Rain, the one enemy of the ninja.

Why you no post Adam Halls?

Long story, combination of golden week, my parent's recent visit, my need to clean the house on a semi-regular basis, joining the gym and something to do with the letters w i i.

But post today guys regarding pretty much my only real adventure during Golden Week. A trip to a little out of the way village near Nara known as Kasagi.



I hadn't intended to go to Kasagi that day, I had thought I was going to go to Nara for some kind of a scavengers hunt. Apparently I thought wrong.

The plan, as it was explained to me, was to go to Nara, meet up with some of my girlfriend's friends and wander around the town solving riddles taking photos of things we thought were the answers to the riddles.

This was wrong in pretty much every respect.

For starters, before my girlfriend and I had even reached Nara we discovered that we weren't in fact going to Nara but instead going to a town just beyond Nara, and slightly beyond the best named town in the whole of Hyogo prefecture. Kamo, or duck.

This was fine with me albeit a little surprising. I quite like the small towns in the area just beyond Nara and Kyoto. They are full of cool surprises such as the Ninja Museum.

In fact this scavenger hunt was going to be ninja themed slightly. I had no idea in what way it would be ninja themed but I brought my ninja mask and my kunai in preparation for the possibility that I might be called upon to kill a man with my half remembered tae-kwon-do and rubber knife.



It seems that Kasagi is actually quite close to the ninja museum and the area was previously a ninja village, however it hasn't turned this into a tourist industry like nearby Iga Ueno.

Fran and I arrived by cab having already taken three trains to get there and met up with Charlie and Sarah, the two people organising the event. They hooked us up with two free maps (neither of which had any scale and had the landmarks only in a rudimentary positional relationship to each other), a free cup of coffee and our final team member in the form of Sarah's visiting brother, a freelance web page designer.

They also explained that the actual aim of the hunt wasn't so much to find everything on the clue sheet as to go to all the areas on the clue sheet and take a ninja pose there. Fair enough, but apparently we weren't just looking for places in Kasagi but in a neighbouring village that we needed to cross a mountain to get to.

Hang on a moment. Climbing a mountain? Nobody mentioned that before and neither me nor Fran were in particularly good shoes for such an endeavour.

However as we set off to go collect our photos thoughts of difficult mountain climbs were far from our minds.

They'd return.



Things started out really cool. Kasagi, like many small Japanese towns, has lots of small scale attractions. The kind of curios that it wouldn't be worth the effort for a tourist to seek out but that are nonetheless cool little treats for we long term residents. Take for example this diorama of samurai in combat with some kind of super human rock throwing man.



Also note how the stealthy ninja dispatches the arrogant samurai. Foolish samurai!

I should probably explain why on earth Fran is posing the way she is. Well everybody had to come up with a name for their ninja team. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles having already been taken we opted for Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters and Fran took it upon herself to pose like a hamster in every photo.

Hence photos such as this.



We were also commanded to do a "Ninja Disco Dance of Death."



BEHOLD MY MIGHTY MOVES!

At one of the targets, a local onsen, we met up with one of the competing teams...



... and mercilessly slaughtered them.



There are ninja hiding here, can you spot them?


Having found all the spots in Kasagi, at about 11:30 in the morning, we set off up the mountain to get the spots on top of the mountain and head over to the next town.

This is where it all started to go wrong.

After about 40 minutes of waling we had no idea where we were and we were seriously scared that we had wandered onto the wrong mountain or done worse. The maps we had didn't detail most of the roads we had passed and there was no sight of the peak, the turning to the next town or anybody else on the mountain.

To make matters worse it started to rain, I lost my kunai and Fran began to get serious pains in her foot. Fran had come directly from Tokyo the day before without getting any proper sleep in between and a mountain hike did not seem like the smartest plan in the world.

We gave serious consideration to retracing our steps and calling off the whole thing but at last we were emboldened by meeting up with another team on the same road. This meant we hadn't been mistaken or lost just underestimating quite how high the climb was.

With courage restored we pressed on and finally reached the sight we had come to see, an 80 foot Buddha carved into the side of a rock.



I love Japan. I love that interesting sights like this are so common that they are hardly ever mentioned. I love turning mountain bends and been confronted by something completely unexpected and perfectly Japanese. I love that art and aesthetics find their way into seemingly everything. It's a great country.



There was an even more interesting carving of a Buddha that had seemingly faded away over the years. Seen here with a ninja "scaling" it. It was certainly less well done than the other Buddha but I consider it more interesting because it prompts so many questions. How old is it? What did it used to look like? Why was it allowed to wear away? Just what purpose did it serve?



Having done our best ninja poses at these two spots we set off down the mountain again to get to the next town and complete all the spots there.

We would never make it.

Oh we made it to the town but the combination of heavy rain, terrible maps and a member of our combined team that was unfortunately wearing heels meant that the travelling was painfully slow going.



It was a lovely walk though. The views from the mountain top were typically grand but furthermore this may be the greenest place in the whole of Japan. It almost reminds me of dear sweet England, except for all the mountains.

It was completely deserted too. No tourists, hardly any buildings and maybe 2 or 3 cars. It is staggeringly rare in Japan to get that level of privacy and I cherished the absence of people. Particularly once we descended the mountain and the valley opened up into these really wide rice fields. It was so..spacious. Not usually an adjective one associates with Japan.




Mostly what impacted on me was the noise. In the absence of human sounds the noises of nature were noticeably louder. There were frogs EVERYWHERE. We never once saw one but the sound of their croaking was omnipresent. The rain too was thundering down and the noises it made as it rushed over roads, gurgled down drains and splashed against rivers made a kind of natural trance. For a long time we just walked and listened as nature filled all that human need for noise for us.

By the time we finally got to the other town (which is so small it isn't listed on wikipedia and I cannot remember the name sadly) it was nearly 3 o'clock. What was supposed to be an easy hike had taken us nearly 4 hours, and worse we were supposed to survey the town and somehow make it back to Kasagi for 5 o'clock.

Simply not happening.



Instead we sussed out a bus heading back to Nara and all poured into the only restaurant in the entire town that was open. I had curry udon, a dish that consisted literally of udon noodles in curry sauce and as such not something I recommend to anyone. It wasn't bad as such but it was deeply unsatisfying in comparison to ordinary udon or ordinary curry.

So that was Kasagi. A bit of an adventure but ultimately a frustrating one. Whilst there are many parts of it I enjoyed I can't help but regret that we didn't get the chance to explore further.

As for the scavenger hunt? Well we never really got to hand in our photos did we. For all I know Charlie is still waiting for us to show up.

Bizarre Biscuits (that would be cookies for our American readers)

A quick follow up to Tuesday’s Ninja post today I am going to discuss.




NINJA BISCUITS!!!!

Oh yes!

There were a huge variety of different brands of ninja biscuit available in Iga, all basically the same thing. An incredibly, astoundingly hard biscuit covered in either ginger or seaweed (Japan has different ideas about what constitutes savoury).

How hard are they I hear you cry. So hard my friends that they come packaged with a tiny hammer.



A tiny hammer which incidentally is bloody useless for breaking the damn things.

Ostensibly these biscuits are really hard to prevent them from going stale and so a ninja can keep a stash of them to feed himself on dangerous missions.

Considering neither museum once mentioned these biscuits I’m going to treat this claim as, um, shall we say dubious. Nonetheless stick the word ninja in front of something and it automatically makes it 1000 times better in my world. I was powerless to resist the allure of ninja biscuits.

That said, they’re not very nice. Oh sure they taste nice, even with the inclusion of sweet seaweed, but it’s difficult to get too excited about eating something that could make passable tank armour. Honestly you have never eaten anything this hard. You may be thinking “oh ho Adam, I’ve eaten some pretty tough toffees in my time,” well not as hard as these biscuits you haven’t. I’m sure if pushed to it I could kill a man with one of these. Actually come to think of it maybe that’s why the ninja carried it around. Food and weaponry in one handy package; it’s dwarf bread from the Discworld books. Available for consumption in Japan, the land of no food taboos whatsoever.



In the world of more palatable confectionary we have two new offerings from Kit-Kat this week. Well newish.

The first is a Muscat of Alexandria Kit-Kat from the premier line. The premier line consists of incredibly pretentious packaging, within which are 2, single finger kit-kats which are slightly larger than the standard size and have very unusual flavours.

The Muscat of Alexandria is a white grape flavour rendered in slightly pale green chocolate. It smells, very, very strongly of grapes but also faintly of milkshakes. I’m not sure why it smells of milkshakes, possibly a shared gelatinous component but I do know that such an odour provides a torment for me. I gave up eating at fast food places about 5 years ago and milkshakes are the thing I miss more than anything.

The first taste of the Muscat kit-kat is surprisingly bland. It doesn’t really taste of anything other than vaguely waxy. After a few chews though the grape flavour is really, really strong. Much stronger than I’ve come to expect from these kit-kats. Obviously it lacks the sourness of a proper grape and I think without that it’s way too sickly sweet. It probably needs some salt (like the watermelon) to just cut the sugar down a bit and make it a nicer overall experience.



Next up we have…. Untranslateable flavour. I’m pretty sure the hiragana says kooji (pronounced ko-O-jee) but I can’t even hazard a guess at the kanji. The picture on the packet seems to indicate English (or if you prefer Black) tea but the Japanese for that is koocha.

A quick taste check confirms that this is indeed English tea. This is not a new flavour for kit-kat. I had an English tea kit-kat last year as part of the premier line (which was very strong and unmistakeably a cuppa). These are part of the kit-kat mini line, apparently meant to be eaten alongside a cup of Japanese tea. Japanese tea is notoriously bitter and it customary to eat really very sweet cakes and biscuits with it to counteract some of the bitterness. Consequently the tea flavour is a bit weaker but the product is much sweeter. It isn’t nearly as sweet as the Muscat though. In fact I really quite like these. They taste like what a kit-kat tastes like after it’s been dipped in tea (but with a still crisp texture). However, for the life of me I cannot figure out what the market for these is? Surely they can’t complement a cup of green tea, because, well, they taste like black tea. And eating them with black tea would just be redundant. They’re too small to be eaten on their own so I ask you Nestle Japan, what are they for?

Oh and before you ask, yes, Japan does produce matcha and green tea flavoured kit-kats too. In fact I’ve eaten them and I do intend to get around to reviewing them on this site eventually.

Well that’s all for now. Next week I’ll probably get some of my Tokyo trip photos posted (finally) and we’re all going to learn about Japanese politics. Don’t miss out.

Ninjaaaaaaaaaaaaaasssssssssss!!!!!!!!!

I’m back!

Ninjas!

Ninjas seem to be everywhere these days. They pop up frequently in all levels of pop culture as stealthy. magical, weapon wielding assassins and the thugs for low grade super villains.

I, love ninjas.

And something that I just recently grasped for the first time is that ninjas are actually real.

I mean they really did exist.

It’s hard for that to sink in. With all the comics, movies and computer games about ninjas, all the super-powers they seem to have and the sheer other worldliness of them ninjas seem more like a recurring fictional archetype than an actual historical occupation. But they were real, they really did exist. And what’s more they existed in the country I live in.

Why have I suddenly had this revelation? Well it came to me courtesy of a recent trip to the Ninja Museum in Iga Ueno.

I know, an actual honest to god ninja museum. I love this country.


Iga is one of the two villages in Kansai that styled themselves as the largest and most influential of the ninja clans in Japan. The other was Koga, also in Kansai and both within a day’s travel from Kobe. Ninja clans were generally based around villages which, appeared to be a normal farming village but in actuality were training camps for clans of ninja. There were hundreds of these villages scattered around Japan, each practicing a subtly different version of ninjitsu but Iga and Koga were easily the most powerful.

Although only being a day trip away Iga is remarkably difficult to get to requiring that I ride 5 different trains and travel for about 3 hours top get there. Including a journey on one two car train that appeared to have been built before the invention of suspension. It was a horrible ride but it did at least have curtains, always a sign of modernity and safety. Also it boasted jaw dropping mountain views. Still, suspension wouldn't go amiss.



Not that I minded too much because the last of these five trains was the “ninja train!” Basically a train, painted to look like a ninja. Yeah. As you can tell on the subject of ninjas I am kind of easily pleased and I was excited beyond all reason to be riding the ninja train.



The ninja train approach to improving mundane items spread to the rest of the town of Iga too. Everything here is geared towards ninja and covering every available surface in them. Right down to the little pink kunoichi (a female ninja) on the manhole covers and this toilet sign. Being at heart an 8 year old boy this pleased me enormously.



The main draw of the town is the park in the centre which has 4 ninja themed attractions and a few minor additional ones.

The first of the ninja themed attractions was a restored ninja house. The ninja villages I mentioned before generally looked like ordinary villages and so the buildings just looked like ordinary Japanese farmhouses.

From the outside.



From the inside what appeared to be a one story building in fact had three as it contained both a cellar (with tunnels that led to underground passages linking the entire village) and a hidden attic from which the ninja could spy on intruders. Inside, the house was filled with various trapdoors, hidden doors, hidden rooms, hidden weapons (under floor planks and secret holes) and a twisty turny structure that allowed someone who knew the layout to observe nearly all of the house from one room. I particularly liked the secret door that could only be unlocked by sliding two pieces of paper under it allowing a quick escape in case of attack.

A guide followed you into every room demonstrating all the secret features but in some rooms a woman playing a kunoichi (in bright pink) would also come into the room and demonstrate the features herself. It is one thing to be told there is a secret door, it is quite another to see a woman clad head to toe in neon pink disappear into the wall and leave no obvious clue as to how she did it. It’s rather spooky and hammers home more effectively than anything else that ninja actually were real.

The second attraction was an excellent museum explaining all about the skills, tools and devices used by the ninja. This was hands down one of the most entertaining and informative museums I have visited so far in Japan and it was a real eye opener with regards to myth busting. Did you know, for example, that ninja almost never wore black? Apparently black shows up very clearly in shadow as a silhouette. Instead most ninja wore dark blue which faded much better and had the benefit of being able to be reversed and worn as peasants clothing during the day.



In fact disguise was used much more commonly than stealth. Much like the ninja house ninjitsu focused on using objects that appeared to be normal but were in fact deadly weapons. The various scythes (gama) and knives (kunai) which appeared to be ordinary farmer’s tools (in fact often were farmer's tools) all had a dual, deadly purpose. Ninja attire was also focused on disguise. Ninja would dress as many of the traditional wandering tradesman of Japan such a Buddhist monks or merchants. This way nobody would ask too many questions of the strangers in town and they could move around unquestioned.



As well as this I didn’t know that ninja were so intrinsically linked to gunpowder. Ninja were one of the few groups in Japan with the knowledge of how to make gunpowder, a secret they jealously guarded from other clans and from the rival military power of the samurai. Many of the conflicts ninja engaged in were to defend their own secrets or secure them from an enemy.



Ninja were masters at using gunpowder too, making elaborate weapons out of it including a primitive landmine and this, my favourite thing in the whole museum, an arrow with a stick of dynamite attached. This is so green arrow-esque and super heroey that I couldn’t believe it was actually real. Ninja were so skilled with gunpowder that during the do period many of the clans were reformed into an artillery corps, accounting for the dying out of the more elaborate stealth and disguise techniques.





The museum also did a very good job of explaining the basis behind many of the supposed “supernatural” ninja powers. In particular their ability to “walk on water” which stems from exaggerated accounts of ninja using mud spiders; basically large wooden shoe/floatation devices that spread their weight on boggy or swampy areas of moats that couldn’t be swum through.

Finally there was an excellent video showing the proper use of various ninja weapons and how someone armed with only a rope and a scythe could easily overpower a fully armed samurai with a sword.


The next area was another museum purporting to demonstrate “how the ninja lived” but in fact making really rather wild and I daresay outright false claims about ninja. Some examples of the claims in this museum are that ninja could hang from the ceiling using only the strength in their fingers (I’ll believe it when I see it) and that the main difference between the Iga and Koga clans was that the Iga clan was superior in “sorcery”. Complete bunkum I fear but the museum still had some interesting exhibits about the various codes ninja would use.

You might find it strange that I just openly disbelieve a museum but frankly there is a surprising amount of lying in Japan and I’m used to it by now. Japan is not a country that has ever placed the same value upon truth that we do in the west. In Japan appearance is the crucial thing and so long as everyone appears to have gone away from an encounter happy the truth is irrelevant. I am certainly used to encountering this in social situations but I was shocked the first time I realized how often it is done by authority or advertisers. I know that advertisers bend the truth back home but they don’t come anywhere near the wild claims that Japanese adverts make. In the west a coca cola advert might implicitly suggest that it makes you cooler and have a fun time. In Japan “you will be cool and have great time super long life health benefit to enjoy total happy” or something similar will actually be written on the bottle and nobody glances twice.

The last attraction a ninja show was possibly the best of all for sheer entertainment value. Several martial artists came onto a stage and showed off some tricks and the use of real weapons. And they were really real weapons as they demonstrated by lovingly eviscerating some bamboo. Some of the skills on display were extraordinarily impressive, such as the man who threw 3 shuriken (throwing stars) at once with complete accuracy. Some of the demonstrations incorporated staged fight scenes, again, with real weapons that were very exciting and really well done. However they were also cheesy as hell, courtesy of the “acting” on display and a backing track that features both early 70’s sonny chiba-esque kung fu music and loud sound effects whenever someone hit someone else or did a kick. Hilarious though these were the show clearly knew it was a bit cheesy and anyway we weren’t there to see fine acting but rather to be impressed that a guy knew how to use sai. Which he did, and very impressive it was too.

Afterwards there was a chance to have a go at throwing shuriken at a target. My friends and I all had a pop but due to an arm injury I had picked up earlier I only hit the target with 1 star. This was worse than my last attempt at using shuriken and so I sadly could not pretend to be a ninja in my heart.

After these four main attractions my companions and I hit up the rest that Iga had to offer. This consisted of a, um, thing.



Yup, no idea.

Obviously it’s something to do with religion or memorials of some kind. There is a statue of a man inside and the architecture suggests a Buddhist temple. But it doesn’t look like any temple I have ever seen. There were no signs about to inform us what it may be and even if there were odds are we couldn’t read them.

Still, it was interesting in a mysterious sort of way.



Iga also hosts a reconstructed castle, which in true ninja style was difficult to spot and hard to find. There was nothing particularly extraordinary about it, except for the ninja dummies dotted along it’s insides, but it did offer some wonderful views of the town and the park.



And that’s it from me today. Thursday should see another post and with any luck I can get back into a routine. Just in time for Christmas when it’ll all end again.