Yamanashi: Psycho Lakes, Bridge Festivities and the Bat Cave

I missed last week’s blog but here’s a quick round up of what I got up to the weekend before last.

So, it was agreed that I’d come visit Vicky, with Kevin, for a weekend. She’s one of the other ALTs, that I first met in London, but then actually got to know on the orientation weekend. She lives in Yamanashi prefecture, which is out in the mountains above Tokyo and actually contains the highest mountain; Fuji-san, which she lives very near. I’m very jealous of her apartment not only because it’s four times the size of mine but also because she has no neighbours either side and so can make as much noise as she likes. The highlight of the first evening had to be the tiny karaoke bar, that Vicky calls her local. It was owned and run by a Japanese Tina Turner, who plied us with wacky Japanese snacks throughout the night. Although, Kevin wasn’t the keenest to get up and burst into song, he really enjoyed watching the old salary men belt out some tunes and after enough beers and some Elton John, well how could he resist.

On Saturday Vicky drove us up to one of the famous lakes near Fuji-san. Unfortunately the weather was overcast and although I promised this to be a trip where Kevin would get to see Fuji, it was sadly shrouded in cloud all weekend. Nonetheless, there was no short supply of postcards, pictures and souvenirs to remind us of exactly what we were missing. After a lap of the lake, we were ready to move on and were inspired by some signs to ‘Lake Saiko’ (pronounced Psycho in Japanese). But it wasn’t just the name of this lake that intrigued us. There were also signs to a bat cave. Well the decision was already made for us, what better an excursion for a Saturday afternoon than visiting Batman’s residence on a creepily named lake in the mountains of Japan. When we arrived at the bat cave, we were disappointed to find that it was not in fact Batman’s residence but a cave with bats in. And what was even more disappointing we didn’t see any bats. Nonetheless, we had fun crawling around igneous rocks underground with silly helmets on.

After heading back to Bicky’s (as the Japanese call her) hometown of Saruhashi we headed down to the bridge (which puts the ‘hashi’ into ‘saruhashi’) for a bridge festival. The bridge is a focal part of the town and has stood there for 500 or so years and was apparently built by monkeys, as I was told. Every year there is a festival to celebrate the bridge, as to some extent it is the raison d’être of the settlement. The bridge stands over a very deep valley that has flourishing lush green forest on each bank. It really is a stunning little part of the country. The festival consisted of some traditional drum performances, archery, children’s stories being narrated, a poetry competition and some more traditional music. We managed to find ourselves in a conversation with a guitarist girl, who was currently studying International Relations in Ibaraki. She then introduced us to her father who was a sculptor, who had trained and sculpted in Italy for over half a decade. What followed was a very surreal conversation in three or four languages. The sculptor would speak in a mixture of Italian adding English where he could and Japanese where he couldn’t. Although Kevin claims to know no Italian his exposure to it in Switzerland and maybe more importantly French gave him a decent guess at what the guy was saying. Even my limited French helped pick out a few sentences and words. Kevin tried to answer in limited Italian but occasionally stumbled into French and I used all the Japanese vocabulary that I could muster.