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Last and final part in our Iya Trilogy

After a slow casual start over the weekend, we finally kicked into full-Iya tourism mode on Saturday night:

First, was a night at Ueda-san’s lovely B&B in a traditional farmhouse: 200 year-old chestnut-wood house, large washitsu with circling corridors, relaxing stone-lined ofuro and mellow family vibe. When I eventually buy my house in the Japanese countryside, this is probably what it will look like.

Even though some the charm of the above amenities was lost on my travelling buddies (particularly the awesome onsen-sized Japanese bath: a little “too exposed to the outside” for their modesty) and Ueda-san’s exclusive use of Japanese required a bit of translating back-and-forth with the group, everybody came together on the homemade, fresh-from-the-farm fruit, veggie and goat-milk yoghurt breakie… followed by a formal introduction to the goats themselves. As it turns out, milking a goat is not easy at all, but I can now add that to my short list of skills that might come handy, should civilisation crumble and send us all back to the bronze age.

Sunday was the day we had picked for finally touring Iya proper.

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If like me you deal with your typical Japanese administration office on a regular basis, you probably receive your fair share of documents, some of them occasionally packaged as a Zip archive…

If also like me, you are not using a Windows machine, but a Mac running OS X or some flavour of Linux, you routinely end up with files bearing such poetic names as “Åuäwà ò_ï∂ä÷åWèëófiíÒèoìÕ.pdf”, “äwà ê\êøìÕÅyÉfÅ[É^Åz.xls” etc. This is due to some incompatibility between the way each system stores Japanese characters1To be specific: Windows seems to be using good-old antiquated Japanese-only SJIS, whereas OS X and others prefer spiffy universal encodings like UTF-8. and the fact the Zip format was never conceived to handle such differences. Not a big problem if you have one file, bit tedious if the archive contains 300 of them.

In the spirit of sharing the fruit of my last productivity-sink effort to fix that problem, I present you with a small script that takes such a Zip archive as input and correctly extract all the files (with their properly encoded filenames):

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A selection of random pics from last weekend’s Halloween party (guest photography credits: Aki, Cory & Yanmei).

Prize for creativity goes to Cory, who came as A Shower.

Prize for glamour icons was shared between Sona’s Audrey Hepburn and Anita’s Betty Boop.

On the witch vs. devil front, the battle was fierce: in the end, Tyana, Aki & Maja took Team Witch to victory by a slim margin against Jun & Yanmei’s Team Devil.

Rafa took a break from his busy Colombian import-export business to show his scarred face at the party (later enhanced by some strategically-placed white powder).

Roland and yours truly provided for some much-needed furry fuzziness and important life-lessons to the kids, courtesy of Sesame Hood’s favourites: Elmo and Cookie Monster.

Towering over the festivities and occasionally bringing chills down the spine of all guests present with his lugubrious laugh and transylvanian accent: Count Rei graced us with his presence (and gets extra points for being the only one ballsy enough to ride Japanese transports as is).

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Continued from Pt. 1

Pilgrim's path After our bus dropped us at Tokushima station in the evening we spent the night at a henro-oriented guesthouse in Naruto (located very close to temple #1). The pouring rain and remote location put a serious damper on our initial ambitions to go explore the local izakaya life and we had to settle for the rather mediocre chain izakaya our taxi took us to. It was a reasonably early night. Good thing too, as our host gently kicked us out at 9:30am the next day (he apparently had to be somewhere and I guess he wanted to see us off before).

Outside Hashikura temple Waiting for the once-every-couple-hours train to Awa Ikeda gave us time to purchase and eat some basic breakfast on the side of the street… Prompting a local obāchan to come running to us, urgently asking for Sona’s help with her needles; twenty thread-through-needle-eye and much effusive thanks later, we were on our way toward the centre of Shikoku by train.

It took less than half-an-hour for the landscape to change from suburban Tokushima-shi concrete, into farm fields and small villages, into just mountains and the odd farm. By the time we arrived in Miyoshi-shi, the stations were little more than platforms in the middle of nowhere.

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Last weekend, Sona, Roland and yours truly decided to go do some exploring of that beautiful country we all live in. After some deliberations, we set our sights on Tokushima-ken in Shikoku, more specifically: Iya valley.

Awa Ikeda station In addition to being a reasonably short and affordable bus ride away (2h30 from Kyoto to Tokushima city, another 2h to Iya proper), the region has a reputation as one of the last somewhat-preserved rural areas of Japan: lush nature aplenty, stunning mountain scenery and slightly less of the concrete horrors that litter every last corner of the Japanese countryside. The latter in particular was a big selling point, albeit taken with the healthy skepticism of someone who has seen his share of “scenic” Japanese countryside towns and “world-famous Unesco sites” consisting of a couple painfully preserved traditional houses surrounded by entire towns of nondescript gray buildings in all their aging 70s glory, along beaches littered with endless lines of tetrapods…

Miyoshi-shi As it turns out, Iya valley might indeed offer some of the last shreds of unblemished rural landscape found in Japan (outside of 2-day hikes to remote mountainous parts of Gunma-ken or the like). In addition to largely unscathed landscapes, the constant mist and low-hanging clouds locked in by mountains on all sides contributed to give the whole area a distinct Lost Valley feel.

Don’t get me wrong: local government is clearly hard at work finding new and inventive ways to lay down concrete anywhere they can and utilitarian, cheap & ugly is the only zoning code local construction abides by. But on the scale of concrete addiction: if your average Japanese town is the worn-out crack whore who will blow you behind the city hall for a new four-lane expressway construction project, Iya would be the fresh-faced socialite who fashionably dabbles in cocaine but still has most of her youthful looks still on1In that overwrought simile, Tokyo is probably Keith Richards: pumped up full of chemicals, and oddly endearing for the sheer excess of it all..

In short: it was awesome and a much needed break from suburban city life.

It has been a while since I posted any real travel notes (instead of just plopping a bunch of pictures), so I thought I could make an effort this time. Behold:

The Wondrous Adventures of Sona, Roland & Dave in Beautiful Iya Valley!

It all started on Friday night, when our bus dropped us at Tokushima station.

to be continued…

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On the 17th of October 1961, 50 years ago to the day, France-residing Algerians gathered in Paris for a non-violent demonstration in support of Algeria’s independence.

Between 20,000 and 30,000 men, women and children, dressed in their best Sunday clothes, many coming from the outer suburban slums where France crammed its growth-fueling immigrant workforce in the 60s, were marching peacefully toward the centre of the city, when municipal police forces charged into crowds, raiding isolated groups, firing on people and making good use of their wooden clubs, murdering dozens of unarmed Algerians: shot, beaten to death or thrown into the Seine river… Weeks later, swollen corpses of Algerian protesters were still being fished out of the river or found hung to trees in nearby forests.

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Around age 6, I made my first steps with a computer: drawing houses in MacPaint and typing elaborately formatted 30-line novellas in MacWrite. A couple years later, building my first programs using HyperCard (at the time I thought of it as “playing some sort of virtual lego game” rather than “writing object-oriented programs”).

Although I long ago decided that I did not want to make a career out of merely writing computer code, the skills I seamlessly acquired back then have since opened countless doors and helped me etch a living at times where options were scarce.

I would have most likely picked these skills anyway, had my dad not brought back a brand new Mac 512k to his practice, one day in 1986… But learning them the way I did unquestionably shaped my entire vision of the modern world: it taught me that technology does not have to look complicated to do complex things, that building things can be exciting and fun…

Apple Inc. is just a company, staffed with many great people at the moment, but still just a company: with no personality or sense of human emotions.

Steve Jobs, on the other hand, like him or not, shaped the world we live in. His ambition, his drive and the people he chose to carry his vision out, will keep resonating in the technologies your life is built around, for many more decades to come.

RIP.

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I really thought the highlight of the night was when that live ska band took the stage at 4am and proceeded to top the previous few hours of bouncy old-school dj beats…

Turned out something even more brilliant happened, an hour later, when the employee carrying the till from the door to the back of the club, dropped it, raining ¥1,000 bills and coins on half the dance floor: two dozen dancing club kids, stopping all at once, forming a circle, reaching for makeshift smartphone flashlights and helping to put every last piece of money into the box… rushing after the guy to bring him the last few coins found after he’d left.

Japan is awesome.