I decided to take another page out of, Japan Unraveled’s guide, and headed for Okayama, a town famous because of the Castle of crows and its massive garden. The town itself is plain as day, but the castle and the gardens are worth visiting all on their own. What I liked most about the castle was the dark gritty feel mixed so well with the immaculately clean grounds. There wasn’t anything there without a fresh coat of paint and well maintained everything, but because the castle was meant to look foreboding, it did, despite the perfect order the Japanese kept it in. Once paying to enter it and going floor by floor to the top, I saw down below the moat to the huge gardens.
After visiting the wardrobe, aka the shitter, which was the first Toto I’d seen which had a music machine built into it in order to A: Sooth your way to completing business, or B: Sooth the ears of others who are beholden to the noise of said business and would prefer Mozart instead... I used the function just for shits and giggles, of which I had both in spades.
The garden was a joy many tiers above the castle, mostly because it was filled with ponds and people enjoying them, surrounded by animals of all kinds both free to roam and held fast behind high fences. It was a promenade of well-dressed travelers equipped with parasols and picnic baskets enjoying the tree shade and ostriches. A real scene if I do say so myself, but that was it for Okayama.
I returned to my guest house, the first one of its kind that I’ve ever visited in all my Japan adventures, to think I’ve been here twice and never stayed in a traditional home with tatami mates, but not any longer! This place was in the boonies away from the city and it was still 4500 yen, which is expensive in my book, over $30. But the owner was really nice and so were the guests whom I got to know pretty well during the late-night dinner conversation. They were French, Dutch, and Chinese. We talked politics and about my book, I gave out my website, need to do that more often, how else are people going to find out about little old me? The Anarchist who barely exists in the world? Exactly.
If I’m being honest, and I always am, the town exists for a single building, one which existed as a living weapon for the people living there not so long ago. It’s hard to appreciate just how our world has transitioned from a state of total war in the physical, requiring massive fortifications, to one that is even more at war, though now the battles are fought almost exclusively in the mind using 5th generational warfare made possible by the age of information.
Now, in the greatest age of deceit and confusion that ever was, in the ruins of the old world built to maintain order, kept immaculate by the greatest losers in history, the Japanese, who though having lost the most important war ever, still rose to ultimate victory regardless... Here, I walk alone, in a country I have no claim too, wondering about my place, my time, my actions in a world gone mad.