Of Mushrooms and Volcanos

Yesterday...yesterday was nuts.
Like I wrote before, my friend Mayumi invited me on a road trip to neighboring Kumamoto Prefecture with her sister's family. Ostensibly the trip was to see her great grandparents, but ended up being much more. I'll get to that later.
She picked me up in front of the local supermarket, Marushoku, at 9AM and we set out towards her house in Mie-machi, another relatively small town like Kusu in the southern reaches of the prefecture. Back in the states I figured I'd be seeing Mayumi pretty often and speculated a two-hour drive between our towns using normal roads. After two-and-a-half hours of driving--a pleasant experience with the lovely and funny Mayumi (no, you're not boring!)--we were just pulling up to Mie-machi, so it's a bit more drive than expected, but shiyou ga nai ("can't be helped", quite possibly the most useful Japanese phrase that exists). We were bored waiting for her sister to get off work and went in search of adventure, which, like Kusu, is a sort of daunting task. In this sedate mountain farming community though we did find what we were looking for, and it's name is the Oita Prefecture Institute for Mushroom Research.
When we pulled up there was only one car there and the facilities were closed. And really, why would a mushroom institute be open on a Saturday anyways? We were about to shove off when a man walked up to us, apparently one of the research fellows, and invited us into the labs to see the whole operation! This type of kindness is something I can barely respond to in English, let alone Japanese. In the US I think we'd be met with a prompt "piss off" and shotgun brandishing, but here you never really can tell. I think maybe he thought I had come all the way from the land of the White Man to see their 'shroom lab.
Inside, the place is exactly as creepy as you might expect a lab that handles only mushrooms to be--climate controlled rooms absolutely overflowing with ten, twenty different kinds of fungi, a mix of eatable and deadly, and the whole thing permeated with a swampy moist atmosphere. I'm officially adding the Oita Mushroom Labs to my top ten list of places I think doomsday will emanate from, somewhere between Fermilab and a Kentucky Wal-Mart. This is the precise kind of place one of Godzilla's flavor-of-the-week nemesiseseseseseses would spawn, I think. But then he'd take a look around, realize nobody would care if he destroyed Mie's Jusco or Book-Off and promptly move on to trample Tokyo. It's how these things work.
Now this is where things got weird. We walked around and finished checking out the labs (unsupervised, may I add) when the research guy who let us in went into one of the walk-in fridges and began ripping out labelled shiitake from the their growing cubes and stuffing them into a bag to give to us. Sure, dude, we'll take them. Mayumi didn't know what to think either. So dinner tonight will be experimental shiitake curry with a side of mutant mushroom monster.
Back at Mayumi's I met her folks again, two incredibly nice farm folk, and her big sister's family, the Takagis. Now, Mr. and Mrs. Takagi wouldn't actually tell me their names, insisting I call them the Japanese equivalent of "mom" and "dad", but their two cute-as-a-button daughters are Ayako and Itsumi. We set off in their hot rod minvan for Kumamoto, stopping near the prefectural border for some peach-flavored soft-serve ice cream, then nonstop to Minami Aso (South Aso) where the old folks live.
Right now I'll only be taking a moment to brush lightly on describing the Aso-Kuju region, but rest assured I'll be spending lots of time here in the coming years and want to make many detailed written and visual reports. I'm not a religious man as you all know, but the best way I can think to describle Aso-Kuju is to say it's God's Country. The best SLR or video camera can never hope to produce a proper expression of its magnificence, you just have to be there. I've spent, cumulatively, maybe a week in and around there, between this and the last time I came to Japan, and have yet to find a non-picturesque landscape. Mt. Aso and its various sister peaks are, seriously, the world's largest active caldera and is powerful enough to generate its own localized weather systems. Imagine six to eight Mt. Diablos standing next to each other with lush greenery crawling up them, a steam and sulfur-spewing crater in the middle and peaceful farming towns all around it and you have an idea of the majesty of Aso.
On the southern side of Mt. Aso we stopped off at a fascinating little park after lunch called Takamori Yuusui Tonneru Koen (Takamori Spring Water Tunnel Park). My dad would love this place, being the water nut that he is. The name describes it pretty well: a tunnel leading into the mountain with a stream of fresh mountain spring water flowing its length in a central channel. You can walk into the tunnel about a hundred meters before you hit the spring where water is literally gushing from the wall into a little rock pool. Only from the highest mountain streams in the Sierras can you ever taste water this sweet and refreshing.
Oh, I almost forgot the rainbow.
I'd like to think I've seen a goodly amount of rainbows in my life, but I ain't ever seen anything like this. Over the eastern reaches of Minami Aso we saw it from the car, cartoonish in its brilliance, ending exactly on the road we were driving about two kilometers ahead. I have a bit of advice if you ever see a rainbow like this when you're driving, and that is don't drive towards it. Stop your car. There's nothing special about being inside a rainbow--you can't see anything--but there's everything special about admiring one so mind-blowing from 500 meters away.
Mayumi's great grandparents' house was mind-blowing as well, but in a more earthy way. At least 75-years-old, the house is as traditional as they likely come in these times. You can see the handmade in every ancient plank, each cabinet, the ranma in the entryway. It turns out the two inherited the house from their parents about twenty years ago and had spent the previous twelve years in Peru as part of that nation's large Japanese population. They got out just in time too, right before Fujimori came in (also a resident of Kumamoto Prefecture) and proceeded becoming a fugitive from Interpol for violations against human rights while president for ten years.
I would have liked to look around more, but the day's shadows were getting long and we had to get to the basashi store before they closed. Ah, Mr. Ed, you never tasted so good. That's right, basashi--horse meat. Raw horsemeat. With a touch of soy and some pureed garlic it's heavenly on the palette as long as you can suspend your childhood love of ponies. Luckily I have none, plus a strong "When in Rome" spirit. I expect all visitors to at least try one strip of it.
It was way too late by the time we were done with dinner back in Mie for Mayumi to drive me back to Kusu, so we stayed at the Takagi's place in Oita City and came back to Kusu in the morning. I want to sincerely thank both the Usuzuki and Takagi families for letting me tag along and then caring for me for the past day and a half. They were my family away from home three years ago and I hope we'll stay tight. More than that, I want to give back after receiving so very very much from them.

--Matt