At the Intersection of Stupidity and Brilliance: Nagasaki, Part 1

One of the JETs I had met in SF pre-departure, Laura from Morgan Hill, had extended an invitation a couple weeks ago to come enjoy Nagasaki's famous Kunchi Festival this weekend, but with all the travel expenses I'll rack up next month (Shanghai with the city hall folks, then Kyoto/Nara/Osaka with Kusu JHS students) I was caught between being sour to the idea and embracing it. I've been browsing a bunch of health reports recently about the risks of this or that and thoughts of my own mortality have been swimming around my noggin where they never were before, resulting in unnatural amounts of jogging, biking and club sports around my schools. It's also got me scrambling to make travel plans--or at least self-promises--to visit all number of reasonable destinations in Japan and around Asia should I be killed by wild boar, bird flu or slippage on wet stairs before my proper time. By Friday lunchtime I still hadn't decided to stay or go, but the Kunchi Festival sounded like a hot ticket, thunder storms were on the menu for Kusu bringing up the possibility of death by lightning strike and Laura is pleasing enough on the eyes that I decided to make the leap, picking up a pair of bus tickets from the local agent fifteen minutes before they closed for the night.

The bus left the Kusu Interchange twenty minutes late, at 8:30 AM, and barreled down the road way over the speed limit, scrubbing about twenty five minutes off the estimated three hour ride. I bought some supplies for the road the night before knowing that I wouldn't get up early enough to make breakfast and one of these items was a vitamin drink called "Capsella". It has a vile-yet-mysteriously-irresistible flavor that I'm hoping follows the old adage that the worse something tastes the better it must be for you. The name of the stuff must be derived from countless little jelly spheres perfectly suspended in the viscous goo that passes as a beverage. Anyways, I arrived in front of Nagasaki Station around 11 AM, secured a map, secured a slice of Trandor cheese toast (note: I judge a Japanese city's worth and greatness by whether or not their station has a Trandor bakery. Nagasaki's automatically up to "enlightened" status) and then...hit a wall.


The fashionable new Nagasaki Station. See the Trandor tucked in back there?
And good god...what the hell happened to this bike?

I was counting on the station info desk to have all the tools I needed to find a rental bike and secure a hotel room for the night. From the most insignificant village rail stops to the mightiest Japanese metropolis, the info desk hook-up has always worked in the past. Here's where the "Stupidity" in the post's title comes into play and this time it went something like this:

Matt: "Hello, I'm looking for the phattest thing on two-wheels you got to rent out. Cards in the spokes, shiny bar-end streamers and a bell that'll wake the dead. Hook me up sharpish, snap snap."
Bionic Infowoman: "We're out of rental bikes because of the festival, spaz."
Matt: "Sucks to be me, but them's how the bones roll. How about the 411 on hotels?"
Bionic Infowoman: "You don't have a hotel yet for the festival? Good luck, sucka. Care to tell me about any more wilsons you're gonna pull today, sir?"

And that was that. No bike and no hotel prospects in sight. The places around the station were booked solid, so my only chance were the seedy little hovels down alleys in further into the city's interior and on the outskirts. Whatever, I didn't have to worry about that until 3 PM, which seems to be the universal check-in time around Japan. I started walking to fill the time.

I suppose the normal thing would have been to make a bee line for downtown and explore around there first, but I went in the opposite direction, across the bay towards Mt. Inasa and up into the hills to breach the labyrinthine stairway neighborhoods that cling to their sides. The urban planning in the Otori, Otani and any of the other neighborhoods west of the bay is nothing short of madness if it indeed exists at all. Most blocks have a main car park at the lowest point and residents must leave their vehicles there and climb countless stairways in various states of repair to reach their houses that may lie as much as fifty meters up the slope. I witnessed several women in their seventies or eighties carrying groceries up hills and stairs that would wind even the hardiest resident of Diamond Heights and the Upper Castro. Is this Nagasaki or Rio de Janeiro? I got lost a few times, unable to find the next flight of stairs up. Once I followed one of the previously mentioned grandmothers to a stairway tunnel that bored into the hillside underneath a preschool. Who the hell designed this stuff!?!


The Lion's Club international cemetery and its Japanese counterpart. In Nagasaki just about everything is built on to the steep hills.

I really didn't know why I was even climbing. It was hot Saturday, my clothes were soaked through with sweat, I was out of Fanta grape already and my Trandor cheese toast supply was perilously low. I came across a Lion's Club international cemetery and stopped in the shade to rest, finish off the cheese toast and look at the spectacular view. Just above the cemetery I happened to stumble on Mt. Inasa Road that leads up to the summit and its observation tower that looks like a fashionable fish tank perched on a cliff. What the hell, it's only two kilometers more up this road to the top. At 333 meters Mt. Inasa has about sixty meters on Twin Peaks and is way, way more steep--I was a wreck when I reached the top and promptly made for the bank of vending machines next to the ropeway station, purchasing a bottle of "Energy Squash" that proudly proclaims in Japanese "now with caffiene!" About that ropeway though, yeah, I could have taken a cable car up the mountain instead of playing Tenzing Norgay, but what's the challenge in that? It's also $12 j-bucks and I'm cheap.


The view from the top: Nagasaki Harbor, Dejima and downtown. The city actually extends way to the left and right outside this photo

I took a power nap on a secluded bench, checked out the view and, with Energy Squash firmly in hand, went to see the monkeys. Why they put a monkey enclosure on the top of a mountain I will never understand, but there they are. After a good fifteen minutes I had to tell myself there was a city out there waiting for me as I could hardly stop watching their antics--I may not believe in perpetual motion machines, but I sure as hell believe in perpetual entertainment machines, and it is the monkey. I took a longer route down then I did coming up and found a posh neighborhood on Mt. Inasa, where everyone lives in their Japanese version of a SoMa loft and drives Benzes, Beamers and Audis. Actually, there were a few times I felt like I was in the Outer Richmond on Balboa. An eerie feeling indeed.

Well, it's about time I go do something productive, so I'll leave the rest of Nagasaki for later on. Expect three parts to this trip as a lot of the absurd as well as the profound came my way this weekend and I want to share it all.

--Matt