Journeys To Places Unknown

My recent trip out across the pacific took me on a journey to meet friends and see places I hadn't seen even in my final year of living in Japan. My first home in Japan was a town in the northern part of Honshu, the main island, called Morioka. In this small yet lively town I met my closest friends in Japan and had a number of adventures touring all across the countryside. I ran into old abandoned shrines and statues long forgotten in the wilderness around my adopted second home. Its amazing to think that I had perhaps been places where few if any people, much less a westerner, had been in perhaps a hundred years.

Brief story: Morioka is surrounded by rice fields and undeveloped hillsides covered in forest growth. This forest growth is not impassable to hiking, however. The trees are spread apart and are themselves thin enough to allow a good level of visibility. In fact, there is a forest near Mt. Fuji called Aokigahara where hundreds of people go each year to commit suicide. They do the deed in various methods, but each year the authorities go through and sweep out the dead bodies. I once saw a television special on the subject while I was living in Tokyo. And, yes, I have hiked around that forest as well when some Japanese friends and I went to climb Mt. Fuji. Muhahahaha! But that is another story. Back to Morioka.

One day, while I was well off the beaten path (or any path, for that matter) I stumbled upon a stone pillar with names engraved on it. My first thought was that it was an abandoned shrine of some sort. Whether it marked a family grave or something similar, I still do not know. I do know that I sensed that I was the first person in a very long while to be looking at it. Oddly, when I tried to photograph the thing with my digital camera, all my pictures came out rounded as if I had tried to take the picture in a convex mirror. Weird. When I showed the photos to some Japanese friends of mine, they had no idea what it was. Even weirder.

On my most recent trip to Morioka just one week ago, I walked not too far from the hill on which that monument probably still rests. And I got some kind of freaked out because for no reason the hair on my neck stood out and my body reacted as if I were deathly cold, though it was a fairly warm evening. Then the freaky part happened. I felt the presence of a Japanese girl whom I'd never met beside me and I remember thinking that she was telling me that I should be afraid. "Kowai! Kowai, desho?" I could not hear her or even see her, but I got the feeling as if she were beside me, looking up at that hill.

Could've been my imagination, but why? I had not even remembered that monument until a good ten minutes or so after that recent freaky experience. I had a cassette recorder with me at the time, and began recording the story right after my brush near that hill. So I have documented my recollection of all that occurred both that night and my recollection of what happened three years ago when I found that monument forgotten in the middle of nowhere.