Kumano

I just got back from Kumano, and it was amazing. This picture probably sums it up the best.

But, anyway, back to Saturday:

Sawa headed off on Saturday back to Yokohama, where she’s taking the second part of the United Nations English exam, having an interview with this visiting documentary filmmaker from the States. If everything goes well, she’ll get this job translating and researching for him. Unfortunately, that means that she’ll have to stay up in Yokohama for up to a month. It’ll be pretty lonely, but it should be a great experience for her, and it might end up being good for me anyway to make me have to fend for myself more. I think I really have to just go for it and get some tickets to Asia and wander around and do cool things. I’m worried because I don’t know how to go about doing that, but I think the key is to just go for it and see what happens. I will try to do a little research and figure out what’ll be best, though.

Anyway, in the morning I picked up some delicious bakery stuff from Eze Bleu and made some delicious coffee, then we went to Watabe Wedding to try on our Japanese-stye wedding stuff. Sawa ended up going with this really cool kimono that suited her very well, and I got this really sweet hakama that’s “Mt. Fuji style” – it’s wide at the bottom and thins in to the waist, and is blue at the bottom and fades up to white at the top, just like the snow on Mt. Fuji. It’s gonna be pretty sweet getting to wear that AND change into a tuxedo.

After that, we said goodbye and I headed off to meet Kimura-san to drive off to Kumano and Sawa headed off to Yokohama.

In the car we listened to a lot of music – some of my picks and some of his – and talked a lot about music. He had some really cool CDs, including this cool one of Okinawan music. Okinawan music and culture in general seems really cool and different from mainland Japan. Sawa and I have been talking about trying to gothere after our wedding.

It took about 5 hours to get there, and we stopped at an onsen when we got there, so it was about 8pm by the time we arrived. I actually didn’t know where we were going when we left, just that we were going to Kumano, but it turned out we were going to this temple where this crazy crazy monk lives. It’s the same place the students went to on the Empower trip back in Novemeber that I really wanted to go on but missed out, so it worked out great!

This monk was so crazy.

(Although he is a monk and has a very hippy philosophy, he also really likes North Face…go figure)

He was really really nice and incredibly fun to hang out with, but he was very demanding too. He loves to talk and apparently he talks about crazy things and his ay of talking is very hard to follow. Not only that, but he likes to ask interesting questions and demands interesting responses, so if I don’t understand his questions or can’t think of a good response, I feel like I’ve failed and wasn’t cool enough for him, so it was kind of tiring trying to concentrate and follow him. He was also pretty arrogant (in a good, joking way, but still arrogant) and was always saying how good the food was we were eating. He was really excited about everything, which is awesome, but it was hard to keep up the excitement and constantly raise everything and be excited all the time. It makes me want to work on my Japanese so next time I meet him I’ll be able to understand him better. I think he has a lot of amazing things to say.

It was really an amazing place, though. Basically we spent the whole time eating, drinking, enjoying nature, praying, making food, singing, talking, bathing, cleaning and sleeping, usually some combination of the above at the same time. I don’t think most monks drink alcohol, but this one certainly does. He also grows and makes all kinds of his own food (rice, vegetables, mushrooms, makes his own pickles, etc.) so we went and picked mushrooms and vegetables and then made delicious food from them.

A couple of times a day he put on his cool monk robes and we went to the temple part and lit candles and prayed and did some improvised singing and he blew on his conch shell. The monk loves gospel and jazz and he encouraged us to improvise and sing around the prayer song he sang. It was so much fun. It was just like the singing we did a lot in the Zumbyes at rehearsals or when we’re just hanging out and want to sing, or when I was cleaning the dorms and we sang while we cleaned.

On the second day, after waking up and doing some cleaning, Kimura and I grabbed our shamisens and the conch shell and some snacks and went on an hour-long hike up to this amazing rocky outlook. I learned how to blow the conch shell – it was an amazing feeling. (Here’s Kimura blowing it)

Just blowing into this shell produces such a powerful sound it shakes the rock. Blowing it and looking up to the hill on the other side of the valley I felt like some kind of soldier from an old army or Lord of the Rings or something, signaling to the regiment up on the other hill to begin the attack.

We also busted out our shamisen (actually, my shamisen and his sanshin) and played and sang, and ate the delicious mamemochi we brought. It was pretty much perfect.

This morning we headed out after a delicious breakfast. On the way back we stopped at this cool bay and wandered out onto the rocks. Unfortunately, it was a little too cool – it was freezing with the wind. It actually reminded me a lot of Wellington. But it was really cool and we played the shamisen and sang a little and ate a quick lunch of cheap chirashizushi we picked up at a road-side stand.

As we were driving back, we passed this huge scary-looking place that stretched on for miles and looked like Zion from the Matrix or something.

It turned out to be some kind of giant chemical factory or oil refinery. It was about as much of an opposite from Kumano as I could imagine and it looked so scary and awful. But, the strange thing is, more likely than not I may be using and enjoying the products that factory was making, and we might even have been using the very oil it was extracting to fuel our car to drive out to Kumano for our awesome time. What a strange world.

Afterwards, we went to his wife’s parents house to meet his wife and baby and had a delicious dinner with all of them, then came back to Kyoto. It was a really fun trip.

I was supposed to have my first utai lesson of the new year today, but because of the trip I got my teacher to change it to tomorrow morning. Unfortunately, with all the holidaying and traveling I haven’t managed to practice even once since my last lesson almost a month ago. Likewise with the shamisen (except for on this Kumano trip), for which I also have my first lesson of the new year tomorrow, so I’d better get to sleep so I can wake up early tomorrow and do a little practice.