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.

China has not been at the top of my “Must Make Friends With” list since, well, ever. There’s something about ruthless authoritarian governments that treat people like mindless, sub-human pets that tends to get my goat. But even I have to admit that last night’s opening ceremony for the Olympics was pretty flippin’ impressive. On one hand, yeah, I know that the entire thing was nothing more than a splashy piece of pure, Grade-A communist propaganda. I don’t believe for a second that a single member of the National People’s Congress gives a rolling rat’s ass about a “harmonious society” or “one world, one dream” or any of the other painfully saccharine slogans they’ve cynically tacked on to the Games to put a friendly face on an Orwellian mug. And sure, I realize that with a budget of $40 billion, almost anything short of a moon shot is possible.

Still, I’ve gotta say that last night’s program got me right right where I live. I’m the kinda guy who gets misty just hearing the Schindler’s List theme song. Stray kittens put a lump in my throat the size of an eight-ball. And sweet-faced, oppressed Asian kids running around in glowing electric body stockings to form the shape of a giant dove? Game over, man. I got verklempt at the giant globe, I choked up at the little girl flying through the air beneath the kite, I actually “Oooohed” out loud at the thousands of martial artists doing their synchronized Jackie Chan impressions. And the umbrellas that unfolded to reveal faces from kids in every nation? It was shameless, hypocritical, blatant manipulation - and I lapped it up.

If I ever have kids, I’m gonna be the world’s biggest pushover. All they’ll have to do is hum the theme song from Shindler’s List and make the form of a giant dove. Game over, man.

When you step onto a Japanese train at rush hour, it’s strangely quiet. The car will be jammed to the windowsills with people, hip to hip on the seats and standing packed as terra cotta soldiers in a Chinese cave, but there’s hardly a sound. Only a murmered, indistinct conversation somewhere within the bright fluorescent glare and the creaking of the plastic hand straps complaining against a stainless steel bar. Close your eyes, and you could imagine yourself in the hold of an 18th-century ship of the line. But open them again, and you’re surrounded by the bleeding edge of the 21^st century, every last soul immersed in the onanistic tools of technology. They’re listening to music on personal music players, watching  TV or typing e-mails on their cellphones, playing games on a PSP or Nintendo DS, thumbing through an electronic Japanese-to-English dictionary - sometimes all at once. A few of them are even reading newspapers or books, the story inevitably running back to front, up-and-down sentences falling off the bottom of the page.

I’ll miss that.

I climb on a bus for Kansai airport in less than an hour. From there, it’s to Taipei, where I lay over for the evening. Then on to Hanoi tomorrow. For the next month, at least, I’ll be living in The Land that Time Forgot. I’ve sold my laptop to Will, since with a busted monitor it’s not much good on the road. I have much that I still want to say about Japan, now that it’s in the rear-view mirror. But I haven’t had much of a chance to get it all down here, what with the events of the past week bunching up in front of me like an interstate pile-up.

But I expect I’ll have plenty of time in the coming days to work on it. For now, it’s sayonara to Japan - and it’s hustling convenience store clerks, its svelte population, terrible pop music, paradoxical ATM machines, thousands of temples and shrines, and breathtaking scenery; its startling dental lapses, microscopic shoes, million curious indiosyncracies, and the friendliest people I’ve ever known.

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…)

Nothing focuses the mind like the immediate threat of certain death - say, for instance, trudging across a snowy ridgeline a few feet wide and the length of three football fields between two 2,800-meter peaks in a howling wind, while swaddled in a mummification of unfamiliar cold weather gear and carrying 40-unwieldy extra pounds on your back, all of it held tenuously upright by legs that feel as if they just emerged from a Jell-O mold and feet whose frozen existence is entirely theoretical at this point, after two days of steep uphill slogging through two-meter-deep snow in sub-zero temperatures to reach such a surreal moment. In that kind of situation, you pay closer attention to the placement of each step you take than you do when walking across the parking lot to the dry cleaners. Unfortunately, nothing unfocuses the mind like having 28 percent less oxygen available to you than you normally could count on. And also the worry that when they find your shattered, ruined, macerated body at the bottom of a rocky slope several thousand feet below you, they will also find it wearing dirty underwear, because you haven’t changed it in two days and because … well, obviously.

After dragging myself across the roof of Japan, I’m back in Osaka again, healthy, happy, and rather surprised to find myself in possession of all my toes. Three days climbing up Mt. Houou’s triplet of peaks and back down again were enough to convince Will and I that both we and our socks will have to be made of sterner stuff before we tackle more than one at a time of the 23 remaining mountains on Will’s hit list. Still, we count the adventure a success if for no other reasons than that we only got lost once - granted, it was a biggie (more on that later) - reached the summit, took a lot of photos, left nothing valuable behind, and neither one of us was forced to eat the other in a desperate bid for survival.

I expect to have a full account available here in a day or two, including all the gory* details. Although there’s been some discussion of spending the last part of our forced 10-day holiday back near my old stomping grounds in Fukui Prefecture for some quality time with 2,700-meter Mt. Hakusan, I plan to ask Will about that idea again when he’s sober. In the meantime, I’m posting a few photos and a snippet of video from the tippy-top. I’m also going to use this brief moment of your attention to introduce a new post category for M&A, which may or may not subsume all other existing post categories, I haven’t decided yet. It’s called The Daily Edamame: short, snack-sized observations about Japan and life here that are likely to be apropos of absolutely nothing. In other words, your standard blog post, but hopefully more frequent. Let’s both keep our fingers crossed.

(*No actual gore included.)

[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3582470136044127001&hl=en]

Except for large-scale political protests, revolutionary uprisings, and the morning after Thanksgiving, there aren’t many times when the entire population of a city takes to the streets with a single purpose. Last Sunday, I witnessed another example up close: the annual rite of hanami, or cherry-blossom viewing. As I’ve mentioned before, the Japanese go apeshit for the sakura blossom. For a week each April, they empty out of their homes by the umptillions to sprawl on tarps beneath the trees, pump themselves full of booze, show off their new spring duds, and gawk at everyone else doing the same. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find so many drunk people so densely packed anywhere in the world last Sunday as along the Shukugawa River just outside Kobe (I know what you’re thinking, but the Red Sox were still on the road). The octopuses that gave their lives for the takoyaki consumed alone must have numbered in the high thousands. On our own menu for the afternoon: beer, gin, chuhai, sake, shrimp-flavored potato chips, edamame, and donuts. What? Is noon too early for edamame?