The Himedomachi Cycling Club

We went down to breakfast at 6.45 when the restaurant opened and joined the back of a very long queue. The Japanese tend to eat early and get up early, something to do with the fact that in summer and winter they don’t change their clocks. The sun rises at 4.30am and by 19.00 it’s dark, so early mornings seem to make sense. We saw Jared’s Zen priest friend from the previous evening with his attractive wife.

Just across the road from the hotel was the sign for the next prefecture, Akita, and I was cycling underneath it by 08.00 and tackling the Hakka pass. The sun was out and the climb never got much beyond 8%. My Garmin couldn’t find any satellites, but it seemed a pretty straight shot through to the Oyu Stone Circle so I wasn’t too bothered.

The Pass took me under the first of many tunnels. These were open on one side with girders holding up the roof and were constructed to keep falling rocks out of the road and presumably off our heads. At the top of the pass there was an observatory where you could look over the lake, calm now after the wind storm.

Akita in spring is a lovely place to cycle through with the rice plants already in the fields, its many rivers that flank the roads and its gentle woods. I sped down the other side of the pass, almost keeping pace with the slower moving traffic.

I saw a bear in a river. It was about 200 metres from me, standing in a shallow river below the road, silhouetted against the sparkling water. A black road sign bear come perfectly to life looking just like the drawing. Not a walrus. Not a rusted barrel. The road curved away from the river and it was gone.

I followed the 282 to the outskirts of Kazuno, then cycled over a small rise with a magnificent view and down towards the Circle.

The Circle now has a visitor centre and Maps told me that Jared was already inside, so I parked my bike, put the electronics in my pocket, stuffed my gloves on top of my bear spray and stripped inside. I was greeted by a young lady wearing a pair of purple pumps and with matching purple pigtails.

“Hello! Hello! Welcome! Welcome!”

She reminded me of an over excited TV show presenter.

“Is there another foreigner here?” I said.

Jared appeared from the interpretive centre where he had paid 380 yen to take refuge.

“They made me weave.”

He was wearing white gloves.

“Today is a special event!” the girl enthused.

“Why are you wearing gloves?” I asked Jared.

“I don’t know.”

We were ushered onto the back of a tour party that consisted of a mother and her daughter, two women of our age, obviously friends, two women in hi-vis jackets and a woman in a grey boiler suit wearing a mask and holding something in her hand which I didn’t recognise. I was handed a pair of white gloves that didn’t fit and we crossed the road into a field where there were trees and a few stones dotted about.

I was still figuring out what was going on. Maybe it was a guided tour of the stones and the gloves were because we were going to touch them.

We stopped beside a white farmers truck and the lady in the boiler suit began giving us instructions, most of which I couldn’t follow. Something about the sasaki trees that we were standing beside. She reached into the truck and handed us handsaws and and secateurs. Then, without any ceremony at all, she unfolded the mysterious object in her hand, it became a helmet, stuck it on her head, climbed a tree and began sawing at a branch, her eyes determined where we could see them above her mask.

She got that branch down in a couple of minutes, much to our wonderment. We copied the others as they fell on it, sawing it into metre long sections and snipping off the leaves. One section was particularly thick and we formed an audience while Jared sawed through it.

“Don’t worry,” I reassured everyone. “He’s a Canadian. He knows what he’s doing.”

(Jared responding to sarky comments thrown from the sidelines)

e still had no idea what was going on. It was like being on the JET Programme again. Unclear instructions, enthusiastic Japanese people, lots of goodwill. Maybe, I thought, we’ll take the wood to the stones and make sure kind of offering?

We trooped back to the visitor’s centre where we were kindly instructed to watch a film on the stone circles, a film so boring that even the Japanese people wandered away from it.

The next step in whatever event we were taking part in happened just outside. The boiler suited lady demonstrated how to peel off the bark of the wood we had collected and tie it into a bundle. There was a lot of wood to get to, maybe forty sticks. Jared and I exchanged, “What the – is going on?” looks.

“Are you enjoying this?”

“Loving it. You?”

“Same. It’s like being a JET again.”

So we set to stripping wood with box cutters and tying it up. The ladies in the hi-vis jackets took it inside and started boiling it. I followed one of them in. Painting stations had been set up on long tables. I told Jared.

“I think this is going to be a very long process.”

He’d already found the end product in the back of the van, carefully weaved baskets and mats. The boiler suited woman was hanging the stripped and boiled bark up to dry. There was no way we were going to stay for the rest.

They seemed to understand when we made our excuses. Were we ok if they put our photos on the website? That would be fine.

Jared jumped in the car and I got on my bike. It was past lunchtime and there was a tonkatsu restaurant in town that needed our patronage. Should we have pressed on without stopping? I don’t think so. I read somewhere that every trip picks up its own rhythm, write independently of the plan you wish to impose on it and I felt we had respected that.

In the restaurant – essentially a long bar where the patrons eat – Jared ordered as soon as he walked in.

“Tonkatsu Curry.”

“And you?”

“I’ll have a look at the menu.”

She asked me again a few minutes later.

“What’s your specialty?” I asked.

“Tonkatsu curry.” Her eyes laughed above her mask.

“Then two of those then.”

“What do you want to do?” Jared asked when we’d finished.

“Let’s just drive,” I said, so we drove into the hills and down through the dams where people were stopping to take photos. I felt like a fraud for taking the easy way, and yet it was the good decision. We chatted like old friends do, laughing over old jokes, catching up with new things, sharing everything.

We made it down to Towaza, drove it’s northern shore, found a restaurant with an empty sun deck where we drank ice coffee and looked over the lake.

A few kilometres down the road Jared slowed the car.

“That shouldn’t be down there.”

A silver sedan sat in a rice paddy, its front wing crumpled and a man was wandering about on the road. He’d clearly driven his car off the road where it had dropped 2-3 metres into the field.

I stepped out to talk to him. He was crying, dazed, in shock.

“Are you ok? Are you injured?”

He looked fine, I was just asking because I didn’t know what else to say. He was wearing a fisherman’s jacket, all pockets and gadgets.

“I just took a drink of juice and went off the road.”

It was amazing that there seemed to be so little damage to the car, that it was still on its wheels and not on its roof, that he was even walking about.

“Do you need anything? Can I get you anything?”

“I have someone coming in thirty minutes.”

I left him to it, although later Jared and I thought we should have at least stopped at the fire station we passed shortly afterwards. I guess I always think that Japanese people know more than me and that, in general, would prefer to be left to their own affairs and not have some foreigner interfere. Nonetheless, we should have stopped and told someone.

When we arrived at the farm where we are staying, the lady was waiting for us outside, chuckling into her phone. We loved her the minute we saw her in her neckerchief and her wellies.

She showed us around, told us they grew mainly spinach and taro, that it was a hard life, that she was born in Matsuba and what time would be like supper, 6?

Supper was a dozen tiny dishes. The onions came from a friend of hers and were served battered in tempura and stewed in foil. Something like an asparagus she had foraged herself in the forest and seared to perfection. Every dish simple yet pregnant with flavour. She said she preferred foreign guests to Japanese because Japanese guests were picky – they wanted onsens and not quiet – whereas foreigners loved the food and the quiet.

It was fully dusk when we’d finished and yet she and her parents were still working around the greenhouses. We retired to our room and listened to a million frogs croak in the paddies.

A poet friend of mine called Chris Perry sent me a poem inspired by my travels called On Yet Bike, Son. I find this incredibly touching and have pasted the poem below. You can read all of his amazing poetry here.

While I sleep you push
Your pedals up and down
Round and round
Joining memory’s dots
Story lines, itinerary stops
Booth without an agenda
Wouldn’t miss the chance
To hit a bar on his wanders
While Wake takes an aesthete’s route
Alert to bears, earthquakes, cars
Lorries, buses, ferries, trains
Painfully aware, at fifty
He’s living again