You may remember my hijinks a while back when Trisna and I attempted to go see Mt. Fuji and the weather did everything in its power to prevent us from enjoying it. I decided to try it again, because I still have exactly zero pictures of Mt. Fuji. I decided last Friday that I would go on the next day if the weather was good. On Saturday morning, I looked out and the weather looked great. Not a cloud in the sky. So I took the train over to Tokyo station, and then got on a bus to Kawaguchiko (one of the five famous lakes north of Mt. Fuji). As I was on the bus, I took a good hard look at the sky and realized that instead of being clear, it was actually completely overcast. Not sure how you screw that up (future tip: look for shadows), but I did. I wasn’t completely disappointed, because it looked to be breaking up a bit, and perhaps it would be all the way clear by sunset.

It took about 3 hours in total to get there, which really doesn’t seem that long anymore after my 18 hour trip from Hiroshima to Tokyo. Having an iPod helped. When I arrived at Kawaguchiko station, I just figured that I would kill some time until the afternoon and then start looking for pictures.

First I stopped for lunch. I should say I was stopped for lunch, because I was flagged down by someone representing a nearby restaurant/museum. Of course she started the exchange by reciting a memorized greeting and showing me a poorly designed menu written in English. I don’t know why Japanese are unable to write in English and understand basic design principles at the same time, but it seems like you can have one or the other over here. I wound up eating there anyway since I’m a sucker and the food didn’t look too bad.

At first I politely answered in English to all their questions. There’s certainly an impulse to want to say some really complex sentence at the beginning as sort of a way to say “okay, stop it. I can speak Japanese.” but I resisted initially. Eventually it got kind of frustrating and I broke the ice. After ordering and some light banter, some employees literally gathered around my table and asked me questions. See, this is the main difference between Tokyo and every other place in Japan. In Tokyo, gaijin are such old news. Although most Tokyoites I’ve talked to seemed genuinely curious when they had the opportunity to talk to me privately, in public they adopt the facade of unaffectedness. But here in the country, even in a touristy place like the foot of Mt. Fuji, the opportunity to talk to a gaijin seems exciting. It’s kind of nice when people seem excited to talk to you.

I got some suggestions of other things to do around Kawaguchiko aside from look at Mt. Fuji, because I certainly wasn’t going to be able to do that for a while. I stuffed my pocket with pamphlets and went on my way.

I passed some time by going to a museum which featured a bunch of photographs of Mt. Fuji. I was trying to notice some compositional trends between the way people photographed the mountain. I noticed that a lot of people saw fit to place the mountain centered on the X axis. That’s typically a compositional no-no unless you have good reason, and I did notice that the ones that had it off-center looked the most impressive. Most of the photos were good, but they weren’t my style. My style is… well, you’ll see when I take a picture, if I ever do.

After that, I also went to a museum devoted to automatic music machines… Yeah. It was very cool, in all honesty, and there was even a string quartet that gave a short concert, but the novelty wore off pretty quickly. After both museums, I was back outside, it was about 2:00 and the weather had not improved. In fact, it was looking a little worse.

Determined to get something accomplished during this trip, I decided to just walk around the entire lake. It’s a pretty big lake you see, and it took about an hour just to get to the furthest point, where it began to rain.

I stubbornly kept going, determined to finish the complete circle. No I didn’t have an umbrella. That’s silly. All the while, I looked in the direction that Fuji should have been. On a normal day, it would have looked like this. On this day, it looked like this.

After about a full hour of rain walking, I arrived back in the area around the station. The rain stopped just as I approached town and I decided to get dinner. I passed the restaurant I ate lunch at and the flagger-downer saw me and we discussed the ups and downs of the previous six hours. As it turned out, eating dinner at that restaurant seemed like a really good idea, so I did. They gave me a towel and allowed me to stand next to their heater and everything.

So, yes, I am now on strike two for my Fuji trips. There was something redeeming about this most recent trip though, and it’s not just me stubbornly trying to imagine value out of something because I spent time and money on it. I know one thing, I’m not leaving this country before I get one picture of Mt. Fuji that I’m really proud of, so I’ll keep coming back until I do it right.