January
17, 2005 - Adventures in Fukiya (Day 7)
hard rock miners
it pays to be short
Demon miners out to get Laura
Walking
Private courtyard at the Hirokane Residence
Roof detail
Kettle
Little tents in a garden
Sign for the "mushroom" shrine
Laura - looking timid at the gates to the "mushroom" shrine
The "mushroom" shrine
The next morning with a “trusty” map, the only two people in town beyond an employee who moved from tourist stop to tourist stop for us, we set off to see the sights. After visiting the museum and pottery factory, we meandered down the road to a Meiji era copper cave (the Meiji era ended a little less than 100 years ago). We were handed yellow helmets and I should have known to back-out at that point. Fortunately, at 5’4,” I was made for Japan, Tim (and Diana) were not. The cave further illustrated this fact.
Tim:
The bit about the employee moving from stop to stop is simply not true. Each place had a different person… At least I think each place had a different person.
Laura:
As we worked our way into the bowels of Gollum territory it was difficult not to become troubled by the oddly bluish-florescent substance flowing on the cave floor to our right, the eerily warm and fragrant RADON air engulfing us, or the effects an ill timed earthquake might have on a hundred year old mining cave. My feelings about this portion of our venture escalated when we came upon moving mannequins with tools. Although I don’t watch horror movies, I didn’t escape seeing Psycho. There we were, deep in the heart of a mining cave with no one except a balding, translucent mannequin swinging a rock pick back and forth through the air accompanied by of the inconsistent whirring of its motor.
Tim:
When she caught sight of the first mannequin Laura came unglued. She started moan incoherently, “ooohheeeeooooo.” Her body hunched up and she began to sway in an outward manifestation of the fight or flight battle that was raging in her head.
Laura:
After completing a life’s worth of repentance, we came upon an opening. It wasn’t exactly in the same place we had entered and we were faced with a choice; we could walk back down the hill to the entrance and leave this place for good –or- we could go back from whence we came, into the dark hole and through the murk and horror.
Somehow, like the many other moments I’ve experienced since my parent’s conception of “the accident” (a.k.a. Timmy), I found myself on the receiving end of a skillful sales pitch. The same sort of sales pitch that had left me standing atop an old refrigerator that was teetering upon a dilapidated deck, clinging to a questionable hunk of rope dangling from an even more questionable branch, poised at the brink of the single largest rope-swing-to-lake-plunge conceived of by man…
Tim:
That rope swing was AWESOME!
Laura:
Or the pitch that landed me a *space* on the floor of the backseat of his ratty Toyota Tercel during a twenty four hour push to Joshua Tree in Southern California.
Tim:
We drove for 24 hours straight to escape the gloom of a Seattle winter only to arrive at Joshua Tree in the midst of a raging blizzard. It probably only snows in J-Tree once a century – rotten luck. How about the time we circumnavigated one of the Broken Islands in a building swell?
Laura:
Needless to say, we reentered the cave.
Tim:
There was still one passage that we had yet to explore.
Tim:
After the cave we visited the Hirokane Residence, the 1810 home of a wealthy landlord.
Laura:
A few miles down the road from the Hirokane Residence, things got even more interesting. What we innocently believed to be a cute banner illustrated with a bucket full of fungus was not. The disproportionate parts of the next attraction were, simply put, traumatizing.
Tim:
I took lots of pictures.
