Beginning with a carnie pic....

I've been home from Japan for about six months now, and I guess it feels like I never went at all but somehow learned Japanese in my sleep. I haven't had a chance to share much with anybody other than the family, so I'm going make this first posting a small scene from my experiences away from you all, and we'll see who reads it. Here's a shot from the superbly eerie abandoned carnival on the western coast of Japan, near Kanazawa.

Breaking into private property, abandoned or not, isn't exactly white-handbook-approved, but the haunted aura of still-soggy towels hiding under dim locker room benches, Japanese switch grass growing up into the rusting remains of the Tilt-O-Whirl, and being able to push each other on the rides with cobwebs in our hair justified any rule-bending.

Elders Moriyama and Petermama had already taken a few runthroughs of the Haunted Mansion, so they led us on a tour with a gimped-out flashlight. Black fabric hung down in long rips, so we'd have to pull them aside like curtains only to come face-to-face with a dirty plastic mad scientist face or the like. The very worst was the last room--a dead woman mummy lying contorted on this long yellow mattress.....her face was the typical scary ghost lady face, with wispy white hairs reminiscent of Indy's Last Crusade scene when the jerk Nazi drank from not-the-carpenter's cup. But since it was midday, and the building partly torn down as it was, the mattress lay mostly in the shadows except for a long angle of dusty light peeking in across her fake skeleton arm. It was gross, is all...it would have been laughably scary in black lights with cheap Halloween soundtracks, but the thing was a thousand times scarier in the noon daylight, with nobody but seven or eight missionaries shuffling their feet around, not talking.

Anyway--the Kaga Onsen. Highly recommended for those planning to visit Western Honshu and thereabouts. Check out the empty swimming pool in the back, too. You'll walk through the empty arcade, sidestepping the joysticks littering the ground, and through the locker rooms and out into one of those really nice swimming areas with the pools shaped like shamrocks or money signs or whatever, with big islands jutting up out of them and connecting bridges. You'll probably still be able to see where we dumped buckets of abandoned golf balls to watch them bounce down the recline and into the murky tadpole-infested puddles at the deep end.

I'll add info about my life-of-now later...it wore me out to walk through that carnival a second time. I'll see what I can do to post some less irresponsible and わんぱくmission pics, too, just so you all don't get the wrong idea..........