It’s time for ‘bush rowing’ (pushing yourself hard through a thick bush)
And this is the entrance.
Now I walk into the mountain.
Don’t get stubbed by bamboos!
It really is dangerous!
He’s kept telling me for the last 10 days.
In the first 2 meters, a bamboo already stubbed my face, luckily missing my eyes.
Wow, this really let me become so minded!
Lots of his advices echo in my mind.
-Always stay close to me.
-Follow me in any means.
-Do not lose sight of me!
Because you do get lost while
you are picking bamboo shoots.
I really
miss him
in a moment.
The owner of Korakukan
as if he was possessed by a ghost
or drained of strength and absorbed into the woods
without running or hurrying at all
his figure becomes smaller
in an abnormal speed
if I followed him in a normal pace.
On the other hand
he sits right next to me before I realized
his existence in the mountain is just like a Tengu (a long-nosed legendary goblin)
To find bamboo shoots,
we crawl on all fours at the foot of 3-4 meter tall bamboo bush.
There must be lots of different animals living here
and now I am one of them.
Trees are here, too.
He gets absorbed in the surrounding
and soon disappears.
It’s not that I miss him
but instead, he becomes a part of the mountain.
Mysteriously
I cannot capture him in pictures
isn’t he really a Tengu?
More and more bushes.
As the cloth I tied diagonally across my chest becomes full of bamboo shoots I go empty the cloth
I continued to go empty the cloth
as it becomes full
Stuffed a backpack with today’s catch
and walked splashing the stream water
across a ski area
Then go back to the inn by motorcycle.
As soon as we get to the inn
we start the sequence of bamboo cooking – from pealing the skins off.
In every dish we had there were bamboo shoots.
What a grateful dinner!
＊(As I hardly had any wifi during this trip, I wrote articles from 1/30-30/30 all at once after coming back. )
＊Click here to read the articles from the beginning.