Fujisan

Before Ray came over to visit, he included this desperate entreaty in one of his emails:
"Is Mt. Fuji worth climbing".
Now, you don't need to be Harold Bloom to unearth the aching subtext contained in these 5 beseeching words. Ray is from Cavan after all where subtle understatement is as much a part of the county character as drumlins and potholed roads. Basically, what he meant was "Brian, please, please, pleeeease come climb Mt  Fuji with me. Please."
Look again at his question, nay plea: "Is Mt. Fuji worth climbing?" Note the use of the word 'worth'. I think I am not alone in detecting a certain dread, a certain sense of barely repressed fear even, in its implied hesitancy. Cuilcagh mountain (hill really), Cavan's highest point, is only 665 metres high; Fuji is six times that. Reassurance is being sought and it was mine to give.
Though then again, as they say up Blacklion way, I could just be full of auld sheep shite.
So plan "Let's Japan highest mountain together, forever, go yeah!!" was hatched. It ultimately involved 36 hours, 2 car journeys, 2 plane flights, 5 bus journeys and some climbing.
Motored up to Chitose airport; flew down to Haneda airport in Tokyo; bussed it into Shinjuku; took another bus to Kawaguchiko; and finally a bus to the 5th station on the Yoshida trail to the summit.
God bless Japanese transport - connections seamless and everything on time (except for Ray's luggage which took an inordinate amount of time to appear at Haneda arrivals). I even had time to go shopping for a gas canister after being forced to dump one by baggage security at Chitose airport. I mean me, an Irishman, and a potentially explosive device, what could they possibly be thinking?
So we arrive at the 5th station which is 2,300 metres up the mountain. So yes, we cheated, as do most people, but 36 hours was all my wife gave me. But it's Fuji, I tried explaining to her, your country's highest, most sacred mountain. But you have to be back here by tomorrow evening she replied, and handed me my car keys.
And we had to climb it at night. Well, we didn't really have to climb it at night, but the tradition, and Japan is a country that places a premium on its traditions, is that you reach the summit just in time for sunrise or goraikou in Japanese. Apparently the view is so spectacular it brings tears to your eyes.
With this mind we packed an extra packet of tissues, checked the batteries on our headlights and started off at 6:30pm. It was now dark, the mountain had been gently enveloped in a thick swathe of fog and we figured all we had to do was keep going up. So no surprises then when just 20 minutes after setting off, we managed to wander off the trail and found ourselves climbing up a rather steep construction site access track.
Back down we went. Rejoined the correct trail and back up we went. And went. For about two hours until we arrived at the mountain hut where we were to spend the night. Or at least that part of it until 1:30 in the morning when we work woken and told to be best on our way if we wanted to get to the top in time for goraikou.
It was cold. Quite cold. There was a stiff breeze blowing which had turned the fog into a drizzle and apparently it was blowing harder further up. Typical Cavan weather in other words.
We kept going.
At the 8th station (there is a series of stations from the fifth to the ninth, marking off the trail), we stopped for a rest. Not that we really needed it (ahem), but at the pace Ray was leading me we would be up and back down the mountain before dawn broke. Plus, we figured it would better to kill some time softly here rather than being blown out of it further up.
So, being Irish, we had a cup of tea. While some of our fellow Japanese climbers, God bless them, sucked on small portable canisters of oxygen.

Fortified by hot tea and mars bars we started off again. But even that turned out to be a tad rushed as we reached the summit some 30 minutes before the sun was due. Not that it seemed we'd have much chance of spotting it. The wind was howling, the snow was blizzarding and the carcasses of frozen sherpas lay strewn around the ground.
Kind of.
There was wind. And rain. No sherpas, though the boys who had been sucking on the oxygen back at the 8th station looked like they needed some. No sun either.
And we waited. And got colder. And this blog became Hemingwayesque.

The sun finally did break through the clouds and there were tears. But that was the wind. 

We stumbled around the summit rim for a bit. Had another cup of tea. Breached the weather station perimeter to reach the true top of Fuji.



Took some photos with my not very good camera.







Then down we went. And the cloud cleared, the wind dropped and Ray decided it was time for a recline.



And yes, dear reader, I was back in Muroran by that evening while Ray took his Men's Health cover shots off to Kyoto.

A visitor

In a surprise visit my friend Ray came to see us here in Muroran. Ray and myself first met exactly 20 years ago on the steps of a BMW wohnheim in Munich. Subsequently we went to Australian together and after that lived a couple of months dangerously in Indonesia. And while I eventually washed up here in Japan, Ray kept travelling. And travelling. And travelling some more. To the point where he has now visited 81 countries all told.
To which I thought, "there but for the grace of my wife, went I".
Japan was the 82nd stamp in his passport and in a climatic show of welcome to such an august visitor,  Muroran rolled out the blue skies and sunshine for him.

After being so cynically robbed at the sport's day the previous weekend, Cian showed his disgust by willfully absenting himself from the nursery school for a couple of days. He wanted to go on hunger strike to draw attention to his campaign for 'clean sports', but then he got hungry and gave it up just before breakfast. Instead he joined Ray and myself for our grand tour of western Iburi.

Ray was impressed.
Ray should be here in the dark, wind blown depths of a frozen February, but even I, grudgingly, very grudgingly, could see that Muroran, on a day like today, might just faintly brush up against the distant reaches of the word 'scenic'.
Next up a pit stop for some damn fine sushi - ahh Muroran, you gastronomical tease.

Then off to Uzu-san, our local, semi-active volcano for a bit of that old 'Japan - land of disasters' experience.

And finally onto Lake Toya because (a) it has its serene moments and we were lucky enough to capture one of them; and (b) it also has its delicious, home-made ice-cream.

A morning's greyness in the east

(with apologies to Cormac McCarthy)

See the runners. Huddled and spendthrift, attired for the heat, mocked and made wretched by the rain. See the pandemonium of clouds, broiling around the smouldering mountain. See the lightning, splayed and dimmed behind its achromatic cover. Hear the thunder, elemental in its warning, unshrouding the pathetic ambitions of those forlorn and foolish huddled at the start line.

Climbed they did, up to where shape dissolved into a scattering of shadows. Spindly figures, outlines of no substance, each alone in wordless anguish, washed by the rain, absolved of all but their needless striving for an end.

And on they ran, crazed, driven by something primeval defying clined logic, reaching back to the obdurate essence of what we were. They ran because they had to and to do otherwise was a refutation of all that rendered them extant.

Like mud snared protean lifeforms spat from some subterranean sepulchre, splattered auguries of a sweaty despair.

And then it came to an end and all that was before terribly was suddenly delivered to the farthest realms of memory and all that was left was the exhausted now.

And the poison ivy. Sweet, scratching Jesus, the poison ivy.

Winning and being made to lose

There was talk of them having been in the Kenyan highlands for a month, training at altitude. Word was they followed that with a couple of hard sessions at Crusheen Hill. Talked Ger Loughnane into coming along. Said   he'd never seen anything like the commitment, the all-consuming will to win. "The intensity lads, the intensity. Like '95 again, but with more rice".
Brian O'Driscoll was brought in to give a pep talk and three minutes into it, he quit. "They don't need it", he explained, simple as that. Some say that after that they retreated to a Zen monastery high on the slopes of Mt. Fuji where they stayed while their minds wandered free, contemplating the singleness of victory and the immutability of loss.
They were spoken of in hushed tones of awe and reverence as befits those who joust with the immortals.
They were ... the White Team.
And as for the Red Team, well they had been seen training with Lance Armstrong; and later spotted at a pharmaceutical company on the outskirts of Beijing, allegedly on a 'goodwill visit'. There were rumors of cash in plastic bags and blood transfusions from orphanages. Never proven, but the rumors stuck. They were after all competing for the 'Undokai' (Sports Day), the biggest event in the Mizumoto Hoikusho calendar since, well, last year's  Undokai.
Stretching first - don't want to lose all that hard training to a tight Achilles tendon just moments before the start. Just look at the frenzied intensity in those eyes - Jesus, but it would give you the shivers.

The opening ceremony was a spectacular display of martial grandeur, evoking John Bonham, the movie 300, and in Cian's case, the hard bastard hurley swing of an enraged Ollie Baker. Kazuma and Taichi uttered some blood curling pronouncements about how they would trod the Red Team's bones into wind blown dust before making off with their womenfolk and sweets. All the while Cian continued to demonstrate just how those poor wretches wearing red would be rendered into dust.

Let the games begin!!! we thundered, and begin they did. First up was the tricky ball in the hoop competition. But the White Team won that one easily enough. 2 points in the bag there. This was followed by the parents demonstrating their complete lack of eye-hand coordination for the same event. Or at least the Red Team did. The White Team with their secret weapon, the tall, lanky foreigner, won this one too. Another 2 points in the bag.

Time for a totally random musical interlude. Why? Because they are White Team - they just can. Talent to burn, these kids.

Next up was the exclusive G 1 race, a decathlon for our times. Cian was the anchor and yes, all too easily the winner too. Another 2 points in the bag.

So we are up to the final event, the relay and by this stage White Team, having won the first three events are 6 points while Red Team, now firmly clasped in defeat's intimate embrace are 3 points. These games are over ladies and gents; those of you with familial bonds to the red team may begin to sneak away in shame now.
And we're ... off.

And incredibly, red team win. Though not so incredibly when the little refusenik girl at the start of the race is subsequently seen with a plastic bag full of cash and kit-kats. Still, even with this disappointing loss, White Team have it in the bag.
But they, nor us, us naive fools, us rain-soaked suckers who still believed in the purity of amateur sports, didn't count on the sheer, brazen cynicism of the must-win-at-all-costs red team.
In an unprecedented move of such breath taking, undisguised favoritism, the principal of the Hoikusho unilaterally awarded 5 points, yes 5 unfrigginbelievable points to the red team for their relay win, thus rendering the final score this

And thus awarding, nay handing victory in the Undokai on a Judas plate to the red team.
Unfrigginbelievable!!!
How that man can live with himself  is beyond me.
The crowd didn't like it either, not one bit and for a while there after final result was announced it all turned a bit Chinese.

What had started a such a celebration of sporting joy had ended as an exercise in easy cynicism and violence. 
For shame.

Winter....

This evening's news had a report about the first fall of snow on top of Mt. Fuji. It was 18 days earlier than normal. Not even the end of the second week of September, a ball yet to be kicked in anger in this year's All Ireland football final and I'm already writing about snow. Why?

The Trees of Life

"Look out through my eyes. Look out at the things you made. All things shining"

"Do good to them. Wonder. Hope." 

Dinosaurs

They bestrode the earth before man was but a twinkle in a mammal's eye. They left behind nothing but bones and Steven Spielberg movies. They were....dinosaurs.
And we went to see them, or rather what bits we could find of them a couple of million years later. This led me to thinking about the very ubiquity of dinosaurs in modern culture, from Jurassic Park to the Flintstones, to exhibitions like this. They have become commonplace and the unfortunate result has been a loss of wonder at what once was. The bones, amazingly reconstituted, are millions of years old and that in itself should invoke a sense of both awe at their longevity, and humility at the lack of ours. But no, it provoked nothing more than a half hearted shrug as I skimmed through the explanations about the Mesozoic period. Similarly, the sheer size of the beasts has been rendered less impressive by their repeated CGI renderings on film and television and there is a sort of media-induced 'ho-hum' reaction to it all.
Or at least that was me.
But Cian...well he was torn between awe and fear. Dinosaurs were that big!! Wow!!!! And their teeth were that big!! Wow!!! And these are really their bones!!! Wow, wow!!! And why do I have to stand for this stupid picture with Daddy?
Mind you the visit to the dinosaur exhibition did provoke a number of near unanswerable questions like "Where do dinosaurs sleep?" and "Can dinosaurs eat whales?" and "How do dinosaurs keep their teeth clean?" and "Why are there so many dinosaur bones?" and "What are the Flintstones?"
I will say that this constant stream of unanswerable questions did get a bit tiring after a while, but I am still glad he had the untrammeled curiosity to ask them all.

Battleship

It has been pointed out to me by a reader who wishes to remain anonymous but who, for the sake of convenience, I shall call 'that Japanese woman', that my posts of late have (a) been essentially solipsistic exercises in navel gazing; (b) have had little to do with Cian or the wider Gaynor-Takahashi family, which is ostensibly the raison d'etre of this blog; and (c) and have featured a lot of hairy navel gazing and overt displays of devastating chest rug.
So, to remedy that this is the first in a series of Cian heavy blogs that will feature a lot of pictures of battleships, dinosaurs, segways and zero hirusteness. No matter how much you clamour for it, Mella.
First the battleship. Last weekend saw the Japanese Marine Self Defense Forces' 2,500 tonne, Abukuma class destroyer Oyodo visit Muroran in celebration of the port's 140th anniversary. And yes, the Marine Self Defense Forces is what Japan has instead of a navy, just as they don't have an army, but rather the Ground Self Defense Forces and yes, you've guessed it, no air force either, instead they have the Air Self Defense Forces.
Anyway, the navy, sorry Marine etc., etc., were having an open day on the ship in an effort to sway impressionable young minds into joining the navy, sorry, the Marine etc., etc. Being the highly impressionable sort, myself, Cian and 'that Japanese woman' went along for the walk around.

Cian wasted no time in heading straight for the bridge where, in the role he was so obviously born for, he immediately assumed command and ordered gunnery sergeant  Sanae to "loose off a couple of rounds" from the forward 76mm, just to "let the goddamned Chinese know we're not going to take any more shit over the Senkakus".

This was duly done, which successfully saw the Shin Nihon Seikyu oil depots on the far side of the bay being blown to smithereens. "That'll let Beijing know we mean business" said Cian, going below to the Captain's cabin for some celebratory drinks at 12 bells and some Louis Armstrong covers.

Meanwhile 'that Japanese woman' was out on the poop deck caressing the HOS-301 triple 324mm torpedo tubes whilst looking longingly at the Chinese iron ore carrier docked at the Shin Nitetsu factory wharf.

I did manage to get a furtive shot of some top secret, classified, highly confidential information on the bridge, but when I tried to sell it to the Chinese, they, unbelievably, said they were not interested in shelling out the big Yuan for the Muroran tide times. So I got Cian to wake up the 76 and lob some at the tug boats circling the harbour just to let those sons of Mao know we were still 'mad as hell and not going to take it anymore'.

A good day then had by all.