Too many megaposts!

I'm back in Ritto- spent nine days backpacking around Kyushu, the Southern Island of Japan (well, as long as you don't count Okinawa) and the cradle of Japanese civilization. Religion plays pretty big down there- the gods lived on that island, and moved north with the early Japanese as they swept up to what is now Honshu, the Main Island of Japan, and Kyushu was also the holdout point for the early doomed Christians of Japan- they hid out on the Shimabara Peninsula, and put up quite a fight before being virtually exterminated and driven underground. Some of the coolest stuff I saw while I was down there were crypto-Christian artifacts that disguised Mary as the goddess Kannon, or Jesus as an incarnation of the Buddha, or worked subtle crosses into sword crossguards and the bottoms of icons of other religions- but more on that later. I'm trying to keep the epic length of these things down (so I can tell you more and slideshow less), so this post is really for one thing and one thing only:

Tale from the Issahaya Train Station, Kyushu, Japan
dialogue translated from the Japanese by A. Moll

A man in what appeared to be his late sixties, sitting on the wooden bench on the platform headed to Shimabara Port, adjusted his baseball cap and called out to me in laughing English. "You! Where from?" In my politest Japanese, I told him that I was from America, but that I live in Shiga Prefecture. With a broad smile, he asked me what I was doing down in Kyushu, waiting on a platform for a train that only comes once every three hours. Tourists, evidently, stick to cities with reliable transportation. I told him my story- I had just left Nagasaki, and was taking a shortcut across the bay between Shimabara and Kumamoto before heading on to Mt. Aso (google earth 32º53'03.80" N, 131º05'06.43" E- the greenish blue pit is a lake of volcanic sulphur), an active volcano in central Kyushu. He laughed again, told me that was great, but had I heard of this other mountain, named Kaimon? Of course, I had not. So he told me about it.

Kaimon is called the Fuji of Kyushu. It's symmetrical like Fuji, fairly large- like Fuji- and holy. Just like Fuji. It's also the site of a peculiar ritual that this man felt the need to act out, in the train station, complete with gestures. He told me that during the war with my country, kamikaze pilots departing from Okinawa would circle Kaimon three times, waggle their wings as a final Sayonara, and depart for their targets. His explanation was joyful and enthusiastic- he stood, he walked in circles with his arms outstretched like airplane wings, he waggled them back and forth to indicate the Goodbye, and he ended it with his straightened hand slamming plane-wise into his other hand, which then crumpled. He told me that all the kamikaze pilots would do this- every single one- as part of their pre-mission ritual. And then he grinned that big grin at me, and touched the brim of his baseball cap, and winked.

"But me, I didn't go. Have a good trip."

A few stops down the line, he walked past my seat on his way out, saluted me, and said "Sayonara."

pax