All the way up that icy slope, my fear kept telling me that I would fail.
Yet as I climbed, I discovered that beneath my fear, something deeper and more primal wanted to succeed. Step by step, I climbed the snowy face and then the final stretch of trail to the summit. The reddish soil crunched underfoot. I sat beside the summit sign and stared at the snowcapped peaks that stretched as far as I could see in all directions.
I had faced my fear and won.
Not yet, hotshot. You still have to get back down.
As I descended through the snowfield, I tried to use the techniques I had read about in mountaineering travelogues. I sidestepped downward, keeping my shoulders perpendicular to the fall line. With each step, I kicked my heel into the snow and created a solid place to stand. My speed would have mortified a sloth, but I did not slip or fall.
When I reached the bottom, I fought back tears—but this time, they were tears of joy. I wasn’t foolish enough to believe I had “conquered” my fears, any more than I could conquer a peak that had stood for millennia before I came and that would exist long after I turned to dust. But I had learned an important lesson.
Fear is a liar.
I could succeed, when fear said I could not.
The hike from Mount Ōdake to the visitor center was a slippery, sweaty adventure (and I use that term in the Misen sense) across an overgrown, partially snowy trail. Gnats and Enormous Winged Biting Things swarmed out of the bamboo grass to hold impromptu raves around my head, completely unrepelled by my repellent. By the time I reached the wetland park, I was sunburned, wrinkled, and covered in mud. My arms hung limp, and my filthy boots scuffed over the wooden boardwalk like I’d walked 100 kilometers instead of only 12.
On the bus ride back to Aomori, I decided to ditch the next day’s scheduled climb, to rest my aching muscles and ensure I had the strength to summit back-to-back mountains in the days that followed.
I felt a surprising lack of guilt over this decision. In fact, my only real concern was finding something fun to do in Morioka City on my unexpected holiday.
Chapter 8
Horses’ Bells and Dragons’ Eyes
June 3–4, 2018
At Morioka Station, dozens of orange traffic cones blocked off all traffic to surrounding streets. Before I could figure out if this was business as usual or not, a Japanese woman in khakis and a Day-Glo vest approached me, wearing a hesitant but hopeful smile that signaled her intention to engage.
As a middle-aged, foreign woman, I make an attractive target for the surveys Japanese tourism bureaus often conduct at railway station exits. As a person in search of an interesting way to spend the day in Morioka, I considered the clipboard-wielding woman an unusual boon. I wouldn’t need to look for the visitor center; the visitor center had come to me.
“Hello,” she said in English. “May I ask you some questions about what brought you to the Kizuna Festival today?”
“Of course.” (I had no intention of admitting I had never heard of the Kizuna Festival.)
She asked the usual questions about my country of origin, job, and where I learned about the festival (my only lie: I said, “I don’t remember”). When we finished the survey, she handed me a six-page newspaper “program”—apologizing for the fact that it was written only in Japanese—and pointed up the street. “The parade is starting. You can make it if you go right now!”
I joined the stream of pedestrians and quickly found a shady spot to stand on the parade route. Groups of early arrivals had spread blankets on the sidewalks and were having festive picnics in the shade. Carts and vendors lined the street, selling festival food and adding to the carnival atmosphere. The scent of grilling frankfurters and yakitori filled the air, along with the calls of barkers hawking soda and nama-beeru (Japanese draft beer, which was apparently legal to drink on the street, at least that day).
While I waited for the parade to start, I read about the festival’s history in my program. Originally known as the Tōhōku Rokkonsai (Tōhōku Six Festivals), the Kizuna Festival was established to celebrate the Tōhōku region and comfort the souls of the people who died in the Great Tōhōku Earthquake. The 9.0 temblor struck northern Honshu on March 11, 2011, and was the strongest earthquake ever recorded in Japan (the fourth-strongest in the world since modern record keeping started). It triggered a tsunami that killed almost 16,000 people, displaced more than 250,000, and caused a disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Since the festival’s inception in 2011, it has become a celebration of regional unity and diversity. Entirely by accident, I had picked the best day of the entire year to visit Morioka.
The rhythmic sounds of drums and cymbals announced the parade, and for the hour that followed I watched, transfixed, as hundreds of singers, dancers, musicians, and martial artists exhibited their skills at intervals along the road. Each group represented one of Tōhōku’s major annual festivals. Lines of chanting men carried enormous braided sandals—each one measuring 12 meters long—to commemorate the Fukushima Waraji Matsuri (Sandal Festival), where celebrants parade through the streets carrying the largest sandals in Japan. Behind them, a platoon of female drummers in colorful costumes marched and played in honor of the Morioka Sansa Odori, a traditional dance that holds the Guinness World Record for the largest concurrent performance of Japanese drums. The groups flowed by in a stream of vibrant sights and sounds that made parades in the United States seem pale and quiet by comparison.
Later I walked to a nearby park to see a few of the hundred horses that would participate in the Chagu Chagu Umakko Matsuri the following weekend. The festival celebrates the working horses of Iwate Prefecture, whose owners dress them in elaborate ceremonial costumes and parade them through the streets to a shrine, where a Shintō priest bestows a blessing on the animals.
Half a dozen enormous horses stood beneath the trees, dressed nose to tail in jingling, hand-embroidered finery (chagu chagu is an onomatopoeic word derived from the sound of the bells on the horses’ costumes). I even saw a jet-black colt who was just being trained to wear the ceremonial attire. He lay in the shade, wearing only a harness and a hand-embroidered headpiece with small pom-poms dangling from his ears.
Enormous, snowcapped Mount Iwate (岩手山) (2,038 meters) rose up beyond the city limits. The snowcapped peak reminded me that I was supposed to be climbing—not watching parades and eating apple-flavored snow cones at a festival.
“I will return,” I promised. “We will dance another day.”
* * *
The morning after the Kizuna Festival, I caught the early bus to Mount Hachimantai ( 八幡平 ) (1,613 meters), the third-highest peak in Towada-Hachimantai National Park. My online trail guide said the hike would be short and easy, but I no longer trusted the judgment of the superhuman trekkers who wrote online trail guides.
As the bus drove up the mountain to the trailhead, patches of snow appeared beneath the trees. They increased in size and depth as we gained altitude, despite the sunny day. At the visitor center, everything—including the trail—was buried under several feet of snow. A map near the bus stop claimed the summit was only a 40-minute hike from the visitor center, and the distance between the topographical lines made it appear as if the trail was almost flat.
The vast majority of visitors had come in jeans and sneakers, and were unprepared to walk on slippery snow. They slid and skidded along in unsteady groups of two and three, clinging to one another and to the pines that lined the trail.
A fur-collared woman clutched at one of the pink-topped wands that marked the route and quickly learned that half-inch bamboo wands are no match for either snow or gravity. The wand bent double and she landed in the snow, to the ill-concealed amusement of her boyfriend—who slipped, and joined her on the snow, a moment later.