Tsukumi-bound: A "Jollytime" is had by all

You might be wondering when, if ever, I'll actually get around to writing about the town of Kusu itself, and it's a valid query considering I've written probably over ten pages about places that aren't here. The reason is that I don't want to short change the town—I want to put forth the most comprehensive and frank assessment of this municipality that I possibly can, replete with oodles of images to supplement the text. How long that will take...I'm thinking a month, maybe two.

There is something I can definitively say about Kusu right now though, which is that this place was not made for the weekends or nights. The downtown-ish area has only a few bars, one karaoke spot, a handful of snack bars (a bit like a hostess bar, expensive, generally garish and completely not my style) and nowhere for a young, ahem, stud like myself to hang out at. Couple that with the fact that I really don't have any Japanese friends to spend the off hours with yet and I'm finding myself either wandering aimlessly through the backstreets of Kusu, reading books at Joyfull (yes, that's how the restaurant is spelled) or holed up inside my room watching all two channels of Japanese TV that I get here.

So unless I'm planning a hike into the mountains around here or a festival roars into town I think the weekends here were made for rambling down the open road/rails. That's precisely what I did this past weekend once again, this time renting a car—a Toyota Vitz to be exact—with Hita City JETs Rachel (from Canada), Adric (from Australia) and Lindsey then setting off for Oita Prefecture's eastern coast to visit our mutual friend Lisa in Tsukumi City.

From Kusu the eastern Kyûshû IC (highway) wraps around Yufu-dake, a superb spike-shaped mountain, then approaches Beppu from the north and finally winds for tens of kilometers through Oita and beyond. When I was last living in Oita the IC was still under construction on its way down the coast to Miyazaki City, ending in Usuki City. In these past two-and-a-half years the teams have finished a series of major bores through the mountains separating Usuki and Tsukumi and are well on their way towards the next city, Saiki.

Even stopping off at the Beppu IC rest area for drinks and vending machine chicken and chips (yum!) we made the trip from Kusu to Tsukumi in under two hours. This is the second time I'd come to the city, the first being with my fellow Oita University foreign students almost three years ago, but I must have been napping or chatting someone up as it felt like the first. I don't remember the blight that awaits visitors entering the town from the west.

Tsukumi is built around the cement factories that line its harbor, employing a sizable chunk of its residents either in the cavernous production zones or on the surrounding limestone mountain slopes, slicing away epic-sized sheets of rock to feed The Machines of Industry. Outlandish as it sounds, I have to keep reminding myself that the basic stuff that ends up as our skyscrapers, rockets and iPods have to come from somewhere. California is a bad place to learn that lesson—we're the goddamn kings and queens of NIMBY. We don't know much about the mountains they slice up in West Virginia to get at cheap coal or the now-acid-filled copper pit mines in Wyoming and so much more.

On Lisa's side of the tracks, more towards Tsukumi's southern mountain borders, things are a lot nicer. This is actually a pretty pleasant place when one isn't looking at smoke-belching stacks and Taiwanese cargo ships. There are little coves where small fishing boats occupy every available slip and then some, where the wannabe Japanese Ahabs hang their anchors at nearby shrines to be blessed for good fortune. A network of small streams and canals snake through neighborhoods, golden koi visible through the crystal waters while children beat the summer heat in the shallows. The co-op grocery and art supply stores are excellent.

Not a bad place to be, really.

Lisa met us shortly afterwards at the station, we dropped our bags off at her stately manor and were on our way to Kamiura, a quaint seaside town just around the cape south from Tsukumi. At a place called Zeai Beach we all hopped in the cool, super-salty currents of the Bungo Channel and dodged jellyfish. The water's so salty we all ended up coated with an uncomfortable film of stickiness. In retrospect, if we wanted to get wet we should have waited until our next destination, Gyoran Waterfall Park. Part shinto shrine, part public rec area, Gyoran has a gorgeous mini-ravine that ends in a 12-15 meter waterfall. I wandered off alone and took the pictures I lost from my last outing here again before we all got a simultaneous hankering for ice cream and drove to the seaside rest area just down the street from the park. What a great rest stop: a fantastic view of the sea from an air conditioned sitting room; fairly good rum raisin ice cream; and the second greatest set of kids play equipment I have ever had the pleasure of dicking around on as an adult.

And then I inadvertently led the group on a death march.

Heading back around the cape to Tsukumi I noticed what looked like a gazebo perched atop a few-hundred meter tall rocky outcropping. We got closer and closer until finally I blurted out something like “It doesn't look to tall, let's have a go of it.” I don't think anyone with more sense than I was paying much attention, so we stopped and started walking up. And up. And up. The path transitioned constantly between slippery moss-covered rock, loose dirt and manicured steps, but massive and complex spider webs were a constant, as were comically large Japanese wasp-things. We reached the summit and found not a gazebo, but rather a four-story-tall lookout tower made entirely of wood. The top of the tower revealed a stunning view of the channel and inland mountains, but my god, what a phyric victory—we were dead tired and soaked with sweat in the 95+ degree heat and humidity. Then, on the way down I got stung or bit on the ear by one of those gigantic wasp-things. That would make four bee stings in a month for me, so I'm getting used to it and that one oddly didn't hurt too bad.

As dusk descended we got back to Tsukumi and picked up dinner and armfuls of alcohol at the cheapest bottle shop I've EVER seen. We got to drinking and I don't remember much afterwards other than getting down wedding proposal-style to ask Lindsey to be my partner...in watching the final season of Battlestar Galactica. I guess I passed out on the couch not long after and didn't wake until morning, hung over and hungry. Lisa couldn't think of a good place to get some grub other than a restaurant she insisted was called “Jollytime”. “Uh, do you mean 'Joyfull'?” I asked. That jogged Lisa's memory back to Earth as it was in fact Joyfull, but from here on out we will always refer to the ubiquitous Kyûshû eatery as Jollytime. Joyfull's katsu teishoku set (breaded, fried pork cutlet with rice and miso soup) had to do for breakfast, but it somehow tasted like ash in my mouth. Man, was I ever hung over.

The only cure, Lisa insisted, was to dick around on yet another kids playground, conveniently located just behind Joyfull. This is the one folks. The Mother of All Playsets. I am kicking myself now for not taking the camera, but luckily Rachel took hers and I'll pilfer her pics before long, trust me. At its tallest point it probably rises just over two stories and has five separate slides leading down from the tower, two being twin spiral ones that wrap around each other so riders can insert themselves like ammunition and race to the bottom. This is linked by three bridges and bar sets to a Noah's Ark-looking module with a stained glass ceiling and rolling pin slide. All over the superstructure are mini-games to play, including one with hundreds of yellow and blue rings arranged in rows so kids can create pixel art work or abstract patterns. I got my hands on it and spelled out “PooP” like the adult I am.

As rain clouds gathered and thunder cracked in the distance we briefly visited Usuki to the north. Known as Japan's second most voluminous producer of the deadly fugu (blowfish) sashimi Usuki is the place to go for seafood in Oita Prefecture. Its historical downtown isn't anything to scoff at either. Again, not thinking, I forgot my camera, but plan to visit my friend Chiaki who lives here sometime in the near future. On that occasion I'll tell you all about the giant stone Buddah, the crisscrossing samurai-era historical streets and the refurbished 17th-century Portuguese church.

Well, we had to get the car back to the Hita rental place by early evening so around four we said our goodbyes to Lisa and hit the road again. The weather was turning to shite anyways. Everyone in the car was spent from the weekend of drinking, swimming and forced marches so our ride back was pretty chill until lightning and heavy rains started freaking out Lindsey who was behind the wheel somewhere around the mountains behind Beppu. But really, why be afraid? If it's our time then it's our time, and who can really think of a better way to go than in a lightning-charged, flaming Japanese compact car barreling down a mountain?

--Matt