After I’ve left Japan, whenever that is, one thing they won’t be able to say about me is that he sat drooling through his weekends in front of the TV. Partly that’s because “weekend” is a relative term for me, as mine fall on Sundays and Mondays rather than into the more traditional time slots. (That’s not a Japan thing, incidentally; it’s just a teaching thing. Saturdays are jam packed with kids whose parents would rather have them sitting through English lessons than playing outside in the sunshine. If you tried to pull that on kids in America, you’d have a blood-spattered revolution on your hands.)

Also, watching TV in Japan isn’t really a viable option for me, even now that I live in an apartment that claims one. Apart from CNN and some random programming on the Discovery Channel, all of Japanese television is – no big surprise here – in Japanese. And since after eight months in the country I still understand only every hundredth word of spoken Japanese on my good days, TV watching here is even less enlightening than back in the U.S., which is saying something.

This leaves me with no alternative but to get out there and look around. That I most certainly did last weekend. After a full day in Kyoto gandering at 850-year-old Nanzen-ji Temple, with its 13 sub-temples, sprawling Zen gardens and Versailles-sized grounds, followed by another full day spent climbing up and across three 1,000-meter peaks in Japan’s Lake Biwako district on a cloudless blue day, my arms and the back of my neck now look like they just got back from spring break in Key West.

The Kyoto excursion was a solo affair – just me and my bike, which not only folds in half, but which I’ve discovered to my great delight that, because of said folding, can ride with me on the train hereabouts. I hopped off at Kawaramachi Station on Kyoto’s east side and headed across the Kamo River, into Gion and the outrageously scenic Higashiyama district. I’d hoped to tool around the northeast section of the city, pedaling up the famed “Philosopher’s Walk” from Nanzen-ji at the southern end to Ginkaku-ji Temple, the Silver Pavilion, at the northern end. But I underestimated the pull of Nanzen-ji in springtime on a nearly perfect April day.

One of the things I love about Kyoto is that you could spend every weekend of the year there gaping at a different temple or shrine or castle or garden or palace or park – any one of which would by itself be enough to pull legions of sightseers from every end of the globe – and still not exhaust the bounty of sights there are to see there. They don’t call Kyoto the City of 2,000 Temples for nothing. You should also know that “temple” doesn’t really convey the vastness of what I’m talking about. A typical temple complex is the size of a small town, which in fact is what it originally was. And every square inch of it, from the gabled roofs to the raked gravel in the garden and the sculpted moss on the trees, looks exactly the way someone wants it to appear; there’s nothing accidental about any of it. Every corner and every angle offers a new surprise, a different and completely unexpected perspective. It’s the most perfect union of the natural and the manmade that exists.

*

The following day, on Monday, Will and I set out to tackle three peaks nestled together like conjoined siblings in the long march of mountains that embrace the west side of Lake Biwako, just to the north and west of Kyoto. We left Ibaraki for the little coastal town of Wani at 8 am and were climbing two hours later through a forest of Japanese cedar dappled with morning sunlight.

After a close encounter with a mamushi I nearly stepped on as it was sunning itself on the trail, (yes, quite poisonous), we reached the summit of Gongen-san, a gnat’s hair shy of 1,000 meters, by 11:30 am. Surrounded by a rolling sea of of waist-high shrub bamboo, we took in the view of the western range under crystalline skies.

Far below us, the tiny town of Wani lay curled between the mountains’ feet and Lake Biwaka, whose far shore we could just make out, a line of lumpen ghosts in the afternoon haze. After a leisurely lunch of inari sushi and chocolate, followed by a nap in the grass, we set out across the ridgeline toward Hourai-san, one of Japan’s 300 most famous mountains. (Sometimes it seems they’ll let any old hill into the club these days.) As we were traveling mostly across instead of up, the hike became more of a meander than a climb, which was just fine. When we finally arrived at 4 pm, the view wasn’t bad.

We took a gondola back down to the bottom – Hourai-san’s a popular skiing destination in the winter – where we followed the twisting road down to the lakeshore.

All in all, an excellent weekend of training for next week’s adventure: a full week in the Japan Alps for a summit of five of Will’s remaining 24 mountains, including Senjo-dake, Ontake-san, and Haku-san, the third highest (and third holiest) mountain in Japan after Fuji-san. At 2,700 meters (almost three times higher than Monday’s adventures), I’m told the snow’s still two meters deep. “But it’s the end of the season,” Will tells me, “It’s all packed snow. We’ll be able to walk right across the top.” Do I believe him? I’m still trying to decide. (I was the one who spotted the snake, after all.) I’m investing in a pair of crampons, just to be on the safe side.

Yes, being outside all weekend meant I missed CNN’s frenetic buildup to the Pennsylvania primary. For some reason, I feel like I got the better end of the bargain.

Looks like Japan’s whaling fleet has slunk home with only half its hoped-for kill this season, thanks to the controversial high-seas efforts of Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd activists.

“Toshiro Shirasu, the vice minister of agriculture, forestry and fisheries, said it was “regrettable” that Japan’s whaling fleet was returning from its annual five-month hunt after killing just 551 whales, not its goal of 900 because of “offshore protests” by opponents of the hunt.”

Ever since 1982, when the International Whaling Commission placed a moratorium on commercial whaling on endangered species – which is another way of saying all whales anywhere – Japan has exploited a little loophole in the ban that allows for 900 or so to be butchered old-school-style each year for “scientific research.” Not by accident, all of this research ends up on supermarket shelves here. Not satisfied by this, Japanese officials want to resume historic levels of whaling, claiming it’s a matter of cultural tradition and national heritage (attention all Confederate Flag supporters: you’ve got like-thinking friends in Japan).

“Asking Japan to abandon this part of its culture would compare to Australians being asked to stop eating meat pies, Americans being asked to stop eating hamburgers and the English being asked to go without fish and chips.”

I don’t know about Australians and meat pies, but I actually eat – and like – hamburgers (or at least I used to eat them). But after eight months in country, I’ve met hardly anyone here who’s ever eaten whale meat, or kujira, as it’s called. And of those few, every one I’ve talked to thinks it’s downright disgusting (this, from a people who pour sea urchin eggs on spaghetti and wolf down grilled chicken cartilage with a smile). So it’s hard to understand the official campaign to force-feed kujira to a mostly unwilling population. In any case, it’s hard to feel bad for those harried Japanese whalers. After all, even a bad day fishing beats a good day at the office.

I’ve discovered from first-person experience and some back-of-the-envelope calculating that there are way more Australians living in Japan than Americans. We’re also outnumbered by expat Canadians, unless I miss my guess. I can’t understand why this is. There are a lot more Americans, in the net global sense, than there are Canadians and Australians combined. Six times more, in fact. But in Japan, not only am I a minority among the native population, I’m a minority among minorities. Recently, I’ve taken to asking people where they think I’m from, rather than telling them outright. It never fails: first guess is always Canada. Canada? It boggles the mind. But you can’t blame them. They’re just playing the odds. I’ve met more Canadians and Australians in eight months in Japan than in my entire life previous. I even live with an Australian. It’s having a subtle effect on me, too. Lately I’ve taken to calling people mate, and I’m catching myself using the adjective “bloody” to describe situations and things that have nothing to do with actual blood.

Incidentally, not that I ever doubted that I’m sharing a house with a native of Oz, but if I had, spotting this in the pantry would have erased all doubt:

Somebody stop me before I start saying “Bob’s yer uncle.”

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?

In the continuing spirit of appearing to be actively blogging while not actually writing anything, I’m posting another big batch of photos – this time from Osaka and a day trip last Sunday to Kyoto. To be fair, the cherry blossoms are going nuts right now, and the effect they have on people here is, well, difficult to do justice in words alone. I have a truckload of new photos I want to stick in your face, but I’ve been waffling over the best way to do that. Do I just toss up a few examples (as below) and link to my gallery site? Use one of those cheesy slideshow tools I experimented with last fall? (You can see better slideshows at my gallery site.) Start a separate photo blog and force you to add the feed to your already bloated RSS aggregator? I’m wide open to suggestions. (I’m also wide open to friends of CSS. My manandultraman.com address is primed for launch – except that I can’t figure out how to edit the title bar so I can shoehorn in that badass Ultraman graphic up there.)

As always, click on any image and find yourself transported to my corner of Japan via the magic of the web. Go ahead: put on your bathrobe and pretend it’s a kimono. I won’t tell anyone.

KYOTO

Geisha in Gion District

Cherry Tree and Storm Clouds in Maruyama Park

Bridge and Sakura along Shijo-Dori

Lanterns at Shrine in Teramachi

Woman in Kimono

Street Corner near Kenninji Temple

Yasaka Pagoda at Dusk

Young Girls at Kenninji Temple

Cherry Blossom at Heian Jingi Shrine

OSAKA

Bar Owner in Namba, Osaka

Man Playing Samisen at Osaka-Jo Castle

Osaka-Jo Castle Walls

Baseball Practice in Ibaraki Park

Osaka-Jo Castle

Incredibly, I had to travel to Japan to see a life-sized plastic model of Colonel Sanders.