ダニエルの冒険

I had breakfast with everyone on Saturday morning and gave the family a Irish turf-made clock which they loved. After Kaori arrived at the house, herself, myself, Ayumi, and her parents headed out for Nikko, where Tokugawa Ieyasu is buried. I pointed out that Tokugawa Ieyasu was born in Okazaki and is buried in Nikko, and I had come from Okazaki and was then in Nikko. There are a LOT of steps at Nikko and the girls got tired a lot on the way up. Ayumi’s father, who’s a smoker, was bounding ahead of the rest of us. He’s into soccer big-time so I suppose he almost balances out the smoking with large amounts of exercise but he still has a nasty cough sometimes. It was actually coming down the steps that was harder and the two girls, in their high-heeled boots, had trouble coming down so they took an arm each while coming down. I wish someone had got a picture of that. There’s a saying in Japan for having two beautiful girls with you — 両手に花 (“ryou-te ni hana”), meaning “a flower in each hand”.

We saw all the famous sites at Nikko: the three wise monkeys (“see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil”), the grave of Tokugawa Ieyasu, Nemuri-neko (“sleeping cat”), Naki-Ryu (“roaring dragon”), and all that other great stuff. Yuki told us about a symbol on Tokugawa’s grave which marks the spot where treasure is buried but can never be dug up because the area is a national treasure. Apparently it looks like the Star of David with the top triangle removed, but we couldn’t find it.

On the way home we took a detour and went up into the mountains and the landscape changed dramatically. When I saw how fast it all changed, I thought of Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country. The line that everyone knows is 「トンネルを抜けると雪国だった」 (“Tunnel o nukeru to yukiguni datta”, “When I came out of the tunnel, it was suddenly in Snow Country”).

Next we went to Ayumi’s grandmother’s house, which I immediately fell in love with. It’s a modern house but traditional Japanese style with some Japanese style rooms and some modern. The living room has a kotatsu and not just a crappy table with a hot box under it but the floor is actually cut away. There’s a hole so big that you could put a table into it. A low table (less than 1 foot from the floor) is put over it and it’s surrounded with a blanket so you sit on the floor and put your legs in and enjoy the warmth. I didn’t want to leave it at all.

I checked out the Japanese style rooms and the family thought I was pretty weird when I was asking if it was ok to take photos of the decorations and stuff. They kept saying “there are so much nicer places you could be taking photos of” and they really thought I was weird when I went around feeling all the walls trying to figure out which were paper, which were plaster and which were concrete. Lots were paper. I didn’t punch through any of the paper walls.

We went for dinner after and tried getting into a Yakinikuya but it was totally packed out so we went to a hamburger-based “family restaurant” (“famiresu”, they call them) and the girls had the bakudan burger (“bomb burger”) which is cut in half in front of you while it’s cooking. They give you sheets of paper to hold between you and the plate so the oil doesn’t burn you, but I only ordered a normal burger (because I wanted the demi-glace sauce) and I didn’t have my cooking gloves with me so I got some of the burn. The girls were entertained but I wasn’t. >:-(

After dinner so we went to a “game centre” (arcade) and I got to see Guitar Freaks by Konami, which I’ve been dying to see ever since I fell in love with Guitar Hero. I also played Metal Slug 6 with Kaori (Metal Slug is my all-time favourite side-scrolling shooter) and a rail shooter with Ayumi (Time Crisis maybe?). There were some really cool Gundam games were you sit into a control chair surrounded by screens and play but for 500 yen and a typically Japanese ridiculously steep learning curve I gave it a miss. Guitar Freaks was fun but I lost about half the songs I played and a Japanese guy played after me on the hardest level, slaughtering the game in a flurry of “PERFECT!”s and “GOOD!”s and “127 COMBO!”s. Japanese gamers scare me.

We took purikura at the game centre before heading home. For anyone who doesn’t know, a purikura machine is a photo booth where you get photos taken with friends, then you leave, use a pen-based touch screen to modify the photo (writing on it, adding “stamps” and such to it), and then the photo is printed on tiny stickers. People usually stick them to their phones.

We dropped Kaori home and again I stayed up until about 1.30am talking with Ayumi and her family before going to bed.