Archie Peters, who completed our MA Creative Writing this year, has just started a new teaching job in Japan. In this blog post, he gives us some first impressions of his new home. He is in the process of developing his own travel blog, which you can follow here.
After fourteen hours of staring at the images of clouds below me from onboard camera, alternating with patches of uncomfortable sleep – the kind from which you wake less rested, with a twisted and cramped neck – I had arrived at my destination. Tokyo.
During my travels time had jumped twenty-two hours ahead: I had left in the afternoon and arrived in the evening of the next day. My head felt as if it could roll back off my shoulders at any moment. But Tokyo is the city that never sleeps, right? So I decided I wouldn’t either.
Me and a few other Assistant Language Teachers (ALTs) from my Japanese Exchange and Teaching (JET) programme, headed into what we thought was central Shinjuku to find an izakaya. A good friend from my time as an undergrad, Alfie, was on the way out, after a year in Japan, so he joined us for his last night and our first. We sat snug in a little booth, shielded from the rest of the izakaya by a curtain with prints reminiscent of Hokusai’s Great Wave, and I had my first taste of Basashi Sashimi. I was no longer at home, after all, and had decided to try any food that was put in front of me. The menu said this was horse, but the man who called us in off the street called it beef, so I thought it must’ve been a translation error. Alfie, well versed in the way of the izakaya, assured me it was horse and proceeded to order a plate. Now, if you told me that a certain supermarket chain had sold me ‘beef’ which was horse, I’d be horrified and would seriously debate whether to finish the Bolognese I had created with it. However, when this was in front of me, a tender red over a large green leaf I do not know the name of, I could not resist. It was delicious.
Another surprise came shortly after when we realised we had not in fact gone to central Shinjuku. We were, as it turned out, in a small neighbourhood fifteen minutes away. It should have been impossible to miss: Godzilla is there, surely, poking his head out over the neon-clad towers.
Other than basashi and incredibly tall towers, my few days in Tokyo, before my job started away to the south, was mostly spent fighting off exhaustion in full suit and thirty-degree heat as I listened to orientation session after orientation session to prepare me for life in this country. I was then back to Haneda to fly down to Ehime, a prefecture covering the northwest of the island of Shikoku. I slept, less fitfully this time, and woke to see a sparkling, still sea (the flat Seto Inland Sea), with island mountains in their thick green coats breaking up the blue. To compensate for all the views I had missed on my short flight, I then glued my forehead to the window of the car as I travelled through the Ishizuchi mountain range on my way to Saijo, my new home.
The mountains here never seem to end. Even when you look out onto the sea, they’re everywhere. They spread along the horizon, and the clouds scrape along them. Ishizuchi, the highest peak in Western Japan and the one behind my house, is a sacred mountain, one of seven in the country. I ventured to the Shinto shrine dedicated to the mountain, which was not hard to find thanks to the gigantic torii gate followed by an equally large stone one signalling the entrance. Beyond these is another gate, two shishi lions guarding it, and with two large tengu – long-nosed yōkai (supernatural entities) with wings, who used to inhabit the mountains – waiting behind a sheet of glass. There is a tree with a shimenawa, a type of rope carefully bound with shide (the lightning bolt shaped paper), dangling from it. These, I learned, trap spirits inside, or ward off evil, marking sacred spaces such as Shinto shrines. A bridge, roughly halfway up the shrine, had a communion of koi collecting just below it, as if they’d been trained to beg for food like puppies. At the top, after countless smaller shrines, I found myself in a large open space, another, bigger shrine, with a mighty view of the whole of Saijo, the Seto Inland Sea, and various islands between me and Honshu. I turned away from this view and looked up, realising that, after all those steps and slopes, I’d only made it perhaps five percent of the way up the mountain.
It is said that when, 1300 years ago, Kozumi Yaku climbed Ishizuchi, he prayed, purified his mind and body, then unsuccessfully tried to reach the summit. As he began to descend, he encountered an old white-haired man, intently sharpening his axe in Jojusha Shrine, and when he asked why, the old man answered, ‘I will sharpen this axe until it is a needle.’ These words motivated Kozumi, for some reason, so he decided to resume his journey to reach the top. It is said the old man was Ishizuchi Omikami (essentially the deity of the mountain), and that after meeting with him, Kozumi’s wish came true. This shrine is revered as a shrine for the fulfilment of wishes.
I do not know what I will wish for. Maybe climbing Mount Ishizuchi will be enough to motivate me to try even harder for my dreams. One thing is for certain, though. If the shrine, for whatever reason, does not grant me my wishes, I’ll return home with further inspiration for my writing. For me, that is enough.
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