The Road to Drift King

In mid-November, I signed up for driving school. How I managed to make it to 40 without ever operating a vehicle was due to a combination of good public transportation, the kindness of friends, bicycles, and Ubers. Depending on public transportation while in Tokyo is easy – we have layers of subway lines and trains that make the need for a car almost obsolete – and getting around by bike in Boston wasn’t difficult either. I assumed, too, that future outdoor excursions would primarily happen on two (unmotorized) wheels. Given that I would likely never need to own a car here, and the cost of driving school in Japan, I kept putting it off. Besides, Uber exists for a reason, right?

What I did not exactly think through is that while Ubers and taxis and friends can drop me off at a trailhead, getting transportation back to civilization from a point where cell phone reception is sketchy, at best, is more complicated. The idea of having a metal box with wheels to plunge into when a bear or cougar inevitably chases me down a mountain provided some further reassurance from involuntary death. Around the time of this realization, friends also started – quite inconveniently – to have children that they preferred or were required to pilot around to avoid being featured on Dateline. All of which indicated that I needed to do what I should have done 20 years ago: learn how to become the Drift King of Tokyo.

So far, learning how to drive has involved more homicide than I’d expected. My first hour at driving school consisted of an aptitude test that asked whether I’d considered killing myself and how much I resented others. I assume this is a low-tech way for the government to gather psychological information on its citizens, which I promptly handed over because I’d really like to drive a car.  A lecture on driving safety was followed up by a video showing a man killing a child in a crosswalk and his subsequent imprisonment. While a voiceover warned about criminal penalties, the man, dressed in a prison-issue sweat suit, desperately pleaded with his weeping wife through a thick plastic wall. Another lecture involved how not to use your car horn if you don’t want to get murdered, or worse, judged, by strangers.

As for the actual driving itself, well, good luck to everyone else. Movies always show the protagonist, a.k.a. Vin Diesel, dramatically shifting into top gear. I shifted into 2nd with the same flair only to have my instructor grab the steering wheel and gently turn the car to avoid driving into the other lane. Within the first week of driving school, I was instructed to stop and start on a steep slope. I immediately rolled back at least a meter while trying to start the car, three times. A couple days later, I was told to negotiate narrow S-turns. It felt like playing Operation, with only my left foot pumping the clutch for navigation.

The process to “join the motoring community” as the driving school textbook calls it, is more mentally draining than I’d expected. The steering wheel and I continue to have our differences. At this age, or because I haven’t been in a formal learning environment for over a decade, attempting to absorb information and accurately and consistently repeat actions for more than an hour turns my brain into oatmeal. My choice of the semi-English course – where the lectures are in English but the driving lessons are in Japanese – means that I am also trying to translate my thoughts into Japanese as I steer, slow, and stop. I can feel steam coming out of my ears as my 40-year-old meat computer gradually overheats and ceases to function.

Driving school also apparently includes lesson on how to manage someone else’s emotions while under stress. So far, two instructors have lost their tenuous grasp on emotional stability with me at the wheel. This either confirms that I am doing my part to terrorize them, or that they have misplaced passenger princess expectations. One male instructor got so upset he made me sit in the passenger seat while he turned at speed before slamming on the brakes, to punish me for my poor driving. It seemed dramatic, even for me. I considered trying to translate “bro, chill” into Japanese, couldn’t come up with anything, and instead hoped he wouldn’t run me over on the way out.

Incredulously, my learner’s permit test is scheduled for the end of this week, after which I’ll be let loose with an instructor on open roads. I have little to no hope of actually passing, but no one ever said the road to becoming Drift King would be easy. Plus, there can’t be much of a villain/vigilante story without failures that will shake the core of my car-driving being, right?

And until then, well, just call me the Engine Stall Queen.

What the Duck?!

“I think it’s a duck,” my mother said.

It was brown, she went on, and there wasn’t a beak, but a bill. It was a duck.

This belief was instantly shot down for its general absurdity. Why would there be a duck nesting in a bush on our rooftop? It had to be a mistake, we said, you just saw it wrong. Don’t ducks hang out near water, anyway? It was probably a pigeon, or one of the turtle doves that are all over our neighborhood. Or some other drab looking bird. Certainly not a duck.

The most recent event to come crashing through my life was precipitated by my dog, who had suddenly insisted on staring at the end of one of the planters situated on the roof. Our rooftop is an area where our dogs, past and present, have been able to run around, and where we hang laundry to dry. Our first dog would slide under the fencing enclosing the rooftop and jump up on the roof’s ledge for the full aerial view of his domain. He eventually launched himself off the edge chasing a crow. Fortunately, he landed in a flower bed about a story and a half down and was fine; we set up cinder blocks underneath the fencing to prevent him from ever gaining access to free fall again.

Those cinder blocks have since become homes to the occasional gecko. Despite my present dog’s general fear of most moving things, she enjoys pressing her nose up to the crevices between the cinder blocks where geckos have taken shelter from the elements. Once she finds a resident gecko, she’ll check up on it at every opportunity.

So when she expressed intense interest at a particular area of our rooftop, whining and sniffing, my mother assumed it was another gecko. She lifted up the dog to show her there was nothing of interest in the planter. Instead, my dog attempted to lunge at something in the bushes that turned to peer towards my mother.

It wasn’t a gecko. It was, we later confirmed, a duck.

This has complicated the general uneventful nature of my life. While the rooftop choice was a wise one in terms of avoiding stray cats and palm-faced civets, the unfortunate timing of having our hedges cut back meant that the duck became more exposed than it should have been. We worried about crows finding it. There’s also the ticking timebomb of ducklings who are somehow supposed to jump down three stories, not die, then walk towards the nearest river without getting run over or picked off by crows. That then presents a moral question: do we stop traffic and ensure the ducklings’ safe return to the river, or do we let nature take its course and allow everything between our house and the nearest body of water decimate the entire brood?

These are all questions and issues I wasn’t ready to voluntarily spend my time thinking about. Nor was the rest of my family. My father told me that he hoped everything worked out for the duck. My mother told me she was too busy to deal with it. Besides, didn’t the duck think things through before making a nest on a rooftop? It must have a plan, right?

Ironically, it was my mother who discovered crows lurking around the nest, quietly plotting death. She texted me with surprising speed.  

When I say “crows,” you might imagine the typical black birds, larger than a pigeon but smaller than a hawk, that might be found near the occasional trashcan or in a Hitchcock film. In Japan, that word refers to a bird the size of a raven that looks like it’s been supersized with steroids. If normal crows were your average human, Japanese crows are Ronnie Coleman. There are stories of Japanese crows dropping kittens on train tracks to kill them, plucking small animals out of zoo enclosures, and snatching food from pedestrians. They’re smart, aggressive, and from what they’ve buried in our planters, particularly enjoy fatty Chinese food.

With the crows fleeing the scene but calling in reinforcements from a neighboring rooftop, we decided to put together a protective guard around the nest. If only to avoid discovering a murdered mallard on her rooftop, my mother came up with the idea of tying two small wire trellises together, then attaching plastic spiked mats made to prevent stray cats from using our yard as a giant toilet, as a further crow deterrent.

Predictably, the duck fled once we placed the contraption over her nest, bursting out of the hedge and quacking in angry distress. It paced around the rooftop as we tried to secure the trellis in place on both sides, my mother telling it that we’d be done soon and asking it not to be upset. It ejected a stream of putrid poop and flew off.

If you’ve never smelled wild mallard poop before, I advise you never to seek the opportunity. What came out of that duck smelled like a mixture of rotten sewage, fish that went bad about a year ago, and wild animal sweat. Even after we hosed down the area, went inside, and vigorously washed our hands, the smell seemed to cling to the insides of our nostrils and our clothes. No wonder my dog found that duck.

I suspect that, at that point, my mother was hoping that it wouldn’t come back. About forty minutes later, I found the duck standing in front of our newly built structure, eyeing it with suspicion and resentment. When I peeked at the planter about twenty minutes later, the duck was securely situated on top of her eggs. She turned and gave me the stink eye.

“You ingrate,” I said as I scanned the sky, rooftops, and telephone lines for any avicidal shadows.

For the present, she seemed safe. If she doesn’t get eaten, Google tells me her eggs will hatch in 30 days. That buys me a month to build a couple crash pads, a ramp, and possibly a sign so I don’t get run over along with the ducks.

Wish us luck, guys.

Tokyo in a Time of Corona

“Put on a mask before you go out,” my mother insisted, “people are getting punched in the face for not wearing one.”

I paused at the front door, about to argue that punching someone in the face seemed like a good way to get a viral disease, or least a bad bacterial infection, and that in the unlikely event that an unusually aggressive Japanese person punched me, that I’d just spit in the person’s face with my mono saliva. Instead, I put on the flimsy mask that was a little too small for me, resulting in large gaps on the sides. I braced myself for the discomfort of feeling my breath condense onto my face for the next few hours.

Tokyo has been a strange place recently, made even stranger by the global panic that hadn’t seemed to affect this particularly densely populated city until approximately 48 hours ago. While entire countries went on lockdown, Japan seemed to be doing what Japan does best: pretending that what’s actually happening, isn’t. That’s not to say nothing changed: cafes and stores were emptier on weekends, my local grocery store now has a limit per person on certain products, and bakeries started to individual wrap their breads and pastries. This raised the question of how many people’s saliva I had been consuming with my chocolate croissants until this point in time.

Yet, while Covid-19 ravaged the rest of the world, Japan’s number of cases had stayed at suspiciously low numbers, most likely due to the delusionary dreams of holding the Olympics sometime in 2020. Once that dream was finally killed off by Norway, Canada, New Zealand, and the fact that large numbers of people around the world were dying, a measured panic has ensued. We have currently been advised by the mayor of Tokyo to try to stay in this weekend.

It’s stupid. It’s stupid and frustrating that the politics and projected financial loss of the Olympics has discouraged a policy of more stringent social distancing here in Japan. Even with the large number of seniors that make up the Japanese population, bars, restaurants, and gyms remain open and people commute to work in crowded trains as usual. They just have more masks on now.

It’s also scary, made more frightening by the fact that governments are not incentivized to be transparent with information about the spread of the disease. But if the grocery store shelves becoming bare the night of the mayoral weekend semi-lockdown announcement are any indication, it seems people are concerned, and that’s comforting. Because we all should be a little more worried than they tell us to be.

Working virtually means my daytime routine hasn’t changed much; but as I live with my relatively elderly parents, one which has a lung condition, I’ve stopped going to the gym and have been refraining from regular social interaction since I survived mono. A week or so ago, caving to the basic human need to interact with someone not my parents, it resulted in a fit of first-world isolation anxiety. I began to ruminate on how deep my depression could go in these Covid-19 times and preemptively panicked because there was no way calculate the time I had left until my sanity unraveled. Would it be weeks, or days? I wondered. I half-heartedly started to flip through one of the piles of used, cut-up magazines on my floor with the hope of retiring a few to the recycling bin. An image caught my eye and brought back fond memories. The background blur of an ad sparked an idea.

The thing that’s easy to forget is that isolation doesn’t put your life on hold. It doesn’t make you any less expressive or creative; instead, it provides the unexpected gift of more time. It’s a time to create, learn a new skill, take online classes, or simply find a hobby. Because based on age and pre-existing medical conditions, even if chances are you low you won’t die from Covid-19 if you go out, you might spread it, and ultimately, someone else might.

So be safe everyone, and kind, and remember to wash those hands

Man Down in Miyazaki

“So, say you’re an omnipotent superhero,” he started, “and Country A and Country B launch nukes at each other. You throw those nukes into orbit so they don’t hit anything, but you can still use them. How would you punish Country A and Country B?”

 “Well, why do they hate each other?” I said.

 “Does it matter? They just do.”

 “Well, yeah, it does. If it’s based on race or religion, I’d make it so people in Country A and Country B couldn’t tell someone’s race or religion,” I said.

 “Look,” he said, the way people do when you tell them you’d save the bulk of a hypothetical $10 million lottery win, as if that’s not a completely reasonable answer, “I know you’re a good person, but you have to punish these people.”

 “Mmm,” I said, around a mouthful of fries, “okay.”

 He looked at me, waiting for a response.

 “I’m thinking,” I said, to buy some more time to absorb my incredulity at being described as a good person. Like someone caught red-handed trying to pass off the suspicious conduct as casual and definitely not what it actually is, I feigned deep thought as I mentally tucked away the answer to the question of how fast I would have sold him out earlier in the day, had we gotten in trouble.

 That particular conversation had taken place in a McDonald’s in Miyazaki after well-laid travel plans had unraveled into another misadventure. Our initial itinerary had us out of the hotel in Kumamoto by 8 a.m. and at  Takachiho Gorge by 9 a.m., where the boat rentals started at 8:30. We’d then planned to covertly fly Jwizzle’s drone through the gorge before driving down to Hyuga to see the Sea-Cross, Ryugo Udo Shrine, and Umagase.

The path to Takachiho Gorge.

Takachiho Gorge.

View from the boat dock.

 We’d arrived just past 8:30 a.m., which meant that we had to park in a second parking lot farther away from the gorge. From that parking lot, there’s a 10-minute scenic walk through the gorge which was largely empty when we wandered through. Despite arriving at the boat dock around 8:45 a.m., there was already a 60-meter long line for the boats. We were able to get a reservation with an hour-long wait. As we browsed the gift shop in the meantime, the lady behind the counter told us that the boat rentals had been closed all summer due to heavy rain. The timing of our visit was apparently fortuitous.

 An hour later, we were on a rowboat with a thirty-minute time limit. We struggle-rowed through the relatively narrow gorge as I quickly discovered that actually rowing a boat is not nearly as easy as operating a rowing machine. With approximately twelve boats in the water at once, there was a lot of gentle bumping and jostling in the water, all of us awkwardly yet politely trying to navigate towards a good spot for a unique photograph. As we neared the waterfall, I contorted myself into different positions to take the kind of pictures that are the métier of unappreciated boyfriends of Instagram-famous women. I hit the shutter button as a ray of sunlight lit the base of the waterfall and felt a surge of validation and pride. It was met with a tepid response.

View from the bridge at Takachiho Gorge.

 Approximately 500 pictures later, we hustled back to shore, returned our life vests and climbed back towards the road overlooking the gorge. There, we found a brief stretch of asphalt where Jwizzle could discreetly launch his drone; as he manipulated the console, I stood by casually, shielding eyes from what we were actually doing and stealing glances at his phone screen.

 And then we dropped the drone.

 Jwizzle’s phone screen suddenly went blank and a brief second later, his drone had decided to descend onto a rock approximately 20 meters away from the waterfall. In a panic, he shoved his dead phone at me and took off running. I lost him at a fork in the road and accidentally headed towards the parking lot. 15 minutes later, finding an empty car, I weaved my way back through an increasingly dense crowd of Chinese tourists and found him agitated yet slightly relieved. The drone wasn’t in the water, but we’d have to get on a boat to get it back. I was sweating profusely.

 By the time we signed up for another boat, it was already late morning and there was a 2.5 hour wait time. We killed time by losing each other again, necessitating yet another trip through the gorge to the parking lot and back. I offered to claim ownership of the drone and ask the boat operators to recover it, but that was quickly rejected. We waited near the boat dock, anxious, when a boat operator suddenly took off through the gorge on a motor boat. He came back a few minutes later with the damp drone, which we finally claimed before hauling ass out of the area.

 With a key member of our team drying (and possibly, dying) in the back seat, we headed east towards Hyuga. Our first stop was the Ryugo Udo Shrine which required getting lost (again) through a winding, wooded path that climbed up before descending down towards the shore. As we neared the mouth of the cave where Ryugo Udo Shrine is located, a sign loudly cautioned us that the path would be steep. We confirmed the veracity of that statement upon arriving at the last ten steps to the cave, which consisted of a pile of wet rocks that vaguely resembled stairs.

Heading down to Ryugo Udo Shrine.

Ryugo Udo shrine from the outside.

Ryugo Udo Shrine from inside the cave.

 Still, we managed to make it down to a gorgeous view. They say you can see a dragon rising if you look out towards the mouth of the cave from the shrine. I apparently lacked the imagination to see that particular beast, but it definitely paralleled my mental image of the empty sack that was my shrunken stomach.

 Having foolishly decided that this was the day to break my addiction to Coke, I’d subsisted on water and mints for the past 6 hours. After the delay due a dropped drone, we were in a rush to get to Hyuga before the sun set. We scrambled out of the cave where Ryugo Udo Shrine is located and a short drive took us to the Sea Cross, a cross-shaped coastal inlet. It’s a naturally occurring seascape that’s impressive on its own, but someone clever in the tourism industry apparently also noticed that the inlet can look like the Japanese character for 叶う, which means when something, like a wish or desire, has been granted. To add to the hyped romanticism of the locale, there’s a large bell that’s been installed where one – or more probably, couples – can make their wishes. Jwizzle clanged it loudly and unceremoniously and my plea for chicken nuggets apparently went unheard.

The Sea Cross.

 At this point, I had no idea where we were headed next. We were on the eastern edge of Miyazaki, traveling along wooded roads devoid of convenience stores or any other source of nourishment. A short drive from the Sea Cross took us to Umagase, where we could see the vertical rock formations of the cliffs reach out towards the sea. We followed the signs to two viewpoints, the last which took us down to a point overlooking the shore where we peered over the edge and watched the waves crash against the rocks. The view was incredible. I thought of meringue and Mallomars.

Umagase cliffs.

Umagase viewpoint.

Cape Hyuga.

Path up from the viewpoint.

 A couple hours later, I learned there was a god as Jwizzle pulled into a McDonald’s and we ordered and inhaled 2,000 yen worth of food. I would regret it later as we watched South Africa beat Japan in the Rugby World Cup and the McDonald’s burps would plague me until, exhausted, we pulled into a service area to sleep for a few hours before finally making it back to the hotel. Once horizontal, I had a second to muse over the fact that Jwizzle somehow believed screwing with two entire country’s worth of people’s psychology wasn’t a punishment, and fell fast asleep.

TL;DR – I Just Want Travel Tips Section

-       Get to Takachiho early. We arrived at 8:45 and still had to wait an hour; by late morning the boat rentals were done for the day and there was a 3+ hour wait. You can check the status of boat rentals here. If there’s been a stretch of heavy rain or bad weather, the boat rentals may not be available when you visit.

-       Cape Hyuga (where the Sea Cross, Umagase, and Ryugo Udo Shrine are located) was relatively deserted when we went, but they’re worth a visit. You’ll want to rent a car to get to these spots.

Mt. Fuji is No Basic Bitch, or, How I Didn't Pee for 15 Hours

It is 3 a.m. and I am on a 45-degree slope that has lasted approximately five hours and won’t end. My thighs are wrung out and heavy. I have miraculously not yet lost my shit. Nor have I peed in the last five hours. I eventually will hold it in for a further ten.

That morning, the plan had been  to climb Mt. Fuji via the Gotemba trial on the southeast side of the mountain. It’s the longest route to the top, with the trailhead located at 1400 meters above sea level, and it’s also the least popular. The ascent has been described as a “gentle” slope, which seemed more reassuring given that we would be climbing in the off-season, when the mountain and all the huts along the way are officially closed. With an unseasonably warm weekend coming up, it was our last chance to climb to the summit this year. Suddenly I was packing a bag with borrowed gear and pulling out my base layers. Because, how bad could it really be?

According to my parents, I was going to die. “Rocks will come flying at you,” my mother said. I wasn’t sure what that meant. “Bring your bike helmet,” she insisted.

This contradicted what I’d heard of Mt. Fuji: essentially, that it’s the basic bitch of mountains. Mt. Fuji is accessible enough from Tokyo to have become a tourist attraction; a heavily Instagram-ed, bucket list item that appears to be easily conquered by the “reasonably fit.” Online, the climb is described as a boring, non-technical ascent, almost like it could be done with a bottle of water and yoga pants.

That characterization is misleading. Temperatures at the summit can fall to below freezing, which is a terrifying concept if you’re the type of person who considers anything below 24C, “cold.” I layered almost every cold-weather item I had from commuting to law school on a bike through Boston winters, and borrowed an Arc’teryx coat from my mother. I looked like I was prepared to climb Everest. Come what may, I was at least dressed to survive.

Unfortunately, although I had realized that I could freeze to death, I failed to take into account several factors, such as the route being largely unmarked, the length of the trail, and the large elevation gain. We started our climb from the Gotemba fifth station at around 10:30 p.m., two hours later than planned, but figured we’d make good time on the trail.

“It better not be like this all the way up,” Jwizzle joked within the first half hour. I’d laughed in response. We would eat those words.

View from near the 8th station.

 With one headlight between us and no trail markers, we would later learn that we’d veered off the trail onto a path for whatever tanks they use to climb the side of mountains. After an hour, we were climbing a 45-degree slope. After another three hours, the soft, volcanic sand had sucked the strength out of my legs. On a much-needed break, I sat back and stared at the stars, which speckled the sky in varying degrees of brightness, like how I imagine my skin looks if examined under those skin analysis machines that show you exactly how shitty your complexion is. I kinda needed to pee.

The thing is, we were essentially in Mordor. There is no cover on Mt Fuji. It’s a barren landscape of volcanic ash and the occasional rock that is no bigger than a medium-sized dog. Ascended in the dark, every marker pole becomes a promise of some sort of turning point, before reality sets in and it breaks your soul. And then there’s the dust. Frodo may have been traveling with an anorexic suffering from a personality disorder, but at least he didn’t have volcanic ash blowing into his face the entire way.

By the time I started questioning whether I was going to get black lung, turning back wasn’t an option. We were still battling towards the 8th station when the sun came up, stretching its rays across the lakes below. The light gave me a little boost of hope and optimism. It lasted about five minutes before my legs were back to screaming and I was deliriously chanting the chorus to Joe Dassin’s “Les Champs-Elysees” in my head.

Luckily, whatever path we were on intersected the real trail near the 8th station. The landscape changed from Mordor to Mars, the soft sand turning into large volcanic rocks and puddles of pebbles, the trail now a sadistic scribble of switchbacks. I heaved myself over unstable rocks, running on fumes and determination. That French chorus quickly became my only companion as I started to seriously lag behind. Every few switchbacks, I could see Jwizzle waiting for me to catch up.  

“You don’t have to wait,” I gasped unconvincingly, “I’ll be fine.”

It only dawned on me later that he was most likely waiting because he didn’t want a dead body – or the responsibility of being associated with one found on the side of a mountain – impeding his descent. At this point, although there were large enough rocks to sneak behind to pee, we started to see other hikers, both above and below us. This was enough of a deterrent; the last thing I wanted to do was to subject several Japanese mountain climbers to the sight of my bare butt. It was also cold. Cold enough that I didn’t know if I’d be able to warm up again if I exposed more than my face to the elements. I checked in with my bladder and reassessed my priorities. Peeing could wait.

We reached the summit a long, hard five hours after arriving at the 8th station. Near the rim of that volcanic crater, we ate a snack and I curled up against my backpack. I closed my eyes ready to jump into unconsciousness, fully aware that this is most likely how people die of exposure and/or freeze to death. I wondered where the helicopter would land to pick up my dead body.  

The Torii gate at the summit.

I felt a small pang in my gut and I opened my eyes. I was okay with the embarrassment of dying on the side of a mountain, but the idea of being found dead in a puddle of my own urine roused me from any chance of sleep/death. Because if I had to go, I’d strongly prefer it wasn’t with a full bladder. I drummed my fists against my dead thighs and prepared to get off the mountain.

Since we had wandered down the scenic route, it had taken us a total of twelve hours to climb to the top. It would take us a laughably easy three to descent. Once we scrambled down the web of switchbacks, the rest of the route is made of deep, soft volcanic sand that’s referred to as “the sand slide.” We were able to almost jog down, the sand cushioning the impact you’d usually feel on the walk down a mountainside. Back at the trailhead, I made a beeline for a bathroom that smelled like a damp corner of Paris in the summer. It was probably worse than the alternative, but at least I didn’t have to worry about volcanic sand getting into my underwear.

 A couple hours later, I emptied about four tablespoons of ash and small rocks from my shoes into a hotel trashcan. After a shower I only got out of so I could lie down, I dozed off to Japan stunning the world by beating Ireland in the Rugby World Cup, and dreamed of toilets.

 [Some of the photographs in this post were taken with an expired disposable film camera.]