Urban Hotel Shinjo

Today we had to clear out of our hotel by 10 am, but our train didn't leave until 5 pm. In any other city we have been to so far, this wouldn't be a problem. Unlike every other city we have been to so far, however, Sakata offers little in the way of...anything. We visited the city's museum about Samuri houses (I think?), but it was difficult to tell what was going on, you know ...

... talked to the old people in the back. Blow off for some middle aged spinsters, of all the insults... Anyway, we were rather lucky this morning as we arrived at the mountain during a couple hours of no rain, still cloudy though. I have to say, despite being really tired, the climb was really good--all 2400 steps of it--they're little steps unlike Mizen on Miyajima. The mountain is totally empty--too early in the season and no one really goes to Tsuruoka. The trees are huge ...

It's Christmas and I'm at work. That's okay, really. I sort of treat it like the Superbowl: a powerful, emotional force that annually sweeps through the population and somehow misses me every time. My role in the holidays and Superbowl Sunday, when I'm at my most active, is therapist. People describe the symptoms of these sociological disorders -- fights with relatives, shopping mayhem ...

... I did go to Akita City and drink coffee with my Japanese teacher and showed her the bookstore she's apparently never seen before. In fact, she was completely unfamiliar with the area despite having lived here for years, so I found myself in the surreal role of being an American tour guide to a Japanese person in a Japanese city. Then I went home and read an article about bees. And that's about it. Any questions?

For an American Midwesterner, trains may represent the most jarring upheaval that comes with living in a foreign country. After all, before coming to Akita, I always thought of trains as nothing more than panoramas of graffiti I could peer at through my windshield -- a way I could stay updated on the real estate acquisitions of various gangs from hoods I would never visit. And when the panorama passed, it also dropped ...

... halfway point is an icy caldera with a few crude buildings that sell tiny bottles of water for five dollars. After that, the landscape gets more vertical. Boulders have to be scrambled over, drop-offs have to be skirted, and, except in the hottest time of summer, snowfields have to be crossed. When you finally reach the desolate, rocky summit there are a few more crude buildings, one of which actually sells beer. That way you can climb down the ...

Rather than just staring intimidated at its shadowy, snow-stained peaks and shaking my fist, I finally climbed Mt. Chokai on Monday. Of course, it sounds like I did this all by myself, scoffed at the notion of taking a guide, started from the very bottom, and wore sandals. We (me, Brad, and a couple of Japanese guys who knew what they were doing) drove to the highest parking lot from which it turned out to be ...

... is because she's crazy. We of the Arex-temperament are very practical about being nuts. The novelist John Gardner once wrote that a good way of getting people to leave you alone about your obsessive and inexplicable compulsions (in his case, writing; in my case, sobriety) was to cry. Personally, I find this lazy. Mystifying people with vaguely intelligible discourse is far more rewarding as you come ...

I had a 75 minute transfer in Shinjo where there just happened to be a festival at the train station today. They had tons of food stalls where I got some food, and one vendor who was cooking live fish on a stick gave me one for free! This was a fun transfer and broke up some of the monotony of riding the local trains continuously.

I am now departing for another long day of riding local trains. I will leave Sakata at 7:51 am and arrive in Hakodate on the northern island of Japan at 10:04 pm. The trains become shorter and fewer the farther north you go in Japan, so I have quite a few hour-long transfers. During that time, I plan to explore whatever city I am in.