August 11th to August 19th this year was the Japanese Obon holiday. I believe this is week long celebration for one's dead ancestors or something like that. More importantly, however, is that Kevin gets the entire week off. Sadly, so does the rest of the country, so the typical avenues of rest and relaxation are thoroughly clogged with urbanites escaping the city heat or visiting ancestral homes to pay respects. This left me in a bit of a conundrum as to where best to take myself: cities would be empty and beaches would be clogged.
Enter Sakura, my pal from training. The email on the training experience has yet to be written, but I've decided to fast forward this one because it ended up being so bad ass. Sakura called me up and told me about some concert/festival she was going to with some friends up in Nagano. This piqued my interest because a) I've never been to Nagano, b) Nagano = mountains = cool, and c) a three-day music festival sounded a whole lot better than sweating it out playing video games in my apartment (only marginally better, you know I do love me some video games).
Traveling from Mie to Nagano is prohibitively expensive on my current budget, but fortunately I remembered a little thing called the juu-hachi kippu, or 18-year-old's ticket. You buy 5 trips for a set price and then you can travel anywhere Japan Rails go. Nominally this is to encourage Japanese youth to visit and experience more of their own country, but in practice I think foreign residents make the most use of it. The catch of course is that you can only travel on local (read: slow) trains, so while you can go anywhere, you better have plenty of time. Example: Nagoya to Hiroshima by sh
inkansen (bullet train) is 2.5 hours, but by juu-hachi kippu it takes around 9. From Suzuka, my city in Mie, to Hakuba, the city in Nagano, took around 8 hours. Thankfully I had nothing better to do, and the series of tubes known as the Internets procured me the magnificent audio book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. By the time I reached Nagano I was happily acquainted with this literary adventure and ready to ascend the Japanese Alps and descend into three days of musically-enhanced debauchery.
Space of Sound (affectionately abbreviated as SOS) was a Sunday-night to Wednesday-morning concert marathon. Concert isn't quite the right word, however, as it was all DJs spinning techno-electronica-house-
For anyone who's been to a festival back home, it was a generally similar affair, only with perks only Japan seems to offer. There were various tent cities, but they remained impeccably clean and stench free. The same could be said for the toilets and cleaning facilities. Indeed, I had a short conversation with a fellow party-goer sometime around 3am on the very subject. I have translated it below, approximately, to sate your curiosity.
Kevin makes for a particular port-a-potty, but is head off mere strides from his quarry. The interloper is clearly inebriated. Kevin is, shall we say, sober as a bird.
Me: My good sir, I ascertain nature has sung her sully song to us both. Your shuffling gate proved the quicker, first strike is belongs to you. But pray, let thy aim be true that I may too enjoy its present purity.
Sir: Let there be no question, my dear White Devil: the Japanese never let fly askance. Be still thy quivering heart, the dragon shall be naught but slain.
Me: With God's speed, then, friend. Be quick, mine own doth seek freedom, and I fear with or without my blessing.
Sir: Ai-ai, I advance.
As you can see, the Japanese take their cleanliness quite seriously and I cannot but laud them for it.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. I arrived Sunday around 8pm, which is to say completely in the dark. Sakura was with a large group of mostly Japanese and a few foreigner friends. I knew one of the Japanese guys, Kenta, back from my training period in Nagoya. He had my ticket so he and Sakura met me at the entrance. We followed the crowd through the dark towards the main event area and even in the darkness you could tell it was simply teeming with crazy little techno-heads. The mob in front of the stage was this amorphous noodling mass of neon lights and erratic limb spasms. We made our away clear around this to get to the tents and drop my stuff off. Having traveled all day I was anxious to drop the excess baggage and jump right in. We arrived to find people cooking up a pot of curry and I decided that it would be better to enjoy the night on a full stomach. After the meal we gathered essentials and made ready for carnage. I tapped the 2-liter sho-chu (Japanese liquor) I had lugged all day and topped off my water bottle for portability and away we went.
Once again, this sort of music was not my scene at all, but it was hard not to enjoy myself with the crazy all around. All sorts of oddities could be found at this place, and all with a Japano-fusion twist. There were the Harajuko-type girls dressed up as fairy-tale and cartoon characters (my favorite was Little Bo Peep), candy-raver types with way too much pastels and accessories, hippies with their dreads and flowery clothing, girls dressed up as belly dancers and leathered-up motorcycle gang members and everything in between. Even the regular-looking people were fashioned-out like only the Japanese can do it. My favorites, of course, were the quintessential Osaka girls: big hair and not-so-big club gear. I'm always amazed by how well the Japanese people do themsel
ves up on a regular basis, but doing it at home is one thing; accomplishing the same feat from a tent on the mountainside in the Japanese Alps is quite another. Osaka girls, I take my hat off to you. There were plenty more sights: twirlers, jugglers, break dancers, pierced body parts and colorful hairdos (and several hair-don'ts! nyuck nyuck), tattoos and all the rest. I even saw a monkey. Word.
The first night went extremely well. I adopted a do as the Romans do attitude and wiggled around with the best of them. Kind of gets old really quick, but the sho-chu helps. I stumbled back around 4am because I didn't want to see the sun come up. I woke up a few hours later to suffocating heat and the stench too many bodies in a tent. I lunged out of the tent into the surprised presence of Japanese faces I vaguely remembered from the night before. They seemed bemused by the voracity of my waking force. I, for one, was not quite ready to be awake.
Still tired and perhaps still a little drunk, it was readily apparent that all shady spots were already covered in bodies. Frustrated in my desire to sleep, I decided to take stock of my situation. Having arrived in the dark, I didn't realize how mind-blowing my new environment actually was. The Japanese Alps are justly named – I felt like I was smack dab in a little slice of Switzerland. The festival site was about halfway up a mountain, with great vistas both up and down. I kind of just stared around dumbly for a little bit until I remembered I was hungry.
I was doing this little trip on the cheap, so all I had brought with me was a stock of cup ramens, a big bottle of sho-chu and a big bottle of water. Essentials, baby, essentials. I borrowed the communal stove to boil some water and enjoyed (?) my cup ramen breakfast squished up against a tree salvaging any scrap of shade I could. It was going to be a brutal day. The mountains were incredibly cool, for which I was thankful, but the sun was incredibly strong as well, and sadly I'm still the whitest of white boys. Comes with the name, I suppose. A million thanks go out to Suzanne who insisted on stocking me with sun screen. As I finished my breakfast, the Japanese guys beckoned me to come with, and we made our way back to the main stage. I didn't really want to go, but I also didn't have a better suggestion. I grabbed the water this time and was horrified when they busted out a handle of Cuervo. Tequila sunrise indeed. I shook my head with a polite smile and watched in morbid fascination as they swigged yellow horror at this ungodly hour.
Much to my surprise, the party was still bumping. Like, full tilt. This remained true every morning – the craziest parts of the day seemed to be the 6am to 12pm block. I still can't account for why. The sun is hot and people are tired but no one seemed to c
are. I'm used to that 11pm to 3am peak zone, but apparently I had it all backwards. Maybe it's because you couldn't sleep past 7 or 8am anyway, so you might as well be awake and shaking it anyway. At any rate, I was impressed enough by their staying power to join back in the fun with abandon. Definitely the earliest party I've ever been to. We stuck around here for several hours until we were about ready to drop. I took a break for lunch and returned to the tent to find Sakura and others. She had the brilliant idea of going to take a bath.
My favorite part of the day was indeed that mid-to-late afternoon period where the party chills out but everyone is really just preparing do to it all over again in a couple hours. In their brilliance, the Zen minds of the Hakuba ski resort city planners had decided to locate an onsen at the base of the mountain. That basically means that after 24 hours of dusty, sweaty, grimy, rhythmic dirtiness all you have to do is jump on a descending gondola and step off into the waiting sanctuary of the-best-bath-you've-ever-
Finally clean and able to stay so in the cooling afternoon, we trooped back up the mountain and away from the quizzical gazes of unassuming townsfolk. After some food we made our way over to a quieter side of the mountain and lay down in the grass to enjoy a peaceful sunset. In the distance the music could be heard thumping to life and with happy thoughts of the party to come we snoozed a late siesta into the dark.
Waking up in the dark on a now chilly mountain side can be a disconcerting experience. Especially if you manage to nap upon a particularly ill-placed weed nudging into your ribcage. Remembering where and why I was, I took account of my surroundings and found bodies gone and a note in their place: Gone back to tent. Drinking. Come soon. Sakura. Bless her heart. I gathered my things and made my way back towards the thumping, which was now thundering, and as I crested the hill saw that it had been joined by a mob of neon lights. I didn't know what time it was, but I knew it was time to start.
I already mentioned that the morning was the peak of the party, and at the time it seemed the event organizers had envisioned this is all but one crucial point. Premier DJs were in early AM attendance, throngs of party-goers joined, and vendors were on hand with plenty of beer and water. And yet for all this fore-thought, it seemed to me that none had been given to the ultimate killer of the day: the sun. The sun came up right behind the DJ stage and quickly set to blinding and burning the assembled crowd. Every morning, despite my great respect for the party, I was also cursing such a ridiculous and avoidable circumstance.
That is, I thought so until I did a double take and realized that once again organizers had indeed thought of everything. Imagine that best DJs are playing when the sunrises and, knowing in advance the exact minute that the sun will peak over the mountains, have perfectly timed their sets to climax exactly with the sun, and now further imagine the effect this must have on all those hardcore party-committed drug induced poppers and that it just about blows their freaking minds. Now imagine at last Kevin rolling over on a bale of hay with this first light in his eyes, groaning intermittently and, finally unable to take it any longer, swinging an idle arm at passers-by and demanding in a pathetic threatening tone for someone to turn the lights back off. No, I never saw the sun actually rise at SOS, though I cursed it as least once if not all three days and was ever aware of our mutual enmity. Royally hung over on this final morning, it appeared that leaving the party to sleep had gone out of vogue so I had just plunked down on the first free patch of earth I'd come across. Don't know where the bale of hay came from, but nor was I much for asking questions at that point. Miraculously, remnants of the crew were also on hand and passing around water (not tequila, thankfully) and I was thus relieved for having to do or think much for myself. Always a plus.
And then it was time to go. I gathered up my stuff and cleaned myself up a bit. I was training it back again and everyone else was driving so I had to leave a bit early. I found them one last time for a final group photo, took a final swig, and then made my way down the mountain and back to reality. For the return trip my music was sadly long since dead, so I had to content myself with studying kanji and mentally preparing to-do lists for when I arrived home. After all, the indispensable Robert J. Monaco would be my distinguished house guest starting the very next day and there was no time to dawdle. It was, of course, time for the real party to start.
