(Don’t forget the extra photos on Flickr!)

Mori’s wedding took place on a Saturday, and after our marathon night and three hours of sleep in a hotel in Hiroshima I got back into the car with Mori’s parents and Hiroko. We dropped Saori and Naoki off at the station and bus center, because both of them had to be back at school on Monday. The rest of that day is pretty much a blur. We drove back, picked up the dogs, stopped for food at a department store in Kure, and then got back to the island. I went back to Graham’s house and spent a little time there gathering up my stuff and then I moved over to the Nakamura’s house. This is actually a big deal, because no matter how many times I went fishing with Mori or had dinner with his family, I had never spent the night there. As a matter of fact, I never lived with a Japanese family. For all the time I spent in Japan, I only ever stayed with other foreigners, or in hotels. The one time I slept over at Mori’s friend’s apartment in Hiroshima could hardly be described as typically Japanese (we watched the Narnia DVD, drank beers, and then fell asleep) - so this was a new thing, and I was kind of nervous. Of course there was no reason to be, and everything was great. It was interesting though, you learn all kinds of things you didn’t know about Japan. For example, towels: In Japan, you use a bath towel once, and then you wash it. Mori’s mother and I had a pretty funny conversation about this in an odd mix of Japanese and English.

Mori’s Mother: Here is a towel for your shower.
Me: Oh, no thank you, I can use the one you gave me yesterday.
Mother: No no! A new towel every day. That is the Japanese style.
Me: Really? In America, we usually use a towel for a week or so before washing it.
Mother: (shocked) Do you also wear the same underwear for a week too before changing it?
Me: No, underwear we change every day. Towels and underwear are different for us.
Mother: (great relief) Oh, ok. Here is a new towel. Throw it in the laundry basket after you dry off.

Fascinating!

Anyway, Mori and Fumiko got back to the island later that day and we had a sleepy dinner together around the table, and everyone was in bed by ten. Hiroko had a third day off from her job on Monday, so we decided that the four of us (Mori, Fumiko, Hiroko, and I) would take a trip somewhere. We tried to decide where to go, and after much deliberation we decided to go to Naoshima, a little island in Okayama, the next prefecture east of Hiroshima. We decided to take my little rental Mazda Demio, and so on Monday morning, we set off across Japan.

I was totally worried that I would have big problems getting used to driving on the right side of the car again, but it took me all of about 10 minutes to get used to it. I used to drive every day when I lived there, so I guess there’s a part of my mind that can just switch back and forth into the two different modes. This is Mori’s picture, taken on his new Nikon SLR - so thank you, Mori.

It was really nice being out on the road, just the four of us. It felt like a pretty classic road trip (despite being only about four hours each way) - sometimes we talked, sometimes we just rode and looked out the window, someone would say something funny and the entire car would be in hysterics for a few minutes. We stopped at a rest area and ate all manner of junk food. We came over a mountain and into a beautiful golden field that went on for miles in every direction. I made a last minute turn into a little gravel lot so that we could get out and enjoy the view.

Mori was sleeping in the car - what a shocker.

Is it just me, or is Japan a surprisingly beautiful place? When I was back in New York, I always remembered Japan as being a gorgeous place, and somewhere in the back of my head there was a voice saying “you are only remembering the good things. Japan has beautiful parts and crappy parts, just like anywhere else in the world” - and then I got to Japan, and try as I might (except for Sunshine City) I couldn’t find the crappy parts. There’s something about that place. It’s just gorgeous.

Being a tiny island, Naoshima doesn’t have any bridges going to it, so we had to take a ferry from a small city by the name of Uno. We had an hour to kill before the next ferry when we got to the harbor, so we decided to take a walk to see what we could find. Uno was a ghost town, a perfect example of why rural Japan is in crisis as the population collapses. On a Monday afternoon nearly every shop was closed down the covered shopping street. We saw an old rusty sign for a fishing shop, and so Mori and I went to check it out - it looked like the door hadn’t been opened in years, the rods and lures still in the store were all covered in dust.

That said, we did find a store called “Mori” and so obviously we took this picture:

That says “Mori.” I swear.

Discovering that Uno was dead and somewhat depressing, we ended up just walking around on the enormous ferry dock for about 45 minutes. Giant concrete ferry docks are nice to photograph on.

These were serious ferries - three stories, announcements in Japanese AND English, and they were fast!

Mori, giant “seto” ferry, new shoes.

Even thought we were an hour early, we still managed to dick around enough that we got back to the ferry with just a couple minutes to go, and that was actually pretty bad because my little car was parked at the front of the line of cars waiting to get on the boat. We apologized and zoomed onto the boat.

What a cool enormous crane! I’ll take two.

It was kind of funny to be out with Mori and Fumiko that day, seeing as they had just gotten married - it kind of felt like Hiroko and I were along for their honeymoon. They seemed happy to have us along though, and I was glad to be there.

Sometimes, during my commute here, when I am squeezing onto a crowded dirty train, or navigating through traffic on my bike, I wonder why I ever left the inland sea. Around this part of Japan, you spend a lot of time on boats of all sizes, and there’s something wonderful about that. Some people don’t get it - they hate the boats because they are slow or not state-of-the-art, but that’s kind of the point of boats. You can’t make a boat go faster, if your ferry ride is an hour, you can be frustrated, or you can enjoy the boat ride for what it is. I never got tired of the ferry ride to and from Osakikamijima, and I always liked going to new places that were only accessible by ferry. There’s always something new to see on the water, even if it’s just a strong tide or new wind. The water is never the same twice, and sometimes, when my subway is stuck somewhere four stories underground, I wonder what the water would be like if I were out on it.

Naoshima is about a third of the size of Osakikamijima, but it has made a name for itself in the arts. It has two contemporary art museums housing some pretty serious work (one of the museums has five of Monet’s Water Lillies), and a bunch of projects in architecture and the arts that are ongoing in the towns. One of the museums is built underground in a mountaintop, but, geniuses that we were, we went on a Monday, and it turns out that even in Japan museums are closed on Monday, so no underground museum for us. Luckily the other one, the Benesse Art House was open, and turned out to be… well, it was a museum.

The building was spectacular, in a very spare minimalist style. The architect was Tadao Ando, and from what I’ve seen after Naoshima, that is basically his calling card. The art within this great building was the most boring and conservative collection of contemporary art I have seen in a long time - and the guards told us it was forbidden to take pictures in the building. This was clearly ridiculous, because why shouldn’t you take pictures of a beautiful building that you are looking at? We made it a game, we would hide from the guards and take pictures, sometimes posting lookouts to see if they were coming. In retrospect, we were all having such a good time just being together and being out in the world that there isn’t much that could have happened to ruin our day. We went to the cafe, where a tiny coke was 500 yen (about $5), and a coffee was 800, and we ordered our drinks and then tried to calculate the cost of each sip. A really fantastic day.

A Bruce Naumann sculpture in the central atrium of the Benesse museum.

Mori and Fumiko in the same room - if you clapped in this room, the echo would go on for ten seconds. And then a guard would be in to hush you.

We wandered the museum for an hour or so, (more pictures from there on Flickr) and then the evening was coming on and we needed to start heading back so we didn’t miss the last ferry back to Osaki. It had gotten kind of cloudy in the evening, and we started walking back to the car. On the way we passed a couple of those mirrors they have to help you see around blind corners.

I got three views in one!

It’s funny actually - I think this is the only Japanese sunset I photographed while I was in Japan. For those of you who read the old blog, you will know that is crazy. I saw a bunch of them, but I only took this picture:

(More talking about beauty, about the water, sunset, etc. You fill in the blank.)

Naoshima must have some industry along with the art museums, because as we left, we were the only passenger car - every other vehicle on the ferry was a work truck. We got onto the ferry and sat in the warm car and nobody said much of anything. We just sat in quiet contentedness.

Or contented sleepiness, depending on who you’re talking about.

It’s kind of hard to write about this - not because of any strong emotion, but because how do you write about a really excellent day that isn’t excellent because amazing things happened, it’s just excellent because of who you spent it with? Driving four hours to a museum on an island doesn’t sound like the best day ever, but it really really was. Sitting in my apartment in Brooklyn, writing this, when I try to come up with concrete things to write about that day, I don’t come up with much, other than a list of what we did. But when I remember how I felt that day - it was sublime. So if the pictures and words don’t quite capture it, it’s not for lack of trying. To say we drove home and went to bed doesn’t convey much, but driving on the dark highway, eating up the kilometers back to Takehara, I was really happy. Happier than I have been in a while.

It’s dangerous, actually, being that happy. Because then you leave the people and places that make you feel that way, and you come back down to reality, and you resent reality for not being as good as you know it could be.