaver on a trip to Akihabara, only to discover when I got home that it came with an inconveniently humungous charger)
Bell – H
Mascot – N (see Day 1)
Chopsticks – S (while waribashi - 割り箸 / disposable chopsticks - are marginally less prevalent in Japan than they used to be, I still saved the equivalent of a small sapling by refusing them in favour of my own, reusable pair)
Spectacles – S
Business cards – N (as I had come to realise these are an essential in Japan, where even bikers carry them)
Mosquito coils – S
Bicycle lock - H
Despite the anally retentive enjoyment of compiling this list, in the end I reasoned that the rain wasn't going to stop at any point before the end of the day, so wrapped my feet in plastic bags and rustled my way along the coast to Hamatonbetsu Town.
That night I went to a restaurant-come-guest house that was buzzing with diners, who every few minutes would stand up in unison, rush outside and start applauding. They would then return with an exhausted-looking companion in tow, who would sit straight down and tuck in to his or her evening meal. Each one wore shorts and a vest with a number on it, and had, as they later explained, taken six days to run here from Cape Erimo in the far south-east of Hokkaido. For some, their 550-kilometre odyssey would reach its climax tomorrow at Cape Sohya, but for a hardy few, that would merely be the halfway point on a 1100km round-trip. There were a mixture of men and women, most in their fifties and sixties, and having covered almost eighty kilometres a day, every day for a week, they had begun to resemble each other: short, wiry, and so heavily tanned that at first I mistook them for a visiting delegation of native tribespeople from the Brazilian rainforest.
On-neyu – Soh-unkyo (温根湯 - 層雲峡) – 72km
'I've been to the Nissan factory in Sunderland a couple of times on business,' said one of the other campers as we were packing our things and getting ready to leave On-neyu. 'As far as I could make out, everyone in England is called John. It was John this, John that, John the other.'
'A friend of mine in Tokyo's called John,' said another. 'He was married to a Japanese lady who died a few years ago, but he says that he's never going back to England because the weather's so awful. Your name's not John as well, is it?'
I reached the 1050-metre Sekihoku Pass by about lunchtime and rewarded myself with some Kumazasa, a well-known brand of ice cream in Hokkaido (of the various flavours on offer I chose lavender, although the other customers seemed to prefer the watermelon).
At around the same time as me a father and his ten-year-old son arrived at the pass from the opposite direction.
'I always promised him we'd go on a trip for a few days when his legs were long enough,' said the father, and despite insisting that he had assigned only the lightest items of luggage to his son, the son's bicycle, a mini-mountain bike with a shopping basket on the front, appeared to be weighed down with even more bits and bobs than mine.
Partly to mix things up a bit and partly after being warned about high winds along the north-east coast, I had decided to head inland for a few days, which after calling in at Lake Kussharo brought me today to Soh-unkyo, a twenty-four-kilometre-long gorge in the Daisetsuzan National Park.
There is a cable car that takes paying passengers from the valley floor to a point 1300 metres up the side of Mount Kurodaké, and apparently, some people catch the last one of the day, camp on the mountain and hike to the summit early the next morning to watch the sunrise. The sunset, though, had been all but swallowed up by the clouds when my cable car reached its destination.
At the onsen in Soh-unkyo, a young man with an impressively intricate array of tattoos over his chest, arms and shoulders was drying himself off in front of the changing room mirror - a rare sight, as tattoos are linked in the public consciousness with the yakuza, and if you happen to have one the majority of public baths will be out of bounds. I would have liked to ask him where he had them done, or even to take a photo - they were expertly drawn and hadn't turned that faded blue-green colour you so often see - but frankly he looked a bit scary, and in the end I chickened out.
The agony and the ecstasy
Baseball is by some distance the most popular sport in Japan, and in order not to feel left out when the subject comes up in conversation, I have been trying to learn a little more about it. Obviously there is a national league with its dominant team, the Yomiuri Giants, and several Japanese play in the American major leagues - most notably Ichiro Suzuki of the New York Yankees, who just passed 4000 career hits, something that only six other players have managed before him - but it seems to me that the true spirit of Japanese baseball is embodied in the Kohshién (甲子園).
Kohshién is the common term for Zenkoku-kohtoh-gakkoh-yakyuu-senshuken-taikai (全国高等学校野球選手権大会 / the All Japan High School Baseball Championship Series), which takes place in August each year at the eponymous Kohshién stadium in Hyogo Prefecture, and while a similar tournament, Senbatsu-kohtoh-gakkoh-yakyuu-taikai (選抜高等学校野球大会 / the Invitational High School Baseball Tournament) takes place at the same stadium every March and April, the former is the bigger draw. This, I suspect, is partly because playing a full baseball match in the blazing heat and humidity of a mid-summer's day makes the players - some of whom are just fifteen years old - seem just that little bit more heroic and self-sacrificing, and indeed, this year the heat came into play in the most unwanted fashion for the representatives from Ibaraki Prefecture, Johsoh-gakuin.
Each of Japan's forty-seven prefectures sends a team to the Kohshién, and Johsoh can boast two of Ibaraki's three overall victories in the post-war years. This summer they won their first three matches to earn a place in the quarter-finals against Maébashi-ikuéi from Gunma Prefecture, and by the end of the eighth inning of that match (each team bats nine times in a game, hence 'bottom of the ninth' being such an oft-heard phrase, even if most non-baseball fans have no real idea of what it means) were on the verge of a place in the semi-finals.
That ninth inning, however, seems to me to place a greater burden on the players involved than the climactic moments of almost any other sporting contest, and in particular on the pitchers (ie - and if you'll forgive me for stating the obvious - the guys who are throwing the ball, as opposed to the ones who are attempting to hit or catch it). If a pitcher goes into the final inning with his team leading the match by just a point or two, the pressure on him to protect that lead is enormous, and while catchers, fielders and batters can and do make mistakes during the course of a ninth inning (see below), the onus is very much on the pitcher to protect a lead rather than on the batter to claw it back (in the same way, the expectation in a penalty shootout at the end of a football match is that the outfield player will score, not that the goalkeeper will make a save). As a result, bottom of the ninth collapses, comebacks and turnarounds are a relatively common - and if you happen to be on the losing side, gut-wrenchingly depressing - occurrence.
In this particular match, Johsoh went into the final inning with a 2-0 lead against Ikuéi, and rather than have a meltdown, their star pitcher - Harumi Iita - succumbed to a combination of the heat, exhaustion, and quite possibly some psychosomatic pressure into the bargain. While professional baseball teams have a whole roster of pitchers on which to call over the course of a season, high school teams will often reach the closing stages of the Kohshién having relied on a single pitcher for the entire tournament, and quite possibly in the preliminary, prefectural rounds as well. Not only that, but the Kohshién takes place over the course of just two weeks, with fewer and fewer days off to recuperate between games as it progresses.
As the match wore on, Iita began to tire - in the words of Johsoh's catcher Yusuké Yoshinari, 'his pitching got slower and his curve balls stopped curving' - and while Iita was warming up before the ninth inning, he got a cramp in his leg. After spending five minutes off the field receiving treatment he resumed his warm-up, only to get a cramp in the other leg. Because this was diagnosed as being possible evidence of the early onset of heatstroke, Iita was taken out of the match, leaving Johsoh's second-choice pitcher, Yuta Kanéko, to handle the all-important final inning.
To liken the situation to a cricket match, this is a little like asking a player from a pub team who just happens to be in the stands to step onto the field and bowl the final over of a match between England and Australia.
'Oy, Dave! Jimmy Anderson's stubbed his toe. Reckon you can come on throw a few balls down the pitch? They only need a couple of runs to win the game and get into the final of the World Cup, but don't worry, I'm sure you'll be fine. Go on, put down your pint and I'll find you a pair of trainers.'
To be fair to Kanéko, he very nearly fulfilled his emergency role, and reached a point where there were no 'runners' (ie batters who had hit the ball and made it to first, second or third base) and just one more batter to get out. The next batter hit the first pitch that he faced from Kanéko towards a Johsoh fielder, Suguru Shindoh, who instead of collecting the ball and calmly running the batter out, fumbled it and threw high and wide of his teammate.
Kanéko was soon in full meltdown mode, and it wasn't long before Ikuéi's star player, the all-rounder Hikari Takahashi, had scored a three-base hit to bring the teams level at 2-2 and send the game into overtime.
By now my colleagues and I had taken an unofficial tea break to watch events unfold on the Board of Education office TV, although the psychological pendulum (if you'll forgive the Colemanballs-esque metaphor) was swinging inexorably in Ikuéi's favour.
In his capacity as pitcher, Takahashi registered three successive strike outs to end the tenth Johsoh inning in a matter of minutes, and as he stepped up to pitch Ikuéi's tenth inning, poor Kanéko was probably shaking like Shakin' Stevens and William Shakespeare doing the Shake 'n' Vac while sharing a milkshake.
Almost every ball he threw seemed to get dispatched to some far corner of the ground, and before we knew it, he had surrendered the winning run and Ikuéi had triumphed 3-2. In a post-match interview, a clearly traumatised Kanéko (his eyes 'red with tears', as the Tokyo Newspaper described it) said, 'All of a sudden I was overwhelmed by the atmosphere in the stadium. I don't remember anything [about the tenth inning] at all.'
The Ikuéi players ran onto the field to celebrate, scores of Johsoh cheerleaders cried into their pom-poms, and Johsoh's head coach Riki Sasaki looked on from the dugout, no doubt wondering how his side had managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Not that it would have been much consolation to Johsoh, but Ikuéi went on to win the tournament, one of the few teams in history to do so at their first attempt. Their coach, Naoki Arai, took up his position about ten years ago when there were problems with bad behaviour within the baseball club. Now, though, his players are so disciplined that he has them get up every morning and walk the streets collecting rubbish, an activity during which they are not allowed to talk to each other. As Arai says, 'A person who picks up rubbish is a person who doesn't drop rubbish.' Wise words indeed.
Lake Kussharo – On-neyu (屈斜路湖 - 温根湯) – 111km
At the Wakoto campsite the temperature fell to single figures, and during the course of the night I put on pretty much every item of clothing I had, including long trousers and a raincoat with the hood up. In the tent next to mine was a scooter-riding university student from Yamagata Prefecture who was at Lake Kussharo for the fly fishing. As it turned out he had been the second-to-last customer at Mrs Bamboo Child's ramen restaurant the previous evening, and like me had been regaled with her life story. By eating the last one of the day, he had also inadvertently deprived me of the opportunity to sample Mrs Bamboo Child's homemade dango_ (団子), although even at eight in the morning a dango stall next to the campsite was open for business.
Elsewhere in Japan, dango are rice flour dumplings, steamed or boiled and served three or four at a time on wooden kebab sticks. In Hokkaido they can also be - as the stallholder explained - big, burger-shaped patties made from potato and cornflour, deep fried, frozen, re-fried and served with a sticky, sweet variation on soy sauce. Whatever was in them and however they were made, my breakfast dango possessed outstanding powers of nutrition, and I positively flew to the top of the Bihoro Pass, from which the view of Kussharo is justifiably renowned.
The Pass even has its own song, which echoed out across the mountains from a set of all-weather speakers next to its very own commemorative stone plaque.
Originally perfomed by a woman called Hibari Misora, Bihoro Pass has quite possibly the most depressing lyrics I've heard this side of the last Joy Division album:
It was a holiday I went on to forget you, but
My heart lost its way in the fog
Standing at the pass where I couldn't see a thing
At least my hatred began to fade
Oh, Bihoro Pass. Here at the ends of the Earth the fog came down
The next day at Lake Saroma - or was it Lake Mashu?
The drizzly sky was heartbreaking
The shadow of a retreating figure, a man pointing at Wakoto Town
Somehow reminded me of you
Oh, Bihoro Pass. Here at the ends of the Earth the wind is howling
These hands that once held me close to your heart
Are now crying tears of sleet
The ice like lotus leaves reminds me of love's fragility
And begins to blur as it sinks into the lake
Oh, Bihoro Pass. Here at the ends of the Earth the snow is dancing
In Kitami City I called in at an old-style kissaten (喫茶店 / coffee shop) called El Paso ('since 1978', the sign said), and got talking to the only other customer, an eccentric old man in a hand-graffitied t-shirt who carried with him a portfolio full of paintings. There were still lifes of a turnip, a tape measure and a money box, and views of a church, a lighthouse and various tourist spots in Tokyo, and despite being reminiscent of the kind of thing serial killers paint while they're on death row (the proper critical term is 'naive'), the pictures had a charm all of their own and a child-like disregard for the laws of perspective.
Not for nothing does Kitami's official mascot have an onion for a head, as the surrounding countryside is so full of onion fields that on this mid-August evening the air even smelled of them: a mouthwatering aroma that made it feel as if I was cycling past a long line of hot dog stands.