Or at least, the path back to Albuquerque. Classes at KCJS ended several weeks ago, and after a brief graduation ceremony we were set free to do as we please until we leave or are deported. As I’d like to come back to Japan one day, I’m leaving the day after tomorrow from Narita. I’m currently in Tokyo after a surprisingly strenuous journey through wide swaths of the Kanto and Kansai area, typing from inside a box (a hostel “single” doesn’t mean what you think it does, guys).  As I had to be out of my apartment by the 27th, I decided to make the trip a sight-seeing one and hit a number of different attractions along the way. First up was Nara.

I was rather effervescent in my praise of Miyajima, but a few short moments wandering through the temple grounds of Nara was all it took for the old memories from my first trip after my high school graduation to come rushing back. Nara is simply a gorgeous place, a pristine oasis of postcard ready-scenery bubbling out of its urban surroundings.

Nara, like Miyajima (or Miyajima, like Nara) is crawling with surprisingly aggressive deer.

My one regret was not spending more time in Nara, exacerbated by my need to drop off my baggage before going sightseeing. I unfortunately dramatically underestimated just how much weight all the books I’ve purchased in Kyoto would add to my luggage… Hauling around seventy or so pounds of luggage across the Japan has been an exhausting experience, especially since this damn place always seems to put it’s elevators in the most out of way places if it has them at all. The worst of it was at my next stop, Osaka, where the hotel I stayed at had no elevator… and I was on the fourth floor. Fun times. Of course, it was 1400 yen a night.

The next day I set out for Nagoya, making a pit stop at Ise along the way. Unfortunately, my luggage once again proved to be my anchor, and I only managed to see Geku, the outer shrine of Ise, and completely missed the supposedly amazing ocean-side cliffs.

The waters were teeming with fish.

There was a wide variety of wildlife at the shrine, including a chicken for a little kid to chase around...

...and around. This went on for about five minutes straight.

I passed by a pretty amazing display of flowers on my way back to the station.

The train to Nagoya.

The view from the train...

...and a passing train.

I got to Nagoya late and in an rather amazing coincidence ran into a fellow KCJS student who was leaving the next day, so I didn’t get many pictures. However, when I got to my hotel room, I looked inside the desk and was surprised to see a book exactly in the location where a bible is usually found in American hotels. Surprised that a Japanese hotel would bother to keep such a thing, I flipped the book over and saw this…

I again got to my next destination, Kawaguchiko in front of Mt. Fuji, rather late, and after nine hours of trains, I wasn’t in a photographing mood. I also didn’t try to climb Mt. Fuji; apparently, outside the official climbing season from July to August, the mountain’s weather is highly unpredictable and dangerous. As I’ve made it this far in my stay in Japan without being seriously injured, I decided to pass this time, and I was pretty exhausted after hauling my bags around for a few miles on the way to the hostel.

This was as close as I got.

Kawaguchiko itself. ("-ko" is a suffix for lakes, so it would be Lake Kawaguchi.)

And that’s how I finally arrived in Tokyo and started living in a box (made of wood and everything). My time in Japan is quickly dwindling away to nothing, but I end each day so exhausted and my feet hurt enough each time that I mind a little less everyday. Maybe it’s time to come home.

Why is my hostel in Asakusa so easy to find? Landmarks.

Music I’m Listening to Now: Bruce Springsteen, “Dream Baby Dream”.

For our last group class event before our “graduation” ceremony, most of KCJS took a boat down Hozugawa and into Arashiyama. The weather was perfect Spring weather, neither too hot or cold, and occasionally interrupted by an errant cool breeze. A trip down the Hozugawa is hardly a white-knuckle experience, but there was the occasional rapid straight and quick drop off to break up the two hour trip. And to top it all off, KCJS paid the 4,000 yen fee that otherwise would have been a non-starter for me. It was nice, but it wasn’t that nice.

Along the way, we passed a huge field, slightly odd site in an area of the country where space is at a premium. Horticulture is not my specialty, so all I can add is “sure looks pretty, huh?”

After a brief wait we set out in several boats down river, into the heart of darkness. Or back into Kyoto. You know, whatever.

We also passed a wide variety of the local fauna on the way down, from cranes to fish to turtles. We saw two turtles (who I unfortunately couldn’t photograph in time) stacked on top of each other. I’m not sure whether they were having wild turtle sex or that’s just something turtles do in their free time, but it looked difficult.

As the river entered a valley…

…we passed a number of landmarks, from temples to oddly named rocks, such as “Lion Rock” and “Pole in Hole Rock” (which, sadly, I also missed).

Supposedly the forest in the background is supposed to look like a smiley face. It's hard to see anything, but to all of us it looked much more like a skull.

We passed under the same bridge (and maybe same train) we used to get upriver.

After four months here, Japan still has plenty left to surprise me. Towards the end of our trip, we saw several boats upriver. Obviously, I was initially concerned about overly ambitious Somali pirates, but it turned out to be overly ambitious Japanese merchants. The boats were in fact mobile, on-river convenience stores, selling everything from cold beer to whole squids. They pulled along side our boat and started hocking their wares.

Finally, we reached the end of the river. And found out that KCJS wasn’t paying for our trip back. Ah, well, you can’t have everything, I suppose. This is my last post from Kyoto, my home since January, and one of my last posts in Japan. I have to leave my apartment on Monday, and on May 5th I leave Japan and, thanks to timezone differences, arrive an hour earlier on the same day in L.A., and from there I go to Denver to meet my sister. All of my classes turned out fine, so I’m leaving Kyoto with a relatively clean conscience and even more cleaned out bank account. From here, I’m going to Nara, Osaka, Ise, Nagoya, Mt. Fuji, and Tokyo, taking pictures all the while. Hopefully I’ll be in a situation to make at least a few more posts before I head back to the U.S. To everyone whose taken the time to read this, thank you very much. I really appreciated all the comments, and the knowledge that someone (even if the audience was rather small) wanted to read this kept me going when all I wanted to do was listen to music. I appreciate you spending your time here.

Arashiyama, home of Monkey Mountain. I'm pretty much monkeyed out after Miyajima, however.

Music I’m Listening to Now: A.C. Newman, “Submarines of Stockholm”.

]]> http://obustamante.wordpress.com/2009/04/25/river-card/feed/ 4 obustamante Flowers 1, Kyoto, 4/22/2009 Flowers 2 Flowers 3 River 1, Kyoto, 4/22/2009 River 2, Kyoto, 4/22/2009 Crane, Kyoto, 4/22/2009 River 2, Kyoto, 4/22/2009 River Temple, Kyoto, 4/22/2009 River Skull, Kyoto, 4/22/2009 Bridge, Kyoto, 4/22/2009 Bridge 2, Kyoto, 4/22/2009 Merchant 1, Kyoto, 4/22/2009 Merchant 2, Kyoto, 4/22/2009 Arashiyama, Kyoto, 4/22/2009 http://obustamante.wordpress.com/2009/04/22/rum-hee/ http://obustamante.wordpress.com/2009/04/22/rum-hee/#comments Wed, 22 Apr 2009 01:02:03 +0000 obustamante http://obustamante.wordpress.com/?p=450 ]]> Shugo Tokumarau is an incredibly skilled Japanese musician (he plays around a hundred instruments, from guitar to piano to musical saw) who makes pop music with a slightly odd bent. A lot of his songs approach a melody at a slightly esoteric angle, but his best make this odd approach infectious. Here’s his newest song, the title track of an EP I’m planning on buying this week, Rum Hee. The song is one of his more direct and triumphant.

]]> http://obustamante.wordpress.com/2009/04/16/saved-by-old-times/feed/ 0 obustamante http://obustamante.wordpress.com/2009/04/13/believe-esp/ http://obustamante.wordpress.com/2009/04/13/believe-esp/#comments Mon, 13 Apr 2009 07:59:59 +0000 obustamante http://obustamante.wordpress.com/?p=435 ]]>

On Saturday after a night misspent at an all you can drink/eat ramen restaurant, I got up extra early, took the train to Kyoto Station, and accompanied a portion of my Japanese religion class to Ishikiri, the fortune telling capital of Japan. Ishikiri is an excellent example of the fluid nature of religion in Japan. A famous study conducted in Japan found that more people claimed that they were followers of a religion, such as Shintoism or Buddhism, than there were people in the country by almost a factor of two. Religion in Japan is simply not a fixed entity as it is in the West; it’s entirely normal, for example, to have a Shinto birth ceremony, a Western, Christian wedding, and a Buddhist death ceremony. Also prevalent are folk religions, communal belief systems based on local values and superstitions. Fortune telling in Ishikiri is similar to it’s mysticism derived relatives in other parts of the world, but it is perhaps lent an air of authenticity by it’s propinquity to the common tradition at temples and shrines of the omikuji, a sort of fortune that comes on a piece of paper and has a wide variety of outcomes, from very good to very bad luck.

Much like Japanese religious life, fortune telling can be a hodgepodge of various traditions, such as the above store, which is based equally in native Japanese nature worship, Buddhism, mysticism, and even Jewish Kabbalah. The character 占 is the character for fortune telling. There was a panoply of methods available in Ishikiri, from the obvious, such as readings by palm and crystal ball, to the more esoteric, such as tongue reading to determine your health (complete with a chart of forty different tongues to compare).

The seers of Ishikiri also do not express the slightest reservation about the commercial aspect of their services, as evinced by this chart relating price to the accuracy of their predictions. They range from 3,000 yen for a sure thing to 1,000 yen for a decent guess. Other services, such a Feng Shui techniques to adjust the directions of your home (I didn't entirely understand this) and lucky names for your future children can run into the tens of thousands of yen, or hundreds of dollars.

A similarly synthetic religious tradition can be found at Ishikiri Shrine, the major tourist attraction in the area. As our professor explained, the original Ishikiri Shrine burned down hundreds of years ago and all records of it’s traditions were lost. Now, all of the shrines ceremonies are of the pinchbeck variety, without the least velleity of truth to them. Ishikiri’s “tradition” is essentially a folk religion in and of itself, based on invented ceremonies that have been lent legitimacy after the fact.

Legitimate or not, Ishikiri Shrine is a popular place.

One such tradition is based on two stones in the middle of the grounds of the shrine. “Legend” says that if you walk around the outside of the two stones one hundred times your wish will be granted. I passed on that.

Wandering around the grounds, I saw what at first I thought were some colored ropes…

Until I realized they were thousands and thousands of paper cranes. Thinking about how long they must have all taken makes my head hurt.

On my way back to Kyoto, I stopped in Osaka and paid a visit to a few stores in order to find the actual comic my project for my translation class was based on. After a bit of foot work, I managed to track down and buy most of the author’s work for a pittance (Americans get killed on the price increases in importing this stuff). I have to admit it was odd to hold something I had grown so use to seeing online in my hands. I also finally saw the damn kanji I couldn’t read in the scans due to blurring and the author’s handwriting. Goddamn 普通 and 誘う.

I got back to Kyoto around nine and completely exhausted, but remembered to snap a picture of Kyoto Tower before wandering zombie-like back to my apartment.

Music I’m Listening to Now: Peter, Bjorn, and John: “Last Night”.

Bonus! Sort-of Engrish:

I imagine you’re all sick of sakura by now, but the cherry blossom season is a major part of the year in Japan. One of the most common activities is hanami, or flower viewing. Basically you take a meal and a bit of alcohol and sit around, admiring the trees and realizing that the blossoms will soon be gone, taken by birds and the wind, pondering the transience of existence. This all makes much more sense after you’ve been drinking.

The temperature jumped up about fifteen degrees over the weekend.

I’m nearly done with the KCJS program, and now I’m beginning to reflect on the program, prompted in part by a letter I received from a former Japanese teacher asking me to recount my experiences in Japan. My main dilemma is that it’s hard for me to separate the program from being in Japan; did I have fun here because or in spite of KCJS? I’m not entirely sure, but I did appreciate the many efforts KCJS made to try and get people involved and give us all something to do. Some of their attempts (such as the community invovlement project) were annoying as hell, but I came to appreciate them over time. Unfortunately, the classes outside of those for Japanese language are a mixed bag. I really enjoyed my translation course, but Japanese religion was nightmarishly boring. It was like some seperate, hellish dimension where every hour in the real world was an enternity for everyone listening for the umpteenth time about how religion was “domesticated” in the Tokugawa era. Seriously, we had like forty goddamn classes on that topic.

And now, music. The new Neko Case, Middle Cyclone, continues to be awesome. Here’s a video for “People Got a Lotta Nerve”.

Japanese game shows continue to amaze me, especially this one. Don’t they have laws against this sort of thing?

Music I’m Listening to Now: “Rosewood, Wax, Voltz + Glitter”, Red Red Meat. I actually payed for this cd on iTunes  (thanks for the gift certificate, Molly and Chris). The former band Tim Rutili, of Califone fame, has a much more emphasis an distorted guitars and dirty blues, but you can definitely see the roots of Califone’s gothic Americana, especially in the ballads, such as closing track “There’s Always Tomorrow”. Here’s one of the highlights of the record, “Chain, Chain, Chain”:

After my last post discussing the virtues of Kyoto in Spring, the city has had several weeks of alternately cold and rainy weather, with the occasional sunny, warm day only a brief respite. With April, however, it seems that Spring is finally settling in. The temperature is rising, the sun is shining late into the day, and the sakura are practically exploding off their branches, turning even mundane streets into picturesque locales. Above is the street I take everyday to get to my apartment.

The beginning of April also marks the start of the new school year in Japan, and with it comes club recruitment. Clubs are highly important in Japanese schools, often providing the main source of socialization during a student’s school years, and are especially central in Japanese colleges, where the work load is much smaller compared to previous levels of education. It’s not unusual to find students who devote much more of their time and effort to their club than to their scholastic pursuits, and consequently club recruitment is a large and important process. The variety of clubs offered is staggering, with options stretching from cheerleading to kendo to tennis to anime to basketball. When all are out making their pitch, you get some interesting mixes…

Cheerleading and cosplay, together at last.

I recently went on a field trip to Eiga Mura, or Movie Village, with my translation class. Eiga Mura is a theme park devoted to Japanese movies, specifically period pieces chronicling the adventures of various samurai, geisha, and ninjas; essentially a Japanese Universal Studios. It’s a bit of a tourist trap, but it was pretty entertaining when I didn’t have to pay for it. We saw a new translation machine that some engineers are working on in conjunction with Eiga Mura. When you speak into the machine it checks a database based on information taken from the internet and returns an appropriate response. Or should. While I was impressed with it’s ability to handle set phrases and simple sentences, the machine has some big problems with consonants and longer phrases and words. When I tried saying “extraordinary” it translated it as an “l” with a period after it. Not quite. It also has no ability to handle slang, and accents are a challenge. For it’s purported objective (an aid for tourists) it’s probably sufficient, but anyone who wants to have an actual conversation is going to have to stick with learning the language for now.

I didn’t take too many pictures as our time was limited, but I had a pretty good time, and saw a rather entertaining show based on a  spell-casting warrior and his incompetent assistant versus and evil lord and his wife. It was as expected over-the-top and goofy, but done with such heart it’s impossible not to enjoy it. The sentai exhibit (sentai is basically a genre for masked fighters for justice) was a powerful blast of nostalgia for anyone who ever watched Power Rangers.

A few villains from the various series.

Every red ranger...

...ever. There was a couple dozen more after this too.

The best thing about these sorts of shows and the many others they inspired, from mecha shows to magical girl anime are the many hilarious lines they have about courage, including “The Earth doesn’t need your mechanization! What it needs is OUR BURNING COURAGE!”, “Have you forgotten, Mamoru? Victory goes to…THOSE WITH COURAGE!”, “If I’m the devil, then I’ll use hell’s ways to make you listen”, “I’ll make the impossible possible”, and “You don’t need probability when you’ve got guts!” Awesome.

Music I’m Listening to Now: “Herring Bone”, Department of Eagles

For our KCJS class trip, I and about forty other students made the journey by Shinkansen to Hiroshima and then once again (for me, at least) to Miyajima. Initially, I was worried that a return trip to Miyajima would be pleasant if slightly underwhelming in light of my previous visit there, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that I had missed a major part of the island: the path leading to the absolute highest peak. The views from above were spectacular. I hate to resort to hyperbole again so soon after the last Miyajima post, but the view from the top of Miyajima is probably the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Also, Spring has arrived in Japan, and the sakura (cherry blossoms) are blooming across the country. The streets and thoroughfares of Miyajima and Hiroshima were dotted with vivid splashes of pink and white.

Warning: lots of nature pictures to follow.

Due to peer pressure I elected this time to take the ropeway, but I didn’t regret it. The ride is disappointingly short for 900 yen, but the scenery is nothing to scoff at, though this is one area where I think New Mexico and the Sandia Tramway could give Japan a run for its money (and in terms of total length, the tramway trumps all trams in totality).

The ride was less fun for the more heights-averse people in the car.

Unfortunately, before I saw all of this beautiful scenery, I ran into… a bit of trouble. Our Shinkansen was scheduled to leave at 9:52 a.m. (and if you know Japanese train schedules, you know that’s 9:52 sharp) and I made a number of mistakes, from underestimating the time to get there to going to the wrong Imadegawa station (apparently, there’s a JR one and a Keihan one). After frantically trying to find track 14 and exchanging some barely understandable Japanese with a station attendant, I emerged onto the platform right as… the clock struck 9:54, and I saw the train receding into the distance. Thankfully, I was able to grab the train immediately after and then take a train to Miyajimaguchi the same way I did during my Spring break. It was slightly embarrassing being the only student dumb enough to miss the train, but everyone seemed impressed when I told them I got there by myself. The Japanese train system seems pretty intuitive to me, though.

Another surprise was waiting for me at the peak besides the amazing view- monkeys. Monkeys, with temperates common to the deer that pepper the island, surrounded the tram station, hooting, running back and forth, and picking bugs out of the fur of each other and annoyed deers.

Though the monkey population far exceeded my expectations, the first hint at their presence was an English voice on the tram warning passengers to stow their valuable away from the curious eyes of the sticky-handed simians.

Now, as for the view…

A temple near the top hosted the “Eternal Flame”, a fire that has supposedly been continuously burning for over 1200 years and was used to light the peace fire at Hiroshima. It… left something to be desired.

It wasn't so much "the eternal fire" as it was "the eternal lightly glowing cinder pile".

Apparently the deer near the top are friendly (or desperately hungry) as one wandered up to me as I was sitting down.

Near the top was a tiny shrine based in a niche in the mountain.

This tiny, tiny shrine was used for tiny, tiny worshp by the tiny, tiny citizens of the island.

At last, after an hour of hiking form the top of the ropeway and a short trip up an observation tower, I reached the highest point on Miyajima and surveyed my surroundings.

I sure hope no one is viewing this on dial-up. But if you are, what's wrong with you?

The ropeway station.

Hell, even the view from our ryokan (a traditional Japanese inn) wasn’t bad.

For whatever reason, taking pictures of the actual ryokan completely slipped my mind. It was a fun experience- we were put into groups of four to six in traditional Japanese rooms, complete with tatami mats and just futons for sleeping, and provided with yukata, a sort of light cotton kimono, to wear. We had a traditional Japanese dinner with a wide variety of dishes, from prepared fish to a sort of tofu soup to a plate of delicious strawberries for desert, all with tasty if weak beer on the side. Sadly, sitting Japanese style in the seiza position (with your legs bent under you) is beyond my abilities as a gaijin, so I sat cross-legged and tried desperately to avoid exposing myself. After dinner we went out and view the famous torii (as seen in my last Miyajima post) in the dark, but unfortunately there wasn’t enough light for me to get a picture that didn’t look like it was taken from inside a trunk.

We departed in the early morning for Hiroshima, and I took several pictures of the blooming foliage surrounding the temples and shrines.

Ze ever-hungry sea.

One more shot of the torii, for old times sake.

We then took a bus to Hiroshima, which was also a bit of a photographic non-event. Our first stop was the Atomic Bomb Memorial, which has an atmosphere not terribly conducive to photography. The memorial is much like any memorial, such as for the Holocaust or Vietnam: an experience that is equal parts moving and horrifying. It’s hard to walk away from a museum that includes graphic pictures of still-living female high school students burned so badly they’re hardly recognizable as human beings, or recounts the story of a young girl inflicted with radiation-induced leukemia years after the bombing and her subsequent desperate attempt to fold a thousand paper cranes so that her wish would be granted and she could live, and feel that it was in any way a “pleasant” experience. Nevertheless, Hiroshima should be a necessary trip for anyone going to Japan, and anyone whose ever seriously considered just “nuking them all”. A little bit of contemplation on horrific suffering has a way of putting things in perspective. I did take a picture of the Atomic Bomb Dome, a building nearly at the hypocenter of the explosion that somehow structurally survived the explosion that utterly demolished all buildings around it for thousands of feet, thought it was gutted by fire. On the left are some picnickers, enjoying the weather and the view of the river outside the memorial.

Music I’m Listening to Now: Lotus Plaza, “The Floodlight Collective”.

Spring has finally begun in Kyoto, and unlike the weekend of warm weather that served as an all-to-short break from the constant rain and chill of the last few months, it seems here to stay. I’ve honestly been a little bored at night, so I’ve been doing a lot of translation and taking late night bike rides. Late night bicycle rides are a pleasure in Kyoto, as in contrast to my native land, my chances of being run over or stabbed actually go down, instead of skyrocketing. One thing I noticed is that there’s cats everywhere. The alley I use to get out from my apartment complex is apparently full of them, as I discovered when I looked up and noticed there were at least three or four in a small niche formed between a wall and a overhanging roof. I opted not to photograph them- I wouldn’t be entirely enthusiastic about having a flash in my face that late at night either.

While Kyoto and Japan in general has as much crime in a year as the average American Denny’s does in a month, the city is not entirely law-abiding. I had the rare opportunity to see the results of some actual political activism on the side of a building located near our special gaijin class/leper colony located on the Kyoto University campus.

We’ve hardly gotten back to class from Spring Break and we’re already going on a number of excursions. Next week is our class trip to Hiroshima (and once again [for me, at least] to Miyajima) and this week we went to a Museum of Ethnology in Osaka. It’s mascot: apparently a giant, angry stone face.

This is about half my Japanese class.

I think this sign speaks for itself.

The museum was slightly disappointing, primarily because it seemed our main objective in going there was to have a box recite a story to us in several Japanese dialects that only further reinforced that I have a long way to go before I understand even standard Japanese. Dialects in Japan are unlike American dialects in that it’s possible for two people to be speaking “Japanese” and still not understand each other. The dialects associated with different regions, such as Kansai and Hokkaido, resemble foreign languages more than, say, an American Southern accent. The museum did have some nice displays, however.

On our way back we saw a now closed amusement park whose name, Expo Land, rather clearly highlights it’s place on the timeline.

I’ll post next week on my class trip to Hiroshima, and possibly Miyajima again. Everybody loves seeing the same pictures of someones vacation, right?

Music I’m Listening to Now: Grizzly Bear, “Cheerleader”.

And thus we reach the last part of my travel post trilogy, which much like most trilogies had little indication of the fact in its genesis and will also likely be a disappointment. For my final major stop, I went to Tsuwano, a relatively isolated hamlet in the mountains at one of the further ends of the Western Honshu archipelago. Tsuwano touts itself as a sort of ‘Lil Kyoto, a even more traditional and rustic alternative to the culturally rich vein the larger Kyoto possesses. To which I say, eh, kind of.

Perhaps it was the weather (distinctly overcast) or the hype (my guidebook made Tsuwano seem like the second coming of Christ), but I have to admit I found Tsuwano slightly disappointing. It had some nice areas, which I tried to photograph as much as possible with my rapidly dying camera, but overall if felt distinctly average and more than a little boring- a bit of a come down after Miyajima. Still way better than Albuquerque, though.

Miyajima featured one prominent shrine that I saw situated on towards the top of a large mountain. The many torii leading from the back portion of the temple was a definite highlight.

There's hundreds of these small gates lining the path all the way down the mountain.

Huh. Doesn't look particularly overcast here.

Sadly, my vacation  ended on a bit of a down note. I had planned to get back to Kyoto late Thursday night, but as I mentioned in a previous I was informed when I reached Tottori that I had missed the last train. The only reason it wasn’t completely miserable was that the air temperature was relatively warm, but the incredibly strong winds (I heard some rather large things being blown over) took care of the rest. Crouching in a underground walkway, desperately huddling against my laptop for warmth was admittedly not the funnest experience in my life, but I did meet a really nice guy when I took shelter at the post office. I had a pretty long conversation with him, and he actually stopped by later and bought me a drink. The human brain is a wonderful and terrible thing in that my vacation, warts and all, is quickly being reduced to similar highlights. Freezing a little bit is a fair trade-off between gorgeous scenery and friendly conversation, right? Right?

Music I’m Listening to Now: The Hold Steady (obviously), “Ask Her For Adderall”.

]]> http://obustamante.wordpress.com/2009/03/13/stuck-between-stations/feed/ 2 obustamante Tracks, Iwakuni(?), 3/5/2009 Tsuwano view 1, Tsuwano, 3/5/2009 Gate, Tsuwano, 3/5/2009 Shrine 1, Tsuwano, 3/5/2009 Shrine 2, Tsuwano, 3/5/2009 Shrine 3, Tsuwano, 3/5/2009 Shrine 4, 3/5/2009 Tsuwano wide view 2, Tsuwano, 3/5/2009