Zen and the art of snowboarding

For weeks before, and during, my time in Tokyo I’d been trying to organise going snowboarding in northern Japan.

I’m no great snowboarder, in fact I’m pretty amateurish really, but I love doing it and Japan has the best snow in the world, so it seemed rude not to at least have a look while I was in this part of the world.

My friend Caryn in New Zealand works for a travel agents and the word among them was not to go - the season was over, there was no snow and everything was closed. Well I agreed with them on the latter point, absolutely every hostel in the region was closed as were most hotels. It wasn’t until the Friday that I found somewhere to stay on the Sunday.

I knew from the webcams there was still snow, but whether I’d be able to hire a board or an instructor I wasn’t sure. I just had to wing it. Oh well, wouldn’t be the first time this trip!

I caught an overnight train from Tokyo to Sapporo, which was an experience in itself. Sixteen hours in a four-man shared cabin and noone else on the train spoke English. In Tokyo I’d seen plenty of gai-jin and the whole idea that westerners have that they’re going to walk around Japan as conspicuous giants just wasn’t true. In Tokyo at least.

But on this train I felt a real outsider. Not because of the way I was treated - in fact you couldn’t find a nicer more polite people than the Japanese - but because I felt so conspicuous. This mode of transport obviously isn’t one tourists take, most usually fly, and it was full of ordinary Japanese who couldn’t stop staring at me.

After a couple of train changes and about 20 hours after leaving Tokyo I saw the snow caps of the Japanese Alps appearing over the low hills and arrived in Niseko to take possession of my little chalet.


It was a funny old place, all wood and weird angles and for the next week it was just me and the ladybirds and the mountain.

It did have a lovely fire though!

Since arriving in Japan, I've tried to avoid electronic toilet pictures, but this one was too good to miss. This is the control panel...

The resort was deserted and being on my own took a bit of getting used to after the chaos of Tokyo and being with my folks. But once I got my head round it, it was very relaxing and kind of zen.

I’d wake up every morning to a gorgeous view of the volcano,

go off for a couple of hours with the instructor, come home, have a very hot bath, watch Dexter (the only programme that wasn‘t dubbed on Japanese TV), listen to my iPod, catch up on my blog and retire to bed.

I’d never experienced boarding on a mountain that was so empty and to be quite honest there isn’t that much else to say. There was noone there so I met no interesting people, there are no temples to see so I have no colourful pictures to share. It was just me, my ipod and the snowboard.

I always used to say before I left home when people asked me why I was going away that I was going to sit on top of a mountain in Nepal and think about my life. It’s not Nepal, but a mountain in northern Japan is pretty close.

I did do a lot of thinking in that little chalet though, and while I’m not sure if I have come up with the answers to any questions that will benefit the human race, I do feel a little bit wiser. About myself at least.

Living in a little wooden hut in a deserted mountain town in northern Japan with noone but ladybirds for company will turn a man’s thoughts internally, so sorry for being self-indulgent again.

Oh, and just to prove I can snowboard…ish

Number 99. The Best Luck.

It’s hard to describe what it was like arriving in Japan for the first time. All my life Japan has represented the exotic and alien. It is always a place I have described as one of the last places on earth you can experience a genuine culture shock.

I don’t know when that idea first took shape in my head, and anyway it’s patently not true - there are far more alien places on this planet than Tokyo with its globally recognised international brands, high-profile influence on modern culture and readily recognisable cityscape.

Nevertheless take shape it did, so I was actually quite disappointed when I looked around me at Narita airport to find it was much as any other international airport. The signs had English translation and I could get a coffee at Starbucks before being guided to the train I needed by a very polite and fluent English-speaking girl on the information desk.

I was so knackered from my flight that I slept through the train journey and missed the new-country-out-of-the-window experience which is so helpful when orientating myself to somewhere new. It was only as I emerged at Tokyo station with the intention of taking a cab to the hotel that I really began to get my head around how different Japan is.

In every other country so far writing the name and address of my hotel in my diary and showing it to the cab driver has been enough to at least get me to somewhere I can gather my thoughts. But here of course the taxi driver couldn’t read roman letters. Damn, didn’t think of that.

He trotted off to a few of his mates in the rank to see if anyone could translate and I eventually arrived at the hotel. Not being able to speak a word of the language or even hazard a guess at what signs say is a handicap but what I also hadn’t realised is how difficult it is to read a map.

How do you read a street name on a map if you can’t read the characters? It’s impossible.

Fortunately Dad was waiting for me in the lobby despite his jet lag and it was great to see him. It’d been six months, but within minutes of giving him and Mum big hugs it seemed like only last week I’d left home.

I’d been looking forward to seeing them for weeks and weeks and it was lovely to finally get together. Bless ‘em. Japan might just have been too much to cope with after six months on the road if I hadn’t known they were there waiting for me.

There wasn’t really time to hang around though as Mum and Dad were only in Japan for a week, so we cracked on with five days of hardcore touristing. First stop, according to all the guide books, should be the Imperial Gardens which we dutifully trotted off to for our first taste of historical Japan.

All very pretty and ‘Japanese’, but a bit sterile and uninteresting as you’re kept at arms length from everything - fair enough given the imperial family still live there, but it didn’t really inspire.
By the middle of the afternoon we were all pretty shattered so we headed back to the hotel, rested, and had dinner at the hotel, where we began to realise for the first time just how hard it is to eat out here if they don’t have English translated menus!

The next day we decided to brave public transport and so headed to Ueno Park, which was a completely different kettle of sushi. The blossom was everywhere, as were the Japanese for whom lunch under a spreading cherry tree is obviously de rigeur. Fortunately they seemed quite pleased to have their photographs taken!

The park had a much more lively feel to it than the Imperial Gardens and although the zoo wasn’t open, there was a market and street stalls and we eventually plucked up the courage to order a couple of bowls of noodles by a pretty lake in the middle of the city.

We also saw the first of the many temples we’d see over the next week surrounded by what we think we lamps and all shaded by blossom. This was much more like it.

In the Shimbashi district, a few stops away on the train, lies the Tokyo municipal HQ, which has a restaurant and shop on the forty-something’s floor so we headed over to have a look at Tokyo from the sky. Unlike New York or London where the skyscrapers are concentrated on Manhattan or in Docklands, Tokyo’s are everywhere, as far as the eye can see. The mind boggles at the scale of the place.

By the end of the day my hips were giving out as was Mum’s, so poor Dad had to nurse us poor cripples back to the hotel where we wandered around for half an hour past countless restaurants not brave enough to go in. Eventually the staff at one place took pity on us and called out to us in English. That was all they had to do, they had us.

The look on mum’s face as we read the menu - ‘grilled gizzards’ among others - was a picture. I think all three of us would try most things, but grilled gizzards are a taste experiment too far.

Having spent a couple of days trudging around Tokyo we headed for the seaside and a town outside the city called Kamakura, a former capital during the shogunate period and crammed full of temples, shrines and Buddhas.

We strolled down to the sea, but the beach was pretty empty. It seems noone actually comes to Kamakura to see the sea because the main temple was absolutely heaving. There was a beautiful blossom-lined avenue up to the temple, but the crowds of people made enjoying any kind of zen-like experience impossible.

Mum and Dad saw a lot of Buddhas in Sri Lanka, but I’ve never seen one - apart from the one at the Peace Pagoda in Battersea Park, but that doesn’t count - so we trekked across Kamakura to have a look. It turns out this one was 700 years old and had survived a tsunami which devastated the town and its surrounding shrine leaving the big man sat there unmoved. I thought it was pretty cool.

That evening we decided to be a bit braver about dinner. We picked a restaurant, walked straight to it and straight in, not giving ourselves time to bottle it this time. And it was great. The menu had pictures and although the electronic menu foxed us we had a gorgeous meal - Mum and Dad had their first taste of sushi and Dad turned out to be a bit of a fan.

We were on a roll now and had to maintain our momentum, so it was on to the Bullet Train and a day trip to Kyoto. Only 1,000 miles there and back. No worries on the Shinkansen.

It took less than three hours to do the 500 miles to Kyoto and Mount Fuji sped past in minutes. Given that it took 30 minutes to crawl out of Tokyo, the speed these things must get up to on the fast stretches to make that kind of speed is impressive. Particularly given they‘re nearly forty years old now.

We only had a day in Kyoto so had to choose just two of the city’s cultural highlights to give us a chance of seeing anything - we settled on Japan’s oldest zen garden and the Golden Pavillion.
It was a shame to have to restrict ourselves, but the two stops were definitely worth the trip.

The zen garden was just delightful. Set in a larger ornamental garden complex we spent a couple of hours wandering around the place enjoying the blossom.

The garden itself was tiny really, but simply beautiful. Or rather beautifully simple.

The Golden Pavilion was very different, the crowds were like a constant conveyor belt that were caught up on going round the lake and there was no time for quiet contemplation. The building itself was undeniably beautiful though, it was just a shame to realise that it wasn’t original. Apparently the real thing burnt down in the 1950s.

Still, it gave Dad the chance to have a bong on the temple bell.

The Shinkansen had us back in Tokyo before nine and we retired absolutely shattered and vowing not to look at another shrine, temple or palace the next day.

We set off the next day with the best of intentions and decided to take the weight of our by now aching limbs by catching the boat from near our hotel up the river to Asakusa. And very pleasant and relaxing it was too.

If it’s wrong to eat ice cream at 11 in the morning then Dad didn’t care - he was on holiday.

Unfortunately Asakusa is the neighbourhood containing Tokyo’s most famous shrine and we just couldn’t help ourselves. Another beautiful shrine. Bugger.

Inside they had a fortune telling machine.

You put your ‘donation’ to the shrine into the slot, shook the silver cylinder and it delivered a thin stick out of a tiny hole in its lid. Each stick was inscribed with characters we presumed were numbers and each character related to one of the tiny drawers in the cabinet. In each drawer was your fortune on a piece of paper and you picked out the one your stick indicated.
Mine was ‘The Best Luck’ apparently. Number 99.

On the back of the sheet was a translation:
“The sun is shining so brightly that you will get the blessing of the heaven.
The moon is shining clearly again after a cloud passes.
You may have rare treasure.
Gaining fame, you can meet all your wishes.”

“Your wish will be realised. The sick person will get well. The lost article will be found. The person you are waiting for will come. It is good to make a trip. Marriage and employment are both good.”

I know it’s silly, but it felt good to have got that particular one of the hundred different fortunes in the chest (and I know they were all different as Dad’s said something else). Apt somehow. I’m not particularly religious, but I will be keeping the fortune with me as I travel from now on.

Anyway, enough of that.

Frustrated at our inability to avoid shrines we looked on the map for a park we could go and have a coffee in and watch the world go by. So we trained it over to another neighbourhood - Hirajuku. And, yes there’s a park in Hirajuku, and a café, but guess what there also is? Another “&%$£ing shrine” as it became known.

Unfortunately we couldn‘t help ourselves and I‘m glad we didn‘t - it was probably the best of the lot. It was Shinto rather than Buddhist and had a much calmer feel about it. The guidebook said Shinto shrines were much more in tune with their surroundings and it was true. We cleansed ourselves according to the instructions (I thought it only respectful after my ‘good fortune‘) and explored the place. It was simple, quiet, uncrowded and very beautiful.

On Mum and Dad’s final day we forced ourselves to take it easy. We made a leisurely trip to the famous Ginza shopping district.

And then mooched around the hotel before heading back to Ginza in the evening for a drink and dinner.

(I think this picture has to be called "Lost in Translation"!)

It was quite bizarre having a beer in a Victorian pub in Tokyo, but it was a surprisingly authentic reproduction and we enjoyed a couple of beers there before heading to a sushi restaurant for our final dinner together.

It was at this restaurant that Dad uttered a sentence I never thought I’d hear: “The seaweed really brings out the taste of the sea.” I think he was hooked.

Mum didn’t seem quite as convinced, but we polished off six plates each. Good stuff this raw fish.
That evening we said goodbye as Mum and Dad were off early in the morning and I didn’t have to check out until 11am. The week had been so hectic and we’d done so much it didn’t seem real they were leaving. I said goodbye and went upstairs as though I’d see them the following morning like I had every morning for the last week.

But I wasn’t going to, it was going to be another six months. It was so good to see them and we’d had a wonderfully busy time together, but my final day in Tokyo without them was spent in the nearby gardens in quiet contemplation.