I’m going to try to keep this on the briefer side of things, only because it’s late and I have a lot of pictures to post. It’s funny, posting about a trip that is quickly fading into the past. When I wrote the first entry, I still remembered every little detail about the couple weeks I had in Japan, but already in a month it has become a bit more jumbled and I need to look at the pictures to remember where I was, what was happening, and how I felt. Someone once asked me how I could remember where I had been and what I had done if I never wrote anything down. At the time I thought about it and decided I would start writing, but then I realized that for me, my pictures are my notes. I don’t take a thousand pictures a week because I want to show everyone a thousand pictures - I take the pictures like someone with a notebook would take notes. Then I take all my notes and edit them for content, length, and interest, and publish them. It’s a process that is pretty similar to writing, actually. The nice thing is that when I want to, I can go back to every picture I’ve taken and go through them one by one. I’ve got about 15 pictures that I took while I was fishing in this post, but I’ve got about three hundred more that I’m not showing anyone - they are definitely not all good pictures, but if I go through them, in a matter of minutes I am transported back to the day, the place, and the feelings I had. The fact that I rely on the pictures so much to remember things worries me sometimes - I don’t know what I would do if I lost my photos.

Last time I posted I wrote about how I was nervous to actually live with a Japanese family. As I mentioned it was no big deal in the end, but living is a hard thing to capture in pictures. I kind of love the Nakamura house though, because it is so Japanese without being typically Japanese at all. There is none of the spare elegant minimalism that most people think of when they think of Japanese aesthetics. The floor is covered in carpets and there are pictures and newspaper clippings stuck on every flat surface. There is a kitchen table and chairs (none of which are ever used), and there is the beautiful low wood table in the TV room where everything happens. If someone is home in the Nakamura house, there is a very good chance that they are sitting around this table, watching TV, reading, sleeping, or planning what to do next. When I live on Osakikamijima I spent a lot of time around this table, and it was truly wonderful to do that once again. See? When I started writing this, I wasn’t having any of those feelings. But while I’ve been writing, I flipped back to my pictures and looked at a bunch of pictures of us sitting around, eating meals, and just relaxing late at night - and boom, in my mind I am back there, petting the dogs and squinting because I’m trying so hard to understand the Japanese talk show on TV.

One of the first things I did in the days after we went to Naoshima was take the car for a day and go to Takehara. Every single time I drove through Takehara, I would pass this ancient abandoned shrine, and when I went back to New York, as I drove past it on the way to the airport, I felt stupid and guilty for never having taken the 40 minutes it would have taken me to get there. As soon as I was back and had some time to kill, I went straight to the temple.

Truth be told, it was the wrong time of day to photograph it, and the pictures didn’t come out very well. It was this temple built out of wood in the 1500s, and then destroyed by floods and torrential rains in the 1920s, and it had been left to decay naturally. Because the building was built in the traditional Japanese way, there are no nails or screws holding it together, and the years and the weather are slowly causing the building to shake itself apart. One building has collapsed completely, the other ones are starting to be worn down. My favorite bit was the ceiling in the top picture - the panels have been slowly falling out, making this great texture.

The stone basin for water has gotten completely covered in moss, but it is still is full of dark clear water.

Hmm. I was just looking over the photos I just uploaded to Flickr as a supplement to this post, and I realize I like a few of the temple more than I like the ones I chose for the blog. In an unprecedented move, I am bringing this one over from Flickr, because in retrospect it is my favorite picture from the shrine.

Here are a few more photos you can check out.

Being in Takehara, after I had thoroughly explored the shrine, I went to see the neighborhood of old buildings that haven’t been destroyed by floods. I had been in Takehara countless times, but I had only seen that area once or twice, another thing I regretted when I left last time. In a lot of ways I felt like I was making right the few wrongs about my time in Japan when I lived there.

Just some old house. I wouldn’t mind having this place as a little pied à terre in Japan.

This was a cool little thing - it was in a bamboo garden, and there was a little sign that pointed into a door and said “viewing area.” Inside was a smooth wood platform - you would take off your shoes and sit cross-legged on it - and enjoy this perfectly balanced little vista. The old wall with the perfectly aged wood, the stone arrangement, the sun coming in from the top, the roof tiles - it’s a little living picture that you can just sit and enjoy. It would be different in the spring or the winter, in the morning, at night, in the pouring rain or in the snow. Frankly, I love the idea of having a little view like this that is built expressly for aesthetic pleasure.

Now that I am looking at the pictures and remembering the day, I remember that this day was a scheduling disaster, with two full ferries, a closed restaurant, a missed connection with a friend, and cultural confusion at a gas station that changed from full service to self service while I was away. (Self service in Japan requires what seems to be an extensive questionnaire about your driving history, what type of gas you prefer, how much you’d like to spend, and probably some stuff about your blood type and annual income to be entered in on a touch screen before the gas starts pumping. After trying three times to press the buttons that make the gas come out, I fetched a gentleman and said “excuse me, but I can’t read.”)

The day after the (mis)adventures in Takehara, Mori, Koichi, and I went fishing. We had already been out on Mori’s boat, but because I was visiting all the way from New York, we had something special in store. We were going out on a big time charter boat, jigging for tuna in deep water. In the year I had been gone, Mori had become good friends with the boat’s captain, who we all referred to as I-san (pronounced “ee-san”) or Captain I. Apparently I-san was the first guy to ever try jigging in the inland sea, and for years he did it while getting very little attention and not much business, slowly mapping out what spots were good and what spots weren’t. Now slowly he has built up a name for himself over the last 12 years, and his boat is covered in sponsor’s decals. He does a bustling business with charters and knows every single rock and ledge along the bottom of certain areas of the inland sea. Normally he doesn’t go out with less than ten customers on board, but he took just the three of us out as an extremely friendly gesture.

His main boat, the Aki III - if you want to go Jigging in Japan, look this guy up - here is his website.

Mori and I-san, plus sponsor’s logos.

The first spot we tried was an extremely deep area where we were looking for tuna - they are not easy to catch, and after about an hour with no bites, we scaled down our expectations. (I was kind of disappointed, Mori had sent me the link to I-san’s homepage, and I had been looking at pictures like these.) We went closer to land and fished for Aji - a small but delicious fish that I had caught before - and immediately, they started biting. They are a pretty weak fish, and they don’t put up much fight. In fact, you have to reel them up gently, because their mouths are so soft that a firm yank will just rip the mouth off and you lose your fish. We were having a contest to see who could catch more, and then suddenly my rod bent double and the line started zipping out of the reel - not sure what was going on, I suddenly found myself in a real fight with a fish. It was light tackle and my drag was loose, but I was certainly not bringing in an Aji. As it came up over about five minutes, everyone came over to see what it was. It turned out I had hooked a Saba - a kind of mackerel. They are shaped like miniature tuna and are fast and strong. It was still the morning, and things were looking up.

Ok, fine, it doesn’t look very big - but it fought hard! That’s I-san on the right.

Lunch on the Aki III - Onigiri, fried chicken, and Aquarius. It doesn’t get much better than that. Mori is making a note of (with I-san’s permission) the spot where we caught all the fish - so he can come back with his customers.

After lunch we moved to a new spot for a new type of fish - tachiuo which literally means “sword fish” but translates to English as Cutlass Fish. We were not the only people looking to catch a few tachiuo, and so we found a spot among the other boats. We ended up next to this guy who did not seem to appreciate us with our giant boat, fancy jigging gear, and dozen or so fishing rods.

Tachiuo is traditionally caught handlining with bait. Because I-san is a big proponent of jigging, that is what we were doing - and for what it’s worth, we were pulling up a lot more fish than the guys who were handlining.

I talked about how much I like being on the water in my last post - for me, this pictures captures a little part of what it is that I like so much about being out on a boat in Japan.

We got down to the business of jigging, and soon we were hooking fish! Tachiuo don’t fight very hard, but they do put up some decent resistance and a few strong runs. They are long and flat, so it’s easy to get them pointed upwards and just slip them through the water. Here Mori is getting a bite.

I’ve got a good one!

Isn’t this just one of those pictures that makes you feel good? Actually, it probably only makes me, Mori, and I-san feel good. But that’s enough for me. Things to note: Tachiuo are almost chrome-like in their shininess - look at how mori’s fish is reflecting the sky and the pink lure. Secondly - they don’t have any tails! Just a little point. Weird. Finally - look at the way Mori’s fish is wriggling its fin. They all did that when you pulled them out of the water, and it looked really cool. I guess that’s probably their main source of propulsion.

Koichi catches one - Tachiuo have pretty mean looking faces. I think I can see myself reflected in that fish. That’s a first.

We kept reeling in the fish for who knows how long - three or four hours until the sun started setting. With the sun at our backs we headed to Takehara to gas up the boat. The ride from Osakikamijima to Takehara takes 30 minutes on the ferry, and ten minutes on the fast ferry. On the Aki III it took about four minutes.

Zooming to Takehara.

Aki III, waiting for the gas truck after an excellent day of fishing. We probably caught about fifty or sixty fish all told.

Heading back to the island for dinner and bed.

A few nights earlier, Mori and I went out for a little bit of night fishing. It was my first time back out fishing in Japan, and as we motored out of the dock and under the bridge, weaving between the little rocky islands that we used to dive around, Mori looked at me and said “So, Ben, how is it? How is being back out on the inland sea in Japan again?”

I thought about it, and waited for the wave on nostalgia and emotion to sweep over me, but it didn’t come. At first I was worried that something was wrong, that somehow my memories had fooled me, but since then I’ve thought about that moment when I waited for the rush of emotions and they never came, and I think I’ve figured it out. When I got back on that boat and untied the front and pushed off, it was like I hadn’t been gone a whole year. The memories of fishing and boating with Mori in the inland sea have become such an major part of my life that a year did very little to diminish them. When we got back on the boat and headed out of the harbor, it felt like we hadn’t gone fishing in a few weeks, and so of course we were out fishing together. There was nothing to come flooding back because it had never gone away.

That is even better than a wave of nostalgia and emotion.

(Extra photos here)

(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.

At the end of my last post I had just escaped Tokyo and made my way to Osakikimijima. The city had overwhelmed me with people, noise, and chaos. I needed calm and quiet and getting to the ferry port in Takehara was a truly wonderful moment. The sea smell in Japan is different than it is in New York, and when I got out of the car my whole life when I was in Japan came flooding back. I bought my ticket, drove my car onto the ferry, and rode back the the island for the first time in a year, standing on the upper deck, leaning against the railing, and grinning ear to ear.

When I got to the island, a funny thing happened - I hardly took any photos. For two days, I took a total of maybe 20 pictures, which for me in Japan is essentially zero. In those two days, I did all the things I think about so often and missed so much. Mori and I went cruising around the island with the seats back and the music on in his gold van. We got ramen from Tokumori’s, the best ramen shop in Hiroshima prefecture. I borrowed Graham’s scooter (Graham has the job I used to have on the island) and spent about three hours driving every single road and narrow path that I used to. I went up and down the mountain a couple times, I went down all the little windy side streets, I stopped at the little beaches I used to stop at, and dipped my toes in the inland sea. The weather was beautiful and clear, and it was stunningly gorgeous. The thing is, I had taken the pictures before. I spent an entire year taking pictures of that life, and as I rode around, I realized that I hadn’t forgotten anything. The intensity of my memories coupled with the roughly 18,000 photos I took while I was in Japan have made sure of that. What I missed were the intangibles - the feeling of pushing the 50cc engine of the Honda Jog around the hairpins on the south side of the island. The way the road feels under your wheels up towards the top of the mountain where the road crews never go and the road is starting to crumble and fall down the mountainside. The way it gets colder when you cross from the sunlit side of the mountain to the shaded side. Going to my favorite spot to watch the sunset and switching off the engine and suddenly being surrounded by this vast soft sound of wind in the leaves and birds far below. I wanted to do all that stuff, and I never once had the urge to pull out the camera. I could look at my old pictures and that would be just fine. Just the doing was sublime.

Just as I was thinking that my four gigs of memory cards and portable hard drive would be unnecessary, Saturday rolled around, and it was time for Mori’s wedding. At 9 o’clock in the morning I packed myself into a car with Mori’s entire family and we drove to Ujina, which is a little waterfront suburb of Hiroshima. After stopping for ramen, dropping the dogs off at the pet hotel, and checking in at our hotel, we arrived at “Remercier” - a fancy french restaurant and western-style wedding venue. Being with a Japanese family, of course we got there an hour early and the staff had to run out and tell us that the last wedding wasn’t finished yet and could we wait just a half an hour? We could, and went down to a pier to kill some time.

From left: Hiroko (eldest sister), Naoki (younger brother), Uncle Kenso (not technically an uncle, but close enough), Saori (younger sister). Remember them, they are the cast of this post.

Hiroko, killing time. It isn’t exactly the most beautiful waterfront, but Japan is a place where some huge percentage of the shoreline is hardened with reinforced concrete - this is the place where the word “tsunami” was invented - so to me, this is a very Japanese waterfront. See how the wall is curved outwards? That is to send a huge volume of water back out to sea. And see in the last picture how the door we came through can be shut with a big reinforced steel door? There are doors like that and walls like these along just about every foot of seashore that is not a huge cliff.

We sat and waited and I think everyone was pretty excited and nervous and after what seemed like just a couple minutes it was time for us to make our official appearances. The wedding staff showed us around and we put our stuff down and waited for the main event to arrive.

Mori and Fumiko - the main event.

Where to even begin? So much happened, and I don’t want to miss any of the strange or fun stuff that happened. This was a western-style Japanese wedding, which is to say that it looks a lot like your standard American or European wedding, but actually there’s a lot going on that is different. In terms of clothing, the men all wore suits and ties, but the women could choose between dresses and kimono. Now here is where my non-Japanese viewpoint clouds things - it could just be that I’ve just seen a million and a half girls in dresses and seven women really wearing kimono. It could be that a kimono seems exotic and different and striking to me just because I’m a dumb gaijin, but I guess I just sort of have to accept that.

I jumped in on this family photo - on the left are two aunts in the (extensive) Nakamura clan, and on the right are Hiroko and her mother. Looking stunning.

Anyway. As members of the Nakamura family (which I was essentially adopted into for the week) we got changed and waited to greet arriving guests. For Mori and his parents, that meant a lot of bowing and extremely formal conversations with distant relatives. For me and the sisters, it meant sitting around, trying to figure out who everyone was, laughing at the odd hairstyles and outfits that came through the door, and ordering endless coffees that we never managed to finish.

Saori is taking this picture, I think. Do I look nervous enough for you? My somewhat-forgotten Japanese got a hell of a workout.

Once the guests were all present, a funny ceremony happens. Some formal signing of the wedding certificate happens in a side chapel, and the wedding is officially done. After that, the families line up on either side of the aisle ordered from most important to least. I protested mightily, but they told me I was part of the Nakamura family and that I had better come along. The families - facing each other across the aisle, formally meet for the first time. Each side goes, and one by one, everyone introduces themselves formally. The general format is “(Family name), (rank in the family), (relation to the person being married). It is an honor to meet you.” - I started sweating as the microphone (yes, microphone) worked it’s way down the Nakamura line, but it was a familiar nervousness - I used to have to introduce myself formally at school when I was a teacher, so I just put on my game face, and when the mic came to me - with my very best Japanese intonation I said “From New York, of the friends, I am Ben. It is an honor.” Which got a big laugh from everyone, so that was all good. Mori clapped me on the back after and said “nice job!”

Mori and Fumiko, immediately after the introductions.

So the families meeting for the first time across the aisle of the secret wedding chapel, away from the guests - that’s pretty strange, right? There’s more. After this ceremony, we have the western wedding proper. Except that they are already officially married. But you know, it’s all good. It’s a Christian wedding - not because anyone is Christian, but because they like the look of a Christian wedding - the veil, the kissing the bride, the loving and cherishing, the “in sickness and in health” - so they do a Christian ceremony. The ceremony has got to be authentic, so how do they do that? A foreigner minister! I have no idea where this guy came from, but when the time came there he was, standing under the flower-draped arch, tiny bible and tiny reading light in hand. Actually wait, I’m getting ahead of myself. Fumiko walked down the aisle with her father to - I’m not joking - a live rendition of Amazing Grace. At some points in this wedding, I had to bite my lip in order to keep from laughing, but it certainly looked good.

Nice, right? Outdoors, on a beautiful evening, as the sky darkened, with the sound of water and boats off in the distance. I can think of worse places to get married.

Oh Mr. Gaijin Minister. You crack me up. His Japanese was really abysmal. It was read, with a heavy American accent, off a small paper where it was clearly written out in English phonetically. When we all talked about this later, Fumiko and Hiroko said something pretty funny - apparently his poor Japanese was a marker of authenticity. If he had spoken flawless Japanese (or, god forbid, been Japanese) it would have given everyone a weird feeling. They prefer their religion imported and not too integrated, thank you very much.

They were married (again), everyone got misty-eyed, and then we went inside for what must have been 15-courses of absolutely excuisite Japano-French food. Tiny cubes of Kobe beef with a garlic cream sauce would be followed by the freshest raw fish salad, and then some lemon sorbet as a palette cleanser. There were two carving stations - the first doing beef, the second with giant slabs of premium fatty tuna, which he would slice with a gorgeous knife and lay over rice and hand-ground wasabi. Like everything in Japan, it was one part traditional, one part contemporary, with a twist of wackiness for good measure. I loved ever minute of it.

After dinner there were speeches. And they don’t mess around when it comes to speeches - We probably had an hour and a half of speeches, and after the wedding everyone was saying “you know, there really weren’t enough speeches.” Some people I couldn’t understand at all, some people I could follow along with. Fumiko gave a really nice one which even got me a little misty-eyed, and that was only understanding about thirty percent of it. Mori’s friends gave speeches. Actually, one of Mori’s friends gave a speech, and then three of his skating and graffiti buddies came out and performed a rap for him that they had written. I saw them going into a changing room and ducked in with them to see what they were doing and ended up with quite a few excellent photos of them. Example:

From Left: Takeno-V, POKUMIN, and MC Gatz.

Before we knew it, it was rolling up on 9 o’clock and it was time to wrap things up. That wasn’t the end of the wedding, just the end of the part at the venue. There was still lots of time for the nijikai - literally “second hour party” and sanjikai - third hour party.

Fumiko and Mori as we left the first party - there’s something about photographing weddings - everyone’s so happy that it just makes me happy to look back at the photos.

We went back to the hotel in Hiroshima and dropped off our (not insignificant) wedding guest gifts, and split off into two parties (adults and young adults). The bars were rented out and it was open bar all night. Champagne was poured over a pyramid of glasses. Girls changed out of their kimono, because the knot around a kimono is so tight that you can’t really move or consume any volume of food. We played bingo, with prizes, but not the usual bingo with prizes. When I was teaching the teachers would get together and we’d have bingo games - you might win a CD binder or a set of coasters. At this bingo game I got a crappy prize and walked away with a fancy lamp, and the main prize was a damn Nintendo Wii!

The girl on the right won it - and everyone shrieked. Except me. Of course I didn’t shriek. I don’t shriek.

So that was serious bingo. Other than that, the main activities were talking and drinking, not necessarily in that order. At around three in the morning the first bar closed (wimps!), so we headed to the third party at a bar in a back alley in Hiroshima whose owners had come from Osakikamijima. There were two people quietly having a drink when about twenty five people in their mid-twenties arrived, making a lot of noise and ordering a lot of drinks. We drank through all the sake they had, and then had a go at the whiskey as well, but somewhere around 4:30 people started getting tired and so we decided to move on. We found ourselves back out on the Hiroshima streets inebriation level high. A couple things happened.

First: many drunken group shots of “the boys” were taken.

Second: Naoki decided it was time to take off his clothes.

Once we convinced Naoki that it was not time to take off his clothes, we started walking - not back to the hotel, but in keeping with Japanese youth tradition - to a ramen shop! This is apparently classic Japanese - after a night of drinking, ramen is almost required. As we checked out shops one after another, each one was full of young people slurping noodles at quarter to five in the morning. I had never gotten to experience this, because there are no late-night ramen shops on the island, and I had never gone drinking elsewhere in Japan - especially not with Japanese people.

At a little after five we found a ramen shop with enough free stools, so we all sat down and shouted out our orders. As I had consumed probably nine or ten drinks over the course of the evening, my Japanese was flawless, and I shouted with the best of them.

Hiroko - most likely thinking “Ben, your Japanese is not flawless, no matter how drunk you are.”

My boys. On the left is SKLAWL - The top graffiti writer in western Japan, and a cool guy too. You can see some of his stuff here. The fifth picture down is a piece he did with Mori on the island. It was cool to meet him, Mori used to talk about him all the time - he got arrested while I was living in Japan and it was a mini sensation in Hiroshima. Now he only does legal writing, but “don’t worry,” he told me “there’s going to be a comeback.”

The sisters Nakamura. Nakamura is written 中村 in Japanese, in case you were curious. The first character means center or middle, and the second one means town or village. Together, Nakamura means “center town” - but it’s about as common as Smith is in the U.S. - so no one thinks about the meaning much.

At about 5:30 the ramen was done, everyone was yawning and starting to feel a little lightheaded. Everyone, that is, except for Mori, who had ended his night a few minutes earlier.

Look at the poor married boy. He certainly earned it.

I’ll be back soon with more adventures from the next week on the island and road-tripping around Japan. In the meantime, I’ve been posting supplemental pictures from each post on Flickr. The photos from the last post are here, and from this post (the wedding) are here.