To Kumamoto

Today I was crossing from Shikoku to the final island of my trip, Kyushu.

The third bed in me and Ray’s room was occupied by an older chap who left at 6 in the morning. I know this because he made it very noticeable. His tactic was to get packed noisily but fast, rather than quietly but taking longer. I don’t know which idea is better, it’s the old opening a crisp packet in the cinema problem – either annoy all the audience for a second, or just the people around you with half a minute of fumbling.

I got up at 7:15 and went down to the showers. The one I used that morning had a smaller cubicle and I entered it backwards for some reason. Water immediately started spraying at me before I had closed the door. “Is this another Japanese invention; an automated shower?” I wondered. But no, on walking backwards into the cubicle my posterior had pressed the on switch without my noticing – I’ve never said that before.

I had been given orders by Ray to wake him up in time so that we could both go down to the station together. Unfortunately he is quite a deep sleeper and waking him was a bit of an effort.

I stooped over him and tried his name. “Ray,” I said, “Ray, it’s 7:30, time to wake up.” He stirred, meaning that he opened his eyes, looked at me, stretched, rolled onto his side, murmured and fell back to sleep. “Damn.”

I tried to delegate the role to my alarm clock but it was even more useless than I was.

I called his name again and he stirred, but with one eye open long enough to see that the other bed was empty. This kick started the Tell Anecdote part of his brain and he was awake.

Apparently his foot and that of the other guy had touched during the night. Ray had thought it was a mouse and jerked his foot away with a big kick, probably giving the guy a free souvenir bruise.

We got ready and left about 8:30, which was cutting it fine for my 9:11 train.

On the tram to the station I remembered that I still hadn’t told Ray my name.
“You don’t know my name, do you?”
“No, I was thinking about that actually. It was going to be the last thing I was going to say. You know,” he continued, “we could make a game of it, I could guess.”

So he guessed. How long would it take someone to guess your first name? He got it in ten, much to his surprise. I never knew I had such a standard name.

Our goodbye was cut short because it was 9:10 and I had one minute to run to the station, buy a ticket, find the train and get on. Needless to say, I didn’t make it.

The lady at the ticket window treated my rushed questions about where the 9:11 train was with unsympathetic calm. It took her a frustratingly long time to talk to me because she was also checking the tickets of everyone entering and leaving the platform. She told me to hold on a few times too and when I heard her voice suddenly behind me I realised she was doing the announcements as well.

The one woman train station did inform me that I could get the express train which would get me to Yawatohama in half the time but double the expense.

At 11AM the express train was slowing down for arrival in Yawatohama. I looked out the windows gloomily at the lack of shops or potential ATMs for me to use. I only had 80 yen (40p) on me and needed money to buy a ferry ticket. Credit and debit cards are very hard to use in Japan, especially foreign ones, so cash is a must.

I was actually willing shops and convenience stores to appear, as if they could just pop out the ground brimming with cash machines.

Yawatohama seemed to be a very narrow place; it’s built in a tight valley with steep hills tiered with farmland in neat rows. I had not seen that kind of landscape in Japan, it looked more like Spain to me.

I got directions to the town’s ATM from a station person. The ATM charged me for my transaction but at least it spoke English – literally it greeted me and thanked me with pictures of people bowing.

I had to find the bus to the ferry and not the port – this was an important distinction.The station had a travel agency for booking cars and holidays, not really a place for giving advice to tourists but I thought I would try my luck.

“Follow me,” said the lady behind the counter after I asked about the bus. “I’m leaving for a moment,” she called out to a hidden colleague.
“Where did you come from?” she asked me on the way out.
“Matsuyama”
“Why are you going to Beppu?” she said this in English and with a fascinated tone like I might be going to fight great creatures, collect a magical energy known as Manna and return the realm to nature’s order.
“Holiday,” I shrugged.

The bus stop was not the one she thought it was. “Wait here,” she gestured and then ran off around the corner.

A lady sitting at the erroneous bus stop asked me where I was going. I told her and she indicated that I should go around the corner my guide had just run towards. The lady said lots of other things too and I just said “Ohh” and walked around the corner. She was one of the only people who helped me on my trip that I forgot to thank.

My guide had found the bus stop and was smiling profusely. She seemed like quite a character, I could imagine her growing onions as house plants and laying a place for her cat at the dinner table.

I thanked her doubly to make up for bad karma and she ran back to her office.

The heat was sweltering, so hot that people actually dress up to protect their skin. A woman cycled passed me wearing long sleeves and gloves, and, even holding up a black umbrella.

Fortunately there was a seat in the shade for me and after a while I was joined by another character.

Her name was Mitomi Yoshikumi and she was an actress who had just finished her 105th performance of something or other in Tokyo. She gave me a leaflet for the something or other, I still have it, a musical about a man called Botchan.

Well anyway, she was cute, confident and cheerful in that way Japanese women sometimes are. She had no apprehension about talking to me and she seemed interested in everybody.

We were both getting the same ferry and she helped me buy a ticket. It was so nice to have someone else to do the hardwork, I had really missed being a backseat traveller.

In the queue for the tickets Mitomi San advised another woman about tickets. Later, upstairs when we went to eat something Mitomi struck up conversation with the woman again and she invited us to sit at her table.

They both quizzed me about my journey, teaching English and Japanese food. I’ve gotten more used to being the centre of conversation in Japan but it still unnerves me a little. I mean, they are both Japanese, they can say lots of in depth interesting things to each other about the nature of space and time, or just say, “Hey, what about our Prime Minister hey, he’s all forehead.” Instead they just concentrated on me and my simple Japanese answers. We fell into silence with me thinking that I’d failed somehow.

The woman, let’s call her Ladyshy, seemed a bit taken aback by our entry into her life. She had never travelled abroad and didn’t reveal what she did for a living. I think it was a bit of a shock for her to be lunching with an actress and a foreigner she had met only five minutes before in a ticket queue.

Ladyshy left the restaurant for the boat before us, she had already finished eating and other generic excuses for just wanting to be alone. I think she hid from us on the boat too as we didn’t see her.

On the boat I and Mitomi took pictures on the deck.


Everything looked stunningly perfect from the boat. That is the great thing about Summer, everything shines.


Conversation with Mitomi was easy because she peppered her Japanese with English, and I did the same.

After a while we went back inside and found a large room with comfortable floors but no chairs. It looked like a cheap tatami room, but with carpet instead of weaved matting.

We both fell asleep, in different parts of the room. Talking together we might have looked like a couple but in sleeping I noticed that my arm was reaching out. I looked over and saw that Mitomi was also reaching out, and neither of us toward each other but to some absent others.

I awoke to find her staring out of the window like a child who has never been on a ferry before.

“Good morning,” I said

She showed me pictures of the cast she had been working with. They had rehearsed in Aimori, in Northern Honshu, and even lived together, all 13 of them.

She was also carrying fan letters which seemed a bit egotistical to me but they must come in useful if you lose faith in yourself on the way to the shops. She didn’t seem egotistical though, I think she was the kind of person who actually replied to her letters.

Time passed quickly and Beppu soon scrolled into view across the windows.

On the way out we met Ladyshy again and Mitomi insisted we take pictures of the 3 of us. She was so eager that it crossed my mind whether she needed the pictures for an alibi or something.

We three were going to the train station and Ladyshy relaxed a little.

At goodbye Mitomi gave me her details, and I gave her mine, Ladyshy had already gone.

Alone I bought my ticket and got on my train after some bready lunch. Waiting on the train platform the sky was full of dramatic clouds.


The train was old. It had red rusted metal on the outside and wooden floors within. But the furnishings were new and it was wonderfully comfortable. It was the rapid limited express, which meant it didn’t go to many places but did go to them quickly and expensively.

On the way to the toilet I was thrown left and right by the speed of the train along perhaps uneven rails. I enjoyed the feeling; it was like a roller coaster, though made urine trajectory management more of a challenge.

I felt exhausted on that train. “It’s the last train of the trip” I told myself. I had a four hour bus ride the day after next and a plane ride the week after but this was the last train and that seemed significant. All in all though I wanted a holiday from travelling, I was knackered.

In Kumamoto at 9PM with no tourist information open I had to find my hotel. This naturally leads on to a long boring story about another trial, but no, I did it and that’s all that matters.

I had an idea for something to do in Kumamoto, a special pilgrimage I wanted to make.

I had been reading a book called Hokkaido Highway Blues by Will Ferguson throughout my trip. It’s about the author hitchhiking from the Southern most point in Japan to the most Northern. It was the complete opposite to my journey, in both direction and transportation. I was doing it the easy way, with just confusing train timetables and G8 Summits to contend with. However, Kumamoto was one place on both our journeys.

Anyway, Mr Ferguson mentions writing graffiti in the toilet of a bar in Kumamoto called the Rock Balloon. The book was written in 1998 but my guidebook still had the bar listed, even mentioning the graffiti. Another factor on my side was that coincidentally I and Mr Ferguson are the same gender, an important factor in toilet pilgrimages.

I got changed and made my way out from the hotel I had just checked into. It was 10PM and the man at the front desk said “Oh,” like a grandfather just waking up from a doze as I gave him my key. It made me smile.

Within 15 minutes I was standing in the street of the Rock Balloon. I started the search hoping it wouldn’t be a scary place with big burly bouncers at the door wearing lipstick; you just wouldn’t know how to act would you.

So what was this graffiti that I was on a pilgrimage to see? Well according to the book it reads, “What is konnyaku? Where does it come from and what does it want?”

To answer this first question, konnyaku is a kind of grey gelatin that looks pretty strange and doesn’t taste very nice. It is used more for its texture than taste and I have experienced it mostly in school lunches where it gets cut into small cubes from which you could build a little gelatinous igloo.

The Rock Balloon was proving hard to find. The map in my guidebook was unclear about which street it was on as it was shown between two streets. One of these streets was part of an enclosed shopping area which had buskers playing despite the late hour of the night.

I couldn’t find the bar on either street. I walked down both again more slowly and managed to find a restaurant listed on the map so I knew I was in the right place.

Two white guys had been talking in the shopping area and they were still there when I was on my second round. I asked them if they knew the bar. They did, or rather they used to.

“It closed down.”
“Oh”
“Are you using Lonely Planet?”
“Yep. 2005”
“It closed down about 5 years ago. I’ve written to Lonely Planet about it and other things in Kumamoto that aren’t here any more, other people did too and they’ve finally updated the new edition.”

I was really impressed. Lonely Planet is like a binding soul between foreigners visiting Japan and that conversation proved my theory. From my simple question he knew why I thought the Rock Balloon was still there and even which edition I was using. He could have whispered, “Number 20, page 644 is a lie” and walked off mysteriously and I would have understood.

And so my pilgrimage came to a disappointing end. The guy did tell me about another rock bar nearby but it wouldn’t be the same unless they happened to have shipped over the toilet walls from the Rock Balloon, seemed unlikely.

I made my way to my newest home disappointed at not getting to see the reality behind the book I was reading, the author’s own handwriting no less. But the moral is that time changes all things, and that Lonely Planet takes a while to keep up.