Down the Rabbit Hole, Through the Looking Glass, Over the Rainbow: Wrapping Up Ikegami

In retrospect, Ikegami might have been some sort of alternate reality. Life took on a surreal cast the moment we hopped on the wrong train and a man jumped up and down while shouting "Ka-ma-ta! Ka-ma-ta! Ka-ma-ta!" to illustrate an effective technique for finding the correct train. Maybe he's Japan's answer to the March Hare.

The icing on the cake, for Bossy at least, was the tiny lady in the purple bucket hat who materialized in the Daibo Hongyo-ji courtyard when we were lacing up our shoes after exiting the Secret Garden. For brevity's sake, we'll call her Merry Prankster.



Merry Prankster had the mannerisms of a songbird, tweeting away in rapid-fire Japanese for twenty or so seconds then standing as still as a statue with an expectant smile on her face. We shrugged, shook our heads, and smiled apologetically, pretty much in unison after the third or fourth refrain. A casual observer might have taken us for a pale imitation of a famous Motown quartet.

Eventually she pointed to the cemetery on the hill behind us. We pointed toward Honmon-ji temple on the hill in front of us. She reached into the plastic bag she was carrying, extracted a bottle of what looked like tea, waved the bottle in the air, and tucked the bottle back into the bag. We started walking toward Honmon-ji. Merry Prankster planted her tiny feet in gravel and jabbed her index finger toward the cemetery. A stream of Japanese poured from her mouth. It sounded like this: beekaydeekayneekay-SAMURAI-shoodoobeekaymeekaynooshoo.

What can I say? She was vivacious, insistent, and vaguely mesmerizing. Maybe she hypnotized us when she waved that magic bottle. At any rate, for reasons that remain unclear two days later, the Four Explorers accompanied Merry Prankster to the cemetery on top of the hill.



There were many stairs to climb but they were shallow and liberally interspersed with broad landings. In other words, the Explorers were not so winded they could not engage in witty repartee.

- Maybe she's leading us to a store where we can buy bottled tea.
- Maybe she's going to show us the grave of a famous Samurai warrior.
- Maybe she's taking us to the cemetery because that's the most convenient place to dispose of our bodies after she murders us.

That last contribution was Bossy's which will come as no surprise to most of you. Weather and Artistic seemed to find it slightly amusing. Novice just looked completely terrified.

We reached the summit. Merry Prankster tugged on Bossy's sleeve. Notwithstanding the language barrier on top of Bossy's hearing issues, dropping her ear to the level of Merry Prankster's mouth seemed the polite thing to do. Just before dissolving into peals of laughter, Merry Prankster chortled, "I know English."



Duly chastened and completely mortified, the formerly sarcastic Bossy and her fellow Explorers followed the Merry Prankster across the broad summit and partway down the other side of the hill until they reached a monument (above). Merry Prankster claimed the monument honors Ieyasu Tokugawa but Bossy believes Ieyasu is buried in Nikko so this is certainly not the great Shogun's final resting place. Bossy is grappling with trust issues at this juncture.

Merry Prankster chatted with another woman, we'll call her Granny Yoda, at the base of the monument then gestured for us to follow Granny Yoda. Which we did (!) until we reached the edge of a precipice (!) overlooking a pagoda with a shiny golden roof.



Bidding sayonara and domo arigato (for not pushing us off the cliff) to Granny Yoda, we followed Merry Prankster to Honmon-ji temple. We had the temple in our sights, it was just across the street in fact, when Merry Prankster shooed us into a modern temple compound, across a stretch of white gravel the length of a football field, and into a building where we admired a pair of ancient statues, the fierce alpha and omega warrior gods traditionally situated at the entrances to Shinto shrines.

After we emitted the obligatory oohs and ahs, Merry Prankster ushered us around the building to a square of gravel in the rear, an extremely stark setting featuring an octagonal wooden building flanked by two very bushy shrubs about seven feet high. Merry Prankster poked her arms into the shrub on the left and pulled out five small oranges the size of a chubby toddler's fist. Mikan oranges are notoriously easy to peel. The rind had already burst open on the Mikan the Merry Prankster handed to Bossy. Bossy popped the juicy fruit out of the rind and into her mouth in one swift motion. The fruit landed in Bossy's mouth just as Artistic warned, "Be careful of the seeds!"

Bossy scooted around to the far side of the bush to expel the seeds as delicately as possible. Seconds later Novice and Weather joined her and pitched their uneaten Mikans into the bush. "How could you put that in your mouth," they asked in concern/disgust/amazement. "Thanks to you, we're still worrying about being buried in that cemetery." (Note to Self: Assuming we survive the Ikegami expedition, take Novice and Weather to Little Mary's Grave when we are all back in the States.)

Compared to the adventure of getting there, Honmon-ji itself was fairly anticlimactic. Bossy's camera died - from Mikan poisoning no doubt - about halfway across the temple grounds but here are some of the early highlights to reward anyone with the patience to have stayed with me this far (Hi, honey!).

The Kyozo sutra storage building (above) is among the historic landmarks that survived the 1945 air raids. That's why Bossy took this picture. Looking at it now, Bossy sees Granny Yoda is standing near the building's entrance. Did she follow us from the cemetery?

A dragon is spitting or vomiting water into the purification tank.

Weather thinks this statue (above) is the patron saint of curling. Bossy thinks (a) this statue is the patron saint of janitors, and (b) Weather might have overdosed on the Winter Olympics.

Novice takes a picture while Artistic, Merry Prankster, and Weather head toward the five-story pagoda, the "oldest and largest wooden tower in the Kanto region".

We had lunch at a lovely cafe near the train station. I had a salad and a piece of toast three inches thick and deeply scored to encourage optimal butter penetration. Weather had pasta with every possible variety of mushroom, while Artistic and Novice settled on a seafood and rice concoction. For the benefit of any readers who might be interested in exploring Ikegami on their own, we left the base at 8:00 am and were back home by 2:30 pm.