lingqi's Journal: October 14th, 2004 (admittedly unfished and late)

October 14th, 2004 (8:33pm)

Today is my 2 year anniversary of coming to Japan. I am not so sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing. Originally the plan was for me to get back to the US around now, and that I can have my driver's license (expiring in a month) renewed, get my low insurance rate as I hit 25, and go forward with whatever the road of life takes me. Spending the 2 year anniversary here in Japan, though, means that a lot of plans made back in the days are no longer meeting my needs: I have no idea what to do about my license, my warrenty on my car is expiring soon, and I would definitely be spending my 25th birthday here - and japanese car insurance rates drop at 28... I need a lesson in planning contingencies, I think.

I wish there was something insightful I can say on this occasion, though - something about the passage of time, the integration of a alien body into a unfamiliar culture, or the loneliness and fulfillment that comes from not having a traditional concept of home - but really, today is just like another day, and unfortunately one of those very un-insightful days for me.

The past weekend was a three-day weekend. Japan have all these awsome holidays for all sorts of interesting reasons. October 10 is a day that usually have good weather and the Tokyo Olympics was held and since they it was "excercise day" and a national holiday. The next holiday will be Nov 3rd - "culture day." It's one of the things I like about Japan - the days are celebrating human endeavours common to the human race instead of some policital, national, or religious cause. Unlike most countries, Japanese currency do not have past political figures but contributors of science and culture for the heads. Maybe I am just being idealist but it's a good system that should be adopted in other places as well.

The point I was trying to make, though, is that I went hiking during the three day weekend. My motivation was not related to the exercising day - but rather that this would have been my last chance to hike Tateyama and Tsurugi-dake. The hike requires that I stay in a hut and the past sunday was the last day of operation for the hut. Besides, the mountains would become covered with snow any day now and it would not be a good ideal to attempt the "hardest hike in japan" under such deteriorated conditions.

One of the problems was that though October 10th and thereabouts is supposed to be the best weathered days in Japan, on this particular weekend Typhoon #22 - the biggest typhoon in 10 years - was heading straight toward us at an alarming speed. The original plan was to go to Toyama on friday night, hike saturday and sunday, and then take a slow day on monday visiting some local attractions and getting back. Unfortunately, around mid-day friday the typhoon probably had a revalation or something and headed directly toward Tokyo, increasing its pace from a leisurely 10km/h to some 60km/h.

I didn't mind the speed so much - if meant that it was possible that the typhoon would pass over this area on saturday and sunday should be beautiful blue skys with white puffy clouds. I ended up glued to the television for the entire day on friday checking the typhoon's progress. NHK has this tendency of cancelling *all* of its regular programming on the occurence of some natural disaster and provide round the clock coverage thereof. For the entire day saturaday, NHK was "The Typhoon Channel." Luckily the typhoon veered right and passed Toyama prefecture relatively untouched, and the trip officially started at 9pm saturday night.

The destination prefecture is Toyama, stuck between Ishikawa and Niigata prefecture on the Japan sea coast. The mountain ranges, Tateyama, is in its eastern side and very famous for various things - most of which I don't remember. One of the more interesting is that the mountain range gets a lot of snowfall during winter, and to keep the roads open massive plowing operations proceed through winter and the resulting road is flanked by walls of snow twenty meters high, the opening of which every april is a highly anticipated event many tourists. Another is that under the mountain is a fairly famous dam called Kurobe dam. It's an arch dam much like the hoover dam, though not quite as big. It's another attraction that draws many people every year.

The hike was to start at Murodo, on the west side of the mountains. There are two ways to reach the start of the hike, one is from the west, and another from the east that's very expensive, as it involves many segments of bus ride in specialized tunnels inside the mountain, and seveal segments of cable car. The bus also passes across the kurobe dam as well - which is one of the reason that even though the route is quite expensive, it's still fantastically popular. The other way is more conventional - the only problem is that since there are no other ways across the mountain range, one have to swing around above it on the ocean side - making the trip near 400km each way, even though linear distance is at most some 70% of that.

-- added Oct 17, 2004 (about 4am) --

Ok, continuing in another file.