the Mount Fuji-san

Just coming out of the famous hotspring in the garden... I have strange feelings sometimes, a mix of romantic and gothic, for example thinking that I will probably never see this place again in my life takes me immediately to very obscure meanings, like facing death and the unknown...
However, yesterday I made another interesting encounter in the hot pool. A guy from Taiwan, on holiday with wife and kids, a teacher in an elementary school. So I took immediately the long-awaited occasion. I wanted to learn how do they teach writing to the little ones in chinese. You know, without an alphabet to spell out letters, but only thousands of symbols... for example, one can have the sound "tià" in many words, with many different meanings, and every time this same sound will be included in a differently written symbol. So, one has no correspondence between sounds and written representation in symbols... how the hell does one learn? only by memory, sign after sign? well, it turns out that to teach writing.... they start from the latin alphabet!! No way!!

Now, that's really funny and interesting, since the chinese (japanese etc.) language and writing has a completely different structure from ours. I always thought that such profound differences must reflect different structures of the brain... like we have words to express a sentence such as "being lazy like a lion sitting under the moon of august", but we cannot catch the meaning, if not by metaphor. In oriental languages such expressions have an immediate meaning, and relate to mental concepts. In fact, when you think about it, if one starts from the assumption that every human thnks more or less of the same concepts, one should prize the fact of someone being able to express such concepts in the most economical way. Therefore, languages requiring the smallest number of symbols should be the ones with better efficacity (albeit the structure of the language could become more and more cumbersome, until you reduce two just 0 and 1, and you must talk via computer programs...) But then, it looks like people must be able to express different concepts, in order to have developed such a radically different approach to the language. Which could be reflected, for example, in the very different approach to "philosophy" and "religion" (if we stick to these words) of the oriental mind.....

But let go the chinese. Today was a relaxing one, I had a nice day of sun and light mountain air. It started weird, though, with a boat trip over the lake Ashi. Now, the boat was arranged as an ancient galeon, with pirates and cannons and treasure chests (all plastic) scattered here and there, and a real guy dressed as a pirate Hook, going around to take pictures with the kids. The ship was a fake 3-mast cruiser, but then... a Union Jack was waving from the back post,... and ancient (fake) maps of England were hanging from the walls, together with.... a painting of Horatio Nelson! It turned out the ship was a (vague) remake of the 'Victory' vessel, and this was even its name :-)

OK, the rest of the day was less adventurous. I went up hill to about 1,100m, to see the smoke-pits on the slopes of Owakudani, where people boil eggs in the sulphuric water until they turn totally black, and eat them to get 7 years of prosperity. The view of mount Fuji from up there is splendid, like a postcard (indeed). Then I went to see a wonderful open-air museum of modern sculpture, with an entire pavilion dedicated to Picasso, and the Hakone National Museum, with beautiful ancient pottery dating back to centuries BC. I even went to eat wonderful sushi at the Inarizushi little rest', as advised by the Lonely planet. I am following the LP strictly on such things :) The national museum is located inside a beautiful park, with one ancient and one reconstructed tea house, and a nice japanese landscape, with (listen to this)..... a moss garden! Now, where else but in Japan would you find a perfectly cared for, and wet, and shady moss garden? LP is great, I am so glad I found the english edition.

The french guide of Le Routard, instead, is totally silly. It is completely french-minded, it lists and hints at everything you can find of french, here in Japan.... how about that? how provincial of the french... (as usual, they always think that anything happens just in France, and things eventually happening anywhere else always need to get compared to Paris etc. .... mmmm, I hate the french!)
For example, the open air museum above, they say it contains works by: Maillol, Rodin, Bourdelle, Saint-Phalle (what a name!), all french artists! Now, it turns out the museum merely hosts the “largest collection in the world” of Henry Moore (28 sculptures)!!! plus a large number of Giacometti, Medardo Rosso, Boccioni, Miro', Dali', one of the "globes" by Pomodoro, some Brancusi, a wide selection of less known german artists, many modern (and genial!) japanese.... and TWO (2!) works of Rodin! But all the guide talks about is French artists.
And the guide totally missed the National Museum and the moss garden, not even mentioned. Of course, there is no french stuff there, who should care???
However, they succeeded to include the 'Museum of Saint Exupery and the Little Prince' (!) and the 'Museum Lalique', dedicated to the famous french designer. No mention of course of the 'Venice Art Museum', with thousands of fine glasses! No wonder, it isn't french!
They missed even the meaning of Fuji-san (which you often hear, in the place of Fujiyama): they pretend it's like the japanese calling their preferred symbol 'the mr. Fuji', whilst 'san' is but another way of reading the kanji for 'yama', mountain, indeed without any relation with the honorary attribute 'san" that you give to respected people.
And they, the French, have such a disturbing attitude in writing about the japanese customs.... looks like they are describing some martians! This guide is a total failure. It even goes as far as saying that the manga comics are inspired by the french dark-movie characters!!! grrrrr!!!!

Mmmm..... Fortunately, I could end my day of long walks with a stretch along the little bits of the ancient Tokaido road, the one way that connected Tokyo to Kyoto with the famous 53 resting stations along the way, as depicted by Hiroshige. Some pieces of this road are conserved around Hakone, and restored to somewhat the original appearance. The narrow trail is lined by humongous cedar trees, of some 20mt height, that were planted to shelter the walker from the sun or the snow. A beautiful ending in the shadows of the evening, until well after the sunset. And right in the middle of the cedar tree forest, I found an elementary school, where some kids were practicing the kodo and other drum playing. I said hello to the few moms that were sitting there watching their sons and daughters playing, and could take a few nice photos of the young musicians.

Well, now it's time to pack for tomorrow. I will take a bus early morning, and get to Tokyo, from where I hope to find a fast train to Nikko. There I am supposed to go see what is called the "real heart and soul of Japan" (hadn't I seen that already in Kyoto and Nara... huh, let's go and see....)