Gokiburi ahoy-hoy

Top of the list of things I won’t miss about Japan – bugs. There’s no need for me to expand on my contempt for giant asian hornets, I’ve probably made that one fairly clear. The list extends to, but is not limited to, mukade (poisonous centipedes), jumping spiders (I didn’t know they existed until one heart-attack-inducing encounter), and cockroaches.

Last night I was on Skype to my boyfriend. It was late, the weather outside was hot and rainy, and inside I was quite comfortable with the air-conditioning on (low, I might add.) In these hot and humid times, insects often seek refuge in the cool and dry apartments of unsuspecting ALTs, such as myself.

As we were talking, I was suddenly aware of a loud buzzing noise. The image of me in the webcam showed me a small black object zooming around behind me. Naturally I assumed it was a giant asian hornet, uttered a stream of profanities and ran into the entry way. As I slammed the bedroom door behind me, I heard my boyfriend’s confused voice calling ‘hello?’

Time slowed to a halt once again. I had no hope of killing something so big and poisonous, and even if I did, the smell of its carcass would attract its hornet mates to finish me off. I pressed my face up against the glass and realised it was no longer flying at the light. It was probably biding its time, waiting for me to wander back in. I opened the door a touch and peered in. I could see it on the ceiling by the light, edging its way in my direction. I stared hard at it and realised it didn’t have the body markings of a hornet.. In fact, it was simply a very large cockroach.

Cockroaches in Japan are bigger than I imagined cockroaches in general to be. Contrary to European cockroaches (which I have never seen), they are attracted to light. Given that I am on the ground floor, I always have a roach motel (known as ‘gokiburi hoi hoi’) placed on the floor by the food cupboard, though it’s never caught anything. On the outside of it are pictures of happy cockroaches encouraging their friends to come in. There are windows, and on the top you can even see a miniature weather vane. Part of the problem, in my humble opinion, is that the roach motel is too damn small. Every cockroach I have found since being here has been too big to conceivably squeeze through the paltry entrance.

So I spent the next ten minutes or so either running back into the entry as my visitor began flying around again, or venturing back in, trying not to lose sight of it. I picked up a large, novelty plastic baseball bat and considered knocking it down, but they are near impossible to kill through brute force alone and I didn’t want it to run under the fridge (the fridge is in my bedroom.) I put down the bat and picked up the deet. Then I changed my mind again. ‘You need to hit it!’ cried the voice from my computer. ‘No wait, I’ll look it up!’ Thus I awaited further instruction.

‘It says here you should use soapy water. Cockroaches breathe through their skin so it will suffocate.’

Easy then. All I had to do was cover the ceiling with soapy water. No, wait..

This was not going to be an easy battle, but I needed to win it before I went to bed. If I could catch it in the plastic box I had just noticed on the kitchen surface, then I could put soapy water in there. The cockroach was twitching a little now as it walked across the top of the light. It approached the edge, peeked over, began to climb down.. then dropped down onto my dirty laundry. On its back, with its legs in the air, it seemed fairly dead.

‘Don’t fall for it! It’s a trick!’ warned my boyfriend. I too knew this was all a sham. Cockroaches are clever. Stronger than samurai, stealthy as ninja, invincible like the phoenix, they never die.

So I slammed my box over it and trapped it there with a book before it could change its mind. Sure enough, a minute later it began to twitch and struggle and beat against the side of the box. Up close, I could see its beady little eyes, its forked feet, its nasty little mouth. I fetched some soapy water and poured it in, closing the box before it could escape.

The cockroach then started to swim in circles around the box. I had hoped it would be a quick death because I hate the idea of causing something to suffer. It’s one thing to kill an insect, but I don’t like drawing out the process. It swam around for ages before finally giving up. Then I ran to the bathroom and flushed it down the toilet.

When I finally got to bed last night, I was shattered. Today I’ll have to sterilise everything in the kitchen. Again. And you know what? Even now I’m not convinced that it’s dead. I imagine it to have a mini scuba set, waiting in the bowels of the toilet to resurface and take its revenge..

Fuji Part I: A False Start

It’s not really the done thing to come to Japan and not climb Mount Fuji. As a bare minimum you’re supposed to see it at least once, but with the mountain being notoriously stealthy and often hidden by cloud, it can be difficult even to take a decent picture. Obviously climbing a mountain (or volcano, if we want to be precise) is tough mentally and physically, so I admit having major hesitations in the weeks before our trip this weekend. I’m not the fittest of creatures and have had problems with my back in the past. On the other hand though, I am fairly lightweight, and excitable at times (a certain level of energy and bounce is required), so with a lot of encouragement I was coaxed into the expedition.

Our team consisted of three people. It’s a nice little number, on reflection. Enough to take care of each other and keep it interesting, but not so many that being in a group becomes a bother. This was lucky as things did not go to plan at the start and we had to change our route. So in our team there were two guys, my kiwi friend and an English friend, and myself. On Saturday I met up with the kiwi, Simon, at Shin-Osaka station to catch the shinkansen (bullet train) to Shin-Fuji.

As Simon quite rightly pointed out, you often forget just how cool the shinkansen is. For that reason, here is a picture for you to enjoy.

I know, the picture doesn’t convey the coolness. Just trust me when I say the bullet train is awesome.

Getting into the station was a bit of a trial because our tickets didn’t work at the barriers. When I bought the tickets the night before, the man working at the booth forgot to give me the second part of our tickets and we had to pay 735 yen to make up the difference. I still don’t know what for. We fooled around on the platform taking pictures of us in explorer poses with our backpacks until the train pulled in, where Rob was already waiting for us in the non-reserved section. (For the record, I’m never buying a reserved seat on the bullet train again, there is no need and it’s a waste of money.) We changed at Shizuoka and arrived at Shin-Fuji at around 2pm. The next plan was to buy return tickets to Fujinomiya fifth station, from which was reportedly the shortest journey to the summit.

[By the way, people don’t often start from the foot of the mountain, mostly people start from the fifth station at about 2400m. If it sounds like a bit of a flake-out, I urge you to try from the first station! It can’t be done in a day!]

Except that when we went to buy the tickets, the nice ladies (with very good English skills) at the tourist information office informed us that the Fujinomiya trail was officially closed from the eighth station onwards until the 14th July. They told us that it was our choice to continue past the eighth station, but as it was officially closed there would be no mountain huts or first aid stations open. Simon rang around his friends and heard that some of them had done the trail the week before, and one was going to do it the same night as us, but I was really sceptical. If the weather suddenly turned bad, as it can do in the mountains, we would have no shelter to turn to. If one of us got hurt, getting help would be that much harder. The boys really wanted to stick to the original plan but on seeing how reluctant I was, they agreed to take the different route. I’m really grateful for that as it did complicate things a lot just to give me peace of mind.

The other route, the Kawaguchiko trail, was on the other side of the volcano and added a few hours extra to our journey and 2500 yen. We first took a two hour bus to Kawaguchiko train station, then the train two stops to the recently renamed Fujisan station. The train was covered in pictures of a cartoon Mount Fuji in its various different moods.

From Fujisan station we took one more bus for an hour up to the Kawaguchiko fifth station. I managed to take this picture from the bus, but it doesn’t really convey just how big Fuji was or how daunting a prospect it seemed to try and climb it.

With that, we reached the fifth station at around 7pm and changed into more appropriate clothes. We relaxed for about an hour, had some water and snacks (we had been eating more or less all day, mostly carbohydrate snacks like onigiri, as well as a take-away from Mos burger), and reorganised our rucksacks. At 8.15pm, we set off into the darkness, torches at the ready, and basically no idea what to expect.

Fuji Part II: The Climb

The first thing I should mention is that there are no lights on the trail up Mount Fuji (apart from outside the mountain huts). Our torches were indispensable, so I was pretty annoyed when my torch broke about an hour from the top. The night air was much cooler than I’ve become accustomed to in Kansai, though we were warm pretty much up to about 3200m because of the exertion. The night view was spectacular. The city lights flickered below us, and even as we started the trek we were aware of just how incredibly high up we were. We were already above the clouds and for us the night sky was perfectly clear. The photos don’t do it justice.

Initially the path seemed to be leading downhill, which led to a little self doubt over directions. Soon though, it turned into a much steeper ascent, which was a mixture of cobbled rock pathways and sand and loose rock pathways. Every once in a while we would stop for a moment to swig water and sip energy drinks. For about an hour and a half the trek was relatively simple and we were making good time, covering parts of the track in two thirds of the forecast time.

Then it became a touch more challenging, involving scrambles over steep paths of rock. This was particularly difficult with a torch as two hands would have been much more beneficial! It was at these moments that I became most light-headed. With the extra effort of climbing and the air being considerably thinner, it was pretty tiring. I found it best to take these sections quickly though, even though I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone else. I find that scrambling up things is easier with a bit of momentum.

We passed the sixth station and the seventh station, resting momentarily here and there to catch our breath. We didn’t rest for too long though, as the sweat on our backs became very cold very quickly. At the eighth station we took a bathroom break and had some more snacks (I chowed down a whole chocolate bar). We turned the corner to find yet another wall of rocks with a huge queue of people climbing excruciatingly slowly up one side of it. On the other side were less hand grips but there was more space, so we threw ourselves up it and sped past the crowds. This is just as well, because later on huge queues of people meant many didn’t get to the top in time for sunrise.

I didn’t suffer too badly from the high altitude. Right near the top my stomach started to feel a little bloated (the way it does when I travel by plane), but apart from that I was really lucky. Simon suffered with a headache most of the way to the top but took some painkillers and persevered.

We continued to power on up with intermittent breaks. Signs which told us how high up we were could sometimes be encouraging (‘look how far we’ve come!’) but often discouraging (‘what! All that effort and we’ve only gone up 100m?!’). The landscape became ever more barren and rocky, but the higher we climbed, the more beautiful the sky became. Up beyond the clouds and away from the light pollution of the cities, the sky was more full of stars than I have ever seen in my life. In fact, after the ninth station we took a longer break and sat for about 20 minutes, finally wearing all our layers, and gazing up at the stars. It was around this point that my torch gave up the ghost.

The final leg of the climb was a steep walk uphill which seemed simple enough, but the random rocks in the sand (or volcanic ash, I guess) made for some interesting dance moves. One last rock scramble and we passed under the torii gates which marked our arrival at the summit. Yatta!

So we made it to the top! It was a bit before 3am and pretty darn cold. As well as six layers, I wore a beanie hat, ear muffs and the hood from my coat and still felt cold. My lips are all chapped from the crazy change in climate. We all tucked up under Simon’s thermal blanket (the effects of which were probably reduced by the gaping big hole in it) and waited for sunrise. In the meantime, Simon’s friend who had conquered the Fujinomiya trail came over to chat to us. He said that on the trail he had taken, he had switched off his torch at one point to be guided by the light of the moon and ‘be one with the mountain.’ Then he stumbled across someone having a poo behind a big rock and regretted his decision. The sky in the distance began to lighten, and we waited for the sunrise.

Fuji Part III: Sunrise and the descent

These photos don’t give anywhere near a clear idea of how incredible it was to watch the sunrise from the top of Mount Fuji. The stars faded into the blue, the horizon grew orange and red, and the world below transformed under the growing light. A row of mountains below appeared to hold back a wave of clouds, so the many trees and fields and a lake could be seen from our stand point. Slowly the sun rose and people tried desperately (but will ultimately have failed) to capture the moment on camera.

Sadly, there was a large line of people at the torii gate who had their back to the show. Thinking they had made it in time, they didn’t bank on everyone else arriving at the same time as them and lost the moment. As I stood with everyone, Simon picked up his phone, claiming to be calling his parents. I turned away to take some photos of the crater in the daylight, but he waved me over and passed me the phone; on the other end was my boyfriend, whom he’d called as a surprise for me. All in all, it couldn’t have been a more perfect experience.

When the sun had fully risen in the sky, we stuck around until about 6am. The boys set off to hike around the crater whilst I went to get a hot tea. There is a restaurant / bar area at the top where you can buy hot drinks and food. A bowl of noodles will set you back about 900 yen, but as I have paid around this price in Kyoto before, I don’t think it was too bad. After all, it must be pretty difficult and costly to get supplies up to the top.

The descent was a series of steep and sandy zig zags which were so much easier taken at a run. And run I did for a little while. However, we came across another ALT who had been abandoned by her group and had a medical condition which meant she had struggled continuously through the night before finally arriving at the top (after a certain point, the only way down is up). Simon carried her bag for her and we slowed the pace right down, so in the end it took us about five hours to descend. She did get back to her group safely in the end though. Here are some photos I took on the way down.

It was pretty hot on the way down, and I did get a little sunburnt. Because of the amazing hiking boots my wonderful colleague lent me, my feet didn’t really hurt at all and I didn’t get a single blister. The journey home once we got to the fifth station is a bit of a blur – I remember it in a fog of sleep deprivation. Elation at having made it, the drunken feeling that comes with a lost night’s sleep, despair at the many layers which were now a torture device. There was ash under my fingernails that took me a long time to remove completely. The boys slept a fair amount but I stayed awake for most of it. I got home at about 7.30pm and could barely find the energy to do anything except shower the volcano out of my hair. It doesn’t matter though, because today I feel like I could do anything in the world.

I climbed Mount Fuji.

A series of unfortunate bathroom related events

Fail number one

Sometimes, being a foreigner is rubbish. The mistakes you make can often seem beyond comprehension. Case in point - last week I wandered into a drugstore to buy sanitary towels. A relatively simple task, one might think. Even without language skills, surely there are pictures on the pack to indicate what the item might be? A successful young career woman getting on with her day, perhaps. Or maybe a flying towel with wings? The language on these packets in Japan is unfortunately vague, and the design gives nothing away. Still, not to be deterred, I located the corner where absorbent material was stacked. Just above pantyliners (these were obvious by their size), I found packets of towels which indicated various levels of absorbency. Perfect! Job done. I picked one which I had used once before, guessed what the absorbent level I required would be, and marched off to the tills. There were two, so naturally I walked over to the one where a kindly old lady was working.

I handed over the packet and proceeded to root around in my bag for my purse. I looked up to find her shaking her head. I responded by cocking my head to the side (Japanese body language for 'I don't understand').

'Not this', she said.

'Should I pay over there?' I asked her in Japanese. She shook her head more fervently. 'Not this' she said again, pointing to the packet. I was completely lost. What did she want from me?

Then she walked off with the packet back to where I got it from, so I put my purse back in my bag and followed her. Away from the other customers, she began talking again in broken English.

'This.. for me.. senior ladies!'

I had attempted to buy incontinence pads.  When I had used them the previous month I remarked that they seemed to have taken the 'odour control' element quite seriously. Oh, fantastic. She indicated the products applicable to me, regaled me with an anecdote about her struggles to understand people when she had visited the USA, and neatly wrapped up the packet that I eventually bought. She was exceptionally kind to me, and discreet too. But I can never return. Oh, the humanity.

Fail number two

Yesterday, one of my worst nightmares was realised. I needed the bathroom, so waited until I knew teachers would either be in lessons or invigilating in exams, then slipped away to where I knew there was a western style toilet. In the corridor, some teachers were tutoring students. I scurried past them and into the bathroom. Locking the door and sitting down, I could hear the teachers talking in the corridor, but they were far and their voices were very low, so I couldn't really hear them over the sound of a lawn mower in the distance.

A lawn mower? When was the last time I had heard a lawn mower? Come to think of it, did the school even have a lawn to mow?

I looked up, and felt my heart stop. The noise was not a lawn mower at all, but a giant asian hornet hovering above my cubicle.

In Japan, such insects are referred to as 'sparrow bees', due to their insane size. Wikipedia has more information here. The sting is deadly and can be administered repeatedly. In addition, the hornet emits a pheramone to attract its nest mates to attack the victim too. Around 40 people die each year from their sting.

So this is it! I thought. This is how I'm going to die. Trapped in a toilet cubicle with a sparrow bee.

What on Earth should I do? The hornet was trying to escape by stupidly banging hard against the window, its buzz getting louder and angrier with every failed attempt. I thought I might be sick; as well as the fear, the adrenaline was making me light-headed. If I stood up, my head would be so much closer to it; maybe it would feel threatened and attack me. Yet, if I stayed where I was, I was a sitting duck. An undignified sitting duck.

The buzzing continued and I made a decision. The advice that you get given when you encounter one of these beasts is to simply get the hell away as fast as possible. I stood up slowly and started to slide my trousers up, my heart racing and apparently banging against the inside of my ear drums.

The buzzing got louder and I started to panic. Why the hell wasn't the zip working?! WHY THE FUDGE HAD THE DESIGNER ADDED A STUPID BUTTON! ...and why had the buzzing suddenly increased in volume by about five times?

I looked up and found the hornet had descended to head level. I screamed. In the distance the teachers stopped talking, though no one came to check on me. Thanks for that, guys! I appreciate it.

As quickly as I had found my voice, I lost it again and froze like a rabbit in the headlights. The hornet hovered in front of me for a few more excruciating seconds, then dropped to ground level, flew under the door, and I heard it fly away out of the open window.

Needless to say, I definitely needed the toilet again after that little episode, but it was well over an hour before I could pluck up the courage to come back, this time ensuring that other people were around and that the window was firmly shut.

I hope this has at least brought a little entertainment to someone out there.