But of course, there are exceptions. While abortion is utterly banned (although naturally, still available in sub-par conditions to the desperate), condoms are sold openly in every convenience store and pharmacy, and the overpopulation crisis has led to a bill in congress to provide public funding to birth control, against the will of the Church and the staunchly Catholic current president Gloria Arroyo.  (Arroyo’s term is nearly over, and the fate of the bill under the next president, yet to be chosen, is uncertain.) Homosexuality is another interesting case. While the law of the land affords no particular rights to LGBT citizens, in comparison with the recent trend in many Western countries towards allowing same sex partnerships of one variety or another, or anti-discrimination laws, the Philippines also does not persecute gays and lesbians, as for example, most Muslim countries so, and as many US state would continue to do if so allowed by the federal government. The society at large, like most of Southeast Asia, is also generally exceptionally tolerant of minority sexualities when compared with the official doctrine of the dominant, highly conservative, religion.

But while being an out of the closet gay is generally acceptable here, coming out as an atheist is reportedly considered to be something deviant. If atheists are the most distrusted minority in America, surely their status is even lower in the Philippines. While my handful of Filipino friends here, who I know from studying in Japan, all fall on or near the atheist end of the spectrum, virtually every other person I have spoken to in the Philippines has been a vocal Christian, usually Catholic.

Which brings us, finally, to the title of this post. The day before yesterday I was getting a tour around the historical district of Intramuros from a government archaeologist  named Joseph, he mentioned to me that he and his family had converted from Catholicism to American style evangelical Christianity several years before, and that he now found the idolatry of Catholicism disturbingly heretical. “These days,” he told me, “the number of freethinkers is really on the rise.” This turn of phrase both surprised and intrigued me, as the term “freethinker” is one I had always associated with the modern atheism movement, but I still understood his usage. I must admit that to make a conscious choice regarding one’s belief and walk away from the religion of one’s parents, rather than to un-critically accept it, is in a sense as much an exercise of freedom of thought as to walk away from religion entirely, even if as an atheist myself I consider both the original and adopted religion equally irrational.

With that brief conversation in mind, I was particularly intrigued when, yesterday afternoon at around 4pm, when I was wandering around the University of the Philippines Dilliman Campus, in Metro Manila’s Quezon City, following a lunch appointment I had had in the area, I was handed the following flyer and pointed to the red brick-faced UP Film Center just down the block.

Naturally, I went.

The program consisted of much what one might expect. (Full list here.) For example, the Richard Dawkins video The Root of All Evil? (Embedded below.)

And ending with Julia Sweeney’s Letting Go of God, which I have embedded part of below.

Both of those videos were ones that I already knew of, but had never seen, so I was happy to go in and watch them. And while  they were enjoyable enough, I had really been hoping to see something local, either the Philippines equivalent of a Richard Dawkins-esque attack on the pernicious influence of religious dogma on society or a documentary about the Filipino Freethinkers group itself. Unfortunately, there were no locally produced films, although they are trying to put together something themselves for the next time. But following the conclusion of the last film, Ryan Tani, president of the group, did take the lectern and microphone and give a summary of the FF’s history, purpose, and activities.

The founding members, a half-dozen friends of an atheistic/agnostic persuasion and frustrated with a lack of public space to discuss their feelings about religion, decided to organize an informal meetup group just over a year ago. After experimenting with different schedules, they settled on a bi-weekly meetup, which gets an average of 20-30 attendees, out of a total of perhaps 100 who come from time to time, and out of 800 members on their Facebook group, which also includes plenty of members who live too far away to make it to the Manila meetups.

A couple of months ago they decided to organize this film festival as a means to reach out to a wider audience. Interestingly, funding for the film festival, which seemed to borrow some of the tried-and-true hospitality tactics of campus evangelical organizations like  free snacks, was provided by a Silicon Valley entrepreneur with no apparent ties to the Philippines, who simply came across the fledgeling organization online and decided to help them out. He gave a brief comment towards the end of the program, but had to duck out before the post-event mingling and I was unable to chat with him to find out his story.

But I did spend a good while talking with those who stayed past the end of the films, which were mainly those who already knew each other from the meetups rather than new faces like myself, and ended up being invited along for dinner. (Amusingly, this was at the same restaurant I had eaten the night before with my local friends, a place called Trellis that we had been to on each of my three visits to Manila, and quite literally the only restaurant in the area the name of which I actually know.)

It is unsurprising that they chose the University of the Philippines Dilliman campus as their venue, as the flagship campus of the elite public university has a reputation for left wing – even Marxist – faculty and students. It is also unsurprising that the members of Filipino Freethinkers are themselves almost universally graduates or current students of elite schools like UP, Ateno de Manila or De La Salle.

Also unsurprisingly, it was a pretty geeky crowd, with a high representation of people in the software industry, sciences, psychology, and plenty of fandom for scifi novels, video games, comic books, tabletop role playing games, anime and manga, etc. Basically, the same kind of people I hang out with at home, with the same kinds of interests, and table discussion that sounds barely at all different from my friends back in New Jersey/New York, except for the Filipino accents, and sometimes – but surprisingly rare – interjection of Tagalog into the heavily English language conversation.

And about the same average level of religious engagement, except that while I estimate that at least half (maybe far more) of my atheistic/agnostic friends at home come from families of an already religiously apathetic bent, the Filipino Freethinkers almost all come from extremely Catholic, or at least Evangelical, families, who were strongly opposed to their decision to leave the Church. This social pressure makes clear why they decided that a specifically atheist themed social organization was needed. I suppose if I had grown up in the Bible Belt I might have longed for such a group in high school or college, but coming from Montclair, NJ it wasn’t exactly an issue, and spending several years in Japan – perhaps the most religiously disinterested nation on the planet – has put me increasingly out of touch with the reality of living in an overwhelmingly religious society.

The last several years have seen the birth of a new movement of pr0-atheism writing and activism around the world, which has even started to bubble up in the strictly Catholic Philippines. Pro-atheism films like those here are rarely, if ever, screened here (The Invention of Lying was also mentioned, as a major Hollywood film that simply wasn’t distributed in the country due to its anti-religious content), and this may very well have been the first public screening of most of this material.

The Filipino Freethinkers are trying to establish more local chapters of their informal group, and some current UP students who are formally establishing a campus chapter, as a registered campus organization, were in attendance. I won’t deny the great art and culture that religion has inspired throughout history, and I do very much enjoy learning about religion in its complexity, and do very much enjoy certain ritual aspects of religion, but as time passes I lean increasingly towards the stance that not only are the most fundamentalist religious – the Al-Qaedas and abortion doctor murders – dangerous to society, but that genuine, deeply felt religious belief is always the enemy of rationality and a danger to a stable world. It heartens me to see secularists starting to come out of the closet in this deeply religious country, and I wish them luck in persuading others of like mind to do the same.

I would also like to end by briefly making a statement along the lines of what was being proclaimed at the meeting. Opposition to religion does not mean opposition to morality, only a recognition that morality is derived from our nature as an evolved social animal, rather than from a supernatural source. Opposition to religion also does not mean opposition to the religious. Freedom of thought and belief is sacrosanct, and nothing is more important than the development of a society in which all shades of belief and non-belief are permitted.

The Filipino Freethinkers website is located at filipinofreethinkers.org , and they do most of their organizing through the Facebook group.

Taiwan will be mainly in Taipei, but with a few days going down to the south, Kaohsiung, maybe Tainan, maybe Taichung area. Philippines will be almost totally Manila, and Korea will be basically just Seoul.

People in any of those places, feel free to get in touch and see if we can meet up!

I thought I knew all I needed to know about the co-op system, but the always informative Shukan Toyo Keizai’s profile of the university co-op system taught me a thing or two.

Here are some key facts:

• University co-ops are non-profit institutions operated and funded by student members. Around 30% of Japan’s 762 four-year universities (around 230 228 to be exact) have a co-op on campus, which will likely run at least one cafeteria, merchandise shop, and bookstore each. 40% of all university students (1.3 million) are members. At universities that have co-ops, membership is around 95%. Students pay between Y10,000-30,000 to join when they enter university, which is returned without interest once they graduate or drop out.


• All such co-ops are organized under the umbrella of the National Federation of University Co-operative Associations in Japan, formed in 1958. While the first university co-op was formed in Kyoto’s Doshisha University in 1898, they didn’t really start to take off until after World War II, as universities set up co-ops to help ensure steady food supplies as Japan’s economy got back on its feet, similar to neighborhood co-ops (they are regulated by the same law). The federation’s website notes that co-ops offer a wide range of goods and services, among them “food, clothing, housing, books, stationery and PCs…arranging and subcontracting for tourism, Student Mutual Benefit [a type of insurance plan], language training programs, courses for applicants for public employee and computer training programs.”


• Co-ops are a serious business – in 2008 the federation counted revenue of Y207.5 billion. Considering there are only co-ops on 230 228 campuses, it’s nothing short of amazing their revenue compares with convenience store chain am/pm (Y195.5 billion in FY08, 1,129 stores) and Tokyu department stores (232.3 billion in FY08, scattered stores in major cities). The article explains the universities benefit from a captive customer base of students on campus and virtually no other on-campus competitors (though that has changed slightly following some deregulation in 2004).


• About a quarter of all sales are recorded in March and April ahead of the start of the academic year. However, in those two months the co-ops typically sell around 60,000 PCs. Sales in 2008 break down as follows: 15% from cafeterias, 19.9% from bookstores, and 65.1% from merchandise stores (in the merchandise category, 18.6% comes from hardware & software vs. 11.5% from food).


• Gross margin (revenue minus cost of goods sold as a percent of total revenue) is roughly 20% overall and 50-55% in the cafeteria segment. That basically means that for every 100 yen in sales, 20 yen is profit before labor/administration, financing, and tax costs.


• One benefit of being a student association is the university charges virtually no rent. This allows them to keep cafeteria prices low and charge the same for electronics as big-box retailers. The co-ops also have considerable bargaining power as procurement is all done through the national federation. That’s how the cafeterias can charge an average of Y380 per meal.


• Another advantage of the co-ops is service. One student interviewed from the article bought a PC at the co-op because he liked getting advice from a fellow student.


• One disadvantage of having your business limited to college campuses is the limited number of business days. Vacations slash the total number of business days to around 250-300, and students only show up for class on about 150-170 days a year.


• In 2004, Japan’s national universities were stripped of their status as arms of the government and reorganized as corporate entities. This meant they gained a freer hand to get creative in running their campuses, and one such initiative has been to open convenience stores on campus in direct competition with the co-ops. Already, 40 co-ops are reported to be competing with on-campus kombini.


• Co-ops have responded to this competition with initiatives of their own, for example opening chain stores inside cafeteria areas and selling pre-paid meal plans to students (something typical at US universities).


• The population of 18-year-olds in Japan (an indicator of the size of the co-ops’ target demographic) expected to hold steady at 12 million in 2009 but then fall steadily into the foreseeable future. With this declining customer base, the author speculates there will be closer cooperation with universities and co-ops in the future. Already there are examples of a co-op collaborating with Yamanashi University to offer Yamanashi wine on campus.

This is a minute detail, but Ichihashi’s arrest means that from now on there will be no more wanted posters with Ichihashi’s face. Ever since I arrived in Japan around two years ago his face has been plastered just about everywhere. In fact, the murder occurred just a month before I touched down. Now I’ll miss not seeing him at every police box. It’s not that I was fond of him – I will just instinctively feel a sense of loss. Today he was there, and at some point in the next few days he’ll be gone from everywhere but the TV. And all this time, he didn’t even look like that anymore because of the plastic surgery!

It’s the same with the Tokyo Olympics 2016 signs. From the time I arrived here (as far as I can remember) until just a couple months ago they were all over the place – but now that the games were awarded to Rio they are gone, too.

The project has long been controversial and has dominated the headlines since the DPJ took power last month and announced the project would be cancelled—despite the fact that the project has burned through more than 70% of its US$4 billion budget.

As a student in the Robert D. Kaplan school of national policy, I wanted to see this project with my own eyes, and see the entire surrounding landscape, not suddenly arriving by train or car. So I took my bicycle by shinkansen out to Karuizawa in Nagano, from where I traveled north over the ride of Mt. Asama, then down into the valleys of Gunma and east into the valley, for a total day trip of more than 100 kilometers. This post summarizes my trip.

Traveling to the Dam
It’s easiest to feel the scale of the project by traveling from the west of the dam, down the river valley north of Mt. Asama in Nagano. As you approach the project, there are suddenly new bridges, most complete or near complete, covering imaginary areas of water. There is also the classic concrete lining of a natural water source that can be seen all over Japan. There are also brand new buildings sitting on the side of what will be a new lake.

Traveling towards the dam brings the existing road “deeper” into the future lake, which brings us to the representative structure of the project, the No. 2 Yamba Dam bridge. The bridge is unique for its hollow structure and that they are building simultaneously out from the supporting stems. This bridge will permit road and rail to cross the lake and connect the two halves of the community. At present, there was also a JR line running through the town, which was also to be relocated up the mountain.

You may notice that construction on the bridge is proceeding. The reasons for that soon became clear.

“Yamba Kan” （やんば館）
At the foot of the No. 2 Yamba Dam bridge sits a two-story facility called the “Yamba Kan,” built in 1999 by the Ministry of Land and Infrastructure to explain the dam’s purpose and its construction to locals and other interested visitors. Like a typical Japanese shiryoukan, it is a small but carefully organized and boasts an impressive set of topographical maps, audio-visual media, photographs, and information regarding the history and construction of the dam. There are also guides on hand to answer questions about the project.

Interest has exploded since the DPJ took power and have announced the cancellation of the dam. According to the informational (and pro-dam) website damnet.org, the number of visitors to the “Yamba Kan” hit a record in September, receiving three times as many visitors as in August. When I arrived on a weekday afternoon, the 40 car parking lot was full, and included a chartered tour bus.

The guides were busy answering visitor questions. I patiently waited my turn to ask questions and finally got to ask: “The government has said they will stop construction on the dam but the bridge is still being constructed, why is that?” I asked in the most neutral of tones, but the guide answered on the assumption that I was an anti-dam fanatic—she responded, “They have to finish it! There is no other option! Otherwise are community will be split in two! There are already people living in homes on both sides of the mountain!”

Her explanation and the Yamba Kan maps made the overview of the project more clear. Before the dam could be built, the government had to relocate all 355 households whose homes would be submerged by the lake created by the dam. After decades of fierce opposition, it was only when the central government conceded on a costly compromise to relocate the villagers up the mountain up the mountain from their homes did they finally agree. This is more expensive than it sounds, and calls for massive earthworks and bridges. It would have been easiest to move the people up or down the valley to join their neighbors.

Yet the project is even more expensive than just moving people up the valley mountains. The mountains are too steep to be flattened to accomodate the whole community on one side of the steep valley, so construction has taken place on two sides of the lake, with massive bridges being constructed to connect the two sides of the lake. The government is of course footing the bill to construct the new houses, schools, roads, bridges, and other facilities for the relocated community.

Most of this construction is completed, as evidenced by the almost finished No. 2 Yamba Dam bridge. But once all this is done, I started to ask myself,

What happens now?
Frankly, no matter how hard Transportation Minister Maehara and the DPJ hold out on refusing to construct the dam, I can’t possibly see how the project cannot be finished. At best the DPJ can delay the plan a year or two. Here’s why:

• All the preliminary infrastructure is complete. Learning more at the Yamba Kan, my understanding of recent news stories where the DPJ said that they would continue to invest in “lifestyle” construction became clear. The DPJ will only halt construction on the dam itself, which was scheduled to commence shortly, but will continue construction that affects the lives of the locals. In other words, the bridge will be finished, as will the rest of the construction, but the dam for which all the construction was invested will not be built. What this means is that billions will be spent relocating a community for no reason whatsoever.

• It could cost votes in important prefectures. The DPJ probably isn’t too worried that the conservative, LDP-allied governors of Nagano, Gunma, Chiba and Tokyo are opposed to halting the project. But the governors of Saitama and Tochigi are independents close to the DPJ. The DPJ caucus of legislators in the Saitama prefectural assembly is vocally opposed to the cancellation. The six affected prefectures together comprise more than 25% of Japan’s total population, and the DPJ has strong voter support in Tokyo, Chiba, and Saitama. The only people firmly opposed to the plan appear to be environmental interest groups. Who knows, it could cost the DPJ votes and they may decide to proceed because of it.

• A future LDP administration may turn things around. Even if the Hatoyama administration does refuse to proceed with the plan, the LDP could always pick up where the DPJ left off.

Anyway, here is what we saw!

This is a monument to local deaths from industrial accidents. Not sure why they died or when.

Going up Tenranzan mountain we came across these oddly shaped Buddhas. The fifth Tokugawa shogun apparently called a monk from a temple near this mountain to heal him with chanting, and it worked. The statues are somehow related to this.

Awesome spider. Probably poisonous.

Lady Tokiwa, a concubine of Heian-era shogun Minamoto-no-Yoshitomo, was walking along this mountain after her former lover had already died in the Heiji Rebellion. Thinking back to her now-faded youth and beauty, she struck her bamboo walking stick in the ground and wished that her stick could take root and grow if Minamoto could prosper again. He never returned from the dead, but according to the sign a bamboo forest survives on the mountain in patches to this day.

This is the Rain Pond. In times of scarce rain, local villagers used to climb the mountain and hold a festival at this pond to make it rain because rain gods were enshrined nearby. Apparently “something strange happens in the pond” if you hold your breath and complete seven full laps around the pond.

The water was pretty stagnant and dirty.

Ontake-Hachiman Shrine. This shrine has a convoluted history. While the shrine has been around for a while, it wasn’t until the late Edo Period that access to the shrine was expanded thanks to stone steps. The local lord subcontracted administration of this area to a samurai named Ogawara, who in turned hired a peasant named Yohei to pull roots and do general upkeep on the mountain. Yohei apparently fell asleep on the job and fell down a cliff. This sparked a religious fervor in Yohei that inspired him to build the stone steps leading to the shrine.

The shrine was roped into Ontake-kyo, a Shinto sect that emphasizes mountain worship, that gained fervent followers in the Meiji Era. It was later co-dedicated to Hachiman, the “Shinto god of war.”

The steps that Yohei built.

Concrete Torii leading to Yohei’s shrine, built in the 80s.

A lumber yard. There were a lot of these in town as the area has been a logging center since the Heian era.

The course called on us to walk through some private farms on the way to the next attraction, a large, fast-flowing river.

A tiny, decrepit shrine apparently kept by the neighborhood.

The purifying water had dried up.

Despite the Shinto torii, apparently this shrine is dedicated to Acala aka Fudo, a Buddhist wisdom king revered for being unmoved by carnal temptations.

Much of the path was lined by concrete fences shaped like wooden logs. This part of the fence had apparently broken at some point, so the caretakers replaced the “logs” with unmolded concrete. It’s a sign of Japan’s modern era that even a well-known logging town uses concrete to fence its hiking paths.

The river. In case you were wondering, yes the riverbank is paved over in some parts.

A farmer put some fruit out for sale using the honor system for payment. Sadly, there was no money in the jar, meaning either no one bought anything or some dishonorable cad stole the money.

There were a lot of overgrown trees and weeds.

The basketball court had obviously not been kept up in years. It stood behind a community center next to a beautifully kept shrine/temple combination. Not sure why no one took care of the basketball court.

This shrine was originally built in the 1150s dedicated to Prince Shotoku, the regent of the 6th and 7th centuries credited with being Japan’s first lawgiver who may have been a myth invented by the Fujiwara clan to justify the political status quo during the Heian period. The accompanying Shinto shrine was probably built by an Ogawara, a samurai family whose name can still be seen all over Hannou-shi.

Is it me, or is the rising sun on this flag a little too big?

More lumber.

This was Ogawara’s house, right next to Ogawara lumber. These guys are like the Tannens in Back to the Future 2!

Several groups were having barbecues on the riverbank. I was tempted to join them.

Closer to the station, there were a lot of modern apartment buildings, but some of them looked kind of abandoned.

First up we have this guy fishing on the tetrapods. Not sure what he is trying to catch, but maybe these tetrapods in the middle of the river give him a strategic position away from other fishermen.

This photo was taken from the Kasaibashi bridge.

Since then, I have flown a hundred thousand miles, earned three diplomas, and have seen my Japanese high school closed down and stupidly renamed while my American high school gets shuttered due to the swine flu.

I still have many memories of that first year, and for the next eleven months, will be sharing some of those memories here on the blog. (Those of you who don’t care can simply avoid the jump, and Adamu will still regale you with tales of the Adachi-ku ballot).

I left Miami on August 19, 1999, said goodbye to the US at Dallas/Fort Worth, and took off for Japan, landing at Kansai Airport on August 20. Although I had flown to Europe many times before, this flight was the longest I had ever taken up to that point, and I could not get a wink of sleep to save my life. The thought of being on a new continent, living a new life, was that exciting.

Arriving at Kansai was surreal. The airport itself wasn’t. Before I left, I had looked up Osaka in Microsoft Encarta, my only handy reference in the days before Wikipedia, and the arrivals hall at Kansai was one of the only pictures they had of the city.

The view that didn’t surprise me

By the time we landed, I was half-asleep and the world was moving several paces faster than I was. I had checked two suitcases, one containing all my clothes, the other empty for whatever I happened to pick up in Osaka. Naturally, the empty one showed up on the carousel and the full one didn’t, so I had to file a report with the JAL attendants and wander out of customs, with no more than the clothes on my back and a carry-on full of CDs. By the time I finally got out, my welcoming committee was also tired and indifferent (the banner they had prepared was halfway on the floor), but they welcomed me anyway, and then my host family drove me home.

My first real memory of Japan is the smell of the air outside the Kansai Airport terminal. It smelled different—I can’t say why or how, but it did. Then I remember riding up the Hanshin Expressway, watching the endless steel walls zip by my window and wondering how much ore they had to pull out of the ground to smelt the things. At one point, we took an off-ramp, drove through the city for a bit and then got back on.

I took a shower in the family’s eerie Japanese bathroom. I knew the proper bathing procedure but didn’t expect every aspect of the room to be so different, from the faucet to the tub to the towels to the humidity of the air inside. They let me borrow a T-shirt, shorts and socks designed for a person several sizes smaller than me, all of which I gratefully accepted. Then I went to bed. Thus ended my first day in Japan.

Anyone who has been in Japan for a while knows that the “international” circles of this country contain a fair share of weirdoes, people who apparently unnerve their fellow Japanese to such an extent that they have to rely on foreigners for social support. Fortunately, when I look back now, I realize that Rotary could not possibly have given me a more orthodox example of a Japanese host family.

The father was a short, tanned, balding, rather muscular fellow who was the president of a dental supply company based out of a rather shoddy-looking office in Osaka. The mother was a needlessly patient housewife who broiled fish for breakfast (the cornflakes were a one-time free pass), cleaned the house in the late morning and napped by the TV in the afternoon. The daughter was in middle school and had joined the “folk song club;” playing guitar was apparently the only thing she did outside school besides homework, TV and manga. There was even a small annoying dog to complete the picture. The son, who I only met once, was on exchange in Canada, and I had effectively taken his place in the household. It was like something out of a prime-time animated sitcom.

Most importantly for me, none of them spoke English. The daughter could piece together a passable English sentence given a dictionary and a lot of effort, but otherwise everything was done in Japanese. So I learned very quickly, and they never failed to correct my mistakes, up to and including the improper use of formal language. My host father was always “Otousan” and my host mother was always “Okaasan.”

The family lived in the Senri New Town north of Osaka proper. Senri is the oldest example of large-scale government-planned suburban development in Japan, dating back to the early 1960s (the 1970 Expo was held just a few clicks to the east). It still has the feel of that era, with roads winding between giant apartment blocks, and odd shades of mustard and lime strewn about the walls of public buildings.

The family’s house was in a sort-of American-style plot of single-family houses in neat curving rows on one side of a large park. To go to the nearest station, Senri-Chuo, I would walk through the park (cicadas blaring in my ears the whole way), then down a long walkway between two columns of office buildings, then across a skybridge spanning the Shin-Midosuji expressway, and then through the giant terraced shopping center surrounding the station. To my eyes, it was almost as if someone had taken the suburbs of Miami and run them through a trash compactor, or perhaps stuck a black hole in the middle which drew everything closer together.

A couple of days into my stay, one of the program administrators called my host family and told them my lost suitcase had been found. Some confused lady had mistaken it for her own and took it home. Another couple of days later, the suitcase showed up at my host family’s door, neatly wrapped in plastic with a takkyubin tag hanging off it. I didn’t think very much of this at the time, and in retrospect, I have trouble understanding why I was so nonplussed: it was a very early snapshot of how Japan works.

In fact, three or four weeks in, one of my friends back home e-mailed me asking “Has it hit you yet?” At that point, it hadn’t: the world around me still seemed familiar enough, even if every minute thing was slightly off. The hammer of culture shock didn’t whack me until I was starting to get used to Osaka. But that’s another post.

大きな地図で見る

What is Tsushima?
Tsushima is an island situated almost perfectly between the Korean Peninsula and the island of Kyushu, but which has been in the Japanese cultural sphere for all of recorded history (since at least the Kofun period). The Mongols invaded the island twice on their way to Japan, slaughtering many of the inhabitants. After their departure, it once again became an independent Japanese province under the control of the So Clan, who ruled the island for seven centuries. The So Clan maintained relatively friendly relations with Korea, and often acted as an ipso facto advocate for Korea domestically in Japan. Today, it is part of Nagasaki prefecture, despite its geographic proximity to Fukuoka.

It has a very small population—despite being Japan’s sixth largest island, it is home to only 34,000 people. (By comparison, the smaller Sado Island off the coast of Niigata has a population of 63,000.)

How do you get there?
I flew from Tokyo into Fukuoka and took a night ferry from Fukuoka to Tsushima. The other way to travel there from Japan is to take a flight from Nagasaki. There are also flights and ferries from Korea.

How do you get around?
You must take a car, motorcycle, or bicycle. There is basically no public transportation and only a few sights are in the city limits. Tsushima is, like much of Kyushu, very hilly and not the greatest cycling terrain, unless you’re crazy enough to enjoy stuff like that (like me). A ferry bus tours around the beautiful bay in the middle of the island about twice a day.

I hear there are problems with Tsushima and Korean tourists/capital investment/territorial claims.
Yes, there are a myriad of issues, from Korean acquisition of (very cheap) land, Korean tourists with awful manners and drunken behavior, and occasional claims by Korean public figures that Tsushima is/should be/in fact actually is/etc. Korean territory. The details are far too tedious to discuss in detail, but if you want more info you can read a summary in Japanese here. I saw lots of Koreans on guided tours, and they were very rowdy and drunk at my hotel—but they must outnumber Japanese tourists 5 to 1, so the money from foreign touristm must be welcome to this relatively poor and isolated corner of Japan.

Where can I get more information?
Japanese travel guides are notoriously lame, with information only on onsens and hotel meals. You can get all the information you need online if you can read Japanese. A good site is here, a tourism pamphlet is here, and a Google Maps collection of sites to see is here.

Is it worth visiting?
Absolutely. There are some wonderful historical sights, natural treasures, beautiful views, and the sights are often empty and allow the tourist to enjoy solidarity. I’ll explain some of the fun sights to see in my next two posts. But in the meantime, here are a few pictures with some comments.

A view of the eastern shore of the southern half of the island.

Tsushima has lots of shale, which is used in building ishigaki stone walls, foundations of buildings, and old castles now in ruins. The stone walls in particular are beautiful, as the shale is inconsistent in shape but with very clean angles, making for elegant construction. These walls really are everywhere, such as here where it remains in front of a shoddy apartment building.

An abandoned shrine.

A kofun grave dating from the 2nd-5th century, evidence of Tsushima’s cultural ties to the rest of Japan.