Memoirs of a Kamikaze: The Story of One Who Survived

I thought I knew, in a general sense, who the Kamikaze pilots were. This tiny slice of my worldview went up in flames when I saw Memoirs of a Kamikaze on the shelf at the main library in Matsumoto, Japan.

On the cover was an image that didn’t fit at all my idea of what a kamikaze fighter would look like. He was just a kid; a child, dressed up like a World War II pilot for Halloween. He was probably too young to get a driver’s license.

This was not the face of a suicide bomber. This was a kid trying to figure out where he was and how he got there, and what the hell was going to happen to him.

His name is Kazuo Odachi. He joined the Imperial Japanese Navy at 16 as a pilot trainee. His story is worth telling.

On Getting Off To a Good Start

It's a commonly-heard sentiment. "Let's get off to a good start." On this project. This assignment. In this game. Monday morning. Hit the ground running and all that.

The senitment grows louder, becomes more encompassing as December comes to a close and January enters with all the significance we decide to throw at it. But what does getting the New Year off to a good start mean?

Toasting the past year's successes and good times? Sure.

Reflecting on failures and disappointments? Yep.

Setting new goals? You bet.

For many of us it's all of these things. For me it's also a time to try to step away from these same things.

So I'm glad my wife grew up in the countryside.

Choosing a Japanese Name: The First Word in a Child's Life Story

A couple of years ago I mused out loud about how I thought my son's name fit him perfectly. Written 誠士 in Japanese, it means “sincere gentleman”.

Note that this does not necessarily mean “cordial”. Or “gracious”. Or “bothers to say good morning”.

My wife and I struggled for months to come up with a name for him. I was leaning toward ‘Kai’ which, written as 海, means ocean. I kind of liked the meaning. I thought maybe it would plant a love in him for the great outdoors. Mostly though I just liked the way it sounded.

My wife didn’t like it any of it.

We eventually settled on the phonetic version of his name. From there we had to navigate the deeply deliberative process of deciding which characters to use.

2020 Olympic Torch Relay: Japan Brings Multiple Torches, Forgets to Bring the Olympic Spirit

 

I’m the kind of dad who will take the family on a month-long road trip and then ruin it with a bunch of rules like “No screaming back there!” (because I don’t want to crash); “The driver picks the music!” (because I don’t want to go insane); and “Hey, no junk food before lunch!” (unless you give half to the driver).

But even up in Akita, in Japan’s pretty-far north, the summer days can be blistering hot by 11am. And after a couple hours cramped in the back seat with no escape from dad’s previous-century music, my kids were likely to start screaming at each other.

I pulled into a convenience store parking lot and said “Nobody wants ice-cream, right?” or something equally corny. The kids exploded out of the car and ran for the air conditioning and the ice-cream coolers. My wife almost beat them there. I couldn’t remember ever seeing her run so fast.

I stayed outside, absorbed in the poster in the window.

Yakushima Island: A Voyage of Choices & Luck

What a quirk of human nature that we dream of faraway places yet fail to go out and take in parts of the world closest to us. I'm from New Jersey. Not a big place in relative terms. Yet in the course of traveling a good bit of the world there remains plenty for me to explore in my own home state.

I'm similarly guilty regarding my eight years in Washington, DC and my subsequent five years in Colorado. Not that I didn't get out. It was just that when it came time to leave I felt like I still had unfinished business.

Things changed in 2001. I signed up for a charity bike ride in Alaska and, remembering I had no bike, bought one. At the end of the ride I shipped that bike to Fukushima, Japan. I met up with it a few weeks later in this brand new home of mine and immediately set out to see every town, mountain and river on the map of Japan hanging on the western wall of my shoebox apartment.

Fast forward to 2015: in a fortuitous turn of events I snagged a side gig as a tour guide, leading groups of Slovenians by train and bus from Nagasaki to Tokyo and a dozen cities in between. The next year, in  a sleepy bed and breakfast at the bottom of the Izu Peninsula I picked up a local magazine and muddled through an article about a guy in the area who ran a cycling tour operation. Back home I spent an hour and a half pecking out an email in Japanese, asking him if he was looking for extra hands.

He was.

Since then I've had opportunity to go on a dozen cycling tours through the beautiful, scarcely-traveled Japanese countryside and on some of the archipelago's furthest-flung islands, including the one called Yakushima.

Luck comes in the course of the choices we make.

In 2004 I was considering spending my two-week winter vacation cycling to Yakushima from my place in Osaka. The trip would have involved several ferries and, now that I think about it, considerably more than two weeks. For better or for worse, I opted instead to go back to Fukushima and ask my girlfriend's father for his permission to marry his daughter.

She would, a few years later, introduce me to a Slovenian guy who owned a tour guide company.

Guiding with that gent brought me to Yakushima in two ways. The experience I gained with him got me the cycling tour gig, through which I've been able to go to Yakushima three times on two different tours. Tasked with booking hotels for our Slovenian guests, I became friends with some hotel owners who invited me to spend this past winter break working at their recently-acquired hotel on Yakushima.

Cycling tours, I have to say, are infinitely more fun than working in a hotel.

I'm sure I'd still be dreaming of Yakushima if it weren't for the work that fell into my lap. Same with Rishiri Island way up north, part of a cycling tour of Hokkaido. Most visitors to Japan don't make it to the far ends of the country. Heck, most Japanese never see these places.

Moving to Japan back in 2001 was a conscious decision. But even that was helped along by my luck in finding, quite accidentally, an Internet ad for a job teaching English in Japan - a discovery I would not have made if the poor customer service rep on the other end of the line hadn't given into my pleadings for one more free trial month of dial-up AOL.

Not knowing what life in Japan would bring only added to the allure of the place. Not knowing how long I'd be sticking around, I hit the road as soon as I'd put my bike back together.

We make our choices. Then we do our best with what they bring.

The picture at the top of this post was taken from the lobby of the Yakushima hotel where I worked. The picture below shows the incongruous snows of sub-tropical Yakushima and 60-meter Senpiro Falls. Note that sixty meters is about two hundred feet, the approximate height of a 20-story building.

Soji-ji Soin: Buddhism in the Noto Boondocks

The Noto Peninsula looks like a hitchhiker’s thumb that has been run over a couple of times. Hilly in the middle and lined with some of the country’s most varied and alluring coastline, this quiet, crooked, 75-mile spit of land sticking out into the Sea of Japan is littered with treasures that demand time and effort if they are to be enjoyed.

One of these treasures is Soji-ji Soin, a Zen Buddhist temple born from pursuits of benevolence, raised in juvenile conflict, and now standing with long-time rival Eihei-ji at the center of the largest school of Zen Buddhism in Japan.

The Costs and Rewards of Being Nice

In 683 a fifteen-year-old boy named Gyōki traveled from his home in the Kawachi Province (near present-day Osaka) to Nara’s Asuka-dera, one of Japan’s oldest temples, to begin his life as a monk. Twenty years later he returned home to share the teachings of Buddhism while actively practicing what he preached: with the help of an army of volunteers, Gyōki built nearly fifty Buddhist monasteries and nunneries that doubled as hospitals for the poor.

From there Gyōki and his followers began roaming the countryside, bringing Buddhism to people who had only ever known Shinto; building more temples (which also served as community centers); and spearheading public works projects (irrigation systems were his thing).

Sounds like a great guy to have around – unless you are the government and can’t handle monks doing anything outside the walls of their monasteries because hey that is against the law and besides who wants robed men freely walking the city streets being nice to people without authorization?

'Kyo-zo' - The Sutra Depository

Gyōki bypassed the government's childishness by going out and raising hell wherever he pleased as an unofficial, private monk. This bent the local officials all out of shape, raising cries of damnation for him not being registered as a Buddhist priest on some list at some sham bureaucratic entity called the Office of Priestly Affairs.

Power to the people, Gyōki beat the beat-down thanks to his popularity among the commoners not to mention his skill in developing public works. (Then, as now, it seems, citizens were only as good as their usefulness to the government.)

The 'San-mon' Temple Gate

          

Among the temples Gyoki built was Morooka-dera, a Shingon Buddhist temple that actually sat on the grounds of a Shinto shrine, Morooka Hiko Jinja. Once called Tetsukawa-jinja, Morooka Hiko Jinja sat way out in the sticks, up where the thumb of Noto bends east.

Over the years Morooka-dera grew, and by the end of the 13th Century it had built up enough mojo to afford a full-time priest and a master ajari whose task it was to teach students the Way of Furthering the Mojo.

In 1321 the shrine was moved a couple of kilometers west, noticeably closer to the beach. The ajari at the time was a priest (and, rumor has it, an avid surfer) named Joken. So excited was he to live closer to the break that when he moved to the shrine's new digs he forgot all about Morooka-dera, leaving it behind for a monk named Keizan Jōkin to deal with. Upon inheriting Morooka-dera, Keizan turned it into a Soto Zen temple, renaming it Shogakuzan Soji-ji.

In 1322 Emperor Go-Daigo, in all his Imperial magnanimity, bestowed upon Soji-ji the honorary title of chokuganjo, meaning a temple built at the request of the emperor – which, according the math, is bullshit.

The Dento-in, the most sacred building of Soji-ji, preserves the spirit of Keizan.

The Creation of a Soto Zen Master

Keizan Jōkin was, according to records, born in 1268, exactly six hundred years after Gyoki. Unlike Gyoki, Keizan didn’t wait until his teenage years to get his Buddhist mojo on. How could he? First of all, his mother Ekan was the founder and abbess of Jōju-ji, a temple of Soto Zen, a school of Buddhism derived from teachings brought to Japan from China by a monk named Dōgen. She was an active proponent of teaching Buddhism to women, and as such was also a fan of Kannon, the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy.

Busy as Ekan was, founding Jōju-ji and another temple, Hōō-ji, it fell to Grandma Myōchi to take care of Keizan during his youngest years. Like Ekan, Myōchi was hooked on Soto Zen. This one-two punch of devout Buddhist influence led Keizan to quickly embark on his own road to monkhood, entering the temple of Eihei-ji at the grizzled old age of eight.

The aforementioned Dōgen had traveled to China in search of a better brand of Buddhism, and found it in a man named Rujing. Dōgen returned to Japan around 1227 and tried to assimilate what he learned in China into the current Buddhist teachings. Kyoto, however, was at the time overrun by holy robes entrenched in their Tendai school of Buddhism, and Dōgen was less than welcome to show up and tell everyone to start practicing zazen.

After a time he left, and in 1244 established Eihei-ji temple in the Echizen countryside near present-day Fukui. Eihei-ji would thus become the head temple of the new and growing Soto school of Zen.

The Butsu-den, where the Buddhist deity Shakamuni-Nyorai is enshrined.

But not for long. Keizan had already founded another Soto temple, Yoko-ji, and the priests there were basically fighting the priests of Soji-ji for spiritual preeminence. (Fighting may not be the right word. I can’t imagine a bunch of bald men in flowing robes brawling.) (Actually yes I can. It’s kind of funny.)

Over time Soji-ji won out, having grown its influence through the monks’ practice of traveling the countryside and bringing small village temples from (usually) Shingon and Tendai over to the Soto mojo, much like Gyoki did six centuries prior.

Meanwhile Soji-ji was also competing with Eihei-ji, which perhaps rightfully considered itself the true head of Soto Zen since it was established by Dōgen, father of the Soto school. But the monks of Eihei-ji carried out their teaching of and instruction in Buddhism strictly within the confines of their temple. Once again, with Keizan's priests out there pounding the dirt paths of the surrounding countryside, Soji-ji’s mojo spread further across the region.

Dōgen’s death in 1253 led to infighting over who should assume abbotship (i.e. control) of Eihei-ji. The pillow fights went on for two centuries until 1468 (exactly eight hundred years after Gyoki’s birth, and exactly two hundred years after Keizan’s) when the lineage of Keizan’s Soji-ji took over Eihei-ji. This would make Soji-ji the Grand Poobah of the thousands of Soto Zen temples now spread throughout Japan.

By the end of the 16^th Century Soji-ji was officially recognized by the Imperial Court as Japan's head Soto Zen Buddhist temple. Yet the slap fights between Soji-ji and Eihei-ji would continue, until the Meiji Restoration (and the end of meaningful imperial influence) brought a sort of truce. It was agreed, at least on paper, that Soto Zen Buddhism would follow the maxims of Dōgen and the inspiration of Keizan, and Soji-ji and Eihei-ji would stand as equals at the head of what had become Japan's largest school of Buddhism.

Soji-ji was completely destroyed by fire in 1898. The temple was rebuilt in 1911 in Tsurumi, Yokohama, to bring more of that Soto mojo to eastern Japan. The Soji-ji here in Noto remains a training ground for Soto monks, and is called Soji-ji Soin, the ‘father’ temple.

For all its history and aesthetic allure, Soji-ji Soin rarely makes it onto anyone's list of must-see places. Must have something to do with its location out in the boondocks of Noto. But as a part of an exploratory expedition around the peninsula it's worth seeking out.

One Naughty Ogre, One Naughty Dance, & Eight Million Gods: Takachiho Gorge, Miyazaki, Japan

Japan's long volcanic history has produced scenery of immeasurable fascination. Some of the country’s most visible, stunning and active geological sites can be found on Kyushu, the furthest southwest of Japan’s four main islands.

Mt. Aso, sitting a bit north of the center of the island, has by all evidence blown its massive top four times over the last 270,000 years, resulting in a caldera 25 kilometers long and 18 kilometers wide. Aso-san thus stands as Japan’s second biggest, the world’s second biggest active, and the world’s largest inhabited caldera.

Mt. Aso, smoking in the caldera.

While belching millions of tons of hot nasty stuff into the air over the eons, some of it landing a hundred miles away, Mt. Aso has covered the surrounding landscape with millions more tons of lava which, as it cooled, formed the basalt columns and the wrinkled layers of rock seen all along the Takachiho Gorge.

It took eons, but the Gokase River has managed to create a kilometer-long place of playful geological intrigue (and, in turn, polite pockets of Japanese tourism).

I’ve read there’s a trail, some twelve kilometers long, that runs from the visitor center in the town of Takachiho, past the below-mentioned Takachiho Shrine, along the gorge and into the nearby hills to another shrine before winding back toward town where you will find plenty of encouragement in spending your yen to rehabilitate your parched, famished, wobbly-legged carcass.

Japan's Hikone Castle: A National Treasure You Can Drive Into

Hikone Castle & the Old Guard 

Japan used to have lots of castles. Several thousand of them, actually. Many were built in the 15th and 16th Centuries during Japan’s Sengoku-jidai – the 150 years or so when everyone was fighting with everyone over land and rice and who got to use what title.

The vast majority of those castles are gone, destroyed during the fighting, lost to natural disaster (fire and earthquake being the usual suspects), or purposefully demolished when, with the onset of the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan decided they didn’t want to see any more castles (or use any more of those titles).

Today there are only about 50 castles in Japan. Most of those are either reconstructions or mere ruins. Only a dozen of Japan’s extant castles are originals, meaning they are the real thing, built when the Japanese were all fighting to keep each other off their land and their precious little titles.

Of these twelve still-standing castles, only four – Himeji, Matsumoto, Inuyama and Hikone – are on Japan’s list of Registered National Treasures.

Put another way, eight of Japan’s 400-year-old castles are not officially treasured. Meanwhile parents in the US are throwing their kids elaborate parties for making it to sixteen.

This Scheming World: Money and the Masses in 17th Century Japan

Short Story Titles from This Scheming World

I recently read a book. I should have been working but someone once said great writers are proficient readers. If I don’t make rent this month I blame the scoundrel who said that.

Now finished with the book, I’m still not finished with my work but I’m going to write about the book.

Thank you for reading. You are justifying my not working.

I Had No Idea Who Saikaku Ihara Was. I Just Liked the Title.

Three words – This Scheming World – describe perfectly the stories Ihara has to tell. Savvy marketing too, for a guy from the 17th Century. The connotations certainly compelled me to pick up the book. (Let's ignore the possible psychological machinations involved.)

Ihara has been called “the first spokesman for the Japanese masses.” Murasaki Shikibu wrote the Tale of Genji, the world’s oldest novel, in the late 10th Century. It was, in the words of Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata, “the highest pinnacle of Japanese literature.” From then on down through Japan’s Warring States Period, when the lords and samurai ruled the land, the printed word was limited to the realm of the country’s nobility.

This changed at the beginning of the 17th Century, with the onset of the relative peace of the Edo Era. No longer were the nobility lords over all; not in the sense they were before, because the economy was becoming heavily reliant on the merchant class. You wanted something, you had to buy it, no one cared who your father once was. How this translated into a sudden wave of interest in literature among the commoners I don’t know, but it did.

Koya-san 2018: Train Schedules, Trail Maps & the Company You Keep

My second trip to Koya-san came in 2018, a mere fourteen years and a few months after my first. And this time, everything was different. I wasn’t with anyone named Amos. I had a smartphone instead of a disposable Fuji-film camera. I would not be camping, illegally or otherwise. And instead of hiking part of the way I’d be taking the train all the way to the top.

When did life become so boring?

This wasn’t a trip, exactly. It was a last-minute reconnaissance mission. And I had only so much time to get up the mountain, get acquainted with Koya-san (the part I missed my first time here), and get back down the mountain and out to Kansai International Airport south of Osaka where I’d meet up with a group of thirteen Slovenian women.

Like most sacred and serene places that have turned into tourist circuses, Koya-san has been made extremely easy to reach and then navigate. I could have skipped this recon mission and blindly led my group around Koya-san’s East Side, including the sprawling crown jewel of Oku-no-in, without looking stupid. I like to avoid looking stupid whenever I can though, so back up into the Wakayama mountains I went.

All the ins and outs of getting to Koya-san can easily be found online so I won’t bother - though I will offer a couple of tips I haven’t seen anywhere else. One, transfer to the Nankai Line at Namba Station. It may look like you can save a bit of time catching the Hashimoto-bound train with a transfer at Shin-Imamiya but ‘Shin-Imamiya’ is actually a code word in the passenger train industry. It means ‘hell’.

If none of this makes sense to you, that’s fine.

But if you ever find yourself trying to get to Koya-san you’ll need to know that Namba is good and Shin-Imamiya is bad. Try to remember.

The other secret I picked up on my time-sensitive recon mission is this: If you’re traveling with a big heavy suitcase on wheels, either store it at Namba Station’s second-floor luggage service center or ship it from Namba (or your last hotel) to wherever you’re going after Koya-san. Navigating your way to and around Koya-san isn’t too difficult. But dragging your crap up and onto the cable car that sits at a forty-five degree angle…then dragging it up the narrow steps inside the cable car as you search for an empty seat (negotiating all the other big bulky suitcases in your way)… then off the cable car and up more stairs to the top cable car station… through and around to your bus platform… and, finally, onto a bus that was designed for Japanese locals and minimalist monks, not big white people (or any other invading color) with big huge suitcases; the endeavor is, in a word, amassiveannoyanceforyouandeveryonearoundyou. Avoid it. Trust me, your trip to Koya-san will be so much nicer.

Just ask my thirteen Slovenian ladies.

One more thing…

…and then I’m done giving travel advice (because quite frankly I hate giving unsolicited travel advice). Spend a night in Koya-san. Yes, you can do a day trip from Osaka or even Nara, but it will end up feeling more like a recon mission – and probably without the part where you meet thirteen Slovenian women afterward.

Not only is there more to see in Koya-san than you can reasonably fit into one day, the best times to see the best parts are early morning and in the evening when the crowds of big Westerners with their big wheeled suitcases as well as the loud-mouth, self-absorbed Chinese tourists have made themselves blessedly scarce. This goes for just about anywhere, but considering Koya-san’s relative isolation an overnight stay is virtually imperative – unless you’re the kind who prefers recon missions. Plus staying the night offers the chance to sleep and eat in a temple, giving you a feel for the life of a monk, albeit a fleeting and superficial one.

However! (All right, I lied. One more bit of advice.) If you can – and this goes for traveling to Japan in general – come in the Spring or the Fall. The crowds are lighter (except during Golden Week) and the temps are significantly more agreeable. And while the cherry blossoms are much more spectacular down in Yoshino, the pockets of fall colors splashed around Koya-san make the unique experience of Oku-no-in even better.

Now, this last morsel of wisdom is not advice. It’s a warning. Don’t come to Koya-san to experience the temples. They’re nice, don’t get me wrong. But they alone do not justify making the trek up here. Oku-no-in is what makes this place special. That said, making a day trip out of Koya-san is certainly possible; a few hours exploring Koya-san is sufficient. You’ll just have to share it with the hordes.

So what’s so special about Oku-no-in?

Konishiki against one of his less formidable foes.

Yes, Oku-no-in is Japan’s largest cemetery, with over 200,000 grave markers and counting. (Yes, after more than a thousand years they are still adding graves.) But just because something is the biggest doesn't mean it’s the best. Consider sumo wrestler Konishiki, who never achieved the top rank of Yokozuna.

The history of this place certainly sets it apart from Japan’s eight million other cemeteries. A monk by the name of Kukai established this remote, forested mountain plateau retreat back in 816 as a place to pursue and teach the esoteric wisdom that he picked up while in China on spring break. These teachings have come to define the Shingon sect of Buddhism, one of Japan’s largest.

Over time Kukai’s high-altitude hideaway grew into a bustling barefoot community of monks. In 834 Kukai pulled his last trick (for the time being) and entered into eternal meditation. That’s right, though Kobo Daishi (Kukai’s posthumous name) is entombed here he is not dead yet. He’s resting. Reminds me of a monty python skit.

According to the legend, Kobo Daishi is waiting for Miroku Nyorai, the Buddha of the future, to arrive and wake him up. Not one to waste time, he multi-tasks in his sleepy state, offering salvation to those who seek it. For this reason, this is THE place to spend eternity. Not everyone can end up here, though, so many will visit and leave an eyebrow hair or a fingernail. Better than nothing, I guess.

Exploring Oku-no-in

The traditional entrance to Oku-no-in is the rather understated Ichinohashi Bridge. This footbridge serves as the passageway into the sacred ground of the cemetery that lines the two-kilometer path leading gently through the impressive cedar forest and past those almost quarter-million tombstones. Many of them are centuries old. Many are covered in moss. Even for Japan, it is rare to feel like you are walking through the land as it was a millennium ago. Here, you do. Unless there are big people with big suitcases around.

And like I said earlier, the atmosphere is most serene, most striking in the early morning hours or in the hours before and after nightfall. Rainy, misty conditions take away from the experience not one bit, and may even enhance the enchantment only a cemetery can offer.

If you’re pressed for time, if you aren’t quite up for the extended stroll, or if you’re just plain lazy, you can take a town bus all the way to Oku-no-in-mae bus stop and cut your walk in half. Note though that you’ll be walking through a recently-added section of the cemetery, where all the graves are nice and new and nothing special. You’d still see Oku-no-in, but you’d be missing all the other good stuff. Which would be like, I don’t know, heading straight for the centerfold.

Along the walk from Ichinobashi, among the thousands of long-forgotten departed, are countless side paths and trails. Don’t hesitate. Go check out a few of them. Your chances of getting lost are nil. (If need be, just listen for the loud-mouth tourists.) Like these short diversions, the main path is not completely flat – you can count on a few slopes and short staircases. But these minor matters are more than fully offset by the scenery.

The Main Event

Right outside the boundaries of Oku-no-in proper sits the Gokusho Offering Hall and, just to the side, a row of Jizo, which are representations of the benevolent little deities believed to look after travelers and the souls of young and unborn children. These particular Jizo are called Mizumuke Jizo, which means you get to splash them with water while you pray for your deceased loved ones. Go ahead. It’s fun. Just remember to pretend to be serious.

The Gobyobashi Bridge takes you over into the uber-sacred grounds of Kobo Daishi’s final resting place (until he wakes up and gets back to business). This means crossing over from the land where eating, drinking and taking pictures is allowed into the land where it is not. Mind your manners. To your left (unless you are walking backwards in which case it’s on your right) you’ll have the chance to test both your strength and your fate with the Miroku Stone. This revered rock sits in a cage, surrounded by a crowd of hopefuls taking turns sticking their arms through the hole in the mesh and trying to lift it with one hand – a feat which, if accomplished, gets you lots of great existential prizes.

The Toro-do is the Lantern Hall where, predictably, there are lanterns. Ten thousand of them, actually, give or take. They are said to be eternally lit. Behind the Toro-do is Kobo Daishi’s mausoleum, Gobyo, where the man the legend is said to be meditating until those lanterns go out.

Ten thousand lanterns. Two hundred thousand gravestones. Eternity. All impressive numbers. Sadly, I wouldn’t have time to confirm any of them.

I had a date with thirteen Slovenian women – and their luggage.

Train or Trail? Depends on Who’s Going.

For me, Koya-san isn’t just a place. This 1,200-year-old ode to Buddhism is an experience – and a truly unique one at that. But like all unique experiences, as it is for travel itself, how you get there can make a huge difference in what you take away.

If I ever go back to Koya-san, I want to hike up again.

That, of course, will probably depend on the company I am with.

Nothing against my Slovenian girlfriends, but I think I’ll give Amos a call first.

Koya-san 2004: No Crowds, No Plans & No Digital Camera

Our train rattled and shook as we wound higher through the ancient forests that blanket the mountains of Wakayama. Through my window I watched the rough and rocky Fudotani River appear and disappear again, then turned to my friend and co-worker Amos. “You know anything about this Koya-san place, by the way?”

Amos laughed. He was the kind of guy who, when he wasn't already laughing, was getting ready to. “Yeah, I hear the illegal camping is fantastic!”

Koya-san, the mountaintop temple complex we were ostensibly heading for, was still a virtual mystery to me - one because I’d never been there before, and two because I’d done zero research on the place. But this was all par for the course. I find out a place exists and I want to go, for no other reason than I’ve never been there. The research part I prefer to do on the spot. Evidently Amos was one to do the same.

So it was in the summer of 2004 when I found myself making the clackety trip up to the roof of Japan’s Kii Peninsula with my co-worker of a month and a half.

We took the train as far as Hosokawa, getting off at a tiny wooden train station that was utterly deserted save for a couple of flying insects and some half-dried bird poop. This was, according to the map we’d picked up while switching trains in Osaka, where we would find the trailhead for a ten-kilometer stretch of woods and (maybe) isolation that would take us up to the Koya-san plateau and the temple complex founded by a monk named Kukai well over a thousand years ago.

A few hours walking through unknown woods is a fine way to sate one's appetite for mild adventure, though hiking up from Hosokawa would serve a couple of additional purposes. Cutting the train ride short and skipping the cable car to Koya-san would save us a fair bit of pocket change, which would prove helpful should we happen to find a place in Koya-san that sold food.

There was also the fact that we'd just spent another week indoors teaching English. We were like a couple of dogs that had been in the car too long. We needed to let ourselves loose for a while. This was one way we knew how.

We found what we thought was the trail and started walking.

This being 2004, I was still using a film camera. Me being me, I don’t have a clear recollection of the hike outside of the few pictures I took. This only makes me want to go do the hike again. I wonder what Amos is up to this weekend.

The trail spit us out at the western edge of the serene temple sprawl of Koya-san where we were greeted by Daimon, a 25-meter-tall orange gate with the twin Buddha-guarding demons known as Nio making furious faces from inside their cages. I'd say that after a thousand years they probably feel like a couple of cooped-up dogs too, even if they are made of wood.

Though the original, and the second, and the third and maybe the fourth Daimon had burned down over the centuries, the one standing before us now had been here for over three hundred years. Someday this one too would likely burn to the ground, but what were the chances that it would happen tonight? If there were an ATM around I would have been willing to bet someone a few yen. And if it rained? Daimon's eaves reached several meters out over its concrete base, on either side. With overnight rain possible and the chances of fire infinitesimal this seemed as good a place as any to pitch our tent.

Later. After dark. Very quietly.

Amos and I stumbled around for a few hours, gawking lazily at the various reconstructions of the age-old temples that make up this western section of Koya-san. Kondo, the massive hall built by Kukai for Buddhist rituals and dance parties, was originally constructed in 819. Since then it has burned down a lucky seven times. The present building dates from 1932.

Konpon Daito is a tall, bright orange pagoda-like affair. The second level is rounded, like a huge marshmallow being gently smushed between the square first and second story roofs.

Kongobu-ji Temple serves as the administrative center of the three thousand and whatever hundred Shingon Buddhism temples that exist in Japan. Among the many rooms of Kongobu is the Yanagi-no-ma, beautifully adorned with exquisite 16th Century paintings that have overseen, among other events, Toyotomi Hidetsugu’s ritual seppuku suicide. There is also a fantastically-detailed rock garden out back - so I hear. Amos and I didn’t see that or anything else because we elected to save the five hundred yen entrance fee since we still hadn’t eaten since our rice ball breakfast.

Also residing on the West Side of Koya-san are structures called Toto, Saito, Miedo and Fudodo, which may sound like characters in a Japanese cartoon about four puppy siblings but they are actually buildings with serious purposes though I’ll be honest and say I don’t know what.

Amos and I didn't completely bail on the historical details of Koya-san. Having saved on Kongobu-ji we decided to splurge and fork over the one hundred yen fee to enter the outer edges of Tokugawa Reidai Mausoleum.

That's right, the outer edges. Sweaty, smelly English teachers (and everyone else) are apparently prohibited from checking out the interior. As consolation we got pamphlets with nice photos of all the cool things we weren't allowed to see for ourselves.

Our pamphlet tried to tell us that this was the mausoleum for three Tokugawa shoguns, including Ieyasu, the man who unified Japan in 1600 and thereby established the Tokugawa Shogunate as the ruling clan for the next two hundred and sixty-odd years. But I distinctly remembered visiting Ieyasu’s tomb up north in Nikko in 2002. Either I don’t understand what’s going on with the mausoleums around here or the Tokugawas had a thing for building lavish and wasteful duplicates of the places they’ll rot away in. Probably both.

This dual-mausoleum issue was as far as my knowledge of Japanese history went – and it didn't even get me an answer. Amos was no help either. Naturally, to a couple of guys who hadn’t done their research on the history of all the things we’d traveled all morning and hiked three hours to see, finding food was the highlight of the afternoon.

I’d been in Japan almost three years by this point. Amos was still counting his time in Japan by weeks. So I let him do all the talking with the nice old woman at the nice old place we found. This was, in part, a strategy to hide my inability to read the menu items spelled out on the walls. But it was also good fun at Amos’s expense.

As we resumed bumming around West Koya it occurred to us: there was no one else around. This was June. Where were all the summer crowds? We were either doing something very wrong or very right.

Come early evening we did something that was probably very wrong: in the woods, just out of sight from anyone who might come by to take a look at Daimon, we set up camp for the night. No campfires, no music, and barely anything to do except watch the world get dark and hope that there were no bears around. Not that we had a single scrap of food between us to attract so much as an ant.

Morning brought the kind of misty, cloud-heavy view of the surrounding mountains that evokes fanciful images of what life was like up here a thousand years ago. Up here, it is written, there was peace and prosperity. For centuries countless students of both Jodo and Shingon Buddhism came here to pursue the intangible treasures of spirituality. At one point Koya-san was home to fifteen hundred monasteries and thousands of monks.

Then in the 16th Century an asshole named Oda Nobunaga decided he should prove his political and military worth by slaughtering a whole bunch of the monks who had been doing nothing but minding their own peaceful business. A century later the Tokugawas assumed the role of assholes and destroyed much of the spiritual and material wealth that the monks and lay priests of Koya-san enjoyed because nothing says power like sending in your armed troops to butcher a community of robed and barefoot monks.

Koya-san has since regained its peaceful allure – which in turn has been destroyed by the daily onslaught of the tourist hordes. Take heart though; there are a few ways to avoid the crush. You can make the trip up here off-season, meaning not during the summer and not during Japan’s Golden Week, a ten-day string of national holidays straddling April and May. You could also stay the night in one of the temples, which not only offers a glimpse into the monastic life but allows for peaceful, almost magical early morning and late evening walks. This I know from my second trip to Koya-san, fourteen years and an exponential increase of overseas travelers to Japan since my first.

And of course, you can do what only the most adventurous and untethered do: Get off the train at Hosokawa and start walking. I’m pretty sure there’s been no increase in this brand of travel.