mountains of porn

A few mad days of posting the excesses of a year's accumulation and booking my flight home. It was time to attempt the biggest mountain in the country: Mount Fuji. Was it a disaster at the outset? If you had your heart set on the summit, it was impending doom. Of course it would have been cool to get there but we had a few mishaps on the way.

In fact we had troubles from the outset. Our team lost one before we even got started as Sachiko had to bail for work reasons. James and Heather missed the booked bus out of Hiroshima, despite my fruitless efforts (with abundant luggage) to stall the driver - no, Japanese buses wait for no passenger, they have a schedule to beat! I have the loaned hiking boots for Heather in my hot little hands and I am going to Fuji alone??

After a flurry of text messages, Heather and James are on the next bus to Yokahama and we arrange to meet the next morning somewhere in downtown Tokyo. With all my luggage I arrived at Eriko's, alas too late. She'd already left and gone to work - FUCK! James and Heather came out and shared in my shit soup situation. Stranded in a strange city with more baggage than you think, I call the only other person I know in the vicinity. Asaka who I'd met at my birthday, saved my soul a dozen times over the coming weeks, starting with taking care of our luggage at her family home.

We got to Yoshida, one of the two base towns, without further predicament - a miracle. Transport to the 5^th station is finished for the day. Basically in the off months the conspiracy is such that it's impossible to dawn summit via the shortest path. Plan C is to get a good night's sleep and set off walking from base town at 5am. Heather decided the hostel was too expensive and wouldn't accept our offers to pay. So after dinner in a cosy restaurant full of country music, she took to the street while James and I slumbered in the hostel.

At the crack of dawn we started hiking. Past the coffee vending machines and through the torii gate, we wound our way to the junction of track and road. Time for a banana and chocolate breakfast. It was here while munching on a bit of choco that I noticed a plastic bag in the roadside ditch full of porn manga (Japanese style of cartoon) magazines. I reefed one out to take a gawk at what this phenomena is all about. The magazines were all in mint condition and I imagine how they came here. Perhaps some poor guy's female companion got a bit upset at his regular purchase of the propaganda and decided to chuck this month's subscriptions before he noticed... Who knows?

Last night's dinner didn't agree with me and the public toilets marked on the map were nowhere to be found. After diarrorhea in the woods, my strength was sapped for the remainder of the day. Heather wasn't exactly bright-eyed and bushy-tailed either after a night spent on the street. James on the other hand was soldiering on with a military mission in mind. We made the 5^th station before the weather closed in then caught the last buses down the mount. This time it was Fuji a no go.

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My Little Pussy from Mujin Comics, is the title of the horrid manifestation I have souvenired. It is so appalling and unbelievable that folks back home won't understand how so, without personally inspecting this trash. Is there a connection between this genre and the psyche of it's audience?

Later in Akihabara, the Electric City where one finds all sorts of Japanese computer sales and boffins bargain hunting for their PC parts, I discovered a side of Japan I'd only heard whispers of in the past. James and I were shopping around for prices on laptops and checking out the specifications. A lot of the stores don't have English operating systems so we really had to try many different shops. In this wandering we discovered that the shops sell mountains of porn rather than so much computers. It's hardly a taboo subject with customers forming very long neat queues for the checkout, waiting patiently to gorge into their several purchases. Depictions on the covers or a quick scan will soon disgust you I'm sure. Who writes / draws this stuff anyway and where do they get their ideas from? With the sheer volume of stock and sales it is undoubtedly a massive industry here in Tōkyō alone. Scary stuff.