hakone

we took rennie and louis to hakone, region of steaming valleys dotted with hot springs and hiking trails - the well-established resort area for tokyo shoguns. after a month of touring around in china, they could use a relaxing bath we thought, and some fresh air before kicking off a new life in san francisco.



tomo introduced us to the holiday life of a tokyo real estate agent, recovering from a week at the company in the members-only resort hotel... of the company. a real treat though, including in-house onsen, a tatami room with floor to ceiling views over the valley, and yukata for all. on the balcony at night (strong smell of pine trees) I thought the last time I saw a sky full of stars must have been from a mongolian haystack.






after breakfast we met up with akira, the guide for the hike, at gora station.
on a first break, in a clearance after a steep climb through bamboo forest, with the view of the picture above in front of us, we were wondering in which direction mount fuji was hiding. we decided it was still behind the hill we were climbing, until all of a sudden we focused and saw this. like finally finding your glasses right on your own nose...




soon we came to a ridge, offering views on both sides, leading to the top of the 'bright star mountain'. clouds refused to dissolve - so hazy fuji belonged more to the sky than to the earth for the rest of the day.


on top of bright star mountain


going down - back to the bright valleys of the inhabited world

with subways and trains and buses and cable cars smoothly interconnecting it feels like public transportation can take you to virtually every corner of the empire - making day trips from tokyo perfectly worth the hassle. the switchback trainride to gora is the steepest in the world.

zonnige groetjes uit shinagawa

and shaky greetz from shinagawa... heaviest earthquake for me so far, shaking me up this morning at 5 o'clock. simply no way to get used to those creepy surprizes... in magnitude not as strong as the one in niigata last fall, but significantly closer, in ibaraki prefecture, just an hour by train northeast from tokyo. appetizer to the big one locals are expecting? there's something like the 70 years rule for big earthquakes, and the last one was in 1923.

lesson number one

counting in japanese is notoriously complicated.
japanese uses ‘classifiers’ to count or quantify specific families of objects. the ‘three’ in three pens (family of the cylindrical objects) is different from the ‘three’ in three cakes (family of the small chunky objects). classifiers roughly equal english words like ‘glassful’, ‘sheets of’, ‘pieces of’...

the list of families looks long and kind of whimsical to western minds. years of age, machines, floors, times, persons, animals, small chunky objects, cylindrical objects, glassfuls cupfuls, books, letters, days of the month – are all counted with different sets of numbers.

a couple of examples, for clarity.
sheets of paper and tickets, from the family of the ‘thin and flat objects’, are counted with ichimai (1) nimmai (2) sammai (3)... pizzas, however deep pan, belong to the same family. calzones (those folded pizzas no one ever orders) on the other hand are counted with hitotsu (1) futatsu (2) mitsu (3) ... the set for non-classified objects.
animals have a different classifier (ippiki (1) nihiki (2) sanbiki (3) ...). birds yet another one (ichiwa (1) niwa (2) sanwa (3) ...). but, rabbits are counted as birds – according to aichan because their ears resemble wings. wonder if it works the other way around for skiing ostriches... roadkill rabbits are again counted as thin and flat objects, like deep pan pizzas and tickets.

fortunately there’s minimix and point it around the bar for easy communication...

naive

lots of new residential towers under construction around my new place, on reclaimed land in shinagawa. one going up right in front of us... only narrow slices of sea and shinkansen sliding by are left, as long as it lasts.


(tokyo, undepletable source of funky Tshirt prints)


(click)