Homeless At Fuji Rock

Holy Hell. This week has been absolutely incredible, culminating with me turning 24. So I took a train down to Fukushima City in Fukushima Prefecture to meet my friend Aaron/Akio whom I worked with at Mori no Ike in 2006. Smallllll city with not much to do, so we booked a hotel room (not homeless yet) and went out to a restaurant for dinner. As is very common in Japan, this was an all-you-can-eat/drink type deal, so we spent 2 hours catching up between glasses of beer/whiskey/shochu and what turned out to be a whole lot of Kimchi... shit is real tasty. Afterwards, we went to another restaurant and tried out the "I Don't Speak Japanese" thing on a few girls there, but in the end English proved to burdensome and we reverted back to Japanese, to their surprise/pleasure. Good night, bad hangover.
Somehow we managed to get out of the hotel by 930 and took a train to a very small station nearby (I forget exactly which) that was located near a Service Area. A note first: service areas are the place to hitch in Japan for a number of reasons, first and foremost being that its illegal to be on the freeway outside of a car, or even to stop if in a car. Of course, a lot of people also stop at service areas, and are in greater numbers than rest areas. They also have a lot of time to consider your own circumstances versus theirs, i.e. "So he's Hitchhiking... looks like a nice guy... I wonder where he's going..."These things all make service areas the most logical place to try and catch a ride.
We managed to catch a lift from a couple with their father (wife's side, from Inner Mongolia) who dropped us off close to the shores of Lake Inawashiro. According to our map, we were wicked close to the lake, so we started walking in that direction, but either the map was wrong or we just weren't right and we ended up in this hidden valley of rice after hiking approximately 3 Km through a woodsy backroad. Fukushima and Niigata prefectures both have a staggering number of rice fields, and this was the first time I had ever been in one. It was dark by this time, and this village we were in was way cut off from everything else (and the houses were very nice/HUGE, surprisingly) so the night sky looked extra big while standing in the middle of many acres of low-rising rice plants.
This village turned out to be just off of the shore, so once we left it and got back on the main road we almost immediately discovered the lake. Unfortunately, we also discovered that this pitch black road had no sidewalks or anywhere whatsoever to walk, so we spent probably another 3 kilometers running along this road avoiding the very few cars barreling towards us. I guess I don't have much in the way of a safety sensor, but it was pretty fun playing Frogger like this.
We found a convenience store and a hotel in a small outlet off the road that was more or less a camping zone, and considered staying there/eating, but for some reason or another we thought it a good idea to keep pushing onwards and didn't do either. Mistake. Maybe an hour and a half later we still hadn't eaten all day and definitely didn't know where we were going to set up camp due to all of the rice fields taking up space. We ducked into a gas station and asked where a good spot to eat was, of which there was only 1 in the area still open, and got a cab there. Typical chain ramen store, but it was pretty tasty and definitely filled our stomachs so I can't say either of us were very angry at that. After eating, we walked around for a while looking for a spot to set up camp, and finally decided on a cemetery by the freeway where we planned on hitching the next day... buuuuuut that didn't happen.
We woke up/decided to start moving again around 8 and first wanted to find an onsen where we could clean up. In a bit of a rain, we walked to the train station and took a train to I-Forget-Where, close by anyway. The Onsen we found was pretty awesome, like the owners somehow collected a bunch of buildings and squished them all together. This "complex" wasn't the best of spots, but it totally sufficed after having spent the previous day hitching, hiking, and sweating all along. We retraced our steps, in a bit of a heavier rain, and had to wait about an hour for the train to come back and return us to where we started. It started raining pretty hard by this time, and we didn't really have sufficient rain gear, so we didn't get off and took the train all the way to Niigata City, in Niigata prefecture.
Despite EVERYTHING around Niigata City being rice fields, the city itself is pretty big and was a hell of a lot of fun while we were there. Went to a small restaurant to start the night off and had a beer with our Whale Sashimi (!!!). Good stuff, but it was getting kind of packed so we headed to another spot that served local nihonshu (Niigata is famous for its booze, supposedly) and we drank some really great stuff while eating Natto Pizza and Cow Liver Sashimi. The whole night was basically focused on culinary exploration and we were pretty successful in finding some great items; I totally want to go back some day and see what else I can find.

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