Only the open road

BananaWilly

February 18, 2019

398 upvotes

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Title	Only the open road
Author	BananaWilly
Upvotes	398
Comments	27
Date	February 18, 2019 10:25 AM UTC (7 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MGTOW
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MGTOW/comments/arvw0d/only_the_open_road/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MGTOW/only-the-open-road.510811 https://theredarchive.com/post/510811

[–]Edixo199335 points36 points37 points 7 years ago (7 children) | Copy Link

[–]apugsthrowaway6 points7 points8 points 7 years ago (4 children) | Copy Link

[–]Edixo19932 points3 points4 points 7 years ago (3 children) | Copy Link

Ask and ye shall receive...

Part one:

After having been raised by a single mother, it was a way for me to regain my independence as a man. I had a minor breakdown a couple of years back that almost pushed me to suicide, but instead I settled on doing something insane to break the cycle. So I worked double full time for half a year to scrape money together, and hit the road. Luckily, I could get a working visa for Japan, where I've always wanted to go, because my country has good diplomatic ties with Japan.

I had signed up for a global volunteer program called WWOOF, where I got access to hundreds of hosts all over Japan that I could write to and ask if I could come and stay with for a period of time. The deal was to work 6 hours a day for room and board, and then you got a few days off every week to do whatever you want. It's the absolute best way to learn how the locals live, and to get to know the customs of a foreign culture.

I landed in the southern part of Japan on the island called Kyushu in the middle of winter, and stayed up in the mountains of Kamiyamada at a little chicken farm run by a couple in their 60's. I would get up at 5 every morning to shovel manure for an hour before breakfast at 6. The work was hard and honest, and so were the couple I stayed with. It really helped ground me to the fact that I was in a different country now, and I spent my first month there with them.

I headed onward towards the east coast of Kyushu, to the city of Miyazaki. There, on a mountainside a bit outside the city, I stayed with an old man in his inn that he'd built himself; a series of wooden lodges along a mountain stream, interconnected with long wooden balconies. There was a restaurant and several rooms for guests to stay in, and I would help him preparing food, cleaning rooms, and servicing guests. He was an absolute legend himself, a top chef and fisherman who knew everything and everyone in the entire prefecture, and taught me so many skills that I still apply in my everyday life to this day. Sadly, he'd been through a lot of hardship in his life, and was a heavy alcoholic. Despite that, he had utmost discipline, and really set an example for me on how you need to soldier on. We had a lot of good talks over drinks during the two and a half months I spent in Miyazaki. He was the one who suggested that I began hitchhiking, and taught me how he used to do it back in the 70's when he did a Japan round trip by himself.

It was baffling how easy it was to hitchhike in Japan. I had scheduled a whole two days for the trip to the next place that I was going to, but it ended up taking 9 hours. I rarely had to wait more than 10 minutes for a car to pick me up, and it was people from all aspects of life who gave me a ride. They just seemed happy to help out, and enjoyed talking a bit with a foreigner. The trick to Japan is simply to be polite and considerate of others. As long as you are that, everyone is open and friendly, and I even had people go up to others in parking lots and explain in Japanese that this foreigner needs a ride and if they could help out.

One experience during this first stretch of hitchhiking that really cemented the nature of Japanese people in me was when I ended up at a massive rest stop near Beppu on the north side of Kyushu; it was in two levels up a mountainside, separated into essentially two different rest stops, with traffic from four directions coming in. I put up my sign, and within a minute a young Japanese couple came up to me. The wife, in perfect English (which was a surprise, since barely anyone spoke a word of English), that I was at the wrong stop and had to go to the other one. So I picked up all my gear and trotted down there. Again, within a minute, two Japanese truck drivers came up to me and communicated that I was as the wrong one again, and had to go back up to the other one. Half way back up the hill, the couple from before came running down towards me. They sincerely apologized that they'd given me the wrong directions, and offered to drive me directly to my destination despite not going in that direction. I told them they didn't have to, since it was a good 45 minute drive into the mountains, but they insisted. They drove me right to the front door, and even gave me some snacks to eat later, and continued to apologize. I was left so flabbergasted, and didn't really know what to do other than thank them deeply, but they seemed perfectly content as if it was the opposite of a bother to do this. We said our goodbyes, and I never saw them again. From there on I was dedicated to be as excellent to others as possible.

I had landed in the hot spring town of Yufuin, located in a valley in the mountains south of Beppu. I was working at a hostel run by the most nuclear family I have ever seen. Husband, wife, and their 3 children, all functioning in sync to make their everyday lives work out. The hostel was run like a well-oiled machine, but the family wasn't stressed out at all about it. They told me how they'd met young and always dreamed about running a hostel and meeting people from all over the world, and now they were living the dream. The Japanese have a concept called 'ikigai', which is basically your meaning for existence, which includes finding something you love that you can still earn a living with. And hands down, these people had found it. They constantly had one or two people working for them through WWOOF, and I got to meet a lot different types from all over during my stay with them. They had a hot spring at the hostel, which was an absolute luxury, and I ended up spending a lot of downtime just soaking in the mineral rich waters with a good book.

After the hostel, I went to a little town about 20 minutes from the hot spring town, and stayed with a lone farmer who grew parsley and tomatoes. He was a dude in his 40's who'd been into some rough stuff as a kid Tokyo, but now had moved to a more quiet lifestyle in the countryside. We did honest farm work from dawn till evening, ate hearty meals prepared by his mother, who lived a couple of streets away from him, and then knocked back some beers while watching western movies. I introduced him to a couple, thankfully it's somewhat easy to find Japanese subtitles.

[–]Edixo19931 point2 points3 points 7 years ago (2 children) | Copy Link

Part two:

This guy had an ex girlfriend who ran a café together with her aunt in a town over from the one we were in. They also hosted volunteers from WWOOF, and through them I was introduced to a German girl who was traveling around Japan kinda like I was. She was sort of nerdy, and spoke Japanese almost fluently from having studied it at home. She'd never gone hitchhiking before, and since we were going the same way, we decided to hitchhike together to Okayama where she was staying for a couple of days. When we hit the road, I held up a sign with the city name on, and she had one saying "We speak Japanese <3", both in Kanji. Suffice to say, the trip that we had scheduled for three days took 12 hours, and I ended up checking in to her hotel with a plan to drink and go sightseeing over the weekend. It was Friday, and she hadn't been out drinking in Japan yet, so we wanted to go out and get boozed. After a quick refresher at the hotel, we hit the streets in our finest clothes, set on having fun. We both wanted to hook up with a Japanese counterpart, so we wingmanned each other the entire evening, but without luck. Way past midnight, we meet some people who speak English, and who invite us to come drinking with them. We hit up some different bars, and along the way I notice that one of the guys in the group that we met is getting a lot of respect from random people we meet on the street, and gets special treatment at the places we go to. It should have been obvious to me that he was Yakuza. Throughout the night, his friends keep asking me if I'm together with the German girl, and I tell them no. When we finally hit up a late night restaurant to get something to eat, the boss of the group starts aggressively hitting on the girl. She's visibly uncomfortable with this, so I step in, and then the guy switches his attention to me. He starts demanding that I go back to the hotel, that he can handle it and that I should mind my own business. The girl tries to comfort him to get him to relax, but he's having none of it. She heads off to the bathroom, and while I'm alone with them, he threatens to kill me if I don't leave right away.

I freak the fuck out and start apologizing profusely, while keeping an eye out for the girl, but he's having none of it. He pulls out his phone and starts texting, which I know is a sign that we need to leave NOW if we don't want to get dragged in to a black van and taken to a warehouse somewhere. So as soon as the girl gets back from the toilet, I bolt up, grab our shit, take her by the arm and run out of the place. First thing I do is to get us on to a main road among people so we could blend in, and then just head back towards the hotel as fast as possible. The girl was shaking and crying, asking what was going on, but I shushed her as I frantically kept checking if we were being followed. Thankfully, we made it back to the hotel, and I sat her down and explained the situation; we didn't know if they knew where we lived, if they'd followed us, or what else, so that we should head out of town as fast as possible. She agreed, and in 15 minutes we were out of the hotel and in a taxi towards the nearest highway rest stop. Keep in mind, at this point it's about 5 in the morning, and we've been knocking back shots and sake the entire evening, but the adrenaline had sobered us up quite well. We flagged down a car that took us to a town some 50km away from Okayama, where we caught a train to Matsue where the girl had some friends we could stay with. We arrived there around 10, and tried finding a hotel with rooms ready. We got some around 13, and she collapsed in hers while I chainsmoked in mine while looking out the tiny hotel window for suspicious cars. Finally, after staying awake for almost 40 hours, I fell asleep.

The next day, the girl and I said our goodbyes as I caught a car headed towards Tottori, and she went off to her friends. I haven't seen her since.

I hitchhiked towards Sasayama, in the Kansai region. Along the way, I got lost in the mountains, and once had to spend the night in the parking lot of a convenience store, under an impromptu shelter made from a tarp. Along the way, I met a couple who'd biked all the way from Germany over Russia and taken a ferry to Japan. I bypassed them a couple of times when I'd caught a ride, and then we'd greet each other when they passed me flagging down a new one. I arrived in Sasayama, and stayed at a homestead that also was a sort of international 'free school'. The kids would come there and learn English from the foreigners working there, and since the couple who ran the place was half Japanese, half American, they spoke mainly English around the house. I had a great time there with them and their unique group of friends in the farming community there, and can proudly say that I'm sure I'm the first in my family to ever have worked in a rice field. It was the perfect combination of comfort and hard work that I needed to calm myself after the experience in Okayama.

At this point I'd been in Japan for about half a year. I hadn't really had time to get my party on, asides from two weeks in Miyazaki where I went to an international bar frequently. So I headed to the party city of Japan; Osaka. There, I got myself a literal broom closet at a cheap-ass AirBNB in the hobo district, but it functioned perfectly for just storing my things and sleeping. One of my first nights there, I met two guys from my home country at a bar, and after not speaking my native language for half a year, we instantly connected and went on an insane 3 week bender together. We did road trips, pub crawls, even went to a massive music festival called Summer Sonic with a day's notice. I'd like to point out that Babymetal had a bigger and wilder crowd than Foo Fighters. Consider that.

They had to head back home, whereas I was far from done traveling. I hitchhiked onward to Tokyo, the city that I'd wanted to visit for over a decade, and got a capsule hotel in the middle of Shibuya. And you know what? I was disappointed. After all I'd experienced, the people I'd met, the festivals I'd attended, the sashimi I'd eaten, the sake I'd drunk, the work I'd done, and the sense of Japanese culture that I'd gained through that, Tokyo was a mediocre amalgamation of the different cultural aspects of all Japan. The people had no soul to them, the food was bland in comparison to what I'd tasted, and every polite act felt faked. After a week, I had had enough and bought a plane ticket to Australia. My working visa had just been approved. So after 4 'random' passport checks at Narita, I caught a plane towards Brisbane, QLD, Australia. But that's a story for another time...

[–]apugsthrowaway0 points1 point2 points 7 years ago (1 child) | Copy Link

Fantastic. Stunning. I'm amazed you wrote this as a comment rather than as a new post, but I guess it isn't too relevant to MGTOW's main messages ... ?

I have never taken travel formally. I just browse the images on Google Maps until I find a place I like, and reckon, "Yeah, I could go there." There are a lot of mountains and shrines in Japan that I would like to see for this reason, but funnily enough, you ended up in the region which I found the most beautiful of all, Kyushu. I love coastal roads above all. I love looking out on the water and seeing land on the other side, especially forests and mountains.

You have also seconded the advice I've heard about going as a volunteer rather than a tourist, though I had never heard of this organization before. Extremely helpful, and the way I might do it now.

Was that encounter with the yakuza both your first and last? The internet has mixed opinions on whether to be afraid of them or not, and how prevalent they are in Japanese society. It would seem Japan would want you to believe it's safer than it really is for tourism reasons, but the locals have a weird relationship with them as well.

Did the country ever live up to its reputation of xenophobia in your experience?

Any etiquette or manners tips that you learned the hard way?

How fluent were you in their language when you went? (And how did dialects differ, if it ever became a problem?)

Thank you for taking the time to write all this up. As promised I was drawn in from the very beginning. :)

[–]Edixo19931 point2 points3 points 7 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

I couldn't help myself, so I posted it as a main thread as well. But it didn't get a lot of responses, so I guess it's not all in tune with MGTOW, though I'd argue the case.

Volunteering is truly the way to go if you want to meet the locals. I had ten times more cultural experiences working on farms in the middle of nowhere than I did wandering the streets of the big cities.

Don't be afraid of the Japanese people. Maybe one in 10.000 is a bad apple. They're more scared of you than you are of them, but the moment you get past the first impression and establish yourself as mannered and friendly, all walls come down.

Not really, I just did as the Romans when in Rome; took off my shoes before going inside someone's house, said "itadakimasu" and "gotisousama desita" before and after meals, and so forth. Just notice what other people do and try to mimic it.

When I arrived in Japan, I knew "ohayo" and "arigato", that was it. But living among the locals forces you to pick up the language. Now I can somewhat get by with my limited Japanese.

You're welcome! I hope to meet you out on the road some day! :D

[–]Asphyxiem3 points4 points5 points 7 years ago (1 child) | Copy Link

[–]Edixo19930 points1 point2 points 7 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link