light vessel automatic

I’ve just returned to Ishigaki, one of the larger southern islands of Okinawa, from three days on Hateruma-jima – Okinawa’s (and therefore, by default, Japan’s) southernmost island. It’s a beautiful place, with a population of a few hundred people and probably a similar number of goats, and not much else apart from the whitest, cleanest beaches and bluest sea and sky I’ve ever seen, even in Okinawa. Very good home-made ice-cream too. I went and stood on the cliff-edge at the southernmost point of the island, and was for a few minutes the furthest-south person in Japan (people in boats don’t count, ok?)

Back from the south, tomorrow I’m taking the ferry four hours west to Yonaguni, Japan’s westernmost island – from which I’ve heard that Taiwan is sometimes visible on a clear day. I’m hoping to dive to the kaitei iseki (海底遺跡) – the pyramid-like formation on the sea-floor just off Yonaguni’s south coast. I will also try and find a place where I can be (for a few minutes anyway) the furthest-west person in Japan.

I got back on Thursday from travelling in mainland Japan, and I’ve been wanting to put up some of the pictures I took, and write about some or all of Nagoya, Takayama, Matsumoto, Kobe & Tottori (where Graeme and Japan’s only desert both live). But I’ve had no time, and in a few hours’ time I’m off travelling again: this time I’m catching the night boat to the southern islands of Okinawa. Ishigaki, and then probably Hateruma and Yonaguni – the last island before Taiwan, and the site of some mysterious ancient underwater structures that may or may not be man-made. I’ll be gone for about ten days.

So. In the mountains between Takayama and Matsumoto, I saw monkeys. Several dozen monkeys. And they were surprisingly unperturbed by human beings: I strolled nonchalantly past the first monkey a couple of times to see if it was bothered by me, but since it barely looked up, I spent the next hour or so sneaking up to monkeys and taking their photographs.

On Monday I went to Nara, which was, for a hundred years or so in about the 8th century, Japan’s first capital. I had a particularly excellent day because, going into the tourist information office in the morning to ask about that evening’s train times, I was offered a free guided tour by two university students who volunteer as English-speaking tour guides in order to practice their English. So instead of wandering around temples on my own, taking pictures and moving on semi-aimlessly, I spent the next six hours or so being shown round by two very enthusiastic and knowledgeable girls who actually seemed to think I was doing them a favour by letting them practice their English! I told them I would tell other people about their tours, and so if anyone reading this ever finds themselves in Nara, I’d highly, highly recommend dropping into the tourist information office and getting a free tour. They are available all year round (though the actual tour guides are different every day – they’re all students from nearby universities who volunteer a couple of times a month).

Nara is probably most famous for the Daibutsu – the giant bronze Buddha sculpture that is housed in the largest wooden building in the world (but which is, amazingly, only two-thirds the size of the original building). It’s also famous for the incredibly tame red deer that wander around the town, and which have been awarded National Treasure status by the Japanese government. I have photos of both Buddha and deer, but will have to wait until I get back to Okinawa before I can show you them.

I’m travelling in mainland Japan with no job to go back to, and no time limit. Okinawa is still a shade hotter than is comfortable, but here in Honshu it’s just about right, in that you can move around and carry bags without sweating too profusely.

On Thursday I spent the afternoon with K, before heading over to Kyoto. There, I stopped a girl to ask for directions, and she walked me half an hour in the wrong direction before looking at my map again, apologising profusely, and insisting she walk me back the right way again. In the course of our wanderings, it was decided that she would practice her English by emailing me, so every evening since then I have received an eccentric email to my phone telling me that I will become fat if I eat ice cream before I sleep, or that I look like the Buddha. I approve of this, and I encourage it.

The reason I actually came to the mainland (at least, the reason I came now rather than some other time) was to meet Graeme and go to the Ryoondo-Tea event that he went to last year. It’s an evening of experimental electronic music and tea ceremony, in a temple in Kyoto. As I understand it, the reason this unlikely combination exists is that the bloke who runs this small Kyoto record label has an interest in the tea ceremony, and wants to create a new, relaxed, 21st century tea ceremony.

It was an amazing event: the whole temple was surrounded on the outside by beautiful tiny lights of shifting colours, and inside filled with warm-coloured paper lanterns. As well as Graeme, his girlfriend and brother, K’s little brother – who I originally met last November – came across from neighbouring Osaka.

Drinking the frothy green tea-ceremony tea while listening to electronic music and watching the lights scattered round the temple garden and the people walking past in yukata gowns (tickets were half-price if you wore one). It was a completely unique event, and tantalisingly brief: starting at 6, finishing at 9, and leaving me wishing that it had gone on all night.

Incidentally, I’m writing this in an all-night ‘manga kissa’ (manga cafe) in Nagoya. I have a 6am train to catch, and partly to make sure I get there, partly because being unemployed I’m hesitant to fork out for a hotel that I’ll only have about four or five hours to sleep in, I decided to find a place where I could wait out the night. This is the first time I’ve spent the night in one of these places, and I’m quite taken with it. It’s a manga library with dozens of booths to sit and read in, each booth containing a big comfortable chair, an internet-enabled computer, a tv and video, and a playstation. I’m paying about five or six pounds to sit in it for four or five hours, and that allows me unlimited free drinks from the drinks machines. There’s even a shower. It’s half-three in the morning and the place is packed.

I left the island on Monday of last week, but have been unable to update this site until now due to the internet connection at my new flat being destroyed by lightning last week. Oddly enough, the last (and only other) time I was inconvenienced by lightning was just over two years ago – the week before I arrived on my island. Being inconvenienced by lightning again the week after I leave the island is just one more of the odd pieces of symmetry that seem to surround my time here.

Leaving the island after two years was very strange. Pulling out of the harbour is so familiar that it was hard to believe that this time my ticket was only one-way. In fact – gothic and melodramatic though it might sound – as the boat pulled away and the island began to dwindle, it felt strangely like dying must sometimes feel: a stream of realisations that things I’d been meaning to do some day will now probably be left undone. Never did climb that hill over there; never did swim round that peninsula, go down that path, explore that piece of woodland; never did make it out to those tiny islands on the edge of the reef. Still, I suspect that feeling is probably to some extent inevitable and I’m currently too excited about the afterlife to miss the island much yet, though I’m sure I will when I get back to the UK.

I’m now in my new flat in Naha, the prefectural capital, on the Okinawan mainland. I am also, for the most part, now a man of leisure: I will be based here until October, during which time I will be studying Japanese, planning my travels in China (which is where I will be going in October), and hopefully doing some more diving before I leave for lands with colder, dirtier seas. I will also be doing a bit more travelling in Japan. In fact, as I write this, I really should be packing, because I have a one-way ticket to Osaka, leaving tomorrow morning. Probably for a week or so, but I’m going to play it by ear. I’ll be meeting k in Osaka, then Graeme in Kyoto. In the last few days I’ve managed to discharge almost all remaining responsibilities, and I’m excited to finally have a bit of time to make it up as I go along.

Leaving the island is proving more difficult than I expected. Not ‘psychologically difficult’, or any such soft nonsense – it’s just that events seem to be conspiring to keep me here. Although my job finished last week, I was going to wait until today to move to Naha, because the weekend just gone was meant to be this island’s biggest festival of the year. However, a typhoon intervened, and the festival was postponed to next weekend, which means I am still on island, and will be for another week. Not having any particular commitments, it makes more sense to stay on island and get a bit more taiko practice in than to rush off to the mainland just because I’ve now got a flat there. On Thursday night, though, I am playing an acoustic set at a live house on the mainland with members of the ripping Okinawan metal band Tetsukabuto, so I’m going to move my stuff over on Thursday, then come back on Friday for some final taiko practice before the festival. On Monday – barring further typhoons / acts of God, I will leave the island properly, and move to the mainland.

Look! There is new, free music at seatunes.org. This time it’s a whole album of electronics by a thing called Sleepy Rabbit entitled “The Distant, The Beautiful”. I would recommend it for listening to as you cross silent sugarcane fields beneath the blazing white afternoon sun, or for watching cells quietly expand and divide in a dish of warm nutrients.

I have exactly a week left here, and I have caught the worst cold. Shivering in the 30 degree Okinawan summer humidity, and my voice is just the hissing sound of rattling husks. Packing can wait – for the time being am biding my time with vitamins, caffeine and basking on flat surfaces while my immune system deals with the intruders. It’s going to be a busy week – apart from preparing for leaving, I’m practicing taiko every evening, ill or not ill, for the year’s biggest festival at the weekend. Tomorrow, I’ll be walking round an uninhabited island. (cancelled at the last minute by my bosses. Balls.)

Two years ago, when I first arrived on the island, there was a run of beautiful full moons — low in the sky on a clear night, the various rocks and uninhabited islands dotted around my island become black silhouettes on a white sea. The sky is deep blue, and the Okinawan mainland is also a black shape along the horizon. Often the light from the moon is bright enough that the foreground of sugar cane fields is visible too. However, even though I bought my new SLR camera partly with a view to trying to photograph the moon, in the last year or so it’s never been quite as good as when I first arrived. Either it’s too cloudy, or the moon is in the wrong part of the sky. But by a stroke of luck my last full moon on the island turned out to be as good as the good old moons back when I arrived. Unfortunately I smashed my tripod in a fight with a giant spider a couple of months ago, so I didn’t have too much choice about where to take the photo from — this picture is a long exposure taken from the second floor of the school, where there was a ledge I could perch my camera on.

With only about two weeks left on the island, I’ve been rushing around a lot lately. Some things I’ve done:

Jen came to visit from Fukuoka last week, and we drank in the bars and cafés of Naha, then came across to Izena for the first of the (five) summer festivals. We also went for what might be my last visit, for a while anyway, to a nearby uninhabited island on whose beaches I’ve spent several lazy afternoons in the last two years.

Last weekend a shakuhachi (Japanese flute) teacher came to visit the island, and I ended up strumming the chords to ‘Yesterday’ on the guitar while he played a haunting shakuhachi version of the melody against the sound of surf breaking on the beach. This sort of thing is why it’s very good to know a couple of standards…

Tomorrow my successor arrives, so I’m heading into the city to pick him up and bring him back to the island. We’ll overlap for the best part of two weeks, which I’m expecting to be strange but which might also hopefully be fun. We’ll see.