Mitake
The woods are so quiet, it�s hard to believe that they�re less than two hours from Tokyo. For me, it makes the mountains harder to climb, knowing that over the ridge lies not an infinite expanse of greenness but a far distant cityscape encased in smog. To the east, miles and miles of trails stretch into the Japan alps. To the west, an obligatory return to the city. From my lack of posts recently, you�d think I chose to wander off toward the rising sun� but no, I�ve come back and regretfully so. Going to the foothills of the Alps was an amazing experience.

The five of us (me, colin, Chris, Reinier and Leila) left Tokyo from Shinjuku station before 8:30AM. Once we changed trains at Ome, we were so engrossed in our landscape that we missed our stop at Mitake and rode all the way to the last stop on the line, some 20 minutes further. The weather was great and we were surrounded on all sides by foothills that fell away into a central river gorge. There were no complaints about the detour.

After we got to Mitake, we spent a few hours (too much time in my opinion) dicking around the river basin near the station before we took the bus to the cable car at 12:30. By that time we were already hungry and none of us had packed lunch. Even so, we decided to hike up the �mountain� rather than take the cable car. The walk turned out to be a bit of a slog up a concrete service road to the houses, inns and restaurants above. All in all it took maybe an hour and perhaps another half an hour from the cable car station to reach the �top� of the mountain. At that point, though we were desperate for food, we climbed to the shrine at the top of Mt. Mitake to pay our respects to the gods that dwell there. I know I�m not THAT out of shape (nor that IN shape either) but needless to say, after all those stairs my legs were barely functioning.

Beneath the shrine on the top of the mountain lies the small town of Mitake. Mitake is inaccessible by car, except for residents and service vehicles, so it is delightfully quiet and quaint. In the whole area, there are probably less than a hundred houses, inns and restaurants. Aside from souvenirs and lunches, there is no place to buy food or goods. Later on, we found this to be a bit of a problem.

After we got some delicious mountain soba in us and sat around eating Nutella and chocolate for a while, we noticed that at 3:30 it was already getting dark. We checked in to our inn, the Komadori Sanso, and found it to be a great little house. Even though the innkeeper lady was expecting fewer of us than showed up, she accommodated all of us with no further preparation. Out rooms faced the east and looked out over the mountains into the valley south of the city.

The Sanso isn�t just an inn but also home to the family that lives there. It was a traditional building, probably tremendously old in parts but added onto in huge sections so that it�s a conglomeration of new and old. It took the innkeeper lady a while to warm up to us but when she learned we were trying to speak Japanese, she gladly told us the history of the house; that it had been a shrine some hundred years ago, that it was supposed to lift the troubles of the heart and that her family had lived there for twenty seven generations.

That�s a LONG time.

The lobby of the Sanso was in ironic contrast to the history of the house. Cluttered with electronics-- a big-screen TV, some odd 10 computers, an Aibo�and filled with cables and cords, it looked more like a computer lab than a real genkan (entryway). I didn�t get to play with the Aibo but it made me just as happy to see that the �man of the house� was reinstalling OS 9 onto a Mac 7600. He had Macs and Pcs of all varieties. Later, we saw three of the kids hook up a Playstation to the big TV. Even here in the middle of the mountains, we were entitled to use the internet free of charge. Yet the next morning, the same round-bodied, round-faced man who was tinkering with the computers emerged from the common meeting room dressed in white priest�s garb after ceremonially striking the large taito drum to welcome the morning. Such is modern Japan.

Our rooms were entirely traditional. The boys stayed in a large, two-part room with sliding screens and a walkway that led to a balcony with a fabulous view. We girls stayed downstairs in a considerably smaller (and cozier, in my opinion) room. All accommodations were of course Japanese. Futons, tatami, squat table and pillows. We lounged on the floor drinking green tea and eating nutella. We had to turn up the heat in the rooms to stay warm. Old Japanese houses (even more than new ones) lack insulation and the walk between the bedrooms and the common rooms or bathroom was enough to freeze the blood.

Once more before dinner, we walked up to the shrine in the dark to look out at the city under the near-full moon. Now it was quite literally freezing, the remainder of snow from some days past glittered in small patches on the thatch-roofed houses below. Beneath the shrine was a box in which patrons left their last years� daruma (round, wishing dolls) and other talismans to be ceremoniously burned. I could see that some of the Daruma only had one eye colored in. I guess wishes don�t always come true.

Back at the inn, we were served an amazing traditional dinner and challenged ourselves to speak entirely in Japanese with Leila, our Japanese guest. We made it most of the way through before we were too full to think. After sitting for a while, we hit the bath. Boys and girls separately were each privy to a large, round cypress tub. The bathroom was lovely but cold, and on the wall I saw what has to be the biggest, weirdest bug I�ve ever seen.

Despite the quiet surroundings, the calm darkness and the hot water bottles the Innkeeper lady put into our futons, I couldn�t sleep. Maybe it was that I was in a room with someone I didn�t really know. Maybe I just drank too much water before going to bed. Whatever the case, I didn�t drop off deeply all night. And when our wake-up time came at 6:30, I�d already been up for an hour.

We went again to the shrine to watch the sun rise. It�s the first time I�ve intentionally watched a sun rise in years I think. I ought to do it more often. It makes the day really seem a lot longer.

We ate breakfast (traditional Japanese style) and packed to check out. The children were running about, the family was saying their morning prayers, the weather was beautiful and we had a whole day of hiking ahead of us. It didn�t even bother me that upon check-out we were unpleasantly surprised to discover that our meals were not included with lodging. That was an extra Y3000 and with the pricey lunches on top of it, I probably spent a whole Y4000 more than I planned.

For once, I didn't mind.

I had a trail map and the gateway to the mountains was before us. Mountains in Japan are a bit special and different than those in the states. First, if there isn�t a shrine or a guru or a village on top, there�s usually someplace to stay along the way anyway. Second, there are access points to major cities easily accessible within a day (or half day) walk from anywhere. The terrain ranges from low, sloping foothills to first-benchmark mountains and is pocketed with plum gardens, lakes, ancient forests and medieval settlements. Heck, the place where WE were hiking was even a habitat for flying squirrels. Not just ANY flying squirrels but GIANT ones!!! Except for a lack of places to buy provisions, it literally is a hikers paradise.

But there is still Tokyo, only some odd miles away. And there is still the Internet. I shouldn�t have checked my mail that morning. I wouldn't have gotten that message. I wouldn�t have felt so let down.

We left the inn for the Visitor�s center and discussed several possible routes to hike. With daylight only a few hours long and no place to buy a lunch to take with us, we had fewer options than we would have liked.

For the first two and a half hours, we climbed down Mitake into a gorge below. There we walked along a famous rock-garden (literally, a place where huge stones seem to have randomly come to rest), visited one waterfall, climbed a huge rock and doubled-back to see another famous, seven-tiered falls before climbing up one of the most ass-kicking set of stairs I�ve ever used. We opted for lunch in Mitake before hiking out�and a good thing because I�d left my wool hat at the Visitor�s Center and only then realized it.

For our final route, we hiked an hour and a half to Kori station, two stops up the JR line from Mitake. This trek was via a trail that crested another, slightly smaller mountain next to Mitake. I'd hoped to do longer, more challenging hikes that day but for lack of food, sleep and daylight, I'm glad we didn't try.

Indeed, as it neared four o� clock the forest fell into twilight. As the day grew longer, it felt more and more as if we were hiking into Lothlorien. The earth was covered in a carpet of green foliage and yet the path was filled with the dead brown leaves from the barren trees above. That morning, in the gorge, I had mentally toyed with the comparison of our group to the Fellowship. Now, with negativity and despair fostered by that morning's message growing in my mind, I felt even closer to Frodo. At first I led the group and walked ahead. My bitterness became a sort of empowering vision, or poetic muse. But in the cold and with no sleep I slowly fell more and more behind and further into my own shadow until I withdrew entirely into my own mind. In my wounded moments, it is becoming harder and harder for me to remember that there is anything good worth caring for. And the wound that I was feeling�having given too much of myself to another only to try and take it all away too late�is one I can not not heal. I can bide my time, I can run away, I can move on, and yet it doesn't heal.

But I am not Frodo. There are no grey havens for me to go. No place where I can relieve the pains of my heart that will not leave me. I bear no ring except my own falsehoods. So these incurable wounds, that I have myself made, are pains I will simply have to endure until I grow old or they pass into uncaring memory.

In the end I simply collapsed on the train platform, ate the rest of my nutella with a heavy heart and heavy hand, and fell asleep once the train came. I didn�t say much of a word for several hours nor felt like speaking the next day.

After that, except for some bodily soreness, I came back to normal life. I have a stong body and a strong mind. Why let a weak heart dampen my functionality? Anyway, besides the emotional bleh of the second day and a lack of snackables, the mountain trip was by far the best outing I�ve had since coming here, especially because I thought up the idea and it was *gasp* actually carried through!!! We came, we saw and we conquered.

The foothills are right at my back door.