Kawaguchiko: Picture of Pictures

Last night, Kim decided to join me for a hike in Kawaguchiko, a small town near Mount Fuji. We purchased the bus ticket through the japanbusonline website. Our departure time was scheduled for 2 o’clock today, so we spent the morning exploring the Ameyoko market in Ueno and ate some tasty panda bread filled with various flavors. Around 12, we retrieved our bag from the hostel and took a JR train toward Nihombashi station, then continued on foot for a few hundred meters toward the Tekko building. Since there were no chairs in front of the waiting area, we simply sat down on the floor until a bus clerk warned us not to sit on the floor

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As the bus departed from Tokyo, the view quickly changed into verdant and rural surroundings. It would take about two hours to reach Kawaguchiko. I plugged in my earphones and tuned into some recommended songs on Spotify — lately I’d been listening almost exclusively to jazz and post-rock, though I couldn’t say why.

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When was it, the very first time I saw a picture of Mount Fuji? I vaguely remember. Perhaps through the bloc section on a Monopoly board or a calendar picture above my grandma’s sewing machine. I don’t know why, but my eyes moisted a bit, and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

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From Kawaguchi bus station, we walked to the hostel while admiring the mountain in front of us. It turned out that we had come to the wrong one. Not completely wrong, because they had another hostel with the same name but with an additional ‘backpacker’ in the end. The receptionist called the operator of the other K’s house and told us to wait. After a while, someone from the other hostel came to pick us up. The second hostel wasn’t too far from the first, about 1.5 km, close to Lake Kawaguchi.

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Google Maps is my savior, yet sometimes it behaves like a supreme authoritarian dictator. Promising the shortest routes but delivering a journey full of tragedy.

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At sunset, we strolled by Lake Kawaguchi. Crossing the Ohashi bridge, which split the lake’s landscape into two parts. I took pictures of Mt Fuji, the lake, the standing fisherman, the picture of pictures, then sat for a moment under the bridge enjoying the view. I shifted my eyes from the lake to the bridge to the mountain to the birds. We talked about Japan’s history. We talked about ourselves. Kim told me about her experience in a crash course of Buddhism which led to her vegetarianism. I told her the opposite story of monks who said that Buddha was not a vegetarian but disliked seeing animals being killed in front of him.

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“What do you think happens to our consciousness after we die?” she asked. “I don’t know.. but do you have any memory before you were born? I think death is just like that, a state of nothingness” … “In some religious story it’s said that our memory has been erased right before we’re born. But, this idea can be traced back to Greek mythology, like they believed that after someone dies and arrives in Hades (underworld) — the soul had to drink water from the Lethe known as Ameles Potamos (river of unmindfulness) where the water would make them forget their previous life and be ready to be born again.”

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“You have made your way from worm to man,” said Nietzsche. Life is a universal dining theater. The soil is eaten by the worm, the worm by the chicken, the chicken by us, and we return to the soil. After we die, we become a source of energy for other creatures; we become part of their physical form without our previous consciousness. We are no longer who we were. Just like the idea of reincarnation in Buddhism.

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Andre Malraux in his novel Man’s Fate, once said: “The great mystery is not that we have been thrown down here at random among the profusion of the matter or the galaxy of stars; it is that from our prison we can project and draw, from our own selves, images sufficiently powerful to deny our own nothingness.”

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Consciousness is not a thing but a process — a self-organizing pattern emerging from complex chemical reactions that form networks that have evolved over time. Physical stimuli like light, sound, and pressure trigger these cascades, which our neural networks interpret and construct into a model of reality. What we experience as “self” is this system modeling itself, a virtual agent the brain simulates to navigate its environment. We are patterns that have learned to perceive other patterns. When the substrate fails, when the chemistry stops, the pattern dissipates. There is no ghost in the machine, only the machine mistaking its own processes for a ghost

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We went to a supermarket and bought some groceries. Kim planned to cook dinner, so we split the expense. While she prepared the spaghetti, I assisted by slicing the vegetables. Later, an elderly woman in a wheelchair asked for help to unwrap her biscuit. She told me that she was from Paris and has a chronic illness. Her doctor has advised her to stay in places with pristine air from time to time, which is why she has been staying in Kawaguchiko for a month.

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I cycled to another part of Lake Kawaguchi — the bigger one — across the bridge, through the tunnel, past the school, to the dock. I saw a beautifully decorated manhole cover. There was a farmer watering the field, a woman taking pictures, a family having a picnic. I kept cycling and stopped in front of a coffee van. There was an archaic temple right in front of the van. I crossed a cemetery, then reached Arakura Shrine and Chureto Pagoda

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I read an article titled “Haruki Murakami’s passion for Jazz” and discovered a playlist on Spotify full of jazz based on “Murakami San No Tokoro”. Murakami is a jazz aficionado who has about 10,000 jazz vinyl records. He often puts element of jazz into his stories and he also ran a jazz bar. In his memoir “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running” Murakami tells the story of his other passion for running and how it has become an inseparable part of his way of becoming a writer.

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I spent the rest of the day hiking on Mt. Mitsutoge by myself. Kim decided to stay to recover her legs. I brought a daylight backpack filled with a pack of milk, bread, a torch, map, windbreaker, water, chocolate, and a set of spare clothes. Since the checkout time was at 10 AM, I finished my packing at once and put my backpack in the storage room near the reception.

When I began my hike, the sky was clear and the sun was bright. At a junction, a crowd of students on bicycles waited for the traffic patiently even though there were no vehicles around. I crossed the Ohashi bridge for the third time and stopped for a moment to watch a fisherman on a boat. Halfway, I took the longer route to reach the mountain and got lost once when I tried to take a shortcut, then decided to go back to the last intersection. I hadn’t seen anybody along the way which made me worried if I’d taken another wrong one, moreover there was a warning notice board about a wildlife area.

On top, the weather suddenly turned cold and misty. Half of Mount Fuji was covered by the cloud. There were two lodgings nearby. Some juveniles gathered around their tent while cooking food. In a distance, there were some people doing rock climbing. I paused for a while, ate my lunch before heading back down. Along the way, I noticed some biodiversity differences I hadn’t seen in most Indonesian mountains such as rows of tall red trees, pine trees, and a lot of melodious birds.

After about 25 km of strenuous walking, I arrived at the hostel around 4:30 PM. Kim was still there and about to leave. We walked together to bus station and said goodbye for the brief life intersection. She was heading back to Tokyo since she’d started her journey from Osaka in the south while I was heading in the opposite direction.

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A vending machine at the top of Mt. Mistutoge is the most Japanese thing I’ve seen so far. The last time I was surprised by such quirks was when I climbed a mountain in Indonesia where I saw a traditional meatball peddler on the peak of the mountain.

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Hotel: K’s House - Backpackers Hostel
Hotel Environment: Modern-traditional Japanese style
Treatment: Self-service tea or coffee for free anytime
Others: Homey, relaxing, and hospitable; spacious kitchen and lounge, bicycle for rent, computers, garden, funny receptionist, Lake Kawaguchi about 5 min walk Impression: Better than any stars hotel I’ve ever stayed in