Regina Glei's Blog, page 4

A Trip to Sadogashima – Part 2: Gold Rush

On my second day on Sadogashima, I chose to ride with the public buses. They offer an all you can ride pass for up to three days and I took the two day pass.
The main attraction on Sadogashima is the gold mine. Gold was discovered in 1601 and mining started soon after. The shogunate operated the mine for over 250 years. The mine ceased production only in 1989. Thanks to that the place is ripe with history. You can do two tours, one of the Edo times mine and one of a Meiji times shaft and if you ever go there, you should definitely do both tours. If you are a cave freak, there are also guided private tours of some two hours, which must be ordered in advance and they lead into shafts where the normal tourists do not go. I was quite happy with the regular tour though

A Trip to Sadogashima – Part 1

Sadogashima is the sixth biggest island of Japan after the four main islands and the largest island of Okinawa. Sadogashima lies around 50 km off the coast of Niigata city and prefecture and the big car ferry ride there takes two and a half hours.
The island has an odd shape with two mountain ridges to the east and west and a flat middle in between. The highest peak on Sadogashima is a whopping 1172 meters high and called Mt. Kinpoku.

Sado has a rich history, first as an island where political and religious figures unliked by the establishment were banished to, and second it is one of the very few places in Japan with natural resources, namely gold. Alas, the goldmine is long depleted.
It took me twenty years of living in Japan before I went to this island with my usual interest more in the direction of the Izu islands and the Okinawa islands. But the company asks its employees in times of coronavirus to take their annual paid leave and so I made the rather quick decision to take a few days off and to go there.

Despite its decent size it’s a pretty quiet island with only some 55.000 inhabitants. That there are so few around might also have to do with strong winters and half a meter of snow, which I find hard to imagine!
The boat ride from Niigata was a very lovely affair in nice weather, with seagulls following the ship the entire way, being fed with shrimp crackers from the tourists.

On my first day I borrowed a free bicycle from my hotel in the middle of the island and rode down south to the sea town of Sawata. There was nothing much going on on the several kilometer long beach and that was a smooth ride.

I tried to get to the south-eastern tip of the island, but without an electric assist and the sun and heat coming out, that became too daunting a ride through the hilly mountain roads. With a battery assist I would have pushed on, but not without it, considering the over fifteen kilometers I would have had to ride back. It was a lovely day on the bicycle though and I enjoyed every bit of it.

Mt. Fuji – 2nd Station

With the mercury ever rising and rising, I saw no way to do e.g. temple sightseeing around Numazu. A third trip to Osezaki also seemed kinda boring and thus I decided to get higher up to escape the brooding heat and that was an extremely good idea! I wanted to go to one of Mt. Fuji’s 5th stations (there are four or them) but I soon found out that Mt. Fuji is closed for the climbing season of 2020 due to the coronavirus. This may sound odd, but: around 100,000 people climb Mt. Fuji every year, most of those climbs happen during the climbing season in July and August, when there is no snow even on the top of the 3776 meter mountain. Also, usually, the huts on the stations 5 to 9 are open during those 2 months. But, this year, everything was shut down. However, one of the bus services up the mountain still went to the 2nd station on the south side, which lies at 1450 meters. That sounded high enough to me and I rode to Mishima by train and from there around 90 min with a normal city bus, not a coach bus, as I had expected. The bus passes also Fuji Safari Park, but I’ve been there once before and it’s “only” at 900 meter elevation. The bus usually climbs up until the Fujimino 5th station but ended this year at the 2nd station with its park called Mizugatsuka.

At Mizugatsuka is a large (pretty newly built) souvenir shop and restaurant, a parking lot for a thousand cars and that’s it. It offers various walking routes around the area. It also has jogging/running courses around the car park and hordes of runners galloped around there. The by far best thing of the place was the temperature – a balmy 23 degrees Celsius. When I returned to Numazu in the evening it was 37 degrees Celsius there… Mt. Fuji itself, which you can theoretically see from a clearing in the forest and from atop a nearby hill, was shrouded in what I have come to call the mothership cloud. If there are clouds, they get stuck at Mt. Fuji, since it’s in their way coming from the sea barely a few kilometers away. It looked to me like the clouds were starting at around 2000 meters elevation. I then ventured on one of the walks/hikes that start from the car park of about 90 min to a shrine at the flank of the mountain. The path was fantastic. Very easy to walk, almost no ups and downs as it went parallel to the mountain and since it had been super wet all of July, every log and rock around was covered in very green moss.

It was absolutely beautiful to walk through these woods. The path was sometimes hard to discern, but every few meters pink ribbons in the trees helped to identify the path and here and there were also signposts. The shrine was standing guard over a cave and a few underpasses, but the cave itself was off limits and also didn’t look very big, just for one person to be able to crawl through, which is not my kind of thing

Where is Numazu?

Numazu is not such a popular Mt. Fuji destination as Hakone or Gotemba or Lake Kawaguchi, but I chose Numazu because it is located at the sea

Giant Aquarium at the End of the World

Considering the ridiculous heat in Kanazawa, which increased every day, I was looking for something to do without too much heat exposure and came upon the idea to go to Notojima (Shima, or jima means island) it’s an island off the shore at the tip of Ishikawa prefecture but close enough to the shore to be connected by bridges to the mainland. It’s about 70 km from Kanazawa. Across from the island, on the mainland is a famous hot spring spa place called Wakura Onsen.
On the island are two main things to see, a glass manufacturing place and a glass museum and an aquarium. Originally I wanted to check out both, but discussing with the lady at the information desk in Wakura Onsen, it turned out to be logistically impractical because the bus going there is only operating once every two hours. The three kilometers between the two sites seemed impossible to walk considering 35 degrees Celsius humid heat. The lady then recommended to concentrate on the aquarium. I am not big about informing myself in advance of my exploration targets. It’s like, there’s an aquarium, fine, let’s go there. I had no idea how huge the aquarium was and that I would need all three hours I had there. How come there is such a huge aquarium at the end of the world? It’s 16km from the train station and the public bus goes only once every two hours. It’s first of all of course a car destination. Also the hot spa town is getting a regular flow of visitors (in normal, non covid times) and they are probably organizing visits to the aquarium. Nevertheless, the thing’s size baffled me. It was constructed in the late seventies, early eighties during Japan’s bubble time, which also explains its size and it also means that it’s pretty old by now, but it’s also well maintained.
Right at the start you get to see the giant tank with two whale sharks and a multitude of other beasts. It’s cleverly made because you get to see the top of the basin and then spiral your way down alongside plenty of large and small windows. There was some interaction at the top of the basin with this giant dude who was fooling around at the edge of the basin glaring at you. It was a lovely moment of who is looking at whom, the fish inspecting the landlubbers or the other way round?

The two whale sharks are smaller in size, meaning younger than the whale sharks of the even bigger main tank at the Okinawa Churaumi aquarium. I hope the basin is not getting too small for them as they grow.

The whale shark tank seemed younger than the rest of the aquarium, the core part of the original aquarium has another large tank in the classic style, only one way to look at it, from the front. Inside that tank was a swarm of small fish that entertain with the patterns they make. There was feeding time for them too and the explanation lady said there were 10.000 of them. Then there were plenty of smaller tanks with loads of inhabitants and the usual seals, penguins, turtles, also dolphins and otters. The dolphins had two tanks, one for the performing ones, one for the perhaps retired ones, with a glass tunnel through the basin. They also had a giant sea otter and I was surprised by its huge size. In two areas they were working cleverly with mirrors, duplicating the fish and also the tanks with jelly fish. There were only four tanks, but it looked like many more thanks to the mirror reflections.

Last but not least they had a kind of cinema with a tank of swarm fish that was being lit in all colors of the rainbow. I hope the fish don’t mind the constant change in color.
As for visitors, there were quite a few around, but much less than usual I suppose, which became evident during the dolphin show. Four dolphins performed and one seal and the ranks in the outdoor theater were not very full. For me the amount of visitors was kind of just right, a few there so you didn’t feel odd about it, but few enough to be able to enjoy each tank at your own pace.
One way or the other, the aquarium was quite amazing, especially considering it’s remote location and it was well worth the visit.

The Holy Void is out to get you

And another one done! A new baby has been released into the cruel world. It’s the fifth installment of my Dome of Souls series: The Holy Void
The other books are: Dome Child, The Anatomy of Anarchy, Jeronimo, Red Angel 42 and now it’s the time of The Holy Void.
The Holy Void was an easy book to write, since it was all pretty clear to me what was supposed to happen and most importantly how it was supposed to end.
I cannot say the same thing about the (maybe) final (?) book in the Dome of Souls series that I have started writing since middle of August. I’m 25.000 words in at the moment and I have no clue yet how to end this book and (maybe) the entire series with it

Kanazawa Part 2

My second day started out with a walk through the Nagamachi samurai district and the Omicho fish market but both were pretty much deserted and many shops and stalls were closed. While I didn’t feel the lack of tourists really the day earlier at Kenrokuen, here it was all too obvious that the place is a tourist town and that there is now a lack of them. There had been not too many people in Kenrokuen but a few had been around and I had perceived that as an advantage, but in the samurai house district and the fish market the disadvantage became truly obvious. Luckily there is still some local tourism in Japan. I cannot even imagine what e.g. Angkor Wat is looking like now, since Cambodian people have in general not enough money for tourism. Siem Reap must be so sad now and all the locals who depend on tourism for their livelihood are out of jobs and probably struggling to survive.

I wandered all the way to the Higashi Chaya tea house district, and at least there were a few people again and a few shops were open. I had an excellent Yuzu (a Japanese lemon variety, very tasty!) shaved ice in one of the open cafes and cooled off a bit thanks to it. The heat that day was pretty insane.

Giving in to the heat, I rode with a bus back to Kenrokuen and the museums around it and visited the Ishikawa Prefectural Art museum. They have a standard exhibition of pottery, lacquer ware and paintings, but they also had a special exhibition going on of a local artist called Rei Kamoi (never heard of him before). He lived in Paris and Spain for a while it seems. His paintings are mostly portraits of elder people, most of them pretty dark and close to depressive. He did not vary his style very much, all those people have their mouths open in some form and their eyes are just holes. He also painted churches, cubic things without resemblance to real churches. It was interesting, but didn’t knock my socks off. I wondered around a bit outside again to two shrines, then made a stop at the very minimalist D. T. Suzuki Museum. He was a Buddhist philosopher who introduced Zen Buddhism to the rest of the world. The museum is tiny, but has great architecture stressing clarity of thought in its minimalist style.

Post Post Post Modern

The 21st century museum of contemporary art, Kanazawa, is housed in a very impressive building, which alone is worth the entrance fee. Within a large glass circle is a labyrinth of corridors that have glass roofs and they lead to the no-window rooms for exhibits, large and small. The building is really cool and kudos to the architect. No photographs are allowed inside the building.

When I visited, two exhibitions were going on, one of a Japanese contemporary artist I’ve never heard of, the other was called de-sport: the deconstruction and reconstruction of sports through art. Now that alone is a mouth-full. It seemed more interesting than the stuff of someone I’ve never heard of.
Every exhibition room had its own installment and the first room was showing a video on two screens of a woman running around in Greece with a fancy torch thingy that was supposed to resemble an Olympic torch. The other camera showed stuff from the perspective of the torch. Bizarre, boring, and it’s meaning escaped me. I liked the Polish weightlifters trying to lift monuments in Poland much better. They were the main attraction in a room which also had portraits of Japanese sumo wrestler kids, a synchronized swimming team from Russia, a water ball team from Russia and some rugby kids from Australia to offer. The portraits (photographs) were interesting, showing diversity in uniformity, but the Polish weightlifters also had a video, simply showing how they were trying to lift monuments hundreds of kilos heavy, with a silly reporter guy commenting on their efforts (in Polish, with English and Japanese subtitles).
Another video installation showed an event in the US. They had an upside down tank whose chains were running noisily and above one set of chains was a treadmill like from a gym and runners were jogging on that treadmill wearing USA Olympic team shirts. People around the tank gawked and took pics and vids of the action with their iPhones. Hm. Well, at least there was some symbolism going on here and various messages depending on your interpretation. Sports as war, military as a treadmill, the US running over the rest of the world like a tank… many more interpretations possible!
Then there was a bunch of tennis balls in the next room and that was it, their meaning escaped me.

Apart from the awesome Polish weightlifters, the Xijing Olympics of 2008 were a blast. Three artists, one Japanese, one Chinese, one Korean held fake Olympics with nonsense disciplines like bread throwing, massage boxing, brush tickling and so forth. The objects, including stone-old bread, were exhibited, as well as nicely designed posters of the Xijing 2008 Olympics and a video showing the guys in action. Now that was cool. It also conveyed a message, our adoration for faster higher stronger is silly, the commercialization of sports sucks and sports should just be fun. I liked that exhibit the most, together with the Polish weightlifters of course.
Then they had another bizarre thing, two guys playing jazz drums while playing chess in some video installment showing the stuff from various angles. Um… okay? So fxxing what? Neither funny, nor a message anywhere, at least not that I got it. Last but not least there was a redesigned ping pong table with a lotus pond in the middle. There were three ping pong table halfs enabling you to kind of play three dimensional ping pong with balls coming also from the left and right, not only the front. Also here I could get a message, change the rules and sports won’t work anymore, it becomes chaos and are all those rules really necessary? It was neat, but couldn’t live up to the Xijing Olympics or my Polish weightlifters.

There also is a permanent installment in the museum of an optical illusion swimming pool. When you look into the pool from the top, which I did, it looks like a deep pool that is at least three meters deep, but in fact there is only ten or twenty centimeters of water. You can go into the pool from the cellar and look up at the tiny pond from below. I would have liked to go down, but due to corona they limited the number of people in the small pool to five at a time and all “tickets” for the pool for that day were already taken. From above it truly looks like deep water, which is pretty neat.
So, that was my brush with contemporary art, it was worth it for the amazing museum building, for the Xijing Olympics, for the air conditioning on this hot summer day and of course for my Polish weightlifters!

A Trip to Kanazawa

At first the coronavirus situation foiled my plans to go to Europe during summer holidays, then, virtually last minute, the governor of Okinawa announced a state of emergency for his prefecture, 36 hours before I was supposed to go there instead. I managed to cancel all arrangements for Okinawa with luckily minimal financial loss and then wondered what to do with my precious two weeks off. I decided to first of all head for Kanazawa. I’ve never been there before and a work colleague recently went there during our Golden Week and liked it and brought the name back into my head. Kanazawa is a three hour Shinkansen direct ride from Tokyo. Due to last minute booking, I got an incredibly cheap price for an excellent apartment that offered cooking facilities, which seemed like a good idea to be able to avoid hotel staff, restaurants, (due to covid) or living off a convenience store.
The unreserved seat area in the Shinkansen on an early Monday afternoon was luckily nearly empty. Much of Japan stayed at home during this year’s summer.
Kanazawa is a tourist town, rich in history and it sports one of the three major Japanese gardens, which are the Korakuen in Okayama, the Kairakuen in Mito and the Kenrokuen in Kanazawa. I’ve not been to the Kairakuen in Mito yet and to the one in Okayama only once during my very first trip to Japan a horrendous amount of years ago, and naturally I don’t remember much about it.
Okayama is a long way from Yokohama and I don’t see myself going there again any time soon, but Mito is not that far away and I’ll check about opportunities to go and see the Kairakuen one of these days.
The Kenrokuen of Kanazawa is fantastic. It was first designed as an outer garden for the Kanazawa castle some 400 years ago and of course was changed and refined plenty of times. As early as 1874 it was opened to the public and its basic structure does not seem to have changed a lot since then. It’s astonishingly big and has plenty of lanterns, flowing water and ponds to offer. Due to the heat and the general lack of international as well as domestic tourists, it was delightfully deserted. There were a few people around of course, but I am developing a talent for photographing around them

Would Have

So, I thought there’d be no more “would have” about my summer holiday, but now there is. Originally I would have gone to Europe this summer, but that was cancelled quite a while ago. Then I booked two weeks in my beloved Okinawa… I would have flown to Naha today, but… on the 31st of July the governor of Okinawa declared a prefecture wide state of emergency, asking people to stay at home as much as possible. And that for at least the period of August 1st to August 15. My plan was to go to Okinawa (main island this time) from August 2nd to August 15th. Aaaaahhhhh!!!! Okinawa has currently 300 active cases (adding 200 in the last four days…) with 1.4 Mio inhabitants, while the prefecture where I live, Kanagawa, has 400 active cases with 9 Mio inhabitants, and that despite being right next to Tokyo with its now 3200 active cases.

It’s not forbidden to fly to Okinawa, but I’d just feel so awkward to be frolicking about during a state of emergency and the request to stay home. So yesterday I spent the morning with cancelling everything and luckily my hotel was super nice and let me cancel for free and it also looks like I’ll get most of the money back for the flight.

So what to do with my precious two weeks off in this very volatile atmosphere? I’ve booked an apartment now for 4 days in Kanazawa on the Japanese sea side where I’ve never been to before and will probably, hopefully go there tomorrow. Let’s see what happens! Stay safe everyone! And wear masks please!