Golden Week

Golden Week is like the Japanese equivalent of Easter, only without the eggs, the crass commercialism and the religion bit. OK, it’s nothing like Easter. It’s just a string of national holidays stitched together rather magnanimously by the government in order to create a decent holiday period at the end of April (for those who are interested, the official explanation of Golden Week is here).
Thursday April 29 was a holiday to commemorate the birth of Emporer Showa. Ruby had a soccer match down at Hiroshima but Eleni had some work on, so Felix and I headed down on the freeway to try out our shiny new e-tag device (which we purchased at great expense last month, only to discover that the government has just changed the laws and you don’t need one any more).

Friday was a normal day, as only the truly generous schools/companies give their students/minions this day off as well. At five o’clock we all went into town as usual to drop Ruby off on her train to soccer practice. Her friend didn’t turn up so for the first time ever we sent her off to a faraway place all on her own with instructions to sit in a carriage with plenty of other passengers etc etc. Another milestone in the Letting Go process.

The three of us then went out for a meal of okonomiyaki, possibly the best food in the world in space, then indulged in a bit of Mihara nightlife, i.e. standing on the Shinkansen platform and watching them zoom past at 250 km/h.

OK so it doesn’t look that exciting on mobile phone video, but Felix loves it and it’s good for half an hour or so. Besides, there aren’t any cinemas in Mihara.

After all that excitement, Saturday was low-key. In the afternoon we all headed up to Fuchu, about an hour away in the mountains, for a practice match organised by Ruby’s Sanfrecce team. Eleni in particular was keen to go not only for the Family Drive in the Mountains aspect but also to revisit the excellent ¥100 shop just near the soccer ground that we discovered last time we were there.

On Sunday we invested in a barbeque at the local Chaddy and had some guests around for dinner. Japanese barbeques are nice and small and you use charcoal not gas; none of this quadruple burner with lid and separate gas ring business.

However you do need to have your wits about you and get the charcoal going early (Daddy Mistake No. 1), have enough hot coals to cook everything properly (Daddy Mistake No. 2) and ensure an even distribution so that the things in the middle don’t burn to a blackened crisp (Daddy Mistake No. 3).

So we ended up eating a fair bit of charcoal on Sunday night, but it’s all part of the learning process and the next BBQ will be that much better.

Monday and Tuesday were our Big Trip Away. Golden Week is legendary for massive freeway congestion as the entire nation attempts to head out of the city and back to their ancient ancestral homes in the country. Over the weekend I was smirking as I listened to reports of 50-kilometre snarls and trains and planes booked to capacity out of Tokyo. That was, until we got caught in a beauty of our own just before lunch on Monday: only 15 km long according to the signs, but real bumper-to-bumper stuff, so that it took well over an hour to inch forward about 10 kilometres. Adding to the excitement was the fact that we were getting perilously low on petrol. 27 km to the next fuel stop seemed reasonable at the time, but there’s no better way to use up juice than travelling in first gear. We managed to make it to an exit and quickly hurtled down through the hills searching desperately for a servo like Mel in Mad Max 2. And ended up in a very picturesque city deep in a valley called Takahashi which was so nice we decided to come back some other time for a holiday, so it was all worth it in the end. Sort of.

The real purpose of the freeway experience was to spend a couple of days in Niimi, which is the family home of Sweden (nobody knows how he got this nickname), the guitarist from The Moment, the band I used to play in back in the Tokyo days, whose lead singer of course is none other than Yusuke, our man in Mihara. Incidentally Sweden, who is Japanese, now lives in France.

Niimi is a tiny hamlet of perhaps 30 houses tucked away in a fold of the hills and accessible only by a tiny mountain road. It really seems like the place that time forgot. This photo doesn’t really do it justice:

We stayed in Sweden’s mum and dad’s creaky old farmhouse together with a couple of other families. Altogether there were 17 of us and the futons were thick on the ground in the big communal tatami rooms that are typical of traditional houses. In the afternoon the kids played out on the roads:

while I went down to inspect the farming operations.

I even hoed a row of my own! (photo not available)

On the next day we headed down to the local fishing festival at a nearby town. Now the Sushi on a Stick household is not normally the slightest bit interested in fishing, and I for one was feeling rather ambivalent about it all, but in the end it was a great event. They’d blocked off sections of the river and stacked them with fish that apparently hadn’t been fed for a few days (cruel I know). So the fish were literally jumping onto the hooks and all of us managed to catch a few; even the cynical nearly-a-teenager enjoyed herself.

After all the fish had given themselves up, there was another event especially for primary school age kids, where a smaller pool over the other side of the bridge had been stacked with yet more fish and the kids had to grab them with their bare hands in a frenzy of screaming and splashing that lasted for about ten minutes solid. Felix ended up with a catch of three or four, some of which he scooped up in his hat; needless to say it now smells rather fishy.

We all piled back to the farmhouse and cooked up thousands of fresh fish on the barbeque and ate them for lunch.

For the return trip we decided to avoid the freeways until the evening and kill some time at none other than beautiful Takahashi where there is a castle, a Ye Olde bit of town complete with samurai residences, and an excellent mini-Chaddy where Ruby bought some jeans and she and Felix discovered one of those dance games where you have to tap your feet in time with the arrows on the screen and it boos you if you don’t do it properly. A bargain at only ¥100 per game.

We even managed to track down a nice restaurant that served soba noodles (tragically hard to find in Mihara; everyone eats udon around here) which made me very happy.

And readers will be pleased to know that there were no traffic jams on the way back, heaven be praised. So that’s it for Golden Week for this year. I’m exhausted.