Sometimes life in Japan resembles Nintendo adventure games so much that it’s no wonder the games came from here.
Take for example my first days in Fukushima. All I knew was that Fukushima was an hour north of Tokyo on the Bullet Train, and that was going on the word of my boss-to-be (the same guy who brought me into the country without a proper visa. It took 90 minutes, by the way).
I was plopped down in a fine apartment in the Bakersfield of Japan, but I had taken a night train and it had been raining, so I awoke on my first day in town without the foggiest clue of where I was or what anything looked like.
Kind of like Link in the GameBoy version of the Legend of Zelda where he has to wake up the Wind Fish to make Marin’s dream come true.
The map in that game was a 256-square grid, and you couldn’t look at places you hadn’t been yet. If you tried to look at the map while you were at Marin’s house in the very beginning, you couldn’t see anything at all.
Waking up in Fukushima that day in 2005 was frighteningly similar. I pushed out square by square and got my bearings, and I had to work at it. Different language, little order to the placement of roads and buildings, no street names, randomly distributed rice fields on any inch of undeveloped land - it was in every way a strange new world.
One of the reasons I so enjoy bicycling around Kochi and traveling through Japan is the interesting geography. Japan is basically a bunch of steep mountains sticking up out of the ocean, and Kochi has some of the gnarliest land formations in the country.
My apartment and school are 4 miles away from the Pacific, but you wouldn’t know it for the 1,000 foot mountain range that runs parallel to the shore between us and the ocean. Kochi Bay comes in through a gap in the mountains less than 1,000 feet wide.
About 10 miles to the west, an even smaller opening creates a dragon-shaped bay that stretches 8 miles inland, but parallel to the shore so that the peninsula is literally mountains poking up out of the water. There is very, very little sand and minimal beach area, and the treacherous road that runs the length of the peninsula offers several views of the bay and the ocean simultaneously.
My descriptions don’t do justice to the amazing natural sights, and the numbers probably don’t mean much to anyone with less than a passing interest in geography. To LINK this back to the Legend of Zelda, it’s as if God wanted to cram all of these geographical features into a limited space - much the same way that artists and programmers had to make everything fit onto the limited memory of a game cartridge.
So you get cool stuff like an active, ash-spewing volcano in the middle of a bay next to a city of 600,000 people Or how about another stinkin’ volcano jutting up out of the ocean on one side and overlooking a lake on the other within a span of 5 miles?
While driving on a Kagoshima highway that doubled as a tsunami wall, I saw an island about a half-mile off the coast. A small, sandy boat launch stuck out between the road and the bay, and I pulled the car off the road to read the sign posted in the turnout.
It was talking about Chiringashima, the uninhabited, tree-shrouded island I saw before me. What I couldn’t see, because it was high tide, was a six-foot wide sandbar that leads out to the island only at low tide. Totally natural. How cool is that?
It reminded me of a level in WarioLand where you had to return to one of the beginning stages, which had changed dramatically because the tide had come in. The higher sea level gave Wario access to a secret door unreachable at low tide.
I often have these kinds of thoughts. Nerdy? Yes. Lame? Perhaps. But tell me that you would be prepared for facing down some video game situations in real life.
On to Castle Mountain. In search of the perfect Morning Ride, I decided to take a road that the Bike Shops recommended to me in the fall.
The main road, Highway 33, begins in Kochi City, goes up and around a group of mountains and a river gorge, and ends on the west side of town. Dozens of farming roads work their way up and down the mountains inside the loop, and I wanted to cut through the circle on the road that went up to the peak of Castle Mountain.
This kind of thing wouldn’t be too difficult with a Thomas Guide and a full tank of gas, but, as I mentioned before, Japan doesn’t name streets. There are highway numbers, but to my frustration, nobody seems to use them. If I stop and ask someone how to get to Highway 195, for example, I usually get a blank look and something like the following:
“This road goes up that-a-way, and that road goes over there.”
That suffices in this video game world. Navigating in the city isn’t too difficult as you have buildings and traffic lights to count, but get away from the concrete jungle and you have to start using riverbends, felled trees, Honesty Markets, and abandoned vehicles.
For the Castle Mountain bit, I looked at my big map of Kochi City and tried my best to visualize what the route would look like. I could see where I wanted to go in the overview map in the bottom corner, but the actual roads on the enlarged map were covered by the legend.
Unfazed, I set out at 6 a.m. the following morning with what I thought was a good picture of the adventure ahead. I made the correct turn off Highway 33 and made it up to Castle Mountain without any problems.
Getting down would be the tough part. Four- and five-point intersections greeted me like pitchforks, and while some roads were obviously dead-ends into someone’s cabbage patch, others tantalized with better pavement or a lighter slope. A few times, I actually had to stop and scratch my head to figure out what to do.
I made it back to Kochi, but I had gotten sucked into a loop within the big loop and ended up descending on the same road that brought me up.
I checked the detailed commercial map at school the next day and saw where I had made a wrong turn. I vowed to set out again and make it through to the other side.
The correct road got steep and nasty pretty quickly after Castle Mountain, which, by the way, turned out not to be the highest peak. I guessed at a few forks in the road and found the back side of Highway 33 on its winding trip back toward the west side of Kochi. Yahoo!
The seven-foot wide concrete road was strewn with pine needles and belied its status as a state highway. It looked like it got one car per hour tops.
A few miles later, I was confronted by a surprise junction - it was exactly the same shape as the one I had taken to get back to the highway. The smoother road made a sharp turn downhill while the rougher-looking option continued in the same general direction at the same altitude.
A rusted sign declared that Kochi City was downhill while Ino, the town to the west of Kochi, was straight ahead. I bought that and also figured that the well-paved road better suited a numbered highway, so I turned and started down the slope.
I arrived at an awfully familiar-looking crossroads, and with good reason: it was one of the head-scratchers from the climb up. I had just made another circle!
I laughed and shouted, “DAMMIT!” Fooled again. I wanted to climb the mountain once more and beat the maze, but my energy meter was critically low and time was running out. I hit SAVE and turned the game off to try another day.
Straight to the Bike Shop I went to solicit the advice of this game’s sages. I asked them why this particular area had to be such a puzzle, and why it was that I couldn’t stop thinking about figuring it out. They chuckled; this obviously wasn’t the first case of bike fever or Castle Mountain Syndrome that they’d seen.
Mrs. Bike Shop wrinkled her nose and said, “Mac, you’ve got to get a nose for Kochi. You have to stop at a fork in the road and be able to say, ‘Kochi is THIS way!’” She sniffed like a curious dog as she delivered her local wisdom.
I complained that even my sense of direction wasn’t working. I just couldn’t predict where the twisting mountain roads would go once I made a decision on one or the other.
“Well, if you do it my way, you only have to use your five senses,” she replied. I didn’t recognize the word for “five senses” right away and she saw it on my face.
I caught the meaning a fraction of a second before she started to ask this question:
“Do you guys have five senses, too?”
Mr. Bike Shop looked up from the cruiser he was assembling and his eyes met mine. We struggled to hold back the giggles, and Mrs. Bike Shop realized what she had just asked after two or three seconds.
“No, no, no! That’s not what I meant!”
But it was too late. I had to take a knee to properly hold my sides, and Mr. Bike Shop dropped his tools while guffawing loudly.
Three years ago, I was ready to punch the next Japanese who asked me if there were also McDonald’s in the U.S. or if I was physically capable of eating with chopsticks. Questions like that are still annoying to an extent, and while Mrs. Bike Shop’s question was formed with precisely the same kinds of words, the context was completely different.
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I am going to conquer that uncharted territory up around Castle Mountain. I’ll draw a better map, send it to the map company, and tell them to put their damn legend over the Pacific Ocean instead of over a very interesting network of farming roads.
But not today. It’s raining, and Mario doesn’t come out to play when it rains.
