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I’ve finally posted all of my photos of my trip to Japan. You can check them out on flickr. Enjoy!

Three videos, all shot on the iPhone so excuse the quality.

Singer on the street in the Shinjuku district of Tokyo, Japan. She has a little surprise…

Japanese Rock Stars performing on the street in the Shinjuku district of Tokyo, Japan.

Shibuya crossing in Tokyo, Japan is the busiest intersection in the world in terms of foot traffic. It is estimated that over three million people a day cross through the intersection.

Climbing Mount Fuji was simultaneously one of the most rewarding as well as one of the most physically and mentally demanding experiences of my life.

The climb began where the picture above was taken, which is an area of the mountain called Kawaguchiko 5th Station. To get to this area I took a bus from Kawaguchiko Train Station. At the time of my climb Mount Fuji was not fully open. As a result, the buses were only running on a limited schedule to try to keep people from attempting to make it to the summit. I went on the first bus of the morning and immediately began climbing. Unfortunately it was already almost 11 in the morning at this point. The final bus headed back to the town where I was staying would leave at about 3 p.m., which meant that if I was going to climb to the top (which I was absolutely determined to do) I would have to find another way to get back to my hostel.

The picture below shows what the second part of the path looked like. The first part of the path was just a basic dirt path without much of a rise. It also shows a guy with a snowboard. When I got to the snowy area I could see tracks where people had carried skis or snowboards up and then used those to get down.

The next picture shows what the next part of the path looked like. There would be spray painted arrows every once in a while to let you know which way to go in case you couldn’t figure it out. I was walking through the clouds at this point.

The next photo shows the beginning of the snow. At this point there were still chains to use as hand rails.

The next picture shows the final part of the climb. The path has completely disappeared. All there was to follow were the footprints of previous climbers. It had started to get really cold and windy here.

It took about five hours to climb to the top, including a quick break to eat lunch. It got harder and harder to make progress the higher up on the mountain I got. Towards the end, every step was a struggle. It was so steep and so slick and I was exhausted. I made it to the top around four in the afternoon. Roughly an hour after the final bus left from Kawaguchiko 5th Station. The picture below is of the volcanic crater at the top.

Making it to the top was so rewarding. I thought the most difficult part of the climb was behind me. I couldn’t have been more wrong. While they trek to the top had been difficult, both physically and mentally, I had no idea what was in store for me still. Below is a picture I took of myself at the top. There wasn’t anyone else up there to ask for a photo. There was so much snow at the top I was walking on the roofs of the buildings. The official climbing season starts a few weeks later when the majority of the snow has melted. It can be very dangerous to climb out of season. If there had been a freak storm I would have really been in trouble.

After spending about 40 minutes at the top admiring the view and relishing in my accomplishment, I began to head down. I can’t count the amount of times I slipped and fell going down. It was very frustrating. It was so slick with the snow and the steepness I had a lot of trouble getting down to the less icy part of the mountain. One nice part was that it was much faster to go down the mountain than to climb up it. I made it back down to the area near where I started in about two hours. At this point there was very little sunlight left. My only option was to walk down the service road. About an hour into the walk the sun had gone down completely and I was left to walk through the pitch black forest by myself. Occasionally I would hear a crashing noise as I inadvertently sneaked up on an animal and sent it running. This was really disturbing for me. Luckily I saw a lot of deer before the sun went down so I used that thought to keep me sane. On the flight to Japan I saw a movie where some hikers get eaten by wolves, so that thought keep trying to make it to the forefront of my mind.

I walked forever. It got to the point where every additional step caused pain to shoot up through my entire body. I later went back to a map and figured out that from the 5th station I walked almost 30 kilometers or 18 miles down that road through the woods. I walked for six hours until I finally came upon a small restaurant. At this point it was about 11 p.m. and I was totally exhausted. I went in to the restaurant to have some water because I had already eaten the food and drank the water I brought with me. I must have looked really bad at this point between the sunburn, dirt and blood from the cuts on my hands. I kept asking the owner of the restaurant where I was on the map and how to get back to the town I was staying in. She thought I needed to go to the hospital. Eventually she called her daughter to come down and translate what I was saying from English to Japanese. When the owner and the last few people in the restaurant heard how far I had walked they were shocked. The owner’s daughter told me there was no way they were going to let me keep walking and drove me back to my hostel. It turned out I was pretty close, the drive was only about ten minutes.

Climbing Mount Fuji was simultaneously one of the most rewarding as well as one of the most physically and mentally demanding experiences of my life. It’s not often that people are put in circumstances where they are pushed to such limits. It was an incredible experience, especially the sense of accomplishment I felt when I finally made it to the summit and then again when I finally made it back to my hostel. I would highly recommend others make the climb, but I would say to wait until actual climbing season.

The furthest south I made it was to the city of Hiroshima. I really wanted to visit the city because of the historical implications. This was the only city where I saw anything at all related to World War II. I didn’t really seek out any World War II stuff anywhere else. Japan has never officially apologized for what happened, many of the other Asian countries still hold major grudges as a result, so it isn’t surprising there wasn’t a lot of museums dedicated to the war. (or maybe I somehow never noticed any of them)

Hiroshima has been totally rebuilt from the absolute destruction it suffered from the atomic bomb. Below are two pictures of a scale model from the museum. The first one is before, the first one is after.

The main attraction of the city is the Peace Memorial Park. Within the park is a major museum. The park exists in the area between the rivers on the models. The hypocenter of the nuclear explosion can be seen on the second picture. It is toward the top right and denoted by a small placard on top of the model. The intended target was the t-shaped bridge towards the top of the model. It was a very strange feeling walking where a nuclear bomb had been detonated, even if it was sixty five years ago. Luckily the radiation has all dispersed.

Inside the park there were hundreds of school aged children. Part of their tasks for the day were to find people who spoke English and ask them questions from a worksheet. It was nice at first, but got pretty annoying when I could only walk five feet before another group of kids would swarm me. It was easy to pick out the English speakers because they were all trying to dart inside the museum building before being stopped by another group of children. At the end of the questions, the children would hand me a bag full of paper cranes.

The paper crane is a symbol of peace and healing for the Japanese. There is a popular story about a young girl who was made sick by the radiation after the bomb. She believed if she could fold 1000 paper cranes she would be healed. She made thousands of cranes, but died anyway. Now Japanese children make paper cranes to give to visitors to the memorial park (like myself) and to leave around the memorials.

The final picture is of what is called the dome. Directly behind the building (from the angle this picture was taken) is where the bomb fell. This building was almost completely destroyed by the bomb, but the outer shell survived. The local government decided to leave the building as a reminder of the destruction of the atomic bomb.

A fellow backpacker said to me that this was the first place he ever felt like a complete alien. After some consideration I would agree. Here are some observations:

Every stares at me all the time. Especially younger people. Especially in cities besides Tokyo. There are so few westerners in some areas it is hard to explain. I’m fairly tall and wearing boots that give me at least another inch, so that might be part of it. Plus I’m usually hauling around a giant backpack.

People constantly talk about me / us. I can tell because usually small groups of younger people are whispering to each other and trying to point when I’m not looking. This happened a ton when Hamby and I were together. We stood out big time in Nagoya because there are very few westerners there.

Everyone minds their own business all the time. No one talks to each other on the streets or on the subway. Almost everyone walks around with headphones, ignoring everyone and everything around them.

The final thing is that the characters not roman, to me they look like scribbles. For the first time I can’t identify any of the writing on any of the signs. It all looks the same to me. At least when I was in Europe I could get the gist of what a sign was saying.

I truly feel like an alien, or a stranger in a strange land.

Hamby and I were unable to climb Mount Fuji this past weekend. To make a very long story short, we could not find any public buses that were running from the closest train station to the base of the mountain. This is because technically the mountain is closed until July 1. We thought about just walking the distance, but when we figured out it was 200 to 300 km we decided that wasn’t really an option. Instead we stayed an extra day in Tokyo.

I am in Hiroshima in the south of the country today and tomorrow, but on Thursday I will take the Shinkansen (bullet train) to an area near Mount Fuji. From there I will try to pay someone to take me to the base and attempt to climb it by myself. I’m not sure if this will work or not, but I have to give it a try. Even if I can’t find a way to get to the base to do a climb, it will be a good area to stay. There are several hot springs onsen (public baths) and the area has the best views of Mount Fuji (weather permitting).

Below is a video of some Americans climbing the mountain around the same time a few years ago. It gives me hope that I can find transportation.

There are two main reasons I decided to visit Japan. The first was that I wanted to do another extended trip to a foreign country, the second was that I wanted to visit my good friend Chris Hamby. We went to college together and are Delta Sigma Phi fraternity brothers. I would not travel across the Pacific Ocean for just anyone.

I’m going to use this post to attempt to explain what his life is like here in Japan from an outside perspective. If you were to ask him what it is like to live here he would give you a very one sided jaded account (which he would probably admit).

While Nagoya is the third largest city in Japan, it doesn’t have many tourist attraction which would attract western visitors and as a result, there are very few English speakers in the city. He sometimes goes days without speaking a word of English to anyone. It’s really rough on him.

He really misses everyone back home and tries his best to know what is going on. It is my estimate that he consumes at least eight to ten hours of American media every day. It is really amazing what you can get through the internet. At home he watches certain shows like the NBC Nightly News and the Daily Show every single night to keep in touch. He subscribes to countless podcasts and has his iPod headphones in at all times. In this regard he has assimilated into the Japanese culture. Riding subways and walking down the streets, 9 out of 10 people are wearing headphones. For him it doesn’t really matter if he has his headphones in, it’s not like someone is going to randomly talk to him. That sort of thing just doesn’t happen here.

The amount of American media Hamby consumes is really incredible. One one hand he is probably more aware of news than many people living in America, but at the same time he lives in this pop culture bubble that leaves him oblivious to the zeitgeist. A good example of this would be when we watched the Larry King interview of Lady Gaga. Before it started he admitted he had only heard one of her songs and didn’t really know that she was a huge deal in the U.S. (and Japan for that matter, I hear here music everywhere here). He had never seen any of her music videos, even though the Bad Romance video is the most popular of all time on YouTube. He then asked what the deal was with that Justin Beiber kid, which made me realize, maybe missing out on American pop culture isn’t always a bad thing.

His girlfriend Mandy says he lives like a monk. If you replace lots of reading with some reading and a lot of television, video games, and podcasts, then the term is very accurate. I asked him what he misses most about America and he gave me the following list: pizza, American food in general, driving his car, his friends, grass (even mowing the lawn) and Mandy. The man misses mowing the lawn, go figure. Goes to show, it is the little things that count.

On Wednesday nights in Nagoya there is a popular place to go for Americans called Misfits. Wednesdays in particular are popular because the bar does “Nomihodai” which roughly translates to all you can drink. The price at this bar is only 1000 yen which is about 10 American dollars. This gets you as much of any type of drink you want. It is a very popular bar with Americans living in Nagoya.

On usual nights I am told this bar is about 99% English speaking westerners who live in Nagoya and teach English (which is pretty much the only job available to westerners in the entire country). On the night we were there this was not the case because we brought along some of Hamby’s Japanese friends.

The bar was a very different place. As the owner explained, when you stand one step outside the doorway, you can say “I’m in Japan!” but when you take one step inside the bar you can say “I’m in America!” The owner himself has a very good position at one of the private schools and bought the bar to create a “little slice of home.”

The night was very fun. Nomihodai creates about what you would expect it to create, a bunch of very drunk Americans. Our Japanese friends tried to teach us many things, but the only thing I can really remember is “nandeernin” which means ridiculous, or at least I think it does. We tried to take video of them teaching us Japanese dance moves, but it was way too dark.

Only a brief update because I am writing this on my phone connected to wifi.

While in Kyoto I took a day trip to Nara which is a smaller town about 45 minutes away by shinkansen (bullet train). Nara is famous for two things: temples and deer. At this point in the trip I had already seen a ton of temples. I was of the mindset if you have seen one temple you have seen them all. As far as deer go, I have seen plenty in America.

Despite this I was still persuaded by fellow travelers to make the trip. I am very happy I did.

Hamby wrote a blog post about the deer already, but I will explain again. The people of Nara believe deer are sacred messengers from the gods. As a result they have created a giant park where the deer are protected. Everyday thousands of tourists flock to the park to see the sights and to feed the deer. The deer have nothing to do with their American cousins. These are totally unafraid of people and have no natural predators. They can be seen chasing small children around to steal food and shitting everywhere. That is pretty much all they do. However, despite smelling like a zoo, the park was very pretty.

It turned out I was wrong about having seen one temple and the rest pretty much being the same. Two of the most incredible temples I have seen so far were in Nara. The first was the oldest known structure in Japan. The second was a giant structure housing a fifty foot statue of Buddha. Unfortunately the English signs did not explain very much about where it came from or when it was built, but it was definitely incredible.

All in all Nara was well worth the trip. When I get a chance I will post pictures of the Buddha statue.

I took a train to the west of Tokyo to a small town called Matsumoto (small is relative, the population is about 225,000). The town contains a significant castle, often described as one of the best remaining in the world. Built in 1504, it is incredible that the castle is still standing. I will post some pictures when I get a chance.

I mentioned previously that I had been having difficulty navigating the country. For some reason I was under the assumption that everyone in Japan spoke at least a little English. I was sadly mistaken. Few know enough English to be helpful. Some major things are listed in English in addition to Japanese (road signs, train stops), but it is inconsistent at best. To further complicate things, road signs are not necessarily parallel with the streets, sometimes they are perpendicular, sometimes both. The final issue is that 90% of the time businesses are only identified with Japanese characters. All of this really adds to the confusion.

A positive outcome is that this has forced me to learn some phrases in Japanese. I am pretty sure I am butchering the language, but a little bit goes a long way. Between that and a lot of hand gestures I am getting much better at getting around in the country.

After Matsumoto I am on my way to Kyoto in the south.

(I wrote this post on my phone, cut me some slack on the grammer.)