Day 11 in Japan: A Pink sea under Mount Fuji

We set our alarms to half past four in the hopes of seeing Mount Fuji illuminated by the first rays of sunrise. It was already quite bright, but when we walked outside, we found the clouds had closed in over Lake Yamanakako while we were asleep, and although we could see some of the nearby hills on the lake’s eastern side, Mount Fuji was completely hidden. We stayed outside for around an hour hoping the sky would clear up; being the last person to leave the house, I did not realise the others had all just walked to the beach in front of it, so I hightailed it all the way to the eastern end of the lake and met the gang somewhere in the middle after we figured out what had happened (they assumed I had gone back to bed).

Perhaps an hour later, as I was catching up on my emails, Ciaran noticed that Fuji had, all of a sudden, emerged from the clouds and the sky was clearing up fast. We ran outside again to take pictures, and Ciaran and I made it back to the eastern end of the lake again where couples were posing in their wedding attire under the blooming sakuras. We were a bit pressed for time because Ciaran had to catch a bus at half past eight. This was his last day in Japan, after which he would return home to Seattle after a four-hour journey to the airport and an unpleasantly short transfer in South Korea.

I accompanied Ciaran to the bus station and reminisced about the catchphrases from this trip, including my personal favourite, “You are only in Japan for the first time once.” He, however, told me that a phrase I used even more frequently was “I already have a thesis topic” – a line I repeated whenever he suggested I study anything related to the religious history of pretty much any place we visited. Ciaran’s own catchphrase was “This is just like camping,” which he said in all possible circumstances, even when the activity in question barely resembled camping at all.

When Ciaran left, Brent, Joel, and I bought a quick takeaway breakfast at a café right next to the closest bus stop to our hotel. Joel – to my mind, very competently – explained that we wanted a vegetarian version of the chicken, egg, and coleslaw sandwiches, but when I bit into mine, I found that the sandwich consisted only of coleslaw. I did not love the taste, nor did I love knowing that it cost exactly the same amount as a sandwich that also included chicken and egg. I managed to eat my breakfast between the three buses we took that morning, which involved a very tight transfer at Mount Fuji Station that we only managed thanks to the fact that our second bus had blocked our third bus from entering its bay.

Our destination for the day was the Shibazakura Festival just west of Mount Fuji. The festival revolves around fields planted with various species of moss phlox, whose bright pink blooms provide a stunning contrast against the green mountains and the blue-white outline of Mount Fuji. We spent about half an hour enjoying the pink carpets of flowers as we walked around letting ourselves be lured in by various stalls selling peach juice, ice-cream, and churros in the shape of the kanji for “sakura.” My favourite moment was seeing an older couple use the hole in the heart of a big signboard to take a picture of their dog in a pram.

We made it to Tokyo with about twenty minutes to spare before the arrival of our two-hour train to Takasaki, a midsized town on Japan’s western coast. As Brent and Joel went off to buy a bento box dinner we could eat on the train, I ran around searching for an ATM: most ticket machines in Japan do not allow passengers to top up their public transport passes with their credit cards, so I have always had to withdraw money before feeding it to the machine. In most cases, I found an ATM at a convenience store within the station, but I had no luck at Shinjuku until the lady at the information desk told me to cross the street back to the bus station, travel all the way up to the fourth floor, and withdraw money from the ATM there. Since this was the journey that cost Joel his seat on yesterday’s bus, I ran the whole way.

I thought it a little strange that when we all made it to the platform for what we believed to be a two-hour semi-express, we found ourselves waiting among a crowd of commuters to Tokyo’s suburbs. There had been no mistake though. We spent the next hour jammed between people heading home during rush hour, barely needing to hold onto the bars as the crowd helped keep everyone in place like thick jelly. Somewhere towards the beginning of the second hour, the train had emptied enough for us to sit down and start contemplating breaking into our dinner bags, but as soon as our bottoms made contact with the cushions, everyone left the train and a kind salaryman stopped to inform us that the train was splitting and everyone who wanted to continue onwards had to move to the few (and crammed) remaining carriages. It was the second time my dreams of a nice bento-box meal on a Japanese train had been dashed.