There's No Place Like Anywhere But Chûgoku

What a difference a narrow strip of water makes. I'm talking about the Kaimon Straight, the tiny passage that separates Kyûshû and Honshû, Fukuoka and Yamaguchi Prefectures. On one side lay Moji and on the other Shimonoseki, which, because of the bridge, tunnel and ferry links to Kitakyûshû, is essentially one big suburb. Maia and I have gone that far, but no further—until last week.

Another glorious Golden Week has come and gone for we residents of Japan, that time when a handful of holidays and royal birthdays align just right to give us three days off in a row. We were planning on three or four days of misanthropic adventure, drinking malt liquor, driving around shooting up road signs and generally kicking around our island neighbor to the east, Shikoku, but once again the logic of Japan has taken us down with a swift right jab. There are two ferries offering service between Kyûshû and where we wanted to go in Shikoku, one from Saganoseki, the other from Usuki, and normally their ships depart once an hour for the seventy-minute trip across the straights. Oh how I wish normality would win the day just once over here. Golden Week is a time of year when everyone knows there's going to be plenty of movement around the island as Ma and Pa Tanaka jet or drive off to Kalamazoo, Japan. Making money hand over fist during this time for anyone intrepid enough to remain open or even offer enhanced services isn't just a possibility, it's inevitable. So why in the hell did these two ferry companies cut service from one ferry per hour to one ferry per day! Of course it was sold out and of course we were fools to believe any trip of this sort wouldn't involve months of planning and carefully laid out spreadsheets.

So within the span of fifteen minutes as we scrambled in vain to find any ferry that would take us across our GW plans were laid to waste. This little issue was compounded by the fact that one of Maia's college friends now living in Kobe was planning on meeting us on Shikoku in Matsuyama for a bit of beach camping. We thought about the situation for about as long as it takes to microwave popcorn and figured that the only course of action would be to meet on Honshû in Hiroshima since he could easily reach it via Shinkansen. Hiroshima is the largest city in what's known as the Chûgoku region, the southern reaches of the main island that is also some of the least densely populated land in the nation, and we were about to see just what that means in real terms.

After making the jump from Moji to Shimonoseki through the Kaimon Tunnel, for those heading north, there's really only one logical choice if you're going it cheap and not using the expressways (literal highway robbery): Route 2. Like I said, this is not the most populated part of the country, however I didn't expect it to be one of the more depressed. Not far past Shimonoseki is a Nissin Cup Noodle factory (I wanted to pull off and see if they offer tours, Maia just wanted to hit me until I agreed to move on. Not a fan of cup noodles I guess) and then...very little else. And I don't just mean in that immediate vicinity, this is the state for the next hundred or so kilometers. The verdant green of spring and the occasional ghost town were our traveling companions. Maia can attest to the fact that something like 75% of the roadside businesses were shuttered up. One thing we could have a chuckle about along the way though is how much Yamaguchi Prefecture seems to hate their own capital, Yamaguchi City. As we approached and passed the city there were nearly no signs indicating that it existed—they all read out the distance to cities around or past Yamaguchi. A sad fate for the metropolis once hailed as “The Kyoto of the West”.

And then there was Shûnan. Last year when I went to Osaka and Kobe I described the city of Amagasaki as the worst, most blighted place in Japan I have ever seen, but that honor may just go to Shûnan now. Driving along the coast from our direction the transition is as abrupt as a bucket of ice water to the face: you just come over a hill and, boom, there it is, a city of factories and smokestacks as far as the eye can see. So many of the apartment buildings are corporate dorms and many have company names or logos on them like “Mitsubishi Concrete” and “Japan Vinyl House”. Charming names, really. Company towns creep me the heck out, but more importantly I can't see how individuals healthy in mind and body can be brought up in such a place. Perhaps it instills a greater appreciation for beauty and love for nature, but more likely it just breeds cookie cutter drudges.

Just a glimpse of Shûnan. Imagine this image of houses backed by sprawling industrial estates for tens of kilometers down the coast and you've got this city.

We couldn't get out of Shûnan quick enough and time was running out before Maia's friend's train arrived so I decided to ride the expressway a short and cheap jump to the city of Otake just outside Hiroshima. No sooner did we get off the highway though than we ran into a massive traffic backup reaching twenty-five kilometers outside the city. We're all very familiar with traffic snarls in California and the constant jockeying and lane changes required to get ahead, but what do you do on a two-lane road? After perhaps a half-hour and less than a kilometer I was pissed off that this road, this trans-Honshû route 2, the main artery in and out of the only major city in the region was a two-lane POS that gets this funky. We bit the bullet and jumped back on the expressway to get into the city.

This is becoming much too long so I'll end here and pick this up later on. I'm pretty sure I can finish this in one more installment if you'll bear with me.

--Matt