Autumn Leaves

On my way to the airport in Chicago, I met the Japanese speaker who had delivered his oration to the departing JETs the night before at the hotel. He had been funny and engaging, and had made me excited about traveling to Japan. In the bus, he sat next to me and began to talk, asking me where I was heading.
"Yamanashi," I said.
"Ah, Yamanashi," he replied. "Mountain, nothing." He explained that "Yamanashi" literally means "Mountain, Pear," but that "nashi" was also the phonetic pronunciation of the Japanese word for "nothing." Thus, the joke is that Yamanashi prefecture has mountains...and not much else.
It's funny because it's true.
Ok, ok, it's not quite that bad. Not quite. But, in any event, that anecdote seems appropriate before I begin talking about Autumn Leaves, and my spontaneous excursion, with Julie, into the mountains of Yamanashi and out of the nothing.

My bedtime, most nights, is 10 o' clock sharp, and Friday night was no exception. The nice thing about an early bedtime is that you wake up early and you have the whole day ahead of you. A novel idea, I know. But for a recent college graduate, this is a little more profound than you might otherwise imagine.

At 7:30 am, on Saturday, I awoke to a frigid apartment. After throwing on some clothes, casting open the curtains to observe a beautiful morning, and eating some breakfast, I pulled Julie out the door with me and into our small car. The plan was to drive south to the area around my second school and observe the leaves. Twice a week I make a 45 minute journey down south to the Western side of Yamanashi and enter Kyonan town where my second school is located. I have a CD player in the car, but I use it sparingly during the week because my students can be pretty loud so I try to preserve my ear drums for a more noise-controlled environment, like my house. Thus, I have little else to do during the drive but to watch Japan roll by. Luckily, during autumn, my drive is stunning. Up until that Saturday, I had not been able to document the beauty that I see daily. I knew I had to make an effort to take pictures--I couldn't let this opportunity slip away. Soon the leaves would be gone, and so too would my autumn in Japan. I needed to seize the opportunity and so I did.

Julie and I drove south and made it to route 52 which winds around mountain passes alongside the Fujikawa river. I was thoroughly unimpressed with the river the first time I drove this route, as I had been with many of Japan's waterways. Japanese rivers are almost universally controlled and covered in concrete, as are many Japanese mountainsides--a rather large shock when one considers the more popular and traditional image of Japan as a natural paradise. The vast concrete jungles of Tokyo and Osaka did not develop in a vacuum--they have simply moved outwards into almost all of habitable Japan.
At any rate, today the Fujikawa was lit by the sun and its blue waters were indeed beautiful. I pulled the car over to take pictures by the river bed, and then we drove further south.
In Kyonan, we parked near an Onsen and began to walk around. This part of Yamanashi is really stunning--any flat ground is necessarily cultivated or concreted and made livable, but in Kyonan, the narrow town (maybe 200 meters wide by 5 miles long!) winds like a snake through the valley created by a large mountain range. In the morning, steam rises from the streams and farmers burn their rubbish in the fields. This town, cut off by the mountains, is a magical place, made even more magical by the bright autumn colors: the crimson, gold and rust colors completely dominate one's vision.
As Julie and I crossed a bridge to get a photo, we noticed an elderly man headed our way. "Ohayoo Gozaimasu" we said. "Ohayoo," he replied, evidently surprised to be talking with foreigners. 5ft tall, he trudged by us carrying a bamboo pole nearly 15 meters long. A few minutes later, after he was out of sight, we heard the echoing sound of that great weight being dropped as he reached his destination.
At this point, Julie and I decided we could either turn back now for lunch, or keep going, up and over the mountains toward Motosu lake. Since we had come this far, we both thought it might be fun to keep going, to be spontaneous and take a mountain drive. And so, we set out in our tiny K-car, with an engine the size of a microwave, over the mountain towards the lake. Two or three times I had to pull over to let other drivers pass us as we inched our way towards the summit. Other times we stopped to take pictures of the beautiful view, of mountains shaped like sand dunes in a brilliant kaleidoscope of autumn color. In the distance, we could see other fantastically high mountains, like Shirane-san, snowcapped anomalies among the fall colors. Finally we reached the last peak and I switched out of 2nd gear and back into "drive" on the automatic transmission to coast down the other side towards the mouth of the tunnel.
As we careened out into the sunlight, both Julie and I gasped at the sight of an awesome Mt. Fuji before us, towering over the still water of the lake.


Viewing Mt. Fuji in person is truly a breathtaking experience. From a distance, the mountain is absolutely immense--almost unfathomably so, compared with the sometimes humble surroundings. Julie and I were viewing Fuji-san from the north looking south, so the sun had back-lit the mountain, creating a magical blue hue that perfectly complimented the stunning lake Motosu. The picturesque symmetry is astounding--it's no wonder that famous Japanese art styles tend to be minimalist, one observes, when looking at a scene like this in contemporary nature.
After taking our fill of the gorgeous surroundings, Julie and I headed back over the mountain and into town. We stopped for tempura soba noodles at a road-side restaurant and continued home. We made our way back to Ryuo and took a stroll in the wooded park near our house, which was also brilliantly colored and beautiful in the Saturday sunlight.

Much of our daily experience so far has been fairly linear and comparatively uneventful, only punctuated by moments like these. I often find myself very self aware of the fact that I am in an active process of shaping my memories for the future, with the photos I take and words I write. What I directly observe will not always remain in my memory--it's what I document that will help me recall experiences and events many years from now. Even as I was photographing Fuji that day, I imagined myself looking at copies of those photographs and wondered how I would react to them later. The preservation of a moment seems to be a goal for many people, and I am no different in this respect. I hope, however, that I can learn to control this premature nostalgia, and to truly enjoy a moment for its own sake, on its own terms. In the meantime, I will be photographing and documenting and reflecting and shaping my memories of this land of mountains and nothing.