The Holy Pilgrimage

What better way to recover from a weekend of festival-induced partying than a national holiday? This month's arbitrary holiday comes to us courtesy of all those people who obliviously walk in front of your car while you're driving in Japan. That's right, it's respect for the elderly day! Matt and Anna had decided that this would be a good day to see the natural splendor of Lake Towada and I decided that Anna has a car and I don't so I invited myself along for the ride.

The main attraction at the Lake is a hiking path that illuminates the area's many scenic vistas; i.e. a bunch of waterfalls and one really large tree. Before we set out, Matt diligently studied the three dimensional map of the trail.

We then did what all good Japanese tourists do, which is to say that we piled into the car and drove from attraction to attraction. That's right no "survival hiking" for us.




You may not have noticed but an enlarged version of the image above can be accessed by clicking on it. I've been receiving numerous requests from a friend of mine who rocks the ludicrously high-resolutions to allow access to hi-rez versions of the photos on this site. Well, since this would entail shrinking the original image (I take these shots at pretty high resolutions) and then uploading it using blogger's rather tedious system (I use batch edit mode in Photoshop for all the normal images on the site), I can't very well do this for every image I post. So I have reached a compromise: I will make hi-res versions available for those photos that I think might benefit from being viewed at a larger size.

After all of the exhausting sight-seeing and car-sitting, we headed into Lake Towada's touristy area for lunch. One thing that Japan seems devoid of is micro-breweries (and good beer in general). When buying beer in Japan, you usually have your choice of about 4-5 national brands, all of which taste about equivalently bland. I think one major reason is that they don't usually bottle beer here, almost all beer comes in cans of various sizes. This, of course, leads to that distinctive "skunky" metallic taste. It's always best out of the tap, kids. Well anyway, in Towada I happened upon "Oirase Beer," which is apparently locally brewed. They apparently brew everything ranging from a pilsner to a stout but I settled on the weizen, due to my undying love for a crisp hefe weizen on a hot day. So how did Oirase measure up? Well, it basically tasted like a 50/50 mix of hefe weizen watered-down with regular bad Japanese beer. Sadly, that's a whole 50% better than most of the stuff I've had here so far.

After that, we headed down to the lake where we stood entranced by what we saw before us: an army of swan pedal-boats. Despite the harsh warnings from the old sea hands at the rental place (it was really windy and the lake was surprisingly choppy) we decided to rent a boat and head out on the lake.

I wanted to get a dragon boat instead but the rental guys said that it was too windy for those and they wouldn't let us rent one.


Once we actually got out on the lake it became clear that it really was choppy. Steering was difficult and our poor swan nearly capsized dozens of times. It was terrific fun.

For a while it looked like we were on a collision course with this tourist ferry (click to enlarge).

Here I am after surviving our all too brief journey on swanboat #27. My mouth is hanging open in approval and excitement.

After our day in Lake Towada, it seemed like nothing could top our level of excitement. Nothing except for Aomori's most hilarious sightseeing destination: the grave of none other than Jesus Christ. Since this site has been covered in exhausting detail by any number of Aomori bloggers, I won't bore you with the full version of the story. Suffice to say, some Japanese people really do believe that Jesus Christ actually lived and died in Aomori while his Japanese brother (and stunt double, apparently) died on the cross. They even cite a few blue-eyed people in the area as actual descendants of Christ.

Here we have the sign that marks the site (click to enlarge) that tells us the real story of Jesus Christ, as dictated by the son of God himself. My favorite part is clearly "Isukiri casually took Christ's place and ended his life on the cross". I guess it 'aint no thang when your bro is the Lord and Savior, huh?

They even have this plaque next to the grave that was sent as a sign of goodwill from Jerusalem. Now I'm no expert in Hebrew, but my guess is that this plaque probably says "Please stop making fun of Jesus".

Here I am, paying my respects to the Japanese JC.

And what trip to a comically sacrilegious tourist trap would be complete without the whole family posing as the holy family (in Japanese clothes, of course)? After this trip, I think it's probably true that there is a place in hell for me and my friends.