Trailblazer Guide Books

Engagingly written… all the guides from this stable are first class
 - Traveller

English or Japlish?
‘English’ is everywhere you look in Japan, on vending machines, advertising hoardings, in shops and on television, though it doesn't take long to realize that this is not the English you may know from back home. The Japanese use of English to sell products or simply look trendy on T-shirts has been dubbed ‘Japlish�; books of examples are available in Tokyo. Here is a selection of signs I spotted around the country:
- On a plastic bag with a picture of a frog: “Through thick and thin, whether green skin's out or in, just say ‘ribbit’ and you'll be OK!”
- On a T-shirt: ‘It is man made. It is supposed to break down.’
- At a market stall selling dried fish in Saga station: ‘When a fish slip, a fish start to walk.’
- In the books section of a Tokyo department store: ‘A good heavy book holds you down. It keeps you from getting up and having another gin and tonic.’

Hi-tech attention to the call of nature
Most toilets in Japan are Western style, though on some older trains and in public loos you'll still find Asian squat toilets. Note that toilet paper is rarely found in public loos.

Big hotels constantly try to outdo their rivals by fitting guest rooms with futuristic lavatories. The facilities on some top-class models include a choice of background music (to hide your own natural noises), heated seats with adjustable temperature gauge, a built-in bidet and a device that measures your blood pressure while you wait. On even the most basic models there are at least two buttons to press: one is for the flush and the other activates a vertical hot water jet – you really don't want to get these two mixed up. On some toilets there are two levels of flush though the effect of using the wrong one is not so dramatic.

don't be surprised if you catch sight in the evening of drunk businessmen relieving themselves in the street or on station platforms – a reminder, perhaps, that however hi-tech the Japanese make their toilets, there are never enough of them.

Real enthusiasts will want to pay a visit to the World Toilet Museum in Utazu.

World Toilet Museum
The World Toilet Museum (daily, 9:30am-6pm) is housed in a small red building attached to the Gold Tower in Utazu. it's tiny, but does contain the world's only solid gold toilet and accompanying gold toilet slippers. This is followed by a brief history of toilets, along with replica lavatories from around the world. you'll find everything from primitive holes in the ground to ornate toilet suites from Versailles and Vienna (proving that citizens of culturally refined cities still have to submit to the demands of Mother Nature). Chopin plays in the background.

Curiously, all the toilets have signs on them in Japanese urging visitors not to use them. Since the toilets are all plumbed in, there is theoretically nothing to stop you giving them a go, except that they are on display in a museum. The museum is on the second floor. Public toilets are on the ground floor and worth a brief look in themselves.

Sir Rutherford Alcock and ‘Poor Toby�
Sir Rutherford Alcock, a British minister, visited Japan in 1859 and the following year climbed Mt Fuji. Clearly not a man used to modesty, Alcock stopped in Atami on his return from Fuji and had a monument built here with the inscription: ‘I am the first non-Japanese to have climbed Mt Fuji and visited Atami’. It stands next to the Oyu geyser, alongside a monument to Alcock's faithful Scottish terrier Toby. Having survived the journey from Britain, Toby suffered the misfortune of standing on the piece of ground from where the geyser used to periodically erupt. The inevitable happened; the unsuspecting dog was blasted into the air by the force of the boiling water shooting out from the earth.

A distraught Alcock organized a funeral for his pet in Atami, an event which was almost certainly the origin of Britain's reputation in Japan as a nation of eccentrics. Toby was buried beside the geyser, perhaps as a warning to other mad dogs and Englishmen to beware of the danger that lurks close by. His tombstone reads simply: ‘Poor Toby, 23 September 1860’. If the sign at the geyser is to be believed, the dog did not die in vain. ‘At that time, Japan had a bad impression of the British people,’ reads the sign. Alcock reported back to Britain that the Japanese had been very kind to him during his period of mourning and advised his country that they should not look upon Japan as an enemy. ‘Thanks to his report and advice,’ continues the sign, ‘Great Britain's public opinion towards Japan turned favourable�.

In Toby's day the spring gushed hot water and steam six times a day, ‘shaking the earth with its vigorous blasts’. During the 100 years since Alcock's visit to Atami the geyser gradually gave up and died. In 1962 it was given a new lease of (artificial) life and now goes off for three minutes with four-minute intervals.

Jesus in Japan?
The journey to the remote village of Shingo, deep in the mountains west of Hachinohe, certainly feels like a pilgrimage. There is no rail line and the only way of reaching the village is to take two buses. Your destination is the Christ Park, so called because locals claim that it contains the grave of none other than Jesus Christ. The story goes that instead of dying on the cross, Jesus escaped at the last minute, fled to Siberia, made his way to Alaska and finally boarded a boat bound for Japan, where he landed at the port of Hachinohe. He quickly found his way to the village of Herai (now called Shingo) where he married a Japanese woman called Miyuko, had three daughters and lived to 106. In his latter years, Christ is said to have travelled around Japan, ‘endeavouring to save the common people, while observing the language, customs and manners of the various regions’. He is described in village records as being ‘grey haired and rather bald with a ruddy complexion and high nose and [he] wore a coat with many folds, causing people to hold him in awe as a long-nosed goblin.’

The extraordinary story only came to light in 1935 when two graves were found in a bamboo thicket at the top of a small hill in the village. It wasn't until May 1936, when Christ's ‘last will and testament’ mysteriously turned up in the village, that the significance of these graves was revealed: one of the graves was Christ's, the other belonged to his brother, called Isukiri. Or rather, just his brother's ear. Supposedly Jesus managed to avoid crucifixion thanks to his brother who ‘casually took Christ's place and died on his cross’, allowing him to escape to Japan clutching one of Isukiri's ears along with some ‘hair of the Virgin Mary’. Further ‘proof’ can be found down in the village: Herai, the ancient name of the village, is said to be a corruption of ‘Hebrew’ and a villager who died some years ago ‘looked not like a Japanese, his eyes were blue like those of a foreigner’. Curiously, there has been little attempt to cash in on the story by turning the park into a tacky tourist trap. Indeed, there's so little publicity that it's almost as if the village is embarrassed by the legend and doesn't quite know what to do with its two graves up on the hill.

The Christ Park, which contains the two graves as well as a small museum (daily except Wed, 9am-5pm) telling the story in Japanese and English, is open to the public. From Hachinohe station, take a bus bound for Gonohe (37 mins). From Gonohe, connect with a bus that takes you direct to the Christ Park just outside Shingo Village (34 mins). Tell the driver you want to get out at Kuristo-koen. For up-to-date timetables, contact Nambu Bus (tel 0178-44 7111, Japanese only).