The Himedomachi Cycling Club

I went looking for Booth’s old houses. I rode so slowly that grandmothers on their Baba Chari’s overtook me. Ribena emitted a sharp, “Hah’” and refused to talk to me. We crossed the Bandai Bridge and I thought about the earthquake that couldn’t destroy it. Across the river the Hotel Okura Niigata the colour of vanilla acted like a box-shaped vanguard for the rows of high rises behind it. “I’ll never see them in this,” I thought. There was no way to see round them, so I headed for the Former Ozawa Residence, a merchant’s house from the Edo era figuring that maybe they’d be there.

They weren’t. Everything was plastic moulded and modern, or concrete built and modern, or just plain ugly. I hadn’t planned to visit the Residence but they had bicycle parking and I had two hours to kill so I locked Ribena up outside and went in.

It is a typical house of the era with tatami rooms and wooden walls and earthy colours. I was struck by one piece of calligraphy that read, according to the guidebook, “A single woven thread binds my way.”

When I booked my train tickets last night I had performed a small act of kindness for an elderly man in the queue behind me. Knowing that my enquiry would take some time and in light of his age, I had ushered him in front of me. As I was walking through the gardens I stepped aside for an elderly man so that he could take the path. He pushed his mask down in astonishment.

“Were you at Niigata station last night?”

“I was.”

“I’m the man you gave up your place for!”

We both laughed at the coincidence, not quite able to believe it.

“Do you like historical places?”

“I do when I have time,” I replied. “I went to the samurai houses in Kakunodate the other day.”

“I’m retired and my interest, my job if you like, is to visit all the historical towns in Japan. There are 130 of them.”

He told me where he had been recently, visiting a site which had something to do with the Boshin War. We parted ways with a spring on our steps.

I packed Ribena up for her travels on a park outside the station in front of an audience of about 50 OAPs. I got lost inside, an awful feeling. Everyone else seems to know where they are going and the signposts don’t seem to help.

I took a local train to Joetsu-Myoko, then a Shinkansen to Awara-Onsen. I easily found room for Ribena in the local train. On the Shinkansen the space for bikes was taken by luggage (the luggage rack was empty.) I tried to manoeuvre her into a smaller space. A foreigner looked up from his phone and started clucking. I wanted to pluck every one of his ruffled feathers. In the end Ribena and I stood in a corridor and watched the houses cluster closer and closer together.

When we arrived at Awara I held the elevator door open for an elderly woman and we rode it down a floor together. I got slightly lost looking for the next elevator. I found the elderly woman there telling her daughter how a kind gaijin had helped her in the elevator.

I’m staying in a place called Shared Zen House in Eiheiji (Temple of Eternal Peace). I had expected the people of Fukui to be as rude as Alan Booth described, but so far I’ve found them to be charming and funny. The only rude person is the other guest, a Japanese man with a band who the farmer in Aomori would describe as, “picky.”

Tomorrow I’m cycling to the temple. If I get there at 10am I can take part in a zen meditation session. I’ll do it if I’m not gone by then. I’ve got a 100 kilometre ride and don’t think I’ll be hanging around. A shame not to though…