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My Golden Week Holiday! prt.3

3rd of May, 2002ce* in: diary

What did today have in store for me then!?

Well if memory serves me correctly I think we went out to see another temple with its famous samurai graveyard, the name of this temple was Hodaiji. The temple its self was massive, beit closed, but the graveyard was very interesting. I was standing here looking at some tombstones of samurais 700 years past, cool! The tombs were in the shape of little houses, with little faces on the outsides peering at me quite menacingly. Me the Gaijin Devil :)

As we were walking back, with our cameras spent, I fell behind to walk with the French chap and the Lord of the house we were staying in (an old man in his 60’s who looked at least 50, and could probably do shot putting in the Olympics) when an old woman on her bicycle road past, looked at our host and just said ‘nani, shashin?’ which in basic terms means ‘what’s that? taking photos?’, then proceeded to ride away. Odd I thought, no hello, no good day, no goodbye. It turns out that she was in the old mans class at school some 50 years ago! In Japan it seems ok to drop all formalities if you know someone well, although I wouldn’t try it to this extent.

We said our goodbyes to our gracious hosts, heading out for Yokama. Tomorrow is Sunday, May the 5th, Boys day festival in Japan. Many of the rich or temple owning families have suits of samurai Armour on display, to the rest of the living this is quite impossible, but they don’t half like hanging bloody great big 20 / 30 foot long flags in their gardens! These flags were everywhere in the countryside, they are in the shape of the Carp fish, and just as colourful. There is a hole in the mouth a bit like a wind sock, so when the wind really picks up they inflate to stand horizontally in the sky. A monstrous and overwhelming sight. As fabrics became cheaper, I suppose the flags got bigger, and these days they really are huge.

We got to our destination but the hosts were out working, so we took a detour up a another mountain, this time is was a seriously large mountain which made my ears pop. At the top, for some bizarre reason, is Japan’s first milk farm. The cows were shipped over from England about a hundred years ago. The farms name is ‘Kozu Bokujo’, me and the cows were the only foreigners about, even though this place was packed out. Lots of animals, real milk (milk in Japan tastes like its been nuked) for a change, lots of people burning their names into wood with branding irons. (really!)

Met the new family, which had the name Aoki, same to Gen’s parents, and 3 other neighbouring houses. No sooner had we done that than we were whisked off to sit in another onsen (called ‘Ara Fune no Yu’ or ‘violent battleship spring’ in my shoddy translation). This onsen was mixed! but only every other week, not this week. Water was a bit better than the others, quite busy though.

Back to the house for more food and beer! Mr Aoki (Gen’s father) proclaimed that I ‘drank like a fish’ to which he kept filling up my glass on his mission to drink me under the table. I probably cursed him in my sleep.