Adventures with Tye!: Day 6. Road trip from Tokyo to Mie.

5/4/2017

The next morning we woke up and got ready for our next day of adventures. The house was already alive and bustling about the kitchen making breakfast. They served us granola, yogurt and oranges. It was good.

We all socialized in the morning and started talking about what we were interested in and where we were going on our vacation. They told us about their lives doing workshops and traveling. Courtney and I told them how we were interested in history, religion and mythology; this lead to us talking about how we were interested in the traditional Japanese stories of yokai. One of the men of the house knew a fair amount about yokai, more than I have heard from any other native Japanese person. He was really fun to talk to.

The little girl was awake and genki as fuck! She had this toy cow and she was having so much fun riding it and throwing it around. She really liked eating the oranges and she was so cute!
After we finished eating breakfast we finished getting ready and getting our stuff together for our next leg of the trip, the long drive to Mie Prefecture. We loaded up the car and said our goodbyes to our amazing host family! If I am ever in need of lodging near Tokyo again, I will definitely look these guys up.

We had one last photo shoot with the family before we left!

This is my "Concentrating really hard on understanding Japanese" face.

Lovely flowers in the region.

Before we left the town we stopped at a shrine nearby, the Miyao shrine. It was a short hike up a hill and a short distance over a flattened area. The shrine itself was pretty simple, but it had some nice carvings of komainu and dragons across the entrance.

The shrine itself was open and had slippers so you could go in. I walked around for a minute, and I took these pictures of these pictures and writing on the ceiling squares. It was pretty cool.

From here we got back in the car and drove towards our next stop Aokigahara.

But we had to drive for a few hours before we got anywhere close. But we did get to drive up through the mountains on the west side of Tokyo Prefecture. The roads were so tiny and so steep! It made me nervous at many parts to drive up these hills. These roads also doubled as hiking trails for many trails on these mountains. So I had to share these tiny roads with pedestrians. It was nerve-wracking at many times!

When we got to the top ridge/crest of these mountains we could see Mt. Fuji in the distance with great expanses of forest spread beneath us. It was amazing!

Mt. Fuji is surrounded by clouds most of the time, so we had a lucky day to get this view!

Even from the top of this mountain, we still had a long way to go until we reached Aokigahara. But there were beautiful sights all along they way!

Tea fields on a hillside.

Tea fields.

A rare time the mountain was not surrounded by clouds.

Fuji-Q Highland! An amusement park at the base of Mt. Fuji. It is still in operation.

I thought this store was so amusing.

Aokigahara is also known as the “Suicide Forest.” It is a pretty famous place for Japanese people to go commit suicide. It is also well known for three caves that are popular for spelunkers and some good (or mediocre, depending on who you talk to) hiking. We didn’t have enough time to go hiking through the forest, but I wanted to see it all the same, so my plan was to just drive through the forest on our way to Mie.

I feel like kind of an idiot. I didn’t really expect Aokigahara to be crowded because it is not really a destination unless you are into hiking or spelunking. So while I thought it would be more busy than usual (because it was Golden Week, a week that has three holidays in a row plus the weekend, potentially) but probably not the most happening spot. Boy was I wrong!  It was crazy busy, the roads around and through Aokigahara were packed with cars. I didn’t understand why, but later I found out that there was some festival going on where you can go see some purple flower that was blooming that week. So it makes sense now, but I didn’t know this at the time. As a result, we were unable to pull over and check out the forest even for a short period of time. So we just crawled through gridlock traffic around Mt. Fuji for a couple of hours.

We still got to see parts of the forest from the road Tye and Courtney were able to see more than I was, because they were the passengers and I was driving, and they were able to take a few cool pictures. But I sadly had to watch the road for the most part. A little disappointing, but maybe I’ll have the chance to go back someday.

Strangely enough, when the scenery of the forest was interesting that was when traffic would start moving. When the scenery became more bland, that was when we stopped. It was frustrating but a few times I got to see interesting scenery. My favorite part was looking at the ground of Aokigahara.

The ground is amazingly rocky and crawling with roots. It is very unstable. This is definitely a place you don’t want to go at night or when it starts getting dark. The forest is also dense and confusing. It is well known that even experienced hikers get lost easily in the forest. And many people say the forest feels dark and creepy even in the middle of the day. Someday I would like to go back and check it out.

A close up of the volcanic rock that makes up the terrain.

When we escaped the bumper-to-bumper traffic around Mt. Fuji we were off again heading south. We hopped on the expressway and rode for many hours occasionally stopping for food and gas.

On the other side of the mountain.

When we escaped the forest the mountain was once again surrounded by clouds.

Here you can see the moon above Mt. Fuji.

From here on out we made our way towards Mie. More beautiful views were all around. There were a lot of cities and waterscapes to be seen, but sadly it was hard to get good pictures in the car. The highways in this area also have a high walls that make looking out difficult.

Finally we made our way to Mie to the cities of Ise and Toba where we were able to juuuuust make it to our final destination before the sun set. These would be the Meotoiwa rocks or “Married Rocks” off the coast of Toba. There are two large rocks sticking out of the water right off the coast. They are connected with a large holy straw rope that weighs over a ton. It needs to be replaced every six months. At the top of the larger rock, there is a small torii gate.

The two rocks are meant to symbolize the two creator gods Izanagi and Izanami. Izanagi is the creator god and he is represented by the larger rock and Izanami is the creator goddess and is represented by the smaller rock.

The creation story for Japan is that one day Izanagi and Izanami were hanging out over the expansive waters over the world. Izanagi decided to dip his sword into the watery depths. When he pulled his sword out of the water the water on the tip of his sword dripped onto the surface of the water and the Japanese islands were created. I’ll leave it to your imagination the real meaning of this creation story.

There is a shrine on the shore called Futamiokitama Shrine. It is large and has spacious areas for people to go inside, sit down and pray to the Shinto gods. Outside there are purification fountains, like all shrines and temples, but this one has lots of frog statues and sculptures dotted around the grounds, but especially in the purification fountain.

There were a couple smaller shrines around the main shrine. One was in the ground under some rocks. There was a passageway leading into the ground where you could see a shrine and torii gate illuminated from the depths. It was pretty cool. There were some straw wheels placed in front of the shrine and I figured you probably threw them into the hole somehow, so when a couple came to pray at this particular shrine I watched them to see how they used the straw wheels. They didn’t use them however, and so their use is still a mystery to me.

The other shrine on a path behind the first it was pretty and new. It had komainu in the front that had painted mouths and eyes, so they looked pretty neat.

After that we walked down to a beach near the shrines. It was just full of shell fragments. I didn’t see many whole shells. I went down to touch the water and Courtney and I got up on a rock on the beach and stated looking at the sea life that was attached to the rocks. There were a few brown creatures that looked like butt holes and they puckered up when poked. It was actually pretty neat!

After we were done checking out the beach we drove from Tobu to Owase where my friend lives. Courtney was still pretty awake when we arrived, but I was so tired that I just crashed. I had some sleep to catch up on if I was going to drive again.