It’s been a while since I mentioned it, but I have another blog - a sister blog to Man and Ultraman called The Daily Edamame. I once described that blog as “the lima beans to Ultraman’s corn” in an effort to make a succotash metaphor about the two, forgetting that a) edamame is made from soybeans, which makes for a confusing metaphor, and b) not all that many people really know what succotash is, and even fewer actually like it. The inevitable result is that people stayed away in droves from Edamame, worrying probably that it was a blog about obscure ethnic vegetable dishes.

Fear not. The Daily Edamame is nothing more than a photoblog featuring some of the many thousands of pictures I’ve taken since I’ve been in Japan and Southeast Asia. I’m not a professional photographer, which will be obvious, but every once in a while I get lucky. Now that I’m back in one place for a while and in possession of a new laptop, I thought it made sense to crank things back up. So forget everything you ever heard about beans and get over there, pinto. Er, pronto.

It’s sort of been lost in all the hubbub lately, upstaged by gang-related beatings (do they have witness protection programs in Japan?) and me being shown the door by Japanese Immigration, but a few weeks ago I started a photoblog. It’s sort of a brother blog to this one, like succotash - the lima beans to Ultraman’s corn - except that it’s all photos, with none of the annoying yammering that goes on here. It’s called The Daily Edamame - you may remember the name from the title of an M&A category I introduced with fanfare and subsequently ignored.

The pitch: one photo per day, a brief caption, and nothing else. Like edamame, it’s briefly distracting, tasty but not too filling, and it lets you feel like you’re partaking of something that’s good for you without, of course, being good for you. Unlike succotash, which really is good for you (I’m mixing vegetable dishes on top of metaphors; maybe I’d better bring Hemingway instead of Bukowski to Vietnam). So go ahead, subscribe. One more RSS feed won’t bring your browser crashing down in a smoking pile around your feet. Unless you’re using Internet Explorer.

While I’m on the subject, I’m not sure what’s going to happen to Man and Ultraman for the next few weeks. Best case scenario: It will seamlessly morph from a staid-life-in-Japan blog to a fresh new life-on-the-trail blog. It will fairly crackle with new characters, overflow with tales and adventures from the underbelly of Asia, and groan with the weight of all the new photographs. Revivified by the salt air and the thrill of the road, it will glitter like the sea at night and shine like the eyes of young lovers.

Worst case scenario: Well, we all know what that is.

The crystal ball is hazy because I don’t know if I’ll be taking my laptop with me. I’d like to, but in a stroke of bad luck that I refused at the time to take as a karmic comment on my decision to move to to Japan, it took a body blow during the flight from San Francisco to Tokyo, destroying the monitor entirely. Since the day I arrived, I’ve had to use it with an external monitor. Which has worked fine. Except that now when I most need a mobile computer, mine’s not remotely mobile.

Most of Southeast Asia, I’m told, is more wired than than a roomful of West Hollywood talent agents, and internet cafes are as common as noodle joints. So keeping connected won’t be too much of a chore, but I may have to do most of my writing old school-style, with pencil and paper - which is a lot more conducive to short and to the point than it is to rambling, stream-of-consciousness monlogues. And I have no idea what I’ll do about saving photos without a computer to download them to. The last time I tried that, I lost everything. Of course, the last time I tried anything like this was 1991. Hopefully I’ve learned something since then.

Sorry about that title. It was bound to happen sooner or later. I figured I’d get it out of the way before I  embarrassed myself by using it in a post from Hanoi.

Does this place sound like it was made for me or what?

Looks like itchy-footed New York Times’ scribe Matt Gross, a.k.a. the Frugal Traveler, is kicking off his latest budget pilgrimage for the paper’s travel section, and it’s a biggie: a 12-week circuit of Europe, modeled on the age-old Grand Tour - the venerated solo trip around the contininent that young Englishmen and women of yore undertook as a kind of on-the-road finishing school. Basically it was a chance to get up to no good, sow their oats and poke fun at the locals, all in the name of rounding out the ol’ “education” on daddy’s credit. Some things never change.

Ah, the European summer. It puts me in mind of my own three-month Grand Tour long, long ago, when I was just out of college - fresh-faced, naïve, horny and idealistic, not necessarily in that order. This, of course, is in the distant prehistory of 1991. But some things never change.

It was my first trip outside of the U.S. I didn’t model it on any legendary historical precedent, but it was still pretty grand. Mine started at the beginning of June in Luxembourg. (What? Why Luxembourg? If you must know, IcelandAir offered rock-bottom European rates at the time, with a stopover in Reykjavík and a terminus in Europe’s least sexy city. Hey, it got me there. As I said, this was a while back.)

I put chilly, dreary Luxumbourg behind me as quick as I could and headed immediately for, well, Normandy, France. Not finding it any different from Luxumbourg in any material sense, I recalibrated my inner compass and made a beeline south, toward warmer climes and less prudish female beachgoers.

The next three three months were chock-a-block with your standard inventory of backpacker adventures: youth hostel lockouts, topless beaches in Portugal, stolen passports, overseas romances, topless beaches in France, a hike along the Cinque Terre, de rigeur museums in Florence and Rome (plus a stop in Spoleto, Italy), pastoral Swiss mountain scenes, a very blurry weekend in Amsterdam, Eurodisco fever, running out of money, having my altered Eurail Pass confiscated by eagle-eyed rail officials, and sleeping under the night sky atop a Paris Metro ticket station with a pair of pierced British lesbian hippies (maybe those last two are not in the standard inventory per se).

I saw London, I saw France, and I saw a cute FSU coed named Jenny Kissel’s underpants in Lagos, Portugal. (Actually, I didn’t see London.) All told, I traveled in a succession of third-class train compartments from France to Spain and Portugal, across to Austria and Switzerland, over the Alps to lurid, humid Italy and back up again through the bratwurst belt of Germany and Czekoslovakia (it was still just one country then), still further up into the Netherlands, on to Belgium, once again into Paris and, finally, to Luxumbourg again at the end of August. I was roughly two thousand 1991-era dollars poorer, but exponentially richer by pints of beer drunk, languages butchered, foreign women ogled, touristy sights seen, snapshots snapped (with actual film), borders crossed, hostels snuck into, kilometers logged, international horizons opened and exotic thoughts thunk.

I kept generally to the beaten path, but I also made a point of breaking from the well-trod tourist trail and striking out into the uncharted realms beyond the guidebooks’ smooth itineraries as often as possible. Here, I hoped each time, let there be monsters. Quite often, I found them, or anyway predators of a sort - an audatious, fearless pickpocket on a near empty bus in the middle of nowhere, Spain; another, even bolder larcenist who sliced the straps of six money belts and relieved their dozing owners of them following an evening at the Hofbräuhaus in Munich; and other, similar encounters.

But mostly I learned that the best way to see a place is to glance through the guidebook and then set it aside, letting your gut lead you where it will, following the invisible string that tugs at it. It doesn’t always yield the greatest number of famous sights notched, but it satisfies a more fundamental, limbic reason for why we travel. Even the most jaded, sunburned, souvenir-shlepping tourista feels this urge, though he may not recognize or acknowledge it.

When I returned from my 12 weeks in Europe, I was crushed to find that every single roll of film I’d taken was completely blank, every inch of it overexposed - ruined because an idiotic 22-year-old first-time traveler didn’t know how to properly load film into a 35mm camera. This mistake ate at me for years. Sure, I still had the journal I’d kept, and I glanced through it wistfully on occasion. But without the photos I’d taken, somehow it all seemed … irretrievable, lost forever to that fixed moment in time, that distant version of me.

Only long afterward did I realize what an excellent thing that is.

Incidentally, Jenny Kissel says hello.

The world we know is but a fraction of the world that exists.

Virtually every speck of living matter on earth exists in a sliver of habitable space on the planet’s surface just a few thousand meters thick, an organic film as diaphanous as a soap bubble. This is true of human beings above all. Except in rare places, we occupy only the sweetest spots in the most pleasant, mild, agreeable corners of this gossamer fabric. Every artifact of our species’ brief tenure on this planet - cities, factories, suburbs, farms, telecommunication networks, skyscrapers, sports arenas, interstate highways and the entire din of all humanity in its chattering billions - occupies the merest scintilla of the earth’s surface and atmosphere, a fraction of real estate so insubstantial you could walk in a straight line from the top to the bottom in just a few minutes, if such a thing were possible.

Beyond the whisper of its skin we inhabit, the world is a tumultuous place, feral and untamed, as primitive and raw as if just emerged from a mold, still ragged at the seams. The closer you move to the edge of this boundary, the further back in time you seem to travel. Out at the furthest fringes, the world looks as it must have in its distant youth, primal and new.

At the moment, I find it difficult not to think about this, as the evidence for it is all around me. I’m 2,800 meters high at the tip of the Southern Japanese Alps, on a small rocky ledge of a knife-edged, snow-covered ridgeline that hangs like a slender saddle between the peaks of Houou and Jisodake, surrounded by a sky so saturated with deepening blue it seems almost to drip. I’m thinking also about the 13 hours hike between me and the trailhead, far below, from which I started up this mountain two days before, and I consider the setting sun behind Mt. Kitadake just to the west, Japan’s second-highest peak, looming like a snow-shrouded battleship.

While all this thinking is going on, my body is occupied with its own more urgent mission: gathering, in the failing light, what little firewood can be found at this altitude and calculating the odds that starting a campfire is even possible, given the circumstances. My mind, molten and sluggish with cold, slides between two opposite extremes: the mountain and the inexpressible beauty of the spreading sunset on one hand, and on the other the reality of my situation - stranded, exhausted, feet soaking wet and frozen through, at the top of a mountain covered in two meters of snow, with darkness coming on, the wind picking up, and already freezing temperatures quickly heading south.

Part of me is aware that if I do not manage to get a fire going, I stand a fair chance of losing some or all of my toes, even with a tent and a sleeping bag. Maybe worse. Far below, it’s the end of April and spring is in full bloom. Here, though, it’s still winter in all the ways that matter. On the way up, I struggled through forests whose leafless trees were buried in snow to the height of a grown man, sinking up to my thigh with every fourth step. The sky up here looks clear enough at twilight, but at 2,800 meters, nothing can be ruled out with certainty.

Despite, or perhaps because of, my situation, another part of my mind prefers not to dwell on these depressing facts, to instead marvel at the power and the patience of the forces that hurled these trillion tons of rock up from the bottom of the sea and thrust them into the sky; to blink at the snowflake-fringed millimeter of ice that seems to have locked two rocks the size of buildings together in a balletic embrace; to thrill at the miracle of an ancient, gnarled tree, branches blown sideways like windswept hair, clinging to a rock on which it is bent nearly perpendicular; or to be moved by the sight of mighty Fuji, sleeping since its last cataclysmic eruption exactly 300 years ago, hanging above the clouds 70 kilometers distant like a mirage, a majestic white city floating in the sky. The entire spectacle of the Southern Alps in all its vastness lies spread out beyond and below me, as if I’ve been placed at its very center by divine purpose.

If I have to go tonight, I think, there are worse places that it could happen.

(more…)