Yamagata, the prefecture immediately to the west of mine, is an exception: its sites and major city are situated right in amongst and on the mountains. It’s an almost excessively picturesque place.
One of the best places from which to view Yamagata in all its picturesque glory is the mountain temple of Ryūshaku-ji, first founded in 860 and located in the one-horse town of Yamadera, which means “mountain temple.” Like so many Japanese temples, Ryūshaku-ji is, all at the same time, a tourist site, a pilgrimage destination, and a functional temple housing monks and various altars. Like the others I’ve seen, it does an admirable job of balancing its roles: the tourists press on to the viewing platforms, while the religious linger at the altars and shrines and the monks go about their daily lives in buildings that remain off-limits to the general public.
Ryūshaku-ji is located at the top of the mountain, a 1100-stair climb (the stairs may well be its most well-known aspect, given the responses of my students when I told them what I’d done over the weekend) that left us very ready to offer our business to the small stalls selling cherry ice cream when we came back down. It was, however, a beautiful climb, dotted with various sculptures and carvings we couldn’t understand. I am particularly puzzled by the holes in the rocks that apparently the monks have been digging for 1200 years. Why is it pious to make your mountain look like Swiss cheese? I don’t know.
Yamadera was my first trip into Yamagata. Ironically, my second trip happened the very next day.
Back in mid-June, at my last visit before the summer at my favorite elementary school, the teacher in charge of English (a wonderfully enthusiastic sixth-grade teacher who recently got her kids talking via Skype to people in Australia) told me that she and her family were planning a trip to Yamagata to pick cherries, and would I like to join them? The trip was apparently dependent upon her husband not being annoyed with her anymore (one of just many tossed-off remarks I’ve heard that make me believe Japanese people are even crazier in relationships than normally), but luckily he cheered up and off we went on Sunday morning.
(They were highly amused to learn that I had just been to Yamadera the day before.)
I had brought donuts for the road, as a sort-of hostess offering, and we also stopped at a roadside rest area that had my favorite (vegetarian!) Japanese snack food: rice squished into a ball, painted with miso, and grilled. (This is better than it sounds.) But we all had to be careful not to eat too much, because fruit orchards in Japan operate on the all-you-can-eat principle: you pay a flat fee and are welcome to stay and eat for as long as you have room, or until you don’t want to even look at another cherry (slash apple, slash strawberry, slash grape) until next season, whichever comes first.
After the cherries had been picked and consumed (with running assessment of each tree -- I will now never forget the words for “sweet” and “sour”), they took me to a museum about the area’s history as a famous site for dyeing clothes with saffron. Along with the reconstructed home and warehouses of a prosperous dyer, there were more typical museum displays-behind-glass. I learned that these are much more interesting when there is someone who will interpret them for you. And as we moved from one building to the next, I learned that I still, even after a year, am not very good at getting my shoes on and off smoothly.
For lunch, they took me to apparently the best soba restaurant in Yamagata, which makes the best soba in Japan. I did not admit that I couldn’t tell the difference. We finished the day by driving up Mount Zao to look at its much-celebrated lake.
Mount Zao is the most famous mountain in the area; it’s actually mentioned in my school song even though you can barely see it from Sendai. It is both highly sacred (I’m not sure there are a lot of mountains in Japan that aren’t) and highly popular in the winter for skiing and in the summer for hiking and looking at the lake, which changes color with the seasons. It is also an active volcano. (You know, I miss the New England mountains terribly, but there’s a certain surreal quality about standing on a mountain that might melt under your feet that the Appalachians just can’t really compete with.)
A couple of weeks later, I found myself back in Yamagata when I went with some students from the Youth Centre where I volunteer teach, on a hiking trip to Mount Gassan, the highest of the three sacred mountains of Dewa Sanzen. I was somewhat nervous when I heard that it is higher than Mount Bandai, which was a long and exhausting climb; I like hikes well enough, but I tend to get tired of them long before they are over. Having never hiked with Japanese people, I didn’t know that I needn’t have worried.
We followed the signs for the mountain (月山, which means moon mountain) and started going up… and up… and up… and how much of this mountain are we going to drive up?... and up… and finally reached the parking lot, maybe 75% of the way done with the hike.
Not until we got there did I begin to fully understand the insanity of Japanese people who like mountains.
Evidence of insanity #1: We parked and joined the legions of tour buses discharging Japanese people wearing several hundred dollars’ worth of L.L. Bean gear and/or donning further gear from the backpacks they’d stored under the bus. We joined them in the grueling walk… 500 paved yards to the ski lift.
There was actually a trail up to the top of the mountain, which those in our group not accompanied by small children opted to take. Note: there were at least fifty cars and ten buses in the parking lot; we encountered a grand total of six (very well-equipped) other hikers on the way up, and nine on the way down. It was a rather damp walk; the trail was frequently crossed with streams of greater or lesser width and depth, which was a boon for our water bottles if not our shoes. (I was intentionally “forgetting” that there is some ridiculous “danger” associated with drinking mountain water, at least in the States. It tasted good, and it was certainly much colder and more plentiful than what I’d brought from Sendai.) Near the top, the trail had been lined with wooden walkways that apparently are one of the most famous aspects of the hike.
Once we reached the other end of the ski lift, cell phone service had disappeared, which made it unexpectedly difficult to find the ski-lifted members of our party. We wandered about for quite a while, which afforded Evidence of insanity #2: People stopping to spend five minutes donning cramp-ons to cross a fifty-yard patch of soft, slushy snow. Then they had to spend five minutes taking them back off. We also ran into people equipped with ski poles, which did not prevent them from slipping and falling down on another, somewhat larger and less slushy, patch of snow.
The crowning Evidence of insanity, however, was #3:
Yes, those people are skiing. Yes, it was July. No, the Japanese have not assimilated the idea of sports having seasons with quite the enthusiasm as the sports themselves.
We didn’t make it quite to the top. After wandering around looking for our people, we were all feeling rather tired. So we went just partway and stopped when a little hillock provided some views that we decided were beautiful enough to count as our fake-top. We christened the site with a kampai of mountain water and apple danish, and headed back down the trail.
On the way home, I learned that onsens are a lot more fun when your muscles are actually tired. And when there is a two-year-old running around babbling in a language you can’t really understand.
