I have an enduring love for the Studio Ghibli film Princess Mononoke. During the opening minute I fell in love with it, it feels like bottled lightning. As with anything I enjoy, I begin to research it. Who made it? How did they do it? Is there source material? What inspired it? As it turned out, the primeval forest that acts as a lush and dramatic backdrop for the film, as well as being a character in and of itself, was based on the ancient forests of the Japanese island of Yakushima. A speck of land due south of the mainland’s most southerly point, it is a World Heritage site and accessible by ferry or a short plane ride.
I had hoped to visit it since about 2006 when I first saw the film, and in 2019 I made that a reality. I had booked a flight to Japan with a cheap ticket to Korea booked as proof of onward travel, but I was really hoping to stay in the country with no plan and just see how long I could wander.
When I was a kid I watched the film Yojimbo with my dad one night when I couldn’t sleep. I was taken with the main character Sanjuro’s decision making. The film opens with him strolling along a path in rural Japan, his arms tucked into his robe. He obviously doesn’t care where he’s going, but appears to have a mild interest in the world around him. He radiates a casual belief that he’ll be okay whatever befalls him, which is a testament to the non verbal acting of Toshiro Mifune. He stops at a fork in the road and looks both directions. Not particularly taken with either one, he plucks up a stick from the path and throws it in the air. It lands pointing down a particular path of the two and he strolls that way. There’s a colossal freedom in that act. That struck a chord with me. A seed was planted that night. Wandering, following your gut, this felt like the point of life, to flap in the wind like a flag tied to the mast of a speeding boat.
My first solo wandering trip was in 2012, I found a ticket to Toronto from Dublin for €200 one night and just booked it without thinking. Now I had to go. I went all over the East coast of Canada, onto Hawaii, back to New York and then on a whim to Glasgow before going home. One memory sticks out from this trip. When in Hawaii, on Maui, I booked a trip to go to the top of Haleakala volcano to watch the sunrise. With any sunrise trip, and I’ve done my fair share, they always require you to miss a nights sleep and generally start climbing a mountain in the dark at about two am so you experience the blooming sunrise through bleary eyed fatigue. This was something similar, except being under US jurisdiction I guessed there’d be no strenuous work for the tourist involved. Thankfully I was right. We were driven in a minibus to the peak, which was nice. I was in a group with two married couples, one middle aged, the other were newlyweds. We got chatting and I remember this so clearly, it felt like a real insight into thought process of the general population, but maybe that’s too vague a term. I asked why they were traveling and they said it was their honeymoon and had always wanted to go to Hawaii, what about me? I explained I’d found a flight to Canada for 200 euros and just booked it because it was too good to pass up. I kind of wandered my way to Hawaii and just did a lot of it on a whim on the day, with not much research, it was fun not knowing what was coming up next. I’ll always remember the way their faces froze into rictus expressions of shock. The guy kept repeating what I’d said like he was trying to absorb it. Whatever I was doing just didn’t even enter into their conception of viable life choices. As I was getting off the bus I said goodbye to them, wished them a nice rest of trip, they did the same but I could see the guy was turning to his wife with a still dazed expression that said ‘what is that guy DOING?!’. They were polite, I found it amusing and their reaction is by no means a barometer of my fearlessness in travel, I think they were just a bit more at odds with freewheeling about the place. Still, it provided a counter point of view to my preferred method travel.
In June 2019 I landed in Tokyo. For three weeks I got the absolute most out of the rail pass I’d bought. I went the length of the mainland twice, stopping wherever I fancied. Each day brought a raft of new experiences and memories. Then I aimed for Yakushima. To make this happen seemed like a tectonic shift in what I thought possible. A simple thing like just booking a flight to a small island made me realise a lot more is possible than I let myself think. When I first became interested in this island, I used to zoom into it on google maps and assume I’d not actually get the chance to see it. I got the train to Kagoshima, had a meal in a restaurant that local school kids had gone to after their day ended. In this less well trodden path, I was possibly more of a curiosity than in the teeming metropolis of Tokyo or Osaka, the stares of the kids made me feel particularly out of place for the first time on the trip. The next morning I was touching down on Yakushima at its small welcoming airport by the blue green sea.
I’d booked the flight on a whim and only arranged one night on the island. My entire aim was to see the forest, containing the yaku sugi, some of the most ancient living trees on the planet. I had done no research, I didn’t even think past what I was going to do. My silly assumption was that I’d walk out of the airport terminal and be presented with the trees, ticking them off my list.
Ambling out of the airport into the July heat, I was confronted with a small empty carpark nestled into a grassy incline, atop which ran the road uncircling the island. Although not a volcanic island, Yakushima has something of the charming verticality of the famous Hawaiian islands featured in ‘Jurassic Park’. It gracefully rises from its perimeter, draped in a lush green fur of dense forest, aiming for the blue sky.
A prefab marked the corner where the carpark joined the road. I strolled up in the heat, with my backpack weighing me down. Quietly I stepped inside. A middle aged woman was behind the counter and was helping a middle aged man with directions. Having no Japanese I busied myself with leafing through the brochures hoping there was an affordable tour that went straight to the trees.
‘The trees’. That was entire reason for going to the island I’d not even researched them, at all. I knew one of them was 6000 years old, or 3000, or was it 600? That was my knowledge. I had the rest of this day to get to these trees and it was currently about noon.
The conversation behind me was still going, an animated friendly chat. Presently the woman made a point of asking what I needed as she had been preoccupied for quite a while. I said I was staying at the port and wondered was there a bus that I could get. Her face dropped and she exclaimed ‘oh no! The bus just left one minute ago and it won’t be coming again for 30 minutes’
‘Oh that’s okay, I can wait, it’s not long’. Suddenly the Japanese man started a serious conversation with her, in which she was obviously referencing me with explanatory gestures. The man was rubbing his chin and giving that type of head nod where he understands the situation and is about to propose something.
My gut, a remarkably sensitive piece of introversion equipment, was picking up the beginnings of a situation I would need to refuse. Was this person about to offer me a lift?! I knew it, I could see the woman’s face making ‘oh that is so kind of you’ expressions to the man who obviously didn’t speak English as she prepared to look to me and deliver the dreaded ‘this man feels so bad he was occupying my time which made you miss your bus, he would like to drive you around the island. He is going to see the yaku sugi trees’. Every fibre of my being was recoiling and screaming at me ‘ just say NO!’. But I made myself accept. Unbeknownst to myself, I had flung a stick in the air and was now going the direction it pointed. Me, a man with no Japanese accepting a lift from a man with no English. A lot of smiling and thumbs up ensued, punctuated by google translate speaking aloud such phrases as ‘ thank you for your help’ and ‘I appreciate this’.
What I thought would be possibly a ten minute drive turned into a four hour round trip. We parked in a small town called Anbo, ate together in silence at a Mos Burger, as the staff gave me a mystified look, then up a steep road into the island interior to see the forest, which was basically at altitude and in what ended up being torrential rain. Once we surpassed a certain point of elevation my mobile wifi stopped working and I couldn’t communicate via the google translate speaker. My options were now solely limited to thumbs up and encouraging smiles.
Myself and Kondo traipsed though the jungle, each with an umbrella in the vertical thudding rain, under the gnarled gestures of the ancient trees, climbing and descending natural staircases cut into the ground. The vegetation and canopy were so substantial that I felt like I was in a warehouse, the feeling of being inside was hard to ignore. It felt like being in the oldest room in the world. Drops of rain splashed down my hood soaking my feet in my sopping flip flops. Clumps of earth snuck between my feet and the rubber soles so I took my feet out and stood there. Bare feet will give you a memory of a place.
As we drove back down the winding, barrier hemmed roads, snaking along jungle cliffside, it felt like we were above the cloud line. We saw one of the pygmy deer, native to the island, crouched on the roadside before it melted into the collage of greens behind it. Shortly after we stopped to watch a macaque with its baby clung to its chest. I looked out through the drumming lines of grey rain to the rising hills poking out of the mist. They felt at once distant and like they were crowding me; a feeling I remembered from the Khumbu region in Nepal, staring at peaks and cliffs of melting ice. When something is so big it eludes your comprehension, sometimes you can’t tell if it’s far away or so near you can almost reach out and graze it. Was I staring at a geological titan or mere feet from a realistic looking model. Scale stops making sense.
As we once again hit sea level, Kondo dropped me at a bus stop right outside the Mos Burger we had visited earlier, he gave me a polite wave and I thanked him, shut the door and watched him drive off. His car shrank as the country road crested a hill, he rounded a corner and was gone from sight, gone from my life.
I waited for the evening bus, alone at this quiet intersection in a town between the sea and rolling hills. The driver of the bus opened the door for me. He looked of yaku sugi vintage himself, and kindly accepted me parroting the name of my destination “Miyanora Port? Miyanora?” as asking for a fare. I sat a few rows back amongst old women holding shopping, at some midpoint in their daily routines. I glanced out the window, watching the hills disappear in an upward curve into the dispersing mist.
My hotel was right on the port, which was a small concrete storm wall and jetty. The clerk was uptight about speaking English and I felt no need to ask any questions and prolong his unease. Making my way to my room I found a balcony overlooking the East China Sea. I lay back and started drawing as the sun began its descent above a barely moving ocean. After my piece was finished I went to the onsen and sat into the boiling water. There were two older men sitting amidst the steam. One, a small man who I’d guess was at least seventy, leaned forward from a bulge of mist. He pointed to the sauna, then nodded with a particular mouth gesture that meant “that’s the good stuff, make sure to try it”. I nodded back with an exaggerated raised eyebrows meaning “Oh, I will partake of this immediately, thank you for the tip”. He smiled, pleased he’d helped an obvious tourist and in his confidence ventured the word “Hot”, intoned as a warning. I nodded seriously. “Noted”.
