Though it has spent a year tumbling around in my head, everything in this post is entirely true.

I’ve got to write a blog post about this weekend I thought, watching Yuu Koyama steal fried chicken off his father’s plate.

It was breakfast on Sunday morning.  Yuu Koyama was disrupting the cold, silent and nearly empty hall with casual English cursing that his father only vaguely recognized.  He was taunting his father by eating his food and moving his plates away from him.  It was December 21st, 2014.

Last year I had a long weekend for the Emperor’s birthday, or Tennōtanjōbi – a Japanese national holiday. Snowboarding was in the air, and who could I go with but Mr. Yuu Koyama?  In a previous post I mentioned Koyama going on two ski trips during the winter, and how I couldn’t attend those events.  In fact, he invited me on a third trip to Hakuba, Nagano, in the famous “Japanese Alps,” home of some of the best skiing and snowboarding slopes in the world. With the holiday weekend, I was finally able to attend.  Koyama, as I normally address him, will be “Yuu” in this post, to distinguish him from his indistinguishable character of a father.

Nomenclature is the least of this story’s concerns.  Why, you rightfully ask, am I presenting it one year late?

This trip was a long, dynamic adventure.  Shouldn’t it be written moment-by-moment the way my birthday post was?  Or my Korea trip?  And shouldn’t it have come out before both of those?

The answer to all these questions is that I’ve been plagued by writer’s block.

Unfortunately I have to face one undeniable truth about my trip into the mountains, that I honestly don’t remember it all that clearly.  For I was under assault.

My head was devastated on two fronts in Nagano – outside and in.  It was pounded by the ferocity of my snowboarding incompetence and plagued internally by the sake I imbibed each night.  Here we see why invasion of the Japanese mainland was such a terrifying prospect to Harry Truman in 1945.  I was deeper than I had ever been in Japan and the country was responding hard.

As a writer I have felt it my mission to share my most interesting moments – an eternally losing battle with time and motivation.  It was during dinner on one of the two nights at the lodge that on top of realizing how necessary it was to record the events of this weekend, I was struck with how imminent that requirement was, with my brain reeling from assaults in every direction.

Without fully functional short-to-long term memory transition, my only remaining weapon was the iPhone Notes application.  On a couple of bathroom breaks from dinner and drinks I recorded as much as I could about what was happening.

Here’s the list I produced:

Hakuba/Nagano:

7 & 5/8

Suzumibachi

First night highlights:

He kept pouring me sake. Custom forbade me from denying it.

He said I was the first American he ever drank with.

He trains blind people

Swore he’d convert me to skiing.

That guy. Two nights

Second night highlights:

Burn the ego

Okinawa song

Preamble

I figured out he picks up the bottle and it’s like a progress confirmation

More physical complements

First time drinking with a foreigner

Yuu was bored. I was not.

Asked me about my race

Communists

Yuus dad had communist face as in asian glow

Asked me about Japan and said I’d apply for citizenship. “you can take the American out of America, ..”

Spilled custard

He teaches blind people to ski

Tried to advertise Buddhism

Yuu said “George Bush Adolf Hitler is same.” “Come on” I said. “George Bush is stupid, but Adolf Hitler” “yes is smart” Yuu said

He was pouring sake from one bottle into another. Only to empty both in the end.

They were laughing about Yuu and his dad wrestling each other into the river

If I lifted my glass past a certain angle the dude would grab the bottle to pour me more

He gave me food and I panicked about whether I have to eat it. Eventually I ate all of it

“Fuck!” With the fingers

Rager!

Natl anthem

–

I don’t quite know what all of this means.  Quite frankly I’m sick of trying to weave a tale out of this wacky cloth.  So here is a bullet-by-bullet breakdown of that iPhone note, with as much of an explanation as I can give about its place in this bizarre weekend in Nagano.

Hakuba/Nagano

Obviously the title of the note refers to where we went.  This is the only note added retroactively.  I chose to add Hakuba because it turns out Nagano is a huge region, and for the local audience of my blog, I felt the specificity would be appreciated.

In general I have good recollection of driving there and what happened during the days.  Indeed, this trip was incredibly memorable and unremembered at the same time.

The snowflakes were barely starting to appear on a cold Saturday night when I received a text message from Yuu, telling me to come outside.  He’d come to pick me up with a driver I didn’t anticipate.  It was then, before taking off on a long journey to the mountains, that I met Yuu’s father, Mr. Takahiro Koyama.  Mr. Koyama is an engineer and lives in the Koyama family home in the historic city of Nara.  He didn’t speak English, and initially, he was kind and quiet, like most Japanese people.

We departed that night from Kyoto, driving through Japanese wilderness toward Nagano, while Yuu mocked his father’s baldness by periodically removing Mr. Koyama’s hat and rubbing his head, calling him a “skinhead.”  In between bouts of sleep, interrupted by the Koyamas arguing over directions, I noticed the terrain outside the car slowly disappearing under a cover of snow.

At last, in the middle of the night, we arrived at the lodge.  Almost as soon as we parked, there emerged, not a group of young people as Yuu had led me to believe, but a lone old man to greet us.

He was a jolly, white-haired man in his 70s, in perfect physical shape, mysteriously wide awake at three in the morning.  Old as his gray hair and hunched stature implied, he had the appearance of having aged gracefully.  He had a warm, youthful smile.  He didn’t have a single wrinkle, as if he lived in a tub of vaseline.  His fraternal bond with Mr. Koyama suggested they had gotten drunk together many times.  And he had a vague aura of being in complete control of his surroundings, like a superhero.  This man was instantly intriguing.

The smile broadening into a grin when he saw me, he spoke briefly to both Koyamas, and showed us to our room.

“He like you” Yuu said to me.  I hadn’t said a word beyond “good evening.”

Watching the Koyamas put together our room was confusing, yet entertaining.  They kept moving the futon mattresses and bags around, and didn’t seem to agree on anything.  Except how to sit.

We eventually went to sleep, ready for skiing (Mr. Koyama) and snowboarding (Yuu and me) the next day.

7 & 5/8

Writing this bullet may have initially been on-the-spot to show Koyama what I couldn’t say in Japanese.

It also may be a subtle reference to a scene from The Nap, an episode of Seinfeld when Jerry calls in a bomb threat to Yankee Stadium and is oddly urged on by Yankees team owner George Steinbrenner, on the other end of the line, into making terrorist demands.  It happens to be both Jerry Seinfeld’s and my head size, and George Costanza angrily shouting it out is the only reason I consistently remember that.

This had to do with my helmet.

Suiting up to go on the mountain after breakfast was a tad degrading. Yuu and his father laughed at me for requesting a helmet, as did the mysterious old man from the night before, who had reemerged during fitting as if he never needed to sleep.  Remembering the concussion I received the last time I tumbled down a mountain without a helmet, I braved the laughter and knew I had to accept one.

“What size?” Yuu said.

“Seven and five eighths,” I said, forgetting what language he spoke.

“What?” he stared in confusion.  “You crazy,” he added, to express his confusion.  He did not mean that in a cool-slang way.

I sputtered out Japanese numbers, but I didn’t know fractions.  “7, 5, 8” I said in Japanese.  They all stared at me.  This may have been when I typed it into my phone and showed him, but if that happened, it didn’t help.

“Large?” Yuu offered.  Things were simpler up here.

They had one match, and it felt a bit hard inside.

“This is like a rock!” I complained to Koyama.  “You pussy,” he responded, omitting his “be” verbs and articles as usual, still not intentionally dismissing grammar for casual effect.

Assuming as I always do that Japanese engineers know what they are doing, I put on the Flintstones cap and we hit the slopes.

In the past few years I’ve been trying to learn how to snowboard.  Anyone who has tried snowboarding before knows it’s a painful learning process.  There are many difficult hurdles.  Never being formally trained, I’d been taught by crashes and falls.  Pain is a brutal instructor, and only of what not to do.

I knew this trip would be no different.

Suzumibachi

This is a misspelling of what Japanese people call the Japanese Giant Hornet, which I first encountered in the mountains outside Kyoto. I have no idea why it was in my iPhone notes for this weekend.  Presumably I asked for this translation, and I was introduced to a conspicuous lack of fear for these deadly creatures by the Neanderthalian Koyamas.  Six months later, this past June, waiting for a bus near distant Mt. Daisen, Yuu scoffed as a huge Japanese Giant Hornet flew around a hotel lobby.  “Suzumebachi!” I sputtered.  “No problem” he said, snoozing in the sunlight.  Possibly at that moment, I opened iPhone notes and, not caring that I was disturbing the six month hibernation of the note that inspired this blog post, hurriedly jotted down the source of my panic to show a nonplussed Yuu.

These things kill 50 Japanese people annually, even though most Japanese people live in cities and work 300+ days a year.

And yet, I still don’t know for sure why it was in my notes.

–

12 hours later…

First night highlights:

I list this here, even though it’s not a bullet point, purely to point out that I wrote it in a rush while in the bathroom during dinner, realizing my short term memory was packed with gold yet rigged with a time bomb.

By “night,” I refer to dinner in the mess hall.  The lodge had a capacity of maybe 200 people, but besides us there were only one or two other small groups at the whole facility.  In the large, chilly hall, we often dined alone, with hearty servings of Japanese soul food.

He kept pouring me sake. Custom forbade me from denying it.

Yup.

Shortly after sitting down to dinner on the first night, with so much food in front of us, we were joined by the mysterious old man coming into the room.  Bestowing his warm smile upon me as he sat down, he began chatting casually with Mr. Koyama, while Yuu and I ate silently.  After a couple minutes, the man reached into his coat and conjured a large bottle of sake out of nowhere.  In Japan, it’s known as ‘shochu’ or rice wine, while the word ‘sake’ refers to all alcohol.

Ignoring that we already had beers, the man poured some shochu into our remaining empty cups, speaking his mind as he did.

A lazy translator, Yuu revealed more about this man at a trickle.  After fifteen minutes or so I realized this old man ran the place.  And, his English rapidly improving, Yuu explained that this man was once the fifth-ranked skier in Japan, or so he placed in a tournament.

He took a major interest in me, and this meant that he noticed whenever my cup wasn’t full.  So despite the pounding my head had taken on the rough slopes, memories of which were a bit out of focus, I was forced to treat it with sake.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have sake?” I said to Koyama, hoping he’d explain the devastation he had witnessed earlier.

“This sake expensive,” Koyama said.  “He give you some.  Japanese, drinking is polite!” he explained.  “Maybe drink little,” he added.  A little of some of the finest shochu in Japan?

That’s harder than snowboarding.  Yes, that part is coming.

He said I was the first American he ever drank with.

The old man spoke not a single English word to me.  And despite having lived in Japan for nine months by this point, I barely spoke any Japanese.  He spoke to the Koyamas and young Yuu would give me a synopsis in the best English he could put together.  And when Yuu translated this fact to me, I had to call malarkey.

This man looked almost 80. Maybe he never drank with the US troops who occupied Japan in his youth.  But for the next 50 years, he rose through the skiing tiers, ranking 5^th in Japan, witnessing the Winter Olympics in that very region in 1998, perhaps even competing in earlier Olympic games, which will take me years of Japanese practice to figure out how to ever actually confirm, and finally hosting an inn in a popular skiing resort in an internationally renowned skiing destination.

And an English teacher hanging out with your friend’s son, with virtually no Japanese skills, just nine months into the country, born after you had already passed the retirement age, is the first American you ever shared a drink with?

In Japan there is almost no concept of drinking too much.  I couldn’t let him down – or my country.

He trains blind people:

Apparently he trains blind people to ski.  Because I wrote that.  Reading this in my notes triggered this memory.  That was kind of the intended function.

This profoundly impressed me.  You can’t guide someone on skis like you could in a pool.  How can you have the confidence to tell someone to go down a mountain on skis if they can’t see where they are going?  How did he come up with that idea?  Who on Earth would willingly make a job out of such a huge and unnecessary responsibility?

These and more questions, which Yuu could not understand, remained untranslated and unanswered.

Swore he’d convert me to skiing.

It was in the wake of this comment by the old man that the events of that day returned in clear picture.

Getting suited up was a bit slow.  After a couple minutes of laughing at me for requesting a helmet, then 30 minutes of laughing at me for putting plastic bags around my socks, Yuu had to laugh just a little more when I wanted to test out the bunny slope first.  But shortly after bullying me into the first real slope, he understood why.

I am still terrible at snowboarding.  And up until this day I still had little sense of what I was actually doing on the snowboard.

After tumbling down the hard, icy mountain several times, with snow invading the inner recesses of my clothes, Yuu, looping past, around, and through my tracks, took pity on me.  He skidded to a stop 12 feet down the slope from my newest crash site.

“Start, finger!” he said.  Assuming he was making a dirty joke, I looked up.  In fact, his arm was elevated, with his index finger held out level with his eyes.

Yuu first picked up English while working as a snowboarding instructor with a British friend.  He had spent nearly a year honing that skill with me, and was now using those skills to teach snowboarding once again.

“Follow, finger!” he said, weaving slowly along the steep slope, following his finger on his outstretched arm.  “Back straight!”

“Butt down!” he had me repeat, as I faced down the mountain.  And when he doubled back: “Penis out!”

At a snailike pace, I found his advice, and my new posture, suddenly gave me balance on the mountain.

Snowboarding: me. Speaking: Koyama.

By the end of the day, I had gone down several miles of mountain, following my finger as I weaved back and forth, focusing on overcoming my fear of crashing painfully to properly position my hips.  I also learned how terribly ineffective and unbalancing it was to wrap plastic bags outside my socks while snowboarding.

In spite of my progress, the mountain still beat my body like loose bowling balls on a small spaceship.  I don’t quite remember how or when, but the mountain landed a good sucker punch right to the face.  I was pretty messed up, and even the soothing hot spring could not reverse the damage.

 

To think I would give up on all that progress and switch to skiing was just ignorant.  And yet this man looked right into this face and assured me he could do it.

That guy. Two nights:

Japanese people are quite reserved in general, and have a way of revealing themselves to you very slowly.  I knew after the first dinner, this experience would only get profoundly more interesting for the second one, if I could survive the encounter.

Second night highlights:

Day two in the snow was triumphant.

Overnight, the complex was shook by the largest earthquake I have yet felt in Japan.  But perhaps the Earth was grumbling under the massive helpings of snow coming down upon it.  The snow that had started to fall an hour after we began snowboarding on day one did not stop until Monday morning.  By then, day two of three in the Japanese Alps, the mountains were covered in plush white powder.  It was an obstacle for the expert Yuu, but for me it was a sight for sore eyes, legs, back, and face.  It was a break for my many falls.  It was salvation.  It was opportunity.

I rose to the challenge, following Yuu’s instructions and in turn my finger, down bigger and bigger mountains.  I took even the largest, towering slope, looping back and forth, stumbling and tumbling of course, but always landing safely in the white powdery ocean of snow.  On this day, a pristine white December 22^nd, I learned how to snowboard.

Here’s Yuu:

And the dinner proved quite as triumphant.

Burn the ego:

A dear friend introduced me to this concept before I left for Japan.  The general meaning is to let go – to pass that sense of a self-identity that might hold you back from something new.  As a mentality it’s generally healthy and advisable, but it became quite necessary during the forthcoming evening, especially as the old man began to engage me more directly with his thoughts and opinions.

Here a surprising truth was clarified.  Yuu, his father, and this man, are old members of the Japanese Communist party.  I guess I’ve been palling around with a communist.  Sorry, Sarah Palin.

As I was once again under the shochu-rules of the old skiing instructor, there is no flow of the conversation on record.  Some information I learned here or elsewhere:

-The men are or were communists.

-They strongly oppose militarism, especially the American military presence on the Japanese island of Okinawa.

-They do not identify with the current Chinese Communist party (“they are shit communists” Yuu says) or the North Koreans, who don’t even consider themselves communist anymore.

-The Japanese far-left similarly entwines pacifism and communist ideals on a generic political spectrum.

I have never been able to figure out Yuu’s opinion of Stalin or Kim Il-Sung, the communist former dictators of the Soviet Union and North Korea, based on his inability to stop joking about serious topics.  That’s also why he’s my best friend.

I was thankful the language barriers were preventing an intense political debate.  But I was wrong to think that would spare me from any challenges.

Okinawa song:

“He want to sing Okinawa Communist song,” Yuu said, after the old man had spoken his thoughts yet again.

“O…Ok?” I answered.

The man sang a catchy tune, staring at me the whole time.  I only recognized the word “Okinawa” a few times. But I knew what the song was, because Yuu had drunkenly bellowed it at karaoke bars in the past.

At the end I applauded like a good American.  Then that part of me was severely challenged, as the men spoke Japanese amongst each other.

“He want you sing Okinawa Communist song,” Yuu said.

“Really?”

I was mortified.  Sing a Communist song?!  Me?  I descend from American veterans and I grew up in a Republican family.  What would my father say about this?  What if I ever run for political office?  How could I escape this?

Burn the ego coursed through my head.

As the old man started singing slowly, I felt my mouth move and my vocal chords start to vibrate.  And soon, drunk and loud, we were singing with a booming chorus, demanding that the barbaric American soldiers leave glorious communist Okinawa.

Hopefully, no one will ever know about this I thought.

Preamble:

I had just sang a song that would, on camera, disqualify me from the court of public opinion in my home country.  Rather than wait until I published this blog post to add a cheesy “forgive me, George Washington,” I decided, as my ego, so bad at hibernation, surged back into coherence, to share his and my culture right back.

“Let’s sing The Preamble!” I declared.

Mr. Koyama and the old man looked at Yuu.

“What you do?” asked Yuu.

“This is a song of my country,” I said. It was Schoolhouse Rock time.

I do not remember their reaction, so I will assume it was a thirty minute standing ovation.

I figured out he picks up the bottle and it’s like a progress confirmation:

This may have been the only note I wrote while still at the table, as rude as that is and as little as think of using a cellphone during in-person conversations.  But in a moment, I watched the old man lift the sake bottle, saw his eyes start scanning rapidly, and observed as both Koyamas lifted their sake cups to make sure they were full.

In Japan, it is rude to pour your own drink.  They have developed this instinctual progress check as a social custom to fill the void where self-service presides in Western culture.

More physical complements

Of course, Japanese kindness is unmatched worldwide.  It is impossible for any human to truly be as nice as a Japanese person appears to be.

This old man put on a shower of complements, calling me handsome and muscular.  Yuu got sick of translating the complements, eventually just saying, “I think he is want to do fuck.”

First time drinking with a foreigner

I wrote this twice?

Yuu was bored. I was not.

Poor Yuu.  Merely 20 minutes into this second dinner, he seemed to largely shut down.  His face was sallow, his eating slowed, and he even mentioned his boredom, in English so only I could understand.  He had the gloomy, bitter look of a boy who had grown up at an altar he was now disillusioned with.  And I’m not talking about communism.

Shortly after I noticed this, the ski instructor burst into yet another rant about my physical appearance.

Asked me about my race:

In continuing his trend of obsessing over my appearance, the ski instructor was very forward about asking me my race.

Some people would find this question – or at least the callous way it was asked, as offensive.  In particular, some of the social justice warriors who populate the JET teaching program in Japan, would slam this question as a ‘microaggression,’ some attempt by the old man to marginalize me.  These safe-space seekers aren’t being divisive, they just don’t understand this is part of the learning process for someone like the old man, who had never drank with an American before.  And his authenticity is what I value here, because it helps me learn more candidly about the culture.

Moments like this are enlightening for many Americans abroad, as they eventually come to realize that they come from possibly the least racist country on Earth.

That’s just my two cents on dealing with old “racists.”

Communists:

I wrote this to remind myself that the men were communists, as if I would forget this profound, setting-determinant detail when I later read these notes.  Perhaps this illuminates how under the influence of alcohol, perceived barriers, no matter how strong, can simply melt away.  Burn the ego.

Yuus dad had communist face as in asian glow:

Takahiro Koyama, maybe 30 minutes into dinner on night number two, was, on top of being a communist, literally the reddest man I had ever seen.  In my stupor, I may have pointed this out this parallel.

Asked me about Japan and said I’d apply for citizenship. “you can take the American out of America, ..”

At some point the old man asked, through a now reluctant, impatient translator, how, if, and when I planned on applying for Japanese citizenship.  I’m not sure who “said I’d apply for citizenship.”  If I did, I was lying.

Some Americans actually do stay in Japan.  But being an expat has never been my plan, and at this point, only nine months into my residency in the country, I couldn’t even read a single Japanese script (there are two, plus Chinese characters).

“You can take the American out of America,” I responded to the old man,  “but you can’t take the America out of the American!”

Yuu didn’t translate.  “You stupid,” he said, still omitting his “be” verb.

Spilled custard

I guess I spilled custard?  This could have been a nice sub-story, but my brain cells were preoccupied.

He teaches blind people to ski

Yes, I wrote that already.

Tried to advertise Buddhism

He was asking me about everything, and religion was no exception.  As I have deferred before in lieu of language fluency, I just said I was Catholic.  “Kurishitan” is the translation.

The man then began trying to convert me to Buddhism.  I don’t remember how.  But it may have been more aggressive than Buddhism usually calls for.

Yuu said “George Bush Adolf Hitler is same.” “Come on” I said. “George Bush is stupid, but Adolf Hitler” “yes is smart” Yuu said

Sometimes what went down felt profound enough that I had to go to the bathroom and record it fully, immediately.  That happened after a political discussion had finally come up. 

I’m not touching this one.

He was pouring sake from one bottle into another. Only to empty both in the end.

This was something I noticed the old ski instructor doing after a while.  Whenever he pulled a new bottle of sake out of nowhere, he’d put it on the other side of the dinner spread, even though there were only four of us.  He’d go back and forth between the bottles, pouring either one into our cups, until they were both below half-filled.  Then he’d painstakingly pour one into the other.  But eventually that one would empty as well.

I was really befuddled at how he kept doing this.  But maybe I never noticed the new sake bottles emerging from his magical coat, thus assuming we only had two bottles when in fact…  This guy was a magician.

They were laughing about Yuu and his dad wrestling each other into the river:

Here is a crime I am committing, by only giving this many details of what is probably one of the funniest events I could ever write about.  I don’t know anything about whatever happened here.  I have no idea how I even know this amount of detail at all.  These guys are like real life Costanzas.

The only thing I remember is Yuu’s sour face as his father and the ski instructor roared over recounting this story, with me helplessly wondering of what glory I was left out.  Perhaps Yuu begrudgingly translated only this many details.

There could be so many circumstances for this event to have happened.  Maybe Yuu ruined the family dinner and his father couldn’t take it anymore.  Maybe he threw a bunch of newspapers into a river because he was sick of his mail route, and his father wanted to throw him in after them.  Maybe they have their own version of Festivus that always ends in a big wrestling match.

I hope one day to extract from Yuu the full story, and publish it here.

If I lifted my glass past a certain angle the dude would grab the bottle to pour me more:

After an hour of soaking in the sake, and two days of being pounded by the mysteriously hard interior of my helmet, I began to listen to the voice of reason in my head telling me to drink no more.  Although I wasn’t feeling any pain, I assumed the damage was being done.

As it turned out, Japanese politeness was my worst enemy.  If my glass rose above any of the surrounding bowls, the sake bottle swooped in overhead like a rescuing apache helicopter to provide assistance.  The old ski instructor never let my glass get below half-full.  He’s an optimist indeed.  And my brain cells suffered the letdown.

He gave me food and I panicked about whether I have to eat it. Eventually I ate all of it

Though this refers only to the second night’s drunken dinner with the old man, it’s a perfect metaphor for the weekend as a whole. I took every opportunity that came and suffered the consequences for it later.

On day three we stumbled out onto the slopes once again.  There was no fresh powder and the mountains were once again starting to hurt.  After lunch I gave it one more crash, and called it a weekend, retreating back to the cafe to drink hot coffee and watch the adorable Chinese kitchen staff worker cleaning plates.  But soon I was distracted by a new revelation.

When Yuu, after chipping his snowboard on a chunk of ice, finally returned to join me, he found me staring confusedly at my helmet.  Wrapping the interior with my knuckles, I spoke, “it’s useless!”

Finally, we spotted a dull soft velcro patch.  I wasn’t exaggerating.   Obviously, the entire helmet cushion had been removed before I received it – perhaps by the old ski instructor to fit my massive foreign head.  In fact, the helmet was more than useless; it probably did more harm than good.

The tale of the weekend was not the helmet providing assistant protection along with my struggling resistance to the sake, it was now the helmet helping the sake exacerbate the damage done by the mountain.  It was a story of destruction, not protection.  I was the weekend’s victim.

The Koyamas thought it was hilarious.

“You are pussy,” said Yuu.

“Fuck!” With the fingers

Earlier that day, as we were suiting up for our last bout on the mountain, Yuu and his father initiated an intense discussion.  It was impossible for me to understand what they were talking about.  I couldn’t even tell if it was serious or not, so I did what I’ve become accustomed to doing in Japan, and stood patiently waiting to be told any necessary information.  Then Yuu walked out.

Mr. Koyama turned to me, realizing the burden of explanation had fallen to him now.

“Eto… (uh…)”

His Japanese did not land.  I smiled and shrugged.

He brought his hands together, still speaking in Japanese.  I just stared at him.  Slowly his index fingers rose up out of his conjoined hands.  He stopped speaking and looked back at me.

For one moment, we just stared at each other.

“Fuck!” he said, thrusting his fingers up, before waltzing briskly out of the room.

My head was hit a lot that weekend, but I am 100% sure that was Takahiro Koyama, and not his son.

Mr. Koyama, perhaps trying to balance out his unacademic behavior, later taught me the days of the week in Japanese, pointing out how some of them have the same roots as in English.  Nichiyobi (literally “Sun Day”) Getsuyobi (literally “Moon Day”), etc.

But I’ll always remember him telling me about the kancho first.

Rager!

I don’t know what this is.  Sometimes you need a word to encompass the whole experience. Maybe this was it.  After all, I was high spirits – word had just come through that I had won the fantasy football championship amongst my hometown friends, more than paying for the entire weekend.

After our third day of snowboarding it was time to head back to Kyoto.  But before departing we took one more hot spring detour.  Having relaxed the first two nights in the small hot spring adjacent to the resort, this time the Koyamas and I traveled a little to a beautiful mountainside hot spring retreat.  It was nearly deserted.  Inside there were canopies blocking out the cold air, beyond which were stunning views of the Japanese wilderness, but within which were warm, stone encased pools of hot Japanese volcanic water.

Also inside, surprisingly, were two New Zealander men, as well as an old Japanese man, quietly enjoying the waters, the way they’re supposed to.

What could the Koyamas do but demolish the serenity of this sacred place?

Completely naked, Yuu walked around the cabin-like structure and tore open the canopy, revealing both the stunning view of the mountains, and letting in a rush of cold air.  While everyone acknowledged the beauty outside, Yuu made sure it was the last questionably beneficial thing he did at the hot spring.  Rather than entering the spring, he turned toward the snowy bank in front of it.

As a bathing experiment, Yuu jumped into the snow and rolled around in it.  Blowing off my shocked reaction, he asked me to film it on his phone, which he had nonchalantly (and probably illegally) brought into this very wet and private environment.  Looking rather like a snowman with quite literally every inch of him covered in warm snow, he then hopped into the warm pool, splashing water everywhere.  And taking back his phone, he repeated his actions again and again, sending Snapchat videos to every one of his Snapchat friends (maybe six people).

The Japanese man walked out.

“Stop that nonsense,” Mr. Koyama said calmly, in Japanese.

Shortly after I stepped back into the hot water to warm up, a cold snowball raced in and crashed near my face.  Relaxation was not happening today.  Resolving to my new experience rather quickly, within thirty seconds I was copying Yuu; tossing around in the snow and dipping back into the hot spring.

As I was warming up again, a snowball smashed into Mr. Koyama’s bald head.

Yuu was giggling, standing outside the open canopy, still completely naked in the snowy valley, still throwing snowballs into the hot spring.

“Yuu, stop!” said his father more forcefully in Japanese.  He was pelted by several more snowballs, right on his head.  Yuu was stunningly accurate.  I did not expect what happened next.

Mr. Koyama rose out of the water and stormed out of the canopy, grabbed a heap of snow, and hurled it at his son.  Yuu retreated, grabbing snowballs and throwing them in a furious rearguard.  Mr. Koyama advanced nonetheless, heaping big chunks of snow and ice at Yuu with surprising ferocity.  The men pursued each other around the snow-covered complex, completely naked, their privates dangling and catching snow from the heaps they collected.

Appearing to reconcile, they instead turned their onslaught to the hot spring, briefly raining chunks of snow upon me.   When Yuu finally lost patience with the cold and splashed back in, his father redirected assault back to Yuu, showering massive piles of fresh powder upon his son.

The New Zealanders and I looked on, for once in our time in this country, the respectful foreigners observing rambunctious Japanese.

So ended our trip, and so began our long march home.

Oh, I see there was one more note.

Natl anthem

You didn’t think I’d respond to the communist anti-American anthem with The Preamble and leave it at that, did you?

After the tunes of that cursed siren withered away and collapsed under the pressure of their own decadence, the drums of freedom beat to life. With fire in his eyes, the burning torch of liberty itself, Yuu turned toward me, and released from within his American heart that holy gospel of all freedom loving peoples from sea to shining planet!

See you this winter, Nagano!

Thank you for reading.  Follow the adventures live: @gregnasif