Mountain Walk: Part 2

In Part 1, I showed the nice parts of this walk. Here I'll show the not so nice. We told you we live in the "real Japan".

In Japan they really love their nature but what they love more is controlling it.

All the way up the mountain a stream flows next to the road. They've paved under the entire thing. They're also currently paving under the big river that flows into the lake. Next they'll pave under the lake!

Here's where the guys are always burning garbage.

Here's where people just dump their garbage.

This appears to be where people open their car doors and ditch their McDonalds wrappers.

It just feels wrong to garden so near the cemetery.

Along the way one must be careful not to fall into the gaijin trap gutters.

It's mostly a lovely town but if you go back up into it a ways this is the kind of thing you'll find. Random garbage dumps. Abandoned cars and shacks. If I could vote here, I'd be asking the politicians (who have recently been riding around in vans waving their white gloved hands out the windows and blaring messages over loudspeakers) about these spots. Also, we can't understand why they don't bury their power lines - they muck up the mountain vistas.

Most days all we notice is the beautiful (like cherry blossoms and Mt. Fuji views) but some days it's the ugly things like these that stand out.