Days 3 & 4- Mt. Fuji

Today I can check these things off my list of stuff to do in Japan:

• Hike Fuji.
• See Tokyo Temple.

We went to church in Shane's ward, which is an English-speaking ward that meets in a building next door to the Tokyo Temple. As it turns out, this building also houses the Japan MTC, and several other church-related things.

The ward we met with, because it was English-speaking, was made up largely of American families living in Tokyo. There were also quite a few families where one parent was Japanese, and the other was Caucasian. So there were a lot of half-Japanese children in the congregation. More that I have ever seen in my life.

I grew up in places where there weren't a ton of Asians. In high school and college, I made a few friends who were half-Japanese, like Ami. Now, I live in a place where I have probably seen five Asian people total after living there a year. In fact, I was in Austin a few weeks ago with friends (see Austin for the Weekend) and remarked, upon seeing a small group of Asian students together that it was the greatest number of Asian people I had seen in Texas. So, I am embarrassed to say, it was kind of stirring to see so many other people who looked like me at church. I almost cried. I felt like we all had a common bond. Apart from the gospel, I mean.

After church, my dad and I rested up for Fuji. The mountain, that is.

In my adulthood, I have learned a couple of things:

• I have a propensity for purposefully doing stupid things.
• If you're going to do something stupid, you shouldn't do it alone.
• My dad will do almost any stupid thing I ask him to do.

So, when I decided to hike Mt. Fuji as part of my Japan experience, he was the person I went to with the idea. The great thing about my dad is that, once he latches onto an idea, he'll take it and run with it, which meant that he researched the route we were going to take, the transportation necessary to get there, and the important souvenir to buy (a walking stick that they stamp at the stations along the trail). At that point, I was the one along for the ride. Plus, he'll generally carry the heavier stuff in his backpack.

We left for Fuji around 5:00, and, after taking a series of trains and buses, began the actual hike around 10:00 p.m. The guidebooks advised that the best time to hike is at night, so that you can hit the summit around sunrise. It sounded very appealing.

A WORD ABOUT GUIDEBOOKS THAT TALK ABOUT HIKING FUJI: They lie. That is, they tell half-truths. It is possible to hike Fuji. I have now done it, which means it does not take an expert to do it. However, it was hard. I mean, it was hard for me, someone who does basically nothing more physical than walk from my car to campus occasionally toting a book or my laptop. For the serious climber, I'm sure it was nothing. But going up involved a lot of steep climbing, over boulders made out of volcano rock. We weren't really prepared for the altitude change, so we spent a lot of time on the side of the trail catching our breaths. Also, it was cold. And, while there were abundant noodle-huts along the way, most of them closed, as the proprietors wished to go to sleep at a decent hour. We didn't pack quite enough food, but they were kind enough to sell us Snickers bars for 300 yen apiece, which were frozen when we bit into them. They also charged us 100 yen for the use of their toilets. Had there not been a monopoly up there, nobody would have been using those toilets for free. But that's probably enough about Japanese toilets from me. If you want to learn more, check out Shane's blog on the subject.

The worst part of the hike (not so much for us, but definitely for the guy it happened to) was when an older man who, previous to this, was pretty far ahead of us on the trail, collapsed about 20 minutes from the summit, and had to be hoisted up on a stretcher made of Fuji walking sticks and other people's coats. On the steepest part of the trail. Through a crowd of people stopping periodically to breathe. It took awhile to get him moving through the crowd, and it created quite a bottleneck. I am ashamed to say that we veered slightly from the trail to skirt this man and the good people who were trying to help him by piling their coats on top of him. All just to get up the trail a few minutes earlier.

Here's a shot of the sunrise. Pretty cool, huh?


Here's a shot of me. I realize how bad I look, so let's just move on.


Unfortunately, that last shot of me drained the batteries in my camera. While I had bought more the day before, I neglected to bring them with me. Consequently, we have no pictures of us at the top of Fuji, and no pictures of Fuji itself.

So, it's entirely possible that I made the whole thing up.

But if I did, why do I have the stick?

The entire hike took about 12 hours. The guidebooks lied there, too. They promised us it would take about 5 hours. Or, maybe we're just that pathetic. The hike down was better-we were breathing regularly-but it was a series of steep switchbacks through volcano-rock gravel, which meant that we were sliding and nearly falling about every 10 feet the entire way down.

We got home around 1:00 that afternoon and had showers and lengthy naps. After dinner, we went down to Ueno Park because that's what most people who have spent the day hiking want to do: walk around some more. Apparently, on the weekends, the park is hopping. On a Monday night, however, there's not a lot.
Except for some shrines. Apparently, they have nowhere else to go. Shane and Maria felt bad, and worried that I thought they were making all the activity in Ueno Park up, or that it was a mystical world that only appeared once every hundred years, like Brigadoon.

So we found a random alley with some shops (not a hard thing to find in Japan) and wandered around for a little while.