Rice and Ramen

This past Monday was a national holiday -- Mountain Day -- so, of course, Troy and I headed to the beach instead. Well, to an island near a beach since (as some of you may know) I'm not exactly the beach-going type. Plus I'd just climbed Mount Fuji, which was more than enough mountain for me. Enoshima is a small island off the coast of Kanagawa Prefecture, fairly near Kamakura. It's connected to the mainland via a bridge, so you can just stroll on over from the train station. The entire island is dedicated to Benzaitan, the goddess of everything that flows -- time, water, speech, music, and knowledge. According to the "Enoshima Engi," (a history of the shrines and temples on Enoshima) there's also a legend associated with the creation of the island involving Benzaitan and a dragon. In brief, the area around Enoshima was once wracked by violent storms and earthquakes. Eventually the tumult ended and a heavenly maiden (Benzaitan) descended from the clouds....

There is a common saying about Japan's tallest mountain: "A wise man climbs Fuji once. Only a fool climbs it twice." There's another tradition that everyone should climb Mount Fuji at least once in their lifetime (perhaps with the intention to become wise, if there's any merit to the saying). Making the trek myself has always bee on my unofficial "bucket list" of things I wanted to do in Japan. Last year I scheduled days to attempt the climb -- twice! -- but was thwarted each time by inclement typhoons. This year, the climb was absolutely going to happen. A few weeks before my own attempt, my coworker, Shaun, climbed Mount Fuji for the first time under the expert guidance of another coworker, Oscar. They made an incredibly entertaining and insightful podcast episode about the entire process (which you can listen to  here ). I took a lot of good advice from Shaun about what to pack for the climb, which Troy, his dad, and I were going to do overni...

Nokogiriyama, also known as "Sawtooth Mountain," is a peak just off the western coast of Chiba Prefecture's Boso Peninsula. As its name might suggest, it has a jagged profile like that of a Japanese saw, and its history as a stone quarry during the Edo Period (1603-1868) has also left somewhat "jagged" physical results into the mountainside. On one sunny day during Golden Week, Troy and I, as well as two friends (Fiodar and Katya) made the trip from Tokyo down into Chiba. It's actually easier to get to Nokogiriyama if you live south of the city, because then you can just take a ferry across the bay, but as it was we trundled our way along the coast on train lines I'd never heard of before. From Hama-Kanaya Station we strolled through a small, sleepy port town until we got to the foot of the mountain. We had some trouble initially finding the start of the hike, but so did some Japanese people, so it wasn't like we had missed any blindingly obvious...