Chasing the Oni of Summer's Past

By the way, an oni is like a Japanese demon or spectre.

As poor as my memory holds in the more practical bits and pieces of day-to-day life--phone numbers, the names of coworkers and students, what I got out of my seat to do not thirty seconds ago--it's surprisingly good at remembering, pointless trivia, locations/directions, smells, sounds and emotions linked with particular experiences. It's that last bit that's most important among the bunch because it's what fills me with energy to write this blog (wanting to share those emotions and experiences, at least) and allows me to convey everything my senses pick up as accurately as possible through the fogging effects of time.

Among the more vivid and extraordinary, if not frantic and panicked, of my memories was my first journey to the East in 2002 to see and report on the Suzuka 8-Hour Race. When tracing the threads of my current life back to their origin so very many of them end up at that first Wednesday night on the Dotombori Bridge looking up at the larger-than-life Glico man in neon running endlessly for the horizon that never gets any closer. It's the Maslow "Peak Experience" in its most pure form, so sweet and good it burns the mind to think back on it.

But good lord was that ever one of the more foolish bursts of bravado I've perpetrated in my years--and also the most rewarding. It taught me a lot about traveling in Japan and helped me develop the "Matt Lopez Travel Agency" style of tourism, moronic as it is to do in a foreign country where you don't speak the language well and have only a fistful of pesos...err...yen. The motto of the Matt Lopez Travel Agency is: "Travel agency? Where? How did you find me? Who told you? I dunno nothing about planes and trains or hotels! Leg it and sleep on the damn ground! What travel agency? We're closed!"

I arrived at Osaka Itami Airport with US$500 at 7PM Japan time on a Wednesday. No map. No hotel reservation. No real idea where the hotels might be at or where downtown Osaka even was. Very little functional Japanese. In a surprisingly effective bid to stave off jet lag I stayed up the entire flight over in order to reset my sleep in a day or two, so I'd been up for about 24 hours by touchdown. With all this in the way I was expected to A) stretch the $500 over the week, B) spend three days soaking up Osaka, C) make my way to another prefecture and spend three more days with my friend Akane's family, D) attend and report on a motorcycle race for a motorsports magazine.

I'm very proud of how it turned out, honestly. Within two hours of touchdown I'd found my way to the correct train, made the correct transfer to arrive at the correct area (the Nanba District), find the cheapest hotel to date that I've ever found in Japan and even get take-out dinner to watch in my room to the sights and sounds of Japanese schlock TV before passing out completely. Over the next several days I explored the city neighborhood by neighborhood, stumbled onto one of the city's biggest annual festivals at Sumiyoshi Shrine, made my way across the penninsula to Suzuka, found my friend's house (by remembering the streets from a satellite photo I saw of the city before I left), got the story at the race and made it back to Osaka for my flight.

I went back to Osaka while en route to see the Suzuka 8-Hour again in 2004, but wasn't there more than sixteen rather unpleasant (but again memorable) hours that consisted mainly of waiting impatiently for my morning ferry. Seeing as how I had, literally, just enough money in my pocket to get the subway to the city's port and no hotel room, that time consisted mostly of reading Dune and doing my best homeless impression around Nanba.

So the whole point of this post is to say that I'm going back next week for three days in a sort of bid to capture just a tad of that first trip's frenetic excitement. The timing of this mini-vacation will coincide with the Sumiyoshi Jinja Natsu Matsuri that I was able to stumble on before. Unlike the previous forays, however, I'm prepared-ish: I know my way around the city, if I'm in trouble with cash I can visit an ATM, I'll have my bike, etc. I'll arrive on Wednesday and make for Kobe, take a look around and see if I can't find the Yamaguchi-gumi's (the largest crime syndicate in Japan) HQ, hit up Arima Onsen and chat up the locals. Thursday and Friday it's back to Osaka where the festival gets underway in the evening and a whole city awaits to be terrorized by a foreigner on a bicycle weaving through gridlocked traffic. Hey, it's one of SF's sister cities, I should show them some NorCal hospitality, maybe introduce Critical Mass!

--Matt