The Ferry

January 18th 2009

Two days ago I took a ferry out of Osaka port bound for Shanghai. This morning (it's around 9:00am) we're currently pulling in to Shanghai. I woke up to find a red disk sun rising over sparse forest off the port side... and warships lining the canal off the starboard. What an apt representation of this country's many curious dichotomies. I like China already.

My last night in Osaka I took a bath with three yakuza. The top floor of my Osaka business hotel had a sentou on it and so I went for my last ever Japanese bath. At first the businessmen were giving me dirty/curious/stony looks for my tattoo. When the yakuza walked in the businessmen's all eyes strayed toward fixed spots on the ceiling. All three of them had the tell-tale body-covering Japanese tattoos which identified them immediately. If surface area-covered is any indication of mafia hierarchy then the guy with both arms, back, neck, pectorals and cheeks (not face, ladies) was probably their leader. Of course, by nature of the fact that they were themselves staying in a cheap business hotel meant they couldn't be very far up the line. Anyway, when they started to read my back out loud I turned around and we made sparse conversation. They feigned interest in my up-coming trip; I forced laughter at their racist jokes. Most of the businessmen had taken this opportunity to excuse themselves so when the yakuza had sated their curiosity with me I was finally free to relax with my hot bath and ume-shu. Japan is all about the small pleasures.

The last week in Japan was full of sayonara parties: good food with great people and copious amounts of drinks. Thanks to everyone who helped me celebrate my many send-offs. Its hard to believe my Japanese adventures are over, at least for now, but I haven't had too much time to fret about it because all of mainland Asia awaits.

The ferry from Osaka to Shanghai hasn't been bad, exactly, but I can't really call it good, either. There isn't much going on on the ship. There's only about fifty passengers, including about six other foreigners, though everyone has mostly kept to themselves. My book was supposed to last me the entire trip (3 days and 2 nights) but I was so bored out of my mind that I finished it the first day. For anyone interested, The Kite Runner was good but incredibly depressing. Also, the ending was embarrassingly predictable which, considering the premise of the story, felt somehow cheap. Don't let this stop you from reading it, however, because despite my diatribes I still read it cover to cover in a single sitting which is more than I can say about most books.

The rest of my time on the ship has been spent on rotation between sleeping (twelve hours a day to kill time), eating, listening to lectures and podcasts, and also (children, earmuffs) a good amount of time on the john. Something from Friday definitely hit me hard on Saturday, and that's all I'm going to say about that.

Nothing else of note really happened during two days at sea. We hugged the Japanese islands for the majority of the time, only going into open water for the short stretch between Kyushu and maindland China. My room, advertised as “authentic Japanese style” was actually just a big open room with about twenty or thirty sleeping pads and a variety of passengers milling about. Besides the fact that I couldn't really roll over, on the whole it wasn't as bad as first appeared. Everyone was pretty mellowed out and except for the occasional talkative old man people generally kept to themselves.

Time to get off the boat.