at
Tsugaru Kanayama, Japan
Photo#1 A typical spotless train station in Japan Off To Japan Once Again
I sort of knew the 2004 invitation was coming since I had been invited to the 2003 event that had to be canceled due to the SARS situation, but it still wasn't "real" until I got the formal invitation. Once I had that envelope from Japan in my hands, it was real. I was headed to Japan once again, this time to spend a month as an artist-in-residence at the Kanayama Ceramic Cooperative in Goshogawara-shi in Aomori-ken, Japan. Then I would be spending about 3 1/2 weeks visiting friends I had made in Japan on my past visits and visiting other pottery centers and cultural locations. Needless to say, I was thrilled.
I arrived at Manchester International Airport in New Hampshire really early in the morning on May 31st, 2004 in order to get through all the new security screening procedures so that I would make my 6:00 AM Air Canada flight to Pearson Airport in Toronto, Canada. The four hour layover time in Canada between flights was mostly spent trying to locate my checked luggage that didn't make it onto the first leg of the flight with me!. After getting a promise that my bags would end up meeting me in Japan via another airline, I caught the Air Canada Airbus 340 and settled in for what I remembered as a long trip. It was. After a 14 1/2 hour slightly turbulant flight from Toronto, I finally arrived in Narita, Japan at the New Tokyo International Airport on the afternoon of May 31st....... thanks to the International Dateline.
Photo #2: My ryokan room in
Narita
After a significant test of my rusty Japanese language skills in order to find my luggage which had ended up flying on United, I finally got through Japanese Customs after waiting in a very long line. New international security seems to make this whole process take longer than it did, but it is necessary. I then had to arrange the shipping of my checked luggage to Kanayama via the Kuro Neko (Black Cat) takubin, a luggage shipping company that is sort of similar to UPS. I then caught the local train one stop from the airport to the city of Narita where I checked into a nice ryokan for my first night in Japan on this trip. Typical of all ryokan I have experienced, my room was spotless and beautiful, and the light yukata felt really good to put on in the already building heat of a summer in Japan. After a nice hot bath and a scrumptious dinner of raw tuna with a wasabi dressing on a bowl of rice along with pickled veggies.... I headed off to bed.
Photo # 3: Ekiben on the train
The next morning after a breakfast of broiled fish, miso soup, pickles, and rice, by 10:00 AM it was time to make the long trek from the Narita area up to the northern tip of the main island of Honshu to the prefecture of Aomori, where the Tsugaru Kanayama Ceramic Cooperative is located. First, I caught the Narita Express which took one hour to go from Narita Eki (station) to Tokyo Eki. Then after buying an ekiben (Japanese boxed lunch), I caught the shinkansen (bullet train) northeast for the city of Hachinoe. That second leg of the train trip lasted about 4 hours as it went from the massive city that is Tokyo out past the freshly planted rice paddies and thru cities small and large as it sped north at 270 kph. Hachinoe is the current end-of-the-line for the really high speed shinkansen, so in Hachinoe I changed trains to a normal high speed limited express train. That train headed up past heavily wooded mountains covered with Japanese red pine and hinoke. In places the tracks wound along the eastern coast of Honshu within only a few hundred feet of the water. It took one more hour on that train to get to the large coastal city of Aomori-shi.. When I walked down the stairs from the tracks and thru the ticket control turnstile, there was my host, Matsumiya Ryouji, and his apprentice, Risako, waiting to pick me up for the 40 minute drive to Kanayama.
Photo #4: The shinkansen is like an airliner on the ground Photo #5: Tokyo is a sprawling metropolis that is like LA Photo #6: The types of buildings change over the miles
Photo
#7: The rice seedlings were just poking above the
water
Photo #8: Between the big cities, small
towns
Photo #9: Aomori city is located right on the coast
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