Sons of Loki

Obviously when I need to get up at 8am, I can’t. When I want to sleep solidly and awake at 8am, I wake up at 7 and can’t get back to sleep. Sho ga nai. I spent about an hour and a half cooking up some rice for breakfast, showering and checking up on the state of the world; then it was packing my bag with a good supply of books and pens and no less than three chargers.

At Musashi-sakai, I proudly asked the ticket fellow at the green window for a 青春18きっぷ (seishun juuhachi kippu, Youth 18 Ticket), a fantastic deal that gets you unlimited travel on any JR local or rapid train for a bargain 11,500 yen for five days (non-consecutively and transferable, so five people can use it on one day, or you can use it for two days and then leave it for a week; it’s cho flexible). Ticket in hand, I boarded the Chuo line to Shinjuku, and asked at the information desk about getting a night train, the Moonlight Echigo, to Niigata (special “Moonlight” overnight trains are covered by the Seishun ticket). After flicking through a dozen JR timetable tomes, the young woman told me that the Moonlight Echigo didn’t run until later in the month. Not to worry. Were there any other night trains, I asked. Oh, there’s the Moonlight Nagara to Kyoto, she said. More timetable tomes. “But not until later in the month.”

Oh well. I’m hoping I misunderstood her, and maybe if I go to Shinagawa tonight I can get to Kyoto. Maybe not. No worries. My original plan, anyway, was to head to Kamakura, a historic city on a peninsula south of Tokyo. As I got further from the Big Toke, you could sense a change in the air; cleaner, fresher, a different aroma. As I got off the train in the pleasant March sunshine I saw a sign inviting me to the beach, so I went there.

Kamakura is famous mostly for its temples, making it a big tourist spot (and an easy day trip from Tokyo). But it definitely has the feel of a seaside town; the pottering elderly types, the surfer youths, the cute little cafes and surf gear emporiums and independent fashion shops made it feel like you could be in Hawaii or Cornwall.

Except Kamakura has giant hawks.

Huge things, screeching and gliding in a strangely serene beauty, or perching on phone cables. I paid them little mind and went down to the beach, which was alright; greyish, coarse sand, but a nice view and rolling waves. I passed a man merrily urinating on the sand and sat down a long way away from him, took off my coat, rolled up my socks and for the first time in my life, waded into the Pacific Ocean. Unfortunately I didn’t have a handkerchief to knot up and place on my head in time-honoured fashion, but I felt like I was bringing a bit of old fashioned English class to distant Kamakura.

I had a pee in Lawson and bought an ice cream, which I ate while wandering through a little green and trying to find a bin (you’d think Japan would be overflowing with bins, but there’s never one when you need one). Something swooped past my head. A second later, I realised it was a hawk. A second after that, I realised he was after my ice cream. A second after that, I panicked and imagined hawk claws digging into my flesh or pecking out my eyes and very quickly finished off the ice cream and started the walk to see Daibutsu, The Giant Buddha. The road to it was paved with the typical Japanese souvenir shops and tourists, both native and foreign. I was reminded a little of the long trail to see God’s Final Message To Creation in So Long And Thanks For All The Fish.

Now I reckon I’ve seen a bigger Buddha in Kyoto at a oddly obscure shrine (obscure because despite the gigantic Buddha it’s not in any guidebooks and no one was there), but hey, who am I to judge size of Buddhas.

After you’ve seen one temple you’ve pretty much seen them all so I thought I’d head back to the station. On the way, though, there was another temple for the Great Kannon (I rather think having gods in Buddhism runs rather counter to the spirit of the whole thing, but again who am I to judge) so I stopped by for a poke around. The view was quite nice, so I had a tea and a rest, before checking out the big statue of Kannon and making a wander through a cave filled with tiny statues and a man who looked at me funny.

Back at the station, I wondered briefly about going to Miura at the very bottom of this peninsula, but it seemed a long way for nothing much and I ached to start my journey north. So I got the train back towards Shinjuku, getting off at Yokohama.

Yokohama is one of the three metropolises making up the enormous Chiba-Tokyo-Yokohama megacity, easily the biggest urban area in the world. As a consequence, there’s nothing you can do here you can’t do in Tokyo, except visit the tallest building in Japan. Still, it feels a little different to Tokyo; more open, perhaps, more authentic. I was surprised to find myself on a pedestriannised street that could have been in Cardiff or Leeds, for example. I popped into Don Kihote to check out rucksacks (1990 yen? Tad steep) and was glad to find a McDonalds where I could steal electricity and internet and listen to quite possibly the most awful music ever recorded (if you can call mushy pap like this “music”). I’m testing out using Word 2007 for my blog posting, and I think it might just work perfectly for offline composition, including photos, and then one-click uploading. This is grand technology. If I could blog from the top of a mountain I would.

So: assuming I can’t get the Moonlight trains anywhere, I guess I’ll just try to get as close to Sapporo as possible and then hunker down for the night in a capsule hotel or manga café or, if all else fails, a bench. The adventure, she is just beginning!