Mixed Bag

It is amazing to me what qualifies as a blog now days. I am not talking about other people’s blogging, but my own. Last week I sat down to write about the trip Chrissy and I made to Koyasan. I couldn’t. Then, last Saturday, we climbed the mountain behind our house. It was about 1200 feet up from our apartment to a shrine at the beginning of the pass to the center of the island. The view up there was amazing. Again, I couldn’t find much to write about.

What kept going through my mind was that two weeks ago, my rear tire went totally flat. I rolled over a piece of glass, the size, shape and color of a pea. It wasn’t sharp, just sharp enough to push through the thin tire and into the tube.

When we got here, nearly a year ago, the differences in culture were so great, and all of the temples were so new to us that we couldn’t help but write about it all. Now, the temples are just another building up the street and the festivals remind me of the parade at the Lentil Festival in Pullman, the pea and lentil capital of the world.

I realize now how comfortable I have become in a totally different culture. It doesn’t even bother me that much not being able to speak with other people. People yak away in Japanese, sometimes to me, sometimes about me, and I understand only a very little. It doesn’t matter though.

Koyasan reminded me of the Girdwood Forest Fair. Girdwood was a town of 400 people back in the early 80s and the fair was a couple of tents, we called them vendors in the trees by the tennis courts across the street from the Mercantile. The fair wound back in under the cottonwoods between a Glacier Creek and Winner Creek. There was a band shell back in the woods, with seats for 100 people. Koyasan, the center of Esoteric Buddhism founded 1300 years ago, was like that.

Part of the reason Koyasan felt like Girdwood is its elevation. The town is about 2500 feet up in the mountains south of Osaka. The altitude gave the air a crispness. The air was especially crisp for the two of us, since we went there planning only to spend the afternoon there, but ended up spending the night in one of the Buddhist monasteries. We had no coats and only shorts and t-shirts. We discovered that June 15th was a major day in Koyasan, and that was the reason we decided to stay. Another reason Koyasan felt small was the parade that they held on June 15 in celebration of the birth of the founder of Esoteric Buddhism.

The parade in Koyasan actually came in two parts. On Saturday night, the novice monk who served us dinner asked if we were going to the festival that evening. He then directed us to the downtown area at sunset after we had eaten our Shojin Ryori, a vegetarian Buddhist meal and the real reason we trekked to Koyasan. The festival consisted of three illuminated floats pulled through town on the town’s only real street.

Sunday morning, Chrissy and I left the monastery after our breakfast and walked through Koyasan to the mausoleum of the founder of esoteric Buddhism. His mausoleum was at the end of a large graveyard that stretched for 1.9 kilometers from the town to the temple in front of his grave. The graveyard wound under the tall cedar trees between two creeks. There is an estimated half of a million graves in the trees. Many of his followers want to be buried close to his grave.

We made it back to town just in time to follow the parade through town. This was the festival that we had learned about on the train ride up the day before. It consisted of the townspeople dressed in various traditional wear dancing through town. The three floats that were lit the night before were also a part of the parade, however sans lights.

The real treat was in the morning as we walked by a temple, we heard the monks chanting prayers. We walked around the side of the temple and were able to peek in to see about 150 monks and novices performing a ritual prayer. Our novice was among them.

Last Saturday, Chrissy and I decided to take a walk to a place we hadn’t been before. Well, I have been by there several times in a car, but I had not walked it yet. The mountain behind our apartment houses parks, temples and reservoirs. It is the way we drive to go to Katsumoto’s farm. The road is steep with many switchback corners. The sidewalks are narrow and often non-existent, but there are shrines along the road and a temple complex at the top. In the trees on both sides of the road there is also a prefectural forest.

As we started out, Chrissy asked if this was a ‘death march,’ like the ones I would drag her on when we first got here. I had no idea; I hadn’t done it before. We started out climbing and kept on climbing. I allowed her to rest on a bench while I reconnoitered a map of the hill and trails leading up to the top of the mountain. It really didn’t seem too bad.

It took us a little over an hour, but we reached my goal. At the crest of the hill, just before the road tunnels under the mountain to the northern extremes of Nishinomiya, we came to a temple. I had no idea what was at this temple, but the view from its deck was the best we have seen in Japan. We could see most of our city but part was blocked by the mountainside and other hills, across Osaka and almost all the way to Kansai Airport. The cities stretched continously off into the distance, melting into the hazy horizon.

On our walk back, I led Chrissy through the large prefectural forest. We found a stand of sculptures in the trees, a couple of bandstands (one with a Japanese harmonica player on stage performing a personal concert to an absent audience) and a feral cat colony in possession of a couple of benches. Chrissy got nervous that I was going to leave her body on one of the more remote trails, but I was confident that we could find our way home. After a hike of about 8 miles, 1200 feet up and back down again, we made it back to our little apartment.

Cool things still happen. We still discover some places even just outside our back door, but I want to write about a little piece of glass that made me walk home from a Saturday afternoon bike ride.

We have been here for such a long time that we have grown used to most of the sights and smells that we once found so unique, so Japanese. We have come to understand that home is where we have been for the last year. We have discovered that when Chrissy and I are together, we are home, but still,this home is no place like the home where our heart is.