July 11th, 2005
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In search of soap and urban grit
~11:40 am
For a while, my goal for today was finding a sento (bath house), but after one unhelpful convenience store girl and two disgruntled elderly people, I’ve decided to give up the search and resign myself to being filthy. However, since I do have my shampoo with me, I think I’m going to put the nail in the coffin of my journey to vagrancy and just wash wash myself with sink water and hand soap at the subway station later this evening. There are far more interesting and useful things to be done than waste my time and money in the pursuit of modern hygiene. I am, however, reminded of the classicly random line from Final Fantasy upon visiting the fountain in Coneria,
See your face upon the clean water. How dirty! Come! Wash your face!
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A pedestrian overpass in Aoba-ku; the view from my tent Sunday evening; Sendai’s food specialty, roast cow tongue with a side of tail soup.
Last night’s sleep was so atrocious that I had half a mind to leave this morning. Despite being utterly exhausted, I tossed and turned constantly; it was probably a combination of the heat, being unclean, and having no real pillow. As is common with bad sleep, I had a series of horrible nightmares, all lingering residuals of work, namely being at the office on Saturday and Sunday with everyone miserable.
Aside from that I had a Spartan breakfast of two Calorie Mate sticks and half a bottle of (incredibly overpriced) 168-yen orange juice from Sunkus. Disappointingly, the only subway line in Sendai has a base fare of two hundred yen, even more absurd than Tokyo’s. So for a few kilometers I spent two hundred and forty yen in my failed search of a bath house. I’m currently walking back under constantly rain-threatening skies, my makeshift home perhaps dangerously unguarded and with the fly door open, risking my bed to saturation. But patches of blue are breaking the tree and cloud-stripped horizon, so I’m betting the risk of disaster is low. Speaking of disasters, I noticed on my way out of the river basin this morning that my camping spot is in a flood area, which may be the cause of the largely surrounding marsh-like ground. There is a picture of an angry, surging river chasing a panicky little girl as sirens blare overhead, so apparently this happens enough to warrant a public defense system. I guess if it starts raining fairly hard I may avoid risk being washed away in the night and move to the high ground and sleep on a bench. Though the overcast sky makes for some horrible shots head level, I’ve managed a handful of fair black-and-white plates of earthbound decay. Odd, how being so filthy and underfed, I’m largely quite placid.
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The public notice warning about flooding; the statue of Dai Kannon overlooking the city; the view down from the hill just south of Dainohara station.
~2:00? 2:30 pm?
As prone to flooding as my “home” on the Hirose-gawa river may be, I have to say that I’m quite content here. When I arrived back at base camp this afternoon there was a scooter parked by the basin and a man in some sort of wetsuit wading in the river. I wasn’t sure if he was washing clothes, but I noticed he had a utility belt and a net of some sort, so I suppose he might have been taking ecology samples. I squeezed a couple more shots out of the nearly dead battery in the PowerShot before sitting down to listen to the birds. There’s quite a good number of them actually, and I’m privileged to hear a wide range of calls from melodic and shrill. In Tokyo the most abundant birds are of course our friends Mr. Crow and Ms. Pigeon, but thankfully there is a yamahato (mountain dove) that serenades me often with a soothing whippoorwill-like hooting.
The north side of the riverbank is much more well maintained than the south, and in the light of midday I noticed a number of people sitting about enjoying the view. I suppose they could see my squat abode if they were looked long enough. So much for anonymity. I’m reminded of the public mowing cycle in southern Kyoto, where the public works department is so poorly funded that it only happens about once a year, in late July, after the rainy season is over. So I suppose the knee-high clover and wild grass here may be due for a wrangling in several weeks’ time. It does seem odd that all these park benches are down here and grown over. The dense forest on the left directly behind my tent must have once been a temple or fortification of some sort. It’s quite surreal to see seemingly abandoned shrine gates and paths half hidden in underbrush, only sixty meters from an apartment complex. Actually a lot of Japan is that way, and it’s kind of sad. Almost all of the universities are pretty run down looking. The promenades and stone pathways are ridden with weeds and errant brush, and most of the land around the buildings is overgrown and bears collected trash. The buildings are probably the most pitiful of all, concrete stained with sumi-e striped soot and the paint uniformly faded, peeling and cracked. These aren’t just any schools either, the top three universities I mentioned before all bear similar states of disrepair. My adopted alma mater of Waseda is well kept for the most part, but space and budget limitations are still readily apparent.
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Apparently I look very American, because Japanese people usually mention that right off when I’m window shopping. I stopped in a store that sold hand-painted earthenware figures earlier this morning, and I got the full treatment as far as traditional Japanese shopkeeping goes. The owner got up from her work at my entry and I kind of had the tingling sensation of things moving quickly beyond my control. But instead of running I just let it go and three cups of tea, coffee, two biscuits, and four pickled plums later I’d had a fairly detailed conversation about Japan while feeling entirely insecure about my bedraggled appearance. I took off my hat out of respect but given the state of my hair it might have been more advisable to leave it on. I also had to continually mop my brow with my handkerchief as I was dripping sweat on the table. Before leaving, I bought a t-shirt with a carp on it for twenty-five dollars (about the cheapest thing in the store), and ended up feeling more giri than was equivalent to the price of my purchase. On the way out my benefactor showed me a kiln full of bells that the town children had made the day before and described something about the history of the area.
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~5:40 pm
I’m again on the Komachi, being whisked home at a ridiculous speed, all with a very warm bath just waiting to be drawn for my sticky, beleaguered skin. I actually had a plan to stay in Sendai for another day or two, but my phone portended “strong overnight and AM rain”, recommending that I “take caution.” As my intenion for staying in the city was predominantly pedestrian and phtograph-oriented, I recided to go against chancing being washed away overnight and come home this evening. As a reward for being so thrifty in my gettting to and sleeping in Tohoku without spending any money, I decided to treat myself with a trip back in about 25% of the the time that it took me to get to Sendai. Looking at the gorgeous countryside streaming by in clay-tiled suburban fashion, I think that even more than hitchhiking I may enjoy touring the country on bicycle. Though it would probably require a considerable amount of planning (finding roads where I wouldn’t be squashed), it would probably be quite fulfilling and produce an entire notebook’s worth of inane dribble. I don’t think my current resources are up to the task however, so I’ll need a large cache of money for a road bike and ryokans along the way. Then again there was a homeless man who stole a bike in front of Shibuya station and rode all the way back to Osaka so he could return to the place of his youth to be a construction worker. It would be neat doing manual labor perhaps for tanbo (rice field) farmers along the way. Or maybe I’m just thinking rosily of the days when I used to watch MTV and you could count the number of Real Worlds and Road Rules on one hand.
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I’m a little tired and look pretty haggard, which is too bad since I was just beginning to revert to semi-normal hair and skin. I’d almost say I was waiting for a revelation this week, but of course real insight never comes from looking for it I guess. Maybe I should just about doing what I do and something will naturally come undone, like how a splinter works its way out of one’s palm.
[An image dump of my pictures from Sendai can be viewed in my new "travel" section of the site, here.]
