Sasaguri

Ena and I took a ride to what is fast-becoming my favorite place in Japan: Sasaguri.

I think this marked my fifth time to come to this little town south of Fukuoka (see previous trips here, you have to scroll down). It is the one with the 88 temple pilgrimage route that runs through the mountains surrounding the town. It is still my mission to visit all 88 temples before we leave Fukuoka. Today we got to visit 5 more. The first we got to visit was Akashiji, which was where we parked our bikes and where we could put our hands on Buddha's:
There was also this big statue:
That little door under the statue is the door to hell. Actually there is just a long, completely unlit tunnel that you are supposed to walk through in the darkness. Which we did. Ena got a bit lost behind me but otherwise we got through hell OK.

After that we walked for a few minutes and the main part of our journey started at what is without doubt the ugliest site in Sasaguri, its big dam:
As an aside I should note that I don't have anything against dams per se. They obviously serve a number of useful purposes that we all benefit from. What kind of bothers me though - and I think this is a problem specific to dams in Japan - is when the people who build them try to "improve" them by turning them into some sort of tourist attraction in their own right. They always end up just making the whole thing even uglier than it need be. Like in the above picture you'll notice that the mountain at the other end of the dam has had all the trees cut down and huge concrete retaining walls built on parts of it. All of that was done to support a little road to the top where there is a little observation deck from which you can get a better view of the dam. In other words, they ruined an attractive mountain in order to give people the opportunity to get a better view of an ugly dam. I write all this because about 8 years ago I went to a similar dam that they had tried to turn into a tourist attraction and I ended up putting up a big rant about it here.

Anyway, back to today's adventure. We started by just skipping the dam "park" and walked straight to the far end of the reservoir, which according to my map was where the road to some of the temples began.

The road began (or really continued) at the end of the reservoir and followed the mountain river that fed it. This is where the scenery turned quite nice and we saw this temple nestled in the woods above the river:
Eventually the road turned into a hiking trail into the woods that followed the river, which by that point was really more of a long waterfall:
We came across some really beautiful waterfalls, the best I have seen in Japan, along this stretch of trail. There was this one:
And this one:
And this one:
And this stretch, with some wysteria in full bloom:
After a while the trail finished and we were back on a road. By this time we had hiked several kilometres from the dam and were quite high in the mountains. We walked along the road for a while and came across a mountain farming village:
We walked through the town and came across some actual pilgrims. These are people who make the 88 temple route circuit for religious purposes, as opposed to just for fun like us. You can tell the pilgrims ("henro san") because they wear special clothing, basically its an all-white outfit. They were pretty nice and we chatted for a while at one of the temples and they gave us some directions. We also met this interesting 80 year old woman who flagged us down on the road and wanted to talk to us. She told us most of her life story, how she had wanted to be a teacher when she was young but ended up marrying into the family that owned some of this farmland at her father's direction. She could speak some English and sang "Somewhere over the rainbow" for us. You meet some interesting people in the mountains.

Anyway, we continued up and up into the far recesses of the mountains, past the mountain village and onto a rough trail:
We were aiming for a group of temples that were REALLY deep in the mountains, but unfortunately it was getting late and we had a long hike back to our bikes (followed by a long bike ride home) so we decided to turn around. I took a ceremonial photo of the two of us at the furthest point we reached:

Picnic at the beach

We had a nice day off together today so we headed out to the beach for lunch. We stopped at a local bakery for some sandwiches and buns and then headed out to the beach at Shingu, about 40 minutes by bike away. We sat down in the shade of some trees and enjoyed the sound of the sea and the view of the waves hitting the beach:
After that we walked along the beach for a while. We came across some sandy cliffs that we had seen last June. One of the cliffs had eroded quite a bit since then. This is what it looked like about 10 months ago:
And this is what the same spot looked like today:
A big chunk of it must have collapsed sometime over the winter.

Anyway, we just enjoyed some time in the sand:
One thing that kind of bothers me...no, make that 'really' bothers me... is the amount of garbage that gets washed up on the beaches around here. Some stretches get cleaned up by the locals but others do not. There was one spot we walked across today that was definitely not one which gets cleaned up as it was saturated with garbage. We noticed that quite a lot of it comes from Korea, including this piece of wood (not sure about where the old boot came from):
We had a couple of plastic bags with us and I filled them with as much garbage as I could find to bring with us and properly dispose of, but it didn't even make a scratch on how much there was. It is a shame because these are some otherwise really lovely stretches of coastline. Fortunately thanks to the efforts of some locals not everywhere is that bad, but some places are just horrible.

After that we just walked along the hills next to the coast, there was a nice trail:
And then we headed home.

Nokonoshima

It was a nice, warm Sunday today so Ena and I decided to ride our bikes to Meinohama in the west end of Fukuoka and take the ferry over to spend a day on Nokonoshima island.

Nokonoshima is an island in Hakata bay known for its nice beaches and pretty flowers. It is only about a 10 minute ferry ride (though it takes over an hour to get to the Ferry terminal on bikes from our place). I'm not sure why we've never made the trip over before.

We arrived at the Ferry terminal just in time to see the doors closing on the 12:15 ferry, meaning we had sped all the way for nothing. The next ferry was an hour later so we got lunch while we were waiting.
Eventually we got on the ferry and were on our way, which made Ena happy:
And the city faded into the distance behind us:
Which also made Ena happy:
And Nokonoshima came into view ahead of us:
Which, again, made Ena happy:
The door opened on the front of the Ferry and we rode our bikes off:
Along with 70 or 80 walk on passengers:
Nokonoshima is a mountainous island with only a few hundred residents. It has one big attraction, which is "Island Park", a big garden on the far side of the island from the ferry terminal. Most of the walk-off passengers made a bee-line for the bus stop that heads to the park. We decided to head away from the crowd and avoid the park, which wasn't too hard.

We followed a road along the coast, which eventually went uphill quite a bit. There were some great views of the sea and neighboring islands, like Shikanoshima visible in the distance here:
Ena, looking happy:
We found a novel way of taking a self portrait:
In addition to tourism in the summer, the island's other main industry is oranges. The road took us through a lot of orange tree groves:
And past some pretty farms:
Eventually we cycled all the way to the highest point on the island (195 metres high). There was a small viewing platform at the top which we climbed up and got to take advantage of the 360 panorama of Hakata Bay. Looking towards Genkai shima (the island on the right):
And the Ito Peninsula:
And Fukuoka city:
And Uminonakamichi:
After that we rode down an extremely steep road all the way back to the island's main town. Ena's brakes squealed the whole way down!

Back in town we stopped at a little cafe where Ena had some cocoa and I had a bottle of "Nokonoshima cider" and a cookie:
And then back to the ferries:
And we said goodbye to Nokonoshima:
It was a really great time. We plan on going back to stay overnight at this place that rents cabins along the beach sometime in the summer.

My old company went bankrupt

The internet (or at least that portion of the internet which foreigners in Japan frequent) is abuzz this week with news of the bankruptcy of GEOS, one of the old "big four"chains of English schools that span the country. At its peak, GEOS had about 500 schools in Japan and around the world (they even have a branch in Victoria), though they had been in decline for the past few years and only had about half that many schools in operation at the time they filed for bankruptcy protection.

Anyway, the reason I'm blogging about this is becuse GEOS was the company that - way back in 1999 - gave me my first job in Japan.

There were a lot of things I didn't like about working for GEOS, there was an element of snake-oil salesman in their business practices that never sat well with most teachers. Nonetheless, over the course of about 30 years it provided a few thousand freshly-minted university grads from the English speaking world like myself with an opportunity to see a part of the world most wouldn't otherwise have ever seen. All you needed was to have a university degree, be a native speaker of English, and be personable enough to make it through the 3-day interview process and then BAM! - off to Japan with you with a job, apartment and whole new life waiting for you when you arrive. What 22 year old with even the slightest bit of adventurous spirit could resist?

Last year I visited Akashi, the city I first worked at for GEOS, and saw that the school that I used to work at no longer existed. The now dark, lonely looking room in the fourth floor of this building is where I spent a year figuring out how to teach English:
So the news of the bankruptcy wasn't too surprising, as they had been closing schools all over the country for the past couple of years.

If this was just one company going bust due to its poor business practices, I wouldn't be that upset about it. But really the GEOS bankruptcy is part of the massive collapse of the entire English teaching market in Japan that has occurred in the past 3 years. The statistics are pretty frightening. In 2006 (according to government statistics) there were 826,000 students enrolled in Language schools in Japan. This year there are only 335,000, meaning the market has shrunk about 60% in that short a time. At the same time, the number of full time English teachers (foreigners employed by private sector schools like GEOS) has gone from a peak of 9,100 in 2003 to a measly 3,500 last year. Of the old "big four" chains, two are now bankrupt (GEOS and NOVA, which went under in 2007) and the other two are facing an uncertain future.

There are a lot of reasons for this collapse. The recession has sapped people's disposable income, so a lot of students who were studying as a hobby have undoubtedly turned to bird-watching or some other less-expensive pursuit. Government subsidies introduced a few years back to encourage workers to upgrade their skills (including English) by covering up to 80% of the cost of tuition have also been done away with, which undoubtedly also hurt. And of course Japan's demographics haven't helped, with the total population having shrunk by almost 200,000 people last year the market for everything is literally shrinking. Throw in some major scandals - particularly those surrounding NOVA's bankruptcy which left hundreds of thousands of students (NOVA had almost half the market at the time of its collapse) stiffed on tuition fees they had paid in advance - and its not hard to see why things have gone down so quickly.

The upshot of it is that the type of opportunity that I had to come here to teach English back in the late 1990s simply doesn't exist anymore. Back then all of the big four had hiring offices in North America and I got hired not once but twice in Vancouver (the second time in 2001) to go teach English in Japan. Now all the hiring offices in Canada are closed and the companies that haven't gone bankrupt only hire new teachers who are already in Japan (or at least they would if they were hiring, which they aren't, as a boatload of now unemployed GEOS teachers are probably discovering).

So there it is, the end of an era. It is still possible for recent grads to come over to teach, but only if they can arrange their own visa, finance their own travel, find their own apartment and then battle it out for one of the few teaching jobs available with the army of experienced teachers already in the country. Or if they can get into the government run JET program, which may be the only one that still hires teachers overseas (and they've been cut back over the years too). The glory days are truly over.

Hanami

Ena and I have been to see the cherry blossoms a few times in the past couple of weeks when the weather has been good.

Najima Shrine, which is just a few minutes walk away from our place, has some good ones:
Its a nice shrine too:
We also went to Fukuoka castle:
And Kashii shrine: