Hakodate – Oshamambé  (函館 – 長万部) – 122km

Sleeping on the futon next to mine at the Limelight rider house was Mr Mountain Field, a seventy-two year old with a ZZ Top beard whose – possibly self-coined – nickname was sen-nin (仙人 / Buddhist hermit).
‘My wife and I run our own rider house down near Nagoya,’ he told me. ‘Our water comes straight from a mountain spring and we’ve even got a goémon-buro. You should come and stay some time.’

Mr Mountain Field had walked the Shikoku-henro a couple of years ago, he said, but decided to come to Hokkaido on a 50cc scooter, along the way customising it with a pair of deer antlers. The outside wall of the Limelight, meanwhile, was adorned with two railway platform signs, one of which had been auctioned off when Hakodaté station was refurbished a couple of years previously, while the other had been custom made with the word ‘Limelight’ as the station name.

Refreshed after my rest day I reeled off the kilometres and by early evening had made it all the way to Oshamambé (among other things, I spotted this bicycle graveyard along the way).

The weather was halfway between foggy and drizzly and I put up my tent at dusk, at a campsite with an ornamental pond as its centerpiece and a stream running through it. In other words, these were optimum conditions for maximum mossie disruption, and despite wearing a hat, long trousers, raincoat, gloves, mosquito repellent and a towel around my face, bandit style, I still managed to get bitten on my ankle, my finger (I had to take off the gloves for a split second to adjust the guy ropes) and even my ear.

Instead of being able to soothe the bites in the bath, though, I ended up at an onsen that wasn’t so much hot spring as volcanic inferno, and whose interior resembled a scene from Journey To The Centre Of The Earth, with every available surface encrusted with limescale or stalactites (goodness only knows what the inside of their kitchen kettle must have looked like). The water – which as the receptionist informed me bubbled up from the ground at around forty-four degrees centigrade – was an uninviting rusty orange colour, and in one corner of the room cascaded from a pipe in the ceiling that was supposed to be a massage waterfall but functioned more as a kind of torture device.

At an okonomiyaki restaurant across the road the only other customers were a mother and her eight-year-old son, Mr Thorough.
‘He's been studying English with one of the teachers at his elementary school,’ said the mother as she grabbed his head and twisted it to face me.

Despite having been coerced into conversation, though, Mr Thorough was a more proficient English speaker than a lot of the teenagers I teach. His ambition, he said, was to be a vet, and as well as two pet cats – one of whom had originally been a stray – he kept a lizard and a beetle, both of which he had caught himself.

Mr Thorough told me that he usually cleaned out the cat litter in the evening and went to bed early, but as I was leaving, his mother – who had just ordered another beer – said that he could take the day off tomorrow.

The owner of the restaurant lent me a katori-senkoh (蚊取り線香 / mosquito coil) to take back to the campsite, although I have to admit that after partaking of a couple of beers myself, when I woke in the middle of the night needing a pee, I opted to use a plastic bottle rather than venture outside and risk being bitten somewhere far more awkward than my ear.

Hakodaté (函館) – rest day

Every available inch of floor and wall space has been given over to futons and bunk beds in the Limelight rider house’s tiny dormitories, and in mine, quite apart from the chorus of snoring, the light was on until two or three in the morning while another guest was reading manga, and at the crack of dawn came the chime from that most objectionable of devices, an alarm-clock-with-snooze-feature.

In the old days, if one had to get up at a particular time the following morning, one utilised a wind-up alarm clock with a tiny swinging hammer and two bells on the top, which when it sounded was loud enough to rouse not just the neighbours, but quite possibly the neighbours’ neighbours as well. Nowadays, though, one is blessed with alarm clocks that go off at the allotted time, but which allow one to then poke one’s hand out from beneath the duvet and press the ‘snooze’ button. A few minutes later the alarm sounds again and the process is repeated, ad infinitum or until one decides that enough is enough and that one really should get out of bed if one isn’t going to be late for work / school / one’s appointment at the job centre.

Now, correct me if I’m wrong – and some readers of this blog who are fond of and / or reliant on the snooze feature may disagree with me here – but if, from the outset, it is perfectly feasible for you to get up an hour later than the initial time at which your alarm goes off, then WHY THE BLOODY HELL DIDN’T YOU SET YOUR STUPID BLOODY ALARM-CLOCK-WITH-SNOOZE-FEATURE TO GO OFF AN HOUR LATER IN THE FIRST BLOODY PLACE!!! Instead of being woken up stupidly early, and then every five minutes for the following hour, why not allow yourself – and anyone else who happens to be sleeping in the same room as you – ANOTHER HOUR OF PEACEFUL, UNINTERRUPTED SLEEP, YOU COMPLETE AND UTTER SMEGHEAD!!!

But anyway, my tiredness was counteracted at least partly by a breakfast of homemade bread and fresh coffee, which I savoured while sitting at the kitchen table, chatting to the other guests, watching TV and petting the Limelight’s official canine mascots, Mitsu and Lime.

The talk that morning was of the tabéhohdai (食べ放題 / all-you-can-eat) deals that are a speciality of the restaurants in Hakodaté. One group of cyclists was thinking of tackling a tabéhohdai that requires the consumption of two kilos of food (per person, that is) in twenty minutes. If a diner manages this, as well as getting the food itself for free, he or she is presented with ten kilos of potatoes – a somewhat ungainly prize for a touring cyclist, it has to be said.

Another group was contemplating the six-kilos-of-curry (not per person, I assume) challenge at Lucky Pierrot, a famous restaurant where I ended up having lunch, although I settled for a more modest and easily digestible scallop burger, fries and milkshake.

This was only my second proper day off of the entire trip, and among other things I finally got round to buying a padded seat cover, which made it feel like I was settling back into an arm chair after four weeks sat on a rusty spike. I also sent a roll cake and some ‘fresh’ caramel – fashionable Hokkaido specialities at the time – to Mrs M and her family, from a shopping arcade that occupies some attractively refurbished brick-and-wrought-iron buildings on the quayside. In the suburbs above the harbour, meanwhile, the architecture was colonial and the streets San Francisco-style: straight and sloping.

At a convenience store near the station I bumped into Mr Warehouse, who was waiting to catch a ferry to the mainland (a couple of months later he emailed to say that having been converted to The Way Of The Glove, he too had completed his Quest for one hundred Gloves), and back at the Limelight the manageress was busy having the same telephone conversation with a succession of prospective guests.
‘Where are you now? And how many of you are there? I see. Do you know the way? OK, we’ll be waiting for you. If you get lost then do call again, won’t you?’

She and her partner supplemented our supermarket-bought food with edamamé, octopus, squid, mackerel, crisps, satsumas and chocolate. We were also provided with shohchu from a plastic bottle at just ten yen a shot, and partly because of this, one guest fell asleep on the floor before the end of the evening – you can see him in this picture, along with the aforementioned manageress, manager, Mitsu and Lime.

Fukushima – Hakodaté (福島 – 函館) – 78km

Mrs Wisteria Mountain treated me to a truly epic breakfast of rice, fried eggs, pickles, spinach, miso soup, prawn and asparagus stir-fry, milk, yoghurt, Yakult, potato salad, tomatoes, raw squid and grilled salmon. As well as asking if I wanted seconds (although it was rude of me, I had to turn her down on this one), she discounted my bill, re-filled my water bottle and sent me on my way with a packed lunch of hand-made rice balls (if it wasn’t for the fact that I’m vegetarian, she said, she would have thrown in some sausages and pork cutlets, too).

On the other side of the Fukushima Pass a scooter rider flagged me down and introduced himself as Mr Border from the guesthouse restaurant in Hamatonbetsu on Day 20.
‘I was supporting that group of long-distance runners,’ he said. ‘I handed out food and drinks and gave them massages by the side of the road if they were suffering from cramp, although I was cycling instead of jogging.’
‘How come you’re on a scooter, then?’ I asked him.
‘Oh, I gave the bicycle away once the race was over. I have to go all the way back to Ibaraki so I figured this would be quicker.’

On the coast road towards Hakodaté I was confronted with a headwind to match the one that myself and Mr Border’s running team had had to deal with on the way to Cape Sohya, and was soon restricted to grinding my way along at little more than walking pace. When I finally caught up with Mr Warehouse in Hakodaté, he told me that despite cycling from Fukushima Town in identical conditions he had arrived several hours before me, and even found the time to go and give blood.
‘If I’d lost half a litre of blood after that ride I’d have ended up in a coma,’ I said.
‘They give you free drinks and sweets, you know, and anyway I’m used to it – that makes twenty-eight times in all.’
‘Since when?’
‘Since as soon as I was old enough,’ he said, showing me his blood donor record card. ‘I’ve already been six times on this tour and my ambition is to make it to a hundred.’

We had arranged to meet at the top of Mount Hakodaté, from which the view at night is renowned – among the Japanese, at least – as one of the most beautiful in the world.

‘Back home in Okayama there are seven of us living in the same house together,’ said Mr Warehouse as we were on our way back down the mountain. ‘Me, my grandparents, my mum and dad, my younger sister and her son.’
‘You've got a nephew? How old is he?’
‘He's five now. My sister got married when she was still a teenager, but her husband spent all of his money on hostesses and in the end she kicked him out. That’s when they moved back in with us.’
‘Doesn’t it get a bit crowded?’
‘It does a bit, but my grandparents like having their grandson around.’
‘You’re not in a hurry to have kids yourself, I take it.’
‘Actually I’d like to start a family soon. I've been going out with the same girl for about a year and a half now, and when I’m at home we see each other most days. She’s pretty laid back so we just like hanging out, really – you know, sleeping late, going shopping, that kind of thing. She comes to cheer me on when I have a soccer game and I watch her when she plays hockey. Since I’ve been on this tour, though, I only call her about once a month. If it was more than that I think we’d start to miss each other – plus it would be too expensive.'
‘She doesn’t mind it when you go away hiking and cycling, then?’
‘Of course she does! She didn’t want me to go on this tour at all, but I just ignored her and went anyway.’

Esashi – Fukushima (江差 – 福島) – 88km

The ridge that runs along the centre of the Matsumaé Peninsula rises to a thousand metres above sea level, and mountainsides lush with foliage stretched up and away to my left beside the coast road. As far as I could tell the forest was unmanaged, and it wasn’t unreasonable to suppose that no human being had ever set foot even a few metres inland from where I was now riding.

As I sat in a layby eating my mid-morning snack, a young man rode past on the kind of bicycle you might expect a  teenager to receive as a birthday present – a small-scale mountain bike with a heavy frame and a garish logo – and I caught up with him at a Seicomart a little further up the road.

From Okayama Prefecture in western Honshu, Mr Warehouse had quit his job as a motorcycle mechanic three years ago and been on various adventures since, including two months spent hiking the 1500km Shikoku-henro (四国遍路) temple pilgrimage.

‘When I left Okayama in March there was still snow on the mountains,’ he said. ‘I’ve been to Kyushu, Shikoku and all along the Pacific coast to Hokkaido. Now and then I’ll stay somewhere for a few weeks and do a part-time job to save some money, and the plan is to make it back home before Christmas.’
‘How’s your body coping with all of that riding?’ I asked him (my saddle sore had been getting steadily worse over the past couple of weeks).
‘Fine – no pain, no problems! I’ve been in football clubs ever since I was at elementary school so I’m used to getting a lot of exercise.’

I suggested to Mr Warehouse that we ride together towards Cape Shirakami – the southernmost point in Hokkaido and the final goal on my circumnavigation – and along the way he mentioned that he had also been on a two-week tour of Holland.
‘I wanted to see Ajax and PSV Eindhoven play,’ he said. ‘It was fantastic – I couldn’t speak any Dutch but I got by on a lot of gestures and a few words of English.’

Mr Warehouse was so strong that it soon became apparent we were a mis-match: despite what ought to have been an inefficient riding style – he stood up on the pedals almost the entire time, even when we weren’t going uphill – he seemed to sail along with ease while I laboured over every pedal stroke (let’s face it, this could also have had something to do with the fact that he was ten years younger than me).

‘How do you manage to go so fast?’ I asked him when we stopped to look around Matsumaé Castle.
‘I’ve had the same bike since I was fifteen so I guess I’m just used to it,’ he said. ‘I didn’t do any training before I left Okayama and I haven’t had a single puncture in about six months. I am on my third set of tyres, mind you.’

Having bowed to his physical superiority I suggested that it might be better if we parted ways, and continued south at a rather more stately pace. Just as it had at Cape Sohya in the far north of the island, a strong wind swirled around Cape Shirakami – or rather, strong winds: when I arrived there the clouds were scudding one way, the flags fluttering another, and the waves breaking in a different direction altogether.

I eventually caught up with Mr Warehouse again in Fukushima Town (not to be confused with Fukushima Prefecture, which is several hundred kilometres to the south east), just as it was beginning to get dark.

On a previous tour of Hokkaido, he told me, he had stayed in rider houses, but this time was restricting himself to a budget of just 300 yen a day, and about to settle in for the night at an – admittedly rather spacious and well-appointed – bus shelter. His routine involved rising at 4am, setting off at 6am, stopping at 4pm and going to sleep at 7pm, and having noticed during the course of the day that his diet consisted almost exclusively of rice balls and dried fish, I treated him to a can of chuh-hai (alcopops) and a box of Pocky before seeking out a place to stay for myself.

‘This Saturday,’ said Mrs Wisteria Mountain, the proprietor of a nearby ryokan, ‘some celebrities are swimming between Hokkaido and Aomori for 24-Hour Television. I’ve got sixty TV people coming to stay and we’ll be chock-a-block - actually it’s against the safety regulations so don’t tell anyone!’

While I didn’t ask – and although, as she explained, she had three children and four grandchildren – I had the feeling Mrs Wisteria Mountain was a widow and would have been lonely without some guests to talk to.
‘Everyone likes it here because the food’s good and we give you lots of it,’ she boasted, and proceeded to ply me with more than I could possibly eat, including kimuchi (spicy, fermented cabbage from Korea) hot-pot, stir-fried asparagus and ooni （sea urchin) omelette.

‘We’ve been in business for thirty years,’ she continued. ‘We used to run the place as a hostess bar and there were girls from all over the place working here – Filipinos, Brazilians, Czechs. That was when the Seikan Tunnel was being built, but once that was finished there weren’t as many customers and we moved over to being an ordinary ryokan instead. The shinkansen (新幹線 / bullet train) should be coming soon, though, so hopefully things will start to pick up again.’

The Seikan Tunnel (青函トンネル) runs beneath the Tsugaru Straits between northern Honshu and Hokkaido, and at just over 53km was for two decades or so the longest tunnel of any kind in the world. Due to its enormous budget and high maintenance costs, however, and along with the fact that in the twenty-seven years it took to complete it was rendered at least partially obsolete by cheaper air travel, the tunnel was seen by many as a white elephant (actually not just a white elephant: a total of thirty-four workers lost their lives during its construction).

While rail passengers may not be plentiful, though, the tunnel has become an essential route for shipping freight to and from Hokkaido, and more to the point, was constructed with a view to one day being able to accommodate the shinkansen. At the time of writing, work is already underway to make the necessary upgrades, and the first shinkansen should pass through the tunnel on its way to Hakodaté in 2015, with a view to extending the service further north to Sapporo by 2035.

(Incidentally, you may or may not be interested to know that the celebrities on 24-Hour Television failed in their attempt to swim across the Tsugaru Straits, although they did raise plenty of money for charity in the process.)

Setana – Esashi (せたな – 江差) 91km

A short ferry ride from Setana lies Okushiri-toh (奥尻島 / literally ‘centre buttocks island’ – yes, as usual, your guess is as good as mine), which on the night of 12th July 1993 was witness to one of Japan’s worst natural disasters of recent times.

Following a 7.8-magnitude earthquake just off the coast, within three minutes the island was hit by the first wave of a tsunami, and just seven minutes after that by a second, even bigger wave. 233 people lost their lives – some as far afield as Aomori in northern Honshu and Russia on the other side of the Japan Sea – and among the dead were 4% of Okushiri’s population.

(There's some news footage of the aftermath about a minute and a half into this video - which is in Japanese - and then at various points throughout.)

At the bottom the Wikipedia page about the disaster – which is known officially as the Hokkaido Nansei-oki Earthquake (北海道南西沖地震) and colloquially as the Okushiri Earthquake – there is a section about what was learned as a result, the salient points of which are as follows:

- Even if it were possible to speed up the transmission of tsunami warnings, depending on the location of an earthquake’s epicentre, the fact that some warnings will not arrive in time is unavoidable.
- If people who live in coastal areas feel the tremors from a large earthquake, they should evacuate to higher ground or the tops of tall buildings straight away, and without waiting for tsunami warnings.
- Depending on their location, tsunami can be higher than predicted, hit many times over, and subesequent waves from a tsunami are sometimes higher than the initial one.

The tragedy is that despite these lessons having supposedly been ‘learned’ after the Okushiri Earthquake, by the time of the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, the Japanese people, the authorities and the so-called ‘experts’ had for a long time been underestimating not just the probability of something similar happening elsewhere in the country, but perhaps more importantly, its scale.

For example, the largest wave from the tsunami caused by the Okushiri Earthquake in 1993 (or to be more specific, the highest point above sea level that was inundated by waves from the tsunami) was thirty metres, while the largest wave from the tsunami caused by the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011 was forty metres.

In both cases, many people died because they either failed to evacuate to higher ground, because they evacuated by car and were caught in traffic jams, because the coming tsunami was estimated in official warnings as being no more than a few metres high, because in some areas, the tsunami arrived within just ten minutes of the earthquake, and because the initial waves from the tsunami were not necessarily its highest.

Much more so than western Hokkaido, the north-east coast of Honshu has a long history of off-shore earthquakes, including some within living memory. For example, the largest wave from the tsunami caused by the Shohwa-sanriku Earthquake (昭和三陸地震) in 1933 was twenty-eight metres high.

In the same way that residential areas are now in the process of being moved to higher ground in Tohoku, laws were introduced after the Sanriku quake in an effort to prevent people from building houses on low-lying ground that might be vulnerable to tsunami. Sadly, though, these laws were never properly enforced, and many of the same communities which had been destroyed in 1933 were destroyed all over again in 2011.

The weather in Setana wasn’t at all conducive to boarding a ferry, so instead of going to Okushiri I struggled on down the coast in the wind and rain.

That evening the owner of the Tsuji Ryokan gave me a map of Esashi with all of the town’s restaurants and bars marked on it, and I followed a roundabout route through the deserted backstreets on the way to and from my evening meal at a local izakaya.

Kuromatsunai – Setana (黒松内 – せたな)

Because a strong wind had whipped up overnight, packing the bike turned into a silent film-style comedy routine, in that every time I leaned over to pick something up it blew away and had me chasing around the campsite after it. The wind was so strong, in fact, that on the descent from a mountain pass above Kuromatsunai I reached my top speed of the summer, a quite literally eye-watering 63kph. For some reason, Mrs M wasn’t particularly impressed with this statistic when I told her about it on the phone, and instead started going on about the importance of road safety.

As the skies darkened in late afternoon I called in at a local shop on the coast road, where the doormat triggered a ping-pong chime and an old lady wearing the ubiquitous pinny appeared from the back room.
‘We don’t have a very big shop, I’m afraid,’ she said, and when I settled on buying an ice cream, totted up my change on a soroban (算盤 / abacus). ‘In the old days everyone used these, although in my case it’s because my fingers aren’t nimble enough to use a calculator any more.’

She proceeded to tell me a similar story to the one I had been hearing all summer: of how the population of Hokkaido is ageing because as soon as they graduate from high school, young people go to Sapporo or the mainland (two of her grandchildren were watching TV in the back room, and presumably she was resigned to the prospect of them moving away at some point), and what business there was has diminished even further because of the recession, the price of petrol and so on.

As I stepped outside it had begun to rain, and a little further up the road I stopped to take this commemorative photograph.

On a previous tour I had noticed that for some reason, the roads in Japan are littered with discarded gloves, and before setting out this summer had decided to count the ones I saw along the way. After four weeks on the road I had reached my target of one hundred, and wondered as I took the picture what proportion of the gloves had been left and right hands, and supposing I had picked them up, how many complete pairs I would now have.

As I’m sure you can imagine, there’s plenty of time to think when you’re cycling all day, every day for weeks at a time, and in my more idle moments I had formulated a theory – you might even say a philosophy – regarding this glove counting pastime, which for want of a better phrase I shall christen The Way Of The Glove:

1) The Glove is more likely to be found in built up and / or industrialised areas, not in the countryside, and on main rather than secondary roads.
2) In 99% of cases The Glove will not be in the middle of the road or on the pavement, but in the gutter.
3) Do not pre-empt The Glove by trying to anticipate its appearance, for this will surely result in disappointment.
4) Conversely, you must not lose concentration in your quest for The Glove. The Glove will materialise when you least expect it, so you must, on a subconscious level, be aware of your surroundings and prepared for its appearance at all times.
5) Searching for The Glove on the opposite side of the road is not advisable, as this could result in The Seeker Of The Glove becoming distracted from their task and passing up a possible Glove-spotting opportunity directly in front of them.
6) You must not return to look for The Glove you thought was there but did not see clearly. This is a form of cheating and goes against The Way Of The Glove, which dictates that all Gloves must be observed from a moving bicycle while on one’s way to a specific destination further along the road.
7) In this sense, The Quest For The Glove can only be embarked upon as an incidental, secondary activity, and never as the primary goal of one’s journey.
8) Last but not least, if you sense that you are about to pass The Glove, you will pass The Glove! This is the essential mystery at the heart of The Way Of The Glove.

Like I say, there’s plenty of time – in fact, possibly too much time – to think when you’re on a cycle tour. (Oh, and for what it’s worth, among the many other roadside detritus I saw over the summer, used nappies came a very close second to gloves. As such, please look forward to a future blog post entitled The Way Of The Nappy.)

Day 27 – Auto House – Kuromatsunai (オートハウス – 黒松内) 129km

When I awoke the only other person up and about was the owner of the Auto House, whose portrait – a Che-Guevara-style image painted onto a large and now faded bed sheet – hung on one of the dormitory walls. Twenty-three years ago, he told me, he had travelled to Australia and stayed at a caravan park. Impressed with the idea of a place to stay that was cheaper than a hotel but more comfortable than a campsite, upon returning to Japan he created his own version, which instead of caravans has log cabins.

The Auto House thus became one of the first rider houses in Hokkaido, and as the economy – and in turn the tourist industry – boomed, within a few years there were more than five hundred on the island as a whole.

‘Nowadays, though,’ he said, ‘a lot of them are closing down. There aren’t as many tourists as there used to be, and like me, the people who run them are getting old. Plus there’s more competition. There’s a ski resort near here called Niseko and most of it is owned by Australians. They’ve built all of these self-catering condominiums which are open all year round – skiers and snowboarders use them in the winter and in the summer it’s hikers, kayakers and so on.’

At Bohyoh-nakayama michi-no-éki I caught my first glimpse of Mount Shiribetsu.

And my interest was piqued when this song - by a band called Aladdin - came over the PA system.

At first listen Hi Wa, Mata Noboru (陽は、また昇る / The Sun Will Rise Again) sounds like just another bouncy J-Pop tune, but the lyrics are in fact a comically over-the-top tribute to the awesomeness of Japan – a kind of funnier, alternative national anthem.

We'll keep on going forever

Do your best Japan, Japan you're great
Now's the time to stand up and be counted, Japan
Fly high, fly beautifully
To win back our pride
Office workers of Japan, fight for your country

When it feels like you're about to give in
Shout out
To rouse the hearts of the people you love
Never give up
And be prepared
When they're catching you up, when they're about to overtake you
Once more, Japan, country of pure gold
The sun will surely rise again
If you're smart, use your head
If you're strong, use your power
We'll keep on going forever

Do your best Japan, Japan you're great
Japan, you're smart
Instant noodles, canned coffee
Karaoké - we invented them all
Do your best Japan, Japan you're great
Fly high, fly beautifully
To win back our pride
Office workers of Japan, fight for your country

Your spirit is blazing
It will never go out
We built our passion together
So we can start building the future too
Don't blame it on anyone else
It's time to transform our society
One more time, Japan, country of pure gold
The sun will rise again
There may only be a few of us
We may only be a small country on a big planet
But we'll keep on going forever

Do your best Japan, Japan you're great
Japan, you're smart
The mechanical pencil, the bullet train
The endoscope - we invented them all
Do your best Japan, Japan you're great
Japan, you'll never give up
Fly high, fly beautifully
To win back our pride
Office workers of Japan, fight for your country

You can't survive on your own
We're here for you
We're here for you
We're in this together
Keep your spirits up
Spirits, spirits, keep your spirits up
Lets go!

Do your best, Japan
Japan, you're great
Japan, you're smart
The blue LED
Once upon a time, we even invented the baby turtle [translator's note: I have no idea what this lyric means, although the members of Aladdin are holding cuddly turtle toys when they sing it]
Do your best Japan, Japan, you're great
Now's the time to stand up and be counted, Japan
Fly high, fly beautifully
To win back our pride
Office workers of Japan, fight for your country

We'll keep on going forever

Later in the afternoon I spotted a fellow cyclist whose unzipped raincoat billowed out behind him like a cape. He introduced himself as Mr Flattery Department, and said that earlier in the week he had fallen ill with a temperature of 40°c (104°f). After taking a couple of days off and visiting the doctor, though, by this morning he had recovered sufficiently to get back on the road.

Originally from Yamanashi Prefecture, Mr Flattery Department was taking six months to cycle to Tokyo, and that night he planned to camp at Rankoshi michi-no-éki. I would have joined him if it wasn’t for the fact that, as usual, I hadn’t brought any food with me.

‘You have to be careful when you’re carrying your own food, though,’ he said.
‘You mean because of bears?’ I said.
‘Not just bears – I’ve had my food stolen by foxes twice now.’

Actually, to say that I was travelling without food isn’t strictly true – I had a half-full box of Choco Pie with me, which I donated to Mr Flattery Department to supplement his evening meal.

A couple of weeks ago I had a moment of enlightenment, or satori (悟り), as they say in Japanese. At the time I was sitting on a mossy rock, next to a pool of water, in a forest, on a mountaintop, on a cold, damp night, in the pitch dark, and with a plastic bottle in my hand. If you're wondering how such an unlikely set of circumstances led to a transcendental experience, allow me to explain.

Ask most of its residents what is the highest mountain in Ibaraki Prefecture and they are likely to say Tsukuba, when in fact the correct answer is Mount Yamizo (八溝山 / literally 'eight ditches mountain'). Yamizo straddles the border with neighbouring Fukushima in the far north of the prefecture, and while it may lack the attractively pointy profile of Tsukuba – not to mention its cable car – it is 145 metres higher and boasts a paved road all the way to its summit.

Noticing this on my dog-eared old Mapple road map one day, I worked out that it would be possible to cycle to Yamizo from our apartment, camp out for a night, get up early to see the sunrise and then cycle back the following morning.

My cycle tours in Japan have been getting progressively shorter over the years – six weeks in 2005, five weeks in 2008 and ten days in 2011 – and with a one-year-old daughter and a son on the way (apologies if this is the first you've heard – I was going to write a ‘Mrs M is pregnant again!’ blog post but never got round to it), this seemed like a good idea for a final tour before I become so busy changing nappies and mixing formula that I never have time to leave the house again.

So having negotiated with Mrs M for permission to abandon her and M Jr for the weekend, I set off at 8.30am Saturday 2nd November, when the weather was warm, the autumn colours were just starting to show, and Route 118 between Mito and Daigo Town was busy with sightseers.

As well as the Fukuroda waterfall (袋田の滝), Daigo is famous for its apples, and in the orchards that lined the way the trees were weighed down with large, ripe, red and green ones (in order to make the apples as large, ripe, red and green as possible, silver sheets are placed on the ground to reflect extra sunlight from beneath them).

The woman behind the counter at Daigo tourist information centre said that a campsite marked on the Mapple as being close to the summit of Yamizo had long since closed for business, and I told her that I would probably nojuku (野宿 / sleep rough) instead. While she was a little surprised by this, I reasoned that, in the same way mountaineers do before they set off on a climbing expedition, it would be a good idea to tell someone where I was going in case I got into trouble.

At a crossroads on Route 118 not far north of Daigo there is a road sign showing the way to Yamizo, along with a family-run convenience store the woman at the information centre had said would be my last chance to stock up on supplies for the night ahead. Among other things I purchased their last three onigiri (rice balls), and had a steaming hot bowl of soba at the very small – and very cheap – noodle restaurant next door.

Route 28 winds its way through a succession of small villages in the Yamizo River valley, and past farms whose main crop – where precious little land is level enough to accommodate rice fields – is green tea. A dog out for a walk with its owner barked suddenly as I cycled past, straining on the end of its lead to try and take a bite out of my tyres, and a stooped old lady in Wellington boots, a bonnet and a pinny stopped me for a chat, telling me to 'Ganbarina' (頑張りな / 'Do your best') about five times before she let me carry on up the road.

There were, as it turned out, a couple more places to buy emergency rations, but they were old-style village shops that sold very little in the way of fresh produce. Again I thought it best to let some of the locals know that a strange foreigner would be camping out on the mountain that night, so engaged the shopkeepers in conversation, and came away with two over-ripe bananas, a tomato and a tube of Smarties for my troubles.

Just as one of the shopkeepers had described it, the road up the mountainside was marked by a large wooden torii (鳥居 / shrine gateway).

Along with this little fellow dispensing free spring water.

Knowing that I would have a long time to spend on the summit with nothing to do, I had made a point of dallying on the way, and reached the torii at three in the afternoon. In theory this left me with just about the right amount of time to get to the top before darkness fell, although in practice it is much, much easier to cycle uphill first thing in the morning when one's legs are fresh, and the shape of this two-day tour gave me no alternative but to tackle its most arduous stretch in late afternoon.

From being on the gentle slope of Route 28, I suddenly found myself on a 13.5% incline (that's about 1 in 7 in old money), which aside from a couple of brief interludes where the road levelled off, barely let up for the entire 8km to the top, and around what felt like several hundred hairpin bends.

Actually there were more like twenty-five, but I was constantly weaving back and forth in an effort to find the line of least resistance – ie. the line of least steepness – and to say that my lungs felt as if they were bursting out of my chest would be an understatement: rather, it felt as if all of my major organs were about to explode and splatter themselves across the road in the manner of a zombie film fight scene.

Often on a climb there comes a point where you find a rhythm and forget about the physical exertion, and if that had happened I would have had my moment of satori right there and then. As it was, though, rather than enduring pain and suffering in order to achieve Zen enlightenment, here I never got beyond the pain and suffering part.

I stopped to catch my breath, eat my Smarties and mutter to myself, 'Jesus fecking Christ this is steep!' approximately fifteen times on the way up, and the only thing that prevented me from walking instead of riding was the fact that the last of the day's hikers and sightseers were simultaneously on their way back down the mountain. The indignity of being seen pushing my bike along by its handlebars would have been too much to bear, so I gritted my teeth, fixed my gaze on the road ahead and strained to turn the pedals, in the hope that the procession of passersby would be impressed with my true-grit, true-Brit, never-say-die spirit of empire-building excellence.

Finally, after the best part of an hour and a half of torture, and just as I had switched on my lights to combat the encroaching gloom, first one car park and then another materialised – both now empty – and the road reached a dead end just below two radio transmitters, the Yamizo-miné shrine and this impressively castle-like observation tower.

By now the skies had clouded over and there wasn't much to observe, although at one point a canvas-covered army truck drove up and three members of the jiéitai (自衛隊 / Japan's self-defence force) dressed in full camouflage gear jumped out. They appeared to be looking for something – or perhaps someone – but after couple of minutes of running around and shouting orders at each other, gave up, got back in the truck and drove off again.

There was a patch of grass in the lee of the observation tower where I could have pitched my tent, but after a little more investigating I found that one of the sliding doors to this outbuilding had been left unlocked.

Inside there was a cubby hole at one end stocked with chairs, mattresses and even a heater, although I resolved not to use them as I didn't want to make a nuisance of myself, and in any case, had made a point of bringing as much clothing and bedding as I could stuff into my panniers.

I parked my bike beneath the eaves before unloading it (I made sure to take off my shoes at the door, of course), and soon it was time to settle down for my evening meal – such as it was – of three rice balls, two bananas, a jam-filled bread roll, a bag of peanuts and a tomato.

One rather important thing was missing, though, and that was fluids.

As well as boasting one of the Bando-sanjusan-kasho (板東三十三カ所), thirty-three shrines in the Kanto area that form part of a 1300km pilgrimage, Yamizo is listed among the Meisui-hyakusen (名水百選), one hundred of the most attractive and well-preserved springs in the country. Assuming water would be plentiful, I therefore hadn't bothered to bring any drinks with me, and set off with my water bottle to find Ginshohsui (銀性水 – literally 'silver gender water'), the highest of Yamizo's five springs.

Onii-san had lent me a miner's helmet-style headlight, which illuminated a cone-shaped shaft of misty air before me as I walked, and a wooden sign told me that ginshohsui was just seventy metres away, although having expected to hear the sound of water gushing forth from the ground, I was greeted instead with silence.

There at a bend in the path was a shallow pool of water with a grey plastic drainpipe poking out from the hillside above it. It wasn't so much a mountain spring as a murky puddle, and by the headlight I could see a beetle-like insect scuttle its way through the carpet of rotting leaves at the bottom – in other words, the water in the pool was just that little bit too stagnant to be trusted as drinkable.

Perhaps, I thought, the other four springs would be more gushing and geyser-like, but I didn't fancy hiking even further downhill only to be similarly underwhelmed. More to the point, I didn't fancy hiking all the way back up again on legs already fragile from the climb.

Looking and listening more closely, it became apparent that there was indeed a tiny amount of water trickling from the drainpipe, so if I was to avoid death by dehydration – well, OK, maybe not death, but certainly a further dose of pain and suffering – my only option was to sit here and wait as my water bottle filled.

Having positioned myself on a moss-covered rock at the edge of the pool, I realised that the water was flowing so slowly that rather than fall directly downwards, it was first of all snaking its way around the rim and back along the outside of the pipe, and that the sweet spot – that is to say the ideal position beneath which to hold my water bottle – wasn't fixed, but moved ever so slightly depending on the subtlest variations in the flow of water. This meant that I had to keep as still and as quiet as possible, all the while listening for the dripping sound in the bottle: if the sound stopped I moved the bottle a smidgen one way or the other until it became audible again.

I was still thirsty from the climb, so at the first couple of attempts waited just a few minutes before gulping down whatever water had accumulated. Eventually, though, I decided that one full bottle – about 750ml – ought to be enough to see me through the night. I found a more comfortable position on a different but equally mossy rock, held out my right arm (it was at this point that I was thankful for my over-developed triceps, the result of years spent holding a boom pole with a microphone on the end of it for film and TV shoots), and since I didn't want to waste the batteries, turned off my headlight.

The trees' swaying silhouettes were visible against the night sky, and their leaves rustled in the wind or crackled like crisp packets as they were blown along the forest floor. I listened for any sound that might be regular – the footsteps of a wild boar, for example, or even a domesticated hiker – but there was none. At one point I felt the tiniest movement of air as a bat flew past my face and circled the pool, its wings a blurred flash in the semi-darkness, but to all intents and purposes I was alone, and it occurred to me this was the most isolated I had been in my entire life, with no other human being within a radius of several kilometres.

So why am I here? I thought to myself. Why am I sitting on a rock in the freezing cold with my arm about to fall off from the strain of holding a water bottle beneath the trickle of water from a plastic drainpipe? Why am I about to spend the night on a lonely mountaintop, when I could be spending it in my living room, in front of the telly, before climbing into a hot bath and going to sleep on a fluffy futon beneath a warm duvet?

Why, for a holiday, of course!

OK, so this might not be most people's idea of a holiday, and I had no luxuries to speak of: no bath, no shower, no TV, no heated toilet seat with bidet facility (although there was a small, basic toilet block next to the radio transmitters that despite the isolated location had been stocked with a fresh supply of toilet paper), no hot food, no hot water, and as it turned out, not much in the way of cold water, either.

I was here for the challenge, I suppose, and for the view: as well as the sunrise and the surrounding countryside, with any luck I would get to see Mount Fuji – more than 200km distant – the following morning.

Then as the trees continued to sway in the breeze, the leaves continued to dance around the forest floor and the dripping sound changed in pitch as my water bottle gradually filled, I once more thought to myself, why am I here? Except this time it was in the larger, philosophical,  Capital Letters, Why Am I Here and What Is The Meaning Of Life? sense.

In my previous capacity as someone who held a boom pole with a microphone on the end of it for a living, I spent many happy hours driving around the UK in vans full of camera equipment, usually with a fellow technician or two to keep me company, and one particular conversation – which took place, if my memory serves me correctly, on the A13 just outside Southend – stuck in my mind.

Myself and the camera assistant were somewhere in our late twenties, while the cameraman was somewhere in his early forties, and after listening to us talking about our lives for a while, he chipped in.
'I know what it's like,' he said. 'You're working in showbiz, you go to some pretty nice places and meet some pretty glamorous people. You're earning a bit of money, you've got your flat in London, your Ikea furniture, a big TV and a nice stereo system. You go to the pub with your mates and you go to the cinema to watch a movie. You think you're pretty happy, don't you? I mean, you think you've got it sorted.’
The assistant and I looked at each other with smiles of recognition.
'Yep,' I said. ‘As it happens you've just described my life.'
'How did you know?' said the camera assistant.
'Because I was like that myself once. But eventually I decided that I needed to settle down. I found someone nice, got married and had kids. And kids,' said the cameraman, 'are the missing piece of the puzzle.'

In actual fact I had always suspected this to be the case, and even when I was young and found the prospect of having children utterly terrifying, deep down I somehow instinctively knew that one day I would change my mind, or perhaps just accidentally start a family and realise that it wasn't such a hideous ordeal after all. It wasn't until I became a father, though, that I truly understood what my colleague was talking about, although this, too, was as much to do with finding someone who was willing to be the mother of my children, rather than with deciding that I wanted to have them in the first place.

Bringing up M Jr is by turns miraculous, and inspiring, and uplifting, not to mention exhausting (a couple of weeks ago all three of us came down with the norovirus, and one particular night turned into a kind of three-person toilet relay of vomiting and diarrhea).

Witnessing one human being's journey practically from conception onwards is akin to witnessing the evolution of the entire human race in microcosm. You see them in the womb when they are barely more than a pixel on a computer screen, and, like some pre-historic sea creature, yet to set foot on dry land (this, incidentally, is one of the most infinitely mysterious things about babies, in that they are first of all amphibious, inhaling amniotic fluid as if through a set of gills, and only transform into air-breathing mammals when they are halfway out of the womb). You hear their heartbeat and watch as their limbs and features develop, and then once they emerge you feel the grip of their hand on your finger, and watch them sleep and eat and pee and poo and cry and smile for the very first time.

In evolutionary terms, M Jr is currently at the caveman stage – or should I say cavegirl – in the sense that she is standing on her hind legs, using rudimentary language, gestures and tools. She hasn't yet started a fire, invented the wheel or written the complete works of Shakespeare, but that will all happen in due course. In the meantime she can already listen, learn, watch, copy, remember, emote, give and receive affection, accept or refuse requests, ask and answer questions. All human life and all of human history has somehow been distilled into this one, tiny being with a wobbly walk and a voice like a slightly less robotic version of R2D2's, and in this sense just one of its members embodies the hopes and fears of the human race as a whole.

All of which contemplation brought me back round to my original, literal, lower-case question, namely, why am I here? If my wife, daughter and unborn son are so important to me, why am I sitting on a mossy rock, on a cold mountaintop, in near darkness, waiting for a water bottle to fill very, very slowly, before sleeping on my own in a bare outbuilding, with not another living soul for miles around? And asking the question like that made it a little more difficult to answer.

I suppose everyone, to coin a phrase, needs a break from time to time, and even though I love being with my family, I also happen to enjoy being on my own. Cycle tours, however long or short, are my way of doing this, what is referred to in Japanese as kibuntenkan (気分転換), a change of scene. Recently, for example, Mrs M has been putting M Jr in a nursery a couple of times a week, not just because she is tired from being pregnant and looking after a one year old, but because she wants to have some time in her life when she is something other than 'just' a mother.

OK, so maybe this is just my excuse for being a good-for-nothing, layabout husband; maybe all of that Meaning Of Life stuff is a bit over the top, and maybe I really was just sitting on a rock waiting for a water bottle to fill, nothing deeper or more meaningful than that. But regardless, there was something meditative about the experience, and by that point any anxiety I had at the prospect of spending the night cold and alone had dissipated.

I couldn't tell you exactly how long I had been there – probably no more than thirty or forty minutes – but eventually I realised that the dripping noise had stopped, and when I poked a finger into the mouth of my water bottle, that it had filled to overflowing.

In exactly the same way that it is possible, on a long climb, to get into such a rhythm that you zone out and forget you are turning the pedals at all, so I had ceased to be concerned about how long it was going to take for the bottle to fill, and ceased to listen for the change in pitch in the sound of the dripping water as it did so. Rested, enlightened and saved from dehydration, I screwed the cap back on my water bottle, switched on my headlight and walked back to the summit of Mount Yamizo to have dinner.

I had planned to call Mrs M and tell her how I was getting on, but there was no signal on my mobile phone and even an email I tried to send didn't make it through the ether, so once I had eaten, all I had to keep me company was a single comic book.

Upon discovering that I was a fan of Japanese manga, a deputy headmaster at one of the schools where I teach suggested that I read one of the classics, namely Hi-no-tori (火の鳥 / The Phoenix) by Osamu Tezuka. Tezuka is described in Wikipedia as the 'god of manga', and Hi-no-tori as his 'life's work', and it tells the story of a phoenix which is said to grant eternal life to anyone who can capture it and drink its blood.

Having read the first of its twelve volumes, I cannot recommend it highly enough, and what follows is my translation of a scene I read that night. In it, the young huntsman Nagi has tracked the Phoenix to the volcano where it nests, and just as he is about to begin firing arrows at it, hears the firebird's voice in his head.

Phoenix: The lifetime of an insect may be ordained by nature, but they are brought up properly, they eat, they love each other, they give birth to their young, they are fulfilled, and then they die. Human beings live longer than the insects, longer than the fish in the sea, longer than dogs and cats and monkeys. In the course of a lifetime, if you can find happiness, isn't that good fortune enough?

Nagi: You're not making any sense! And anyway, I'm going to shoot you down.

Phoenix: Whether or not you understand, Nagi, you will still die one day.

Nagi: Before I do, I'll be sure to drink your blood!

I'm not ashamed to say that I went to sleep that night with tears in my eyes, because as I read Hi-no-tori, I realised that I have found happiness in my life, and this is as much as I can ask for. My alarm woke me at five-thirty the next morning, and I packed up my belongings as quickly as I could – the sun was due to rise at six – before stepping outside.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I had been alone for almost exactly twelve hours when an early-morning sightseer joined me in the observation tower, and we lamented the fact that even on such a fine day, this was as close as we would get to seeing Mount Fuji.

Then at about seven-thirty I threw a coin in the collection box at Yamizo-miné shrine and prayed that my children will grow up happy and healthy, before drinking the remainder of my precious spring water and freewheeling my way back down the mountain.

Sapporo – Auto House (札幌 - オートハウス) - 63km

I was woken by the sound of Mr Assistant Wisteria's hacking, phlegm-filled smoker's cough, which was followed closely by the smell of his first cigarette of the day.
'When I was a salesman,' he said. 'I would get up at 6.30 every morning, but now that I'm self-employed I sleep in for an hour. I always watch Renzoku-terebi-shohsetsu (連続テレビ小説 - the NHK daily soap opera) at 8.15. It's part of my routine.'

In the episode that we watched together, a young girl with ambitions of becoming a dancer was being reassured by her older sister that she was, if only she could believe in herself a little more, destined to realise her dream.
'Obviously she'll succeed in the end,' said Mr Assistant Wisteria. 'Then they'll move on to a different part of the country - the location and the characters change every few months.'

Mr Assistant Wisteria gave the Transeo 4.0 GT 7005 City Cross Design a service before I left, and as he did so noticed the sign I had attached to one of the panniers.

It reads: Hello! I'm travelling around Hokkaido. Please feel free to honk your horn in support! Thank you! But having expected to be bombarded with horn honks from passing motorists, I had only received about four in as many weeks.
'Sounding your horn at cyclists and pedestrians,' said Mr Assistant Wisteria, 'is NG - it's not considered to be very good manners.'

After removing the sign I cycled off through Sapporo city centre, where quite by chance I happened upon Seicomart HQ, a modest high-rise block in the Chuo district.

Founded in 1971, Seicomart (seikoh / 成功 means 'success') is the oldest chain of convenience stores in Japan, although unlike the more familiar 7-11, Lawson, Family Mart and so on, and apart from a handful of branches in Saitama and Ibaraki Prefectures, it has yet to expand into a nationwide concern. Almost all of the cyclists I met over the summer had Seicomart club cards, and with over a thousand stores in Hokkaido (that's one for every 5,500 people), the company inspires a great deal of loyalty among its residents, and regularly tops ratings for customer satisfaction.

From the start, Seicomart specialised in taking over pre-existing, independently run off-licences (that's liquor stores for my American friends), and has maintained its connections with alcohol producers around the world, meaning that, among other things, it tends to stock cheaper, better quality wine than its competitors.

Seicomart also has an advertising jingle that, after calling in at a branch pretty much every day for five weeks, is even now etched into my subconscious.

The first campsite I came to on the road out of Sapporo was closed due to a bear incursion and the second had gone out of business, so I ended up instead at the Auto House rider house, where the facilities were basic to say the least. The bath, for example, was a goémon-buro (五右衛門風呂), essentially a large, cast-iron cooking pot with a fire underneath.

In the days before gas boilers and domestic plumbing, any household that didn't happen to be located next to a natural hot spring was obliged to use a goémon-buro, or at least a variation thereof. It is named after a thief called Goémon Ishikawa, who was sentenced to be boiled to death in one in the late sixteenth century, and Ishikawa was apparently not the only criminal to receive such a punishment.
'Sometimes,' said a fellow guest as he was stoking the fire, 'the goémon-buro was filled with boiling oil instead of boiling water.'

Its most important feature, therefore, is a wooden disc that looks like the lid on an old-style okama (お釜 / rice cooking pot), and on which the bather sits so that - and I quote - 'you don't fry your bollocks' on the bottom.

As we were eating dinner, I got talking to a fellow who - like Mr Bell Tree on Day 6 - was touring on a Honda Cub, which he told me ran for between sixty and eighty kilometres on a single litre of petrol.
'Now the price of gasoline is so high,' he said, 'a lot of my friends are switching from cars to bikes.'

When I mentioned today's closed campsite, Mr Cub told me that he had come across a couple of bears during his travels.
'The first time I was hiking and found one fast asleep in the middle of the path', he said. 'I managed to tiptoe past without waking it up, but the second time I was with a friend of mine and the bear was wide awake. As soon as we saw it we ran away as fast as we could.'
'But I thought that was the wrong thing to do?'
'I wasn't too scared because we had some bear spray with us. We'd tried it out beforehand at the zoo and it seemed to work, although one thing you've got to make sure of with bear spray is that you're upwind of the bear when you use it.'

The focus at the Auto House was very much on bikes, barbecues and booze, and on the wall of the main dormitory was a montage of graffiti and old photographs, of, among other things, blow-up dolls, bikers flashing their arses (the slang term for this in Japanese is, you may be interested to know, mangetsu - 満月 / full moon) and women flashing their, er, assets.

Mr Cub and I were joined in conversation by a motorcyclist from Osaka, and it soon became clear why the Auto House was so popular, and so much more blokey than the other rider houses I had stayed in.
'There's a street in Sapporo called H Street,' said Mr Osaka (H - short for hentai / 変態, which means 'pervert' - is a slang term for sex). 'It's renowned as the best and the cheapest place to get laid in Japan. A lot of the girls there are Japanese, which is unusual, and they're pretty cute, too.'
'You should try it,' said Mr Cub, 'seeing as you're here.'
'But I'm a newlywed!' I said.
'Fair enough,' said Mr Osaka. 'Although you should still go there one day. It only costs about ten thousand yen for an hour and a half, you know.'

Mr Osaka told us all sorts of stories during the course of the evening, to the extent that I couldn't work out if he was married, divorced or single, had children, a mistress or a younger girlfriend, or perhaps all of the above. At about 11pm, his face still bright red from drinking shohchu, he wandered off into the dark, and at first I assumed he had gone for a pee. A couple of minutes later, though, we heard the sound of his Harley firing up and being ridden off into the night, no doubt in the direction of H Street.

Hamamasu – Sapporo (浜益 - 札幌) - 90km

As I was talking to Mr High Bridge - a student from Ibaraki who had got up at five that morning and cycled all the way from Sapporo - a four-wheel-drive van with monster truck tyres pulled into the convenience store car park. Having jumped down from the driver's seat, a middle-aged man with an Elvis-like quiff came over for a chat and a cigarette and handed both of us his business card.

'If you're ever in trouble, call me here,' he said, and while it was highly unlikely that either Mr High Bridge or myself would find ourselves in trouble in or around the town of Hamamasu at any point in the future, we appreciated the gesture.

I made it to Sapporo myself at about lunchtime, and on the recommendation of Mr Eminent - the architecture student I had met the previous day - went straight to Moérénuma Park. Moérénuma Park is perhaps the most famous work by the artist Isamu Noguchi, who was born in the US to an American mother and a Japanese father, and became active in numerous different disciplines, including sculpture, painting, interior design, set design and landscape gardening.

While construction on the park began a few months before Noguchi's death in 1988, it wasn't completed until seventeen years later, and among Moérénuma's several square kilometres of geometric landscaping are fountains, cherry trees, tennis courts, an art gallery, an athletics track, a concert stage, a playground, a paddling pool, a baseball field, and a sixty-two-metre-high artificial mountain that boasts one of the best views in the city.

My next appointment was with Mr Assistant Wisteria, who had given me his phone number three weeks ago at Cape Erimo, and we met at Misono subway station to the south east of the city centre.

Over dinner at a restaurant nearby, Mr Assistant Wisteria confessed that he had given up drinking six months ago, before proceeding to down three glasses of beer in quick succession, and I wasn't quite sure whether to feel privileged that he was willing to jump off the wagon in order to toast my safe arrival in Sapporo, or fearful that I had managed to make friends with another raging alcoholic, in the same mould as Mr Small Field from Kushiro. In the event, though, Mr Assistant Wisteria knew how to hold his liquor, and to the best of my knowledge didn't use the phrase 'Sapporo, number one!' at any point during the time I was with him.

Like me, Mr Assistant Wisteria played guitar in his spare time, and at the end of the evening we had an impromptu jam session back at his apartment, where I tried my best to remember the chords to a medley of Oasis and Frank Sinatra songs, and he played the English (that is to say, British) songs that he knew - among them Yesterday and Layla - along with some Japanese enka (演歌).

Enka is the Japanese equivalent of American country music, in that it is perennially unfashionable, beloved of old folks, and its lyrics - cf Hibari Misora's Bihoro Pass from Day 15 - are more often than not about breaking up with one's lover. In fact, Mr Assistant Wisteria's life story wouldn't have looked out of place in an enka song.

'I used to be married,' he told me. 'We even had our honeymoon in Hawaii, but then a couple of years ago we got divorced.'
'Have you got a girlfriend now?'
'No, I haven't. I'm playing a concert with some mates of mine soon, and all of them are married with children. I'm forty-four now and I'm the only one left from my year at school who's still single. My sister's got two kids and my parents are putting pressure on me to get married again, but I'm not in a hurry. I've had my heart broken once so I'm a bit more choosy now - I'm waiting for my destiny.'