SYNOPSIS: Andy drinks with the folks at work near fabulous Mount Fuji.

For us JETs, there was a group trip planned for Mt. Fuji. Even though I had never actually been to Fuji,  I wasn't really too interested, so I turned it down.  However, it was one week later that Kigure at the village office told me that there was a full office trip (some 100+ people) planned that very same weekend.  I was interested in doing the bonding thing with my workmates, so I heartily agreed to go.   I told him that I was very interested in climbing Mt. Fuji, to which he replied that we weren't going to actually go to the top of Fuji, but rather do something to the extent of go near Mt. Fuji.  And drink a lot.
The bus ride.  It all started at around 6:30 in the morning on Saturday, when the dreary masses shuffled onto three chartered busses and we were soon off.  Interesting note about Japanese chartered busses- they don't have bathrooms, but they do have TVs, movies, Karaoke, and a woman who tells you all about the nondescript places that you're passing through in a high, squeaky vioce through a microphone when you're trying to sleep.  I'm not kidding about that either- a bus "tour guide" is as common a feature to a Japanese chartered bus as... say... wheels.  The trip to Fuji lasted far longer than any decent ride should have.  I can’t recall completely what happened on our bus, the second of three. I just remember that a lot of people were smoking, even more were drinking, and everyone was having a blast talking and generally being silly.  As it turns out, when a bunch of men get together in such a situation they regress in age to about the age of 13 or 15 or so. I remember being asked (grabbed, actually) by this one guy who worked downstairs from me about the size of my penis.  I was warned about these kind of things earlier at a more leisurely JET conference, and was told a humerous way of answering that sort of question: "Chooooo suge" (lit.  'Fuckin' WOW!').  This didn't do the trick though- he became more and more insistent on finding out (even resorting to grabbing, or asking "10 centimeters? 20? 30?").  So I kept trying to come up with wittier and wittier remarks: I'd love to tell you, but I don't want to make you cry.  I would really like to tell you, but I came on this trip to make friends, and if I told you all how big I was, you all would get jealous and hate me.  Ever really see a horse?...  That sort of thing.  To no avail.  I ended up politely excusing myself and getting the hell out of there.   Soon after, everyone (that is, the guys that were around me) started talking about their dicks and making silly jokes of poor taste.  After a bit though, they got over it and got around to having fun with my name.  My name in Japanese is "An-do-ryu", and written a certain way in Chinese characters means "Safe Path Dragon" (or the Dragon of the Cheapest Path, or the Dragon of Traffic Safety).  Anyway, one guy, who was nice, but drunk to stupidity at that point, insisted on calling my simply "Ryu", like the Street Fighter character of the same name.
Anyway, I, being an American, naturally thought that our busses we were going to go straight to Fuji; You know, the short, fast and pragmatic.  Nope.  First, we stopped at one gift center, than another, and then yet another.  We ate lunch at some cafeteria (prepaid) where, while we ate udon, a man came up and told us how the udon was famous in the area and please, would we not buy some for gifts? I felt like throwing something at him for advertizing himself so blatantly and in such a door-to-door fashion.

I met the interesting, oft strange young ladies who also worked at the Yakuba like young Suzuki with the brown hair and Mochi-chan, this cool girl who’s a black-belt at Shotokan Karate.  We both love martial arts and promised to sometime get together and kick each others' asses.  Anyway, I met a bunch of people on the way there.  Not only did I hang out with Hosono Shigeru, whom I had befriended earlier (see relevant link), I also made the aquaintance of the young Akustu Yoshi, who I hung out with every once in awhile.
Anyway, it took us forever to finally arrive to the Mt. Fuji area.  I was complaining to myself at that point- it's too hot, everyone's drunk, I've finished my book, that weird chick's hitting on me again... basically whining myself into a slump until we finally arrived at the hotel.  From there, though, everything changed.  Everything.  I took back in a heartbeat all my juvenile whinings a hundredfold.  In fact, I can’t even remember the bus trip that well at all, but I recall almost every minute, every second, of my stay at the hotel.  First of all, it was simply the most beautiful place I had ever stayed in my life.  It was a cross between modern hotel decadance and old-school japanese ryokan.  It was called Kaneyamaen, and I said that I will probably come again if I get married (it's the kind of place that normal folks like me could afford maybe once in their lives).  There were normal doors mixed with the Japanese style rice-paper sliding doors everywhere (I just learned that the word for sliding doors, at least the sound, is 'Garagaragaragara…')
Kigure and I, upon our arrival, immediately ran around the hotel looking at the various sights and services that the hotel had to offer.  We held off on going to the sentoo, or Japanese-style hot baths, for later.  Instead we geared up in the yukata (robes) that we were given, and wandered all over the place, observing things like the cool, black-marble bedded stream that ran through the length of the hotel, the massive garden in the back which boasted spectacular rock gardens and fascinating trees, and the lobby that had contained a pond with fish, and huge taiko drums.  Soon after, we made our way to the enkai hall with the rest of the people in the Yakuba.  The room was huge, lined completely with tatami, upon which we sat on these little stiff pillow-chairs.  There were about 100 or so chairs set up, and in front of each one was a plate loaded with food- all sorts of strange foods.  Two words: fresh and weird.  There was sashimi (raw fish), raw this, raw that, everything tasted like it was just picked, grown, killed, or whatever.  On a hotplate in front of me, over an unlit sterno stove, was something that looked like a large shellfish- still in the shell, but upside-down so that its "foot" was bulging into the air.  The guy next to me pointed at it and we had an exchange that went something like this:

J: "Have you ever eaten awabi before?"
Me: "Oh, me?  Not yet.  But it looks pretty... fresh. I Can't wait."
J: "It's very delicious.  You should try it."
Me: "It's really that good?"
J: "Yeah, really.  It's probably the best-tasting shellfish."
Me: "Wow.  Well, in that case I really am looking forward to eating it."
J: "They cook it in front of you."
Me: "Yeah, I can see the sterno." (he didn't appear to understand Sterno, but he went on anyway)
J: "It's still alive. Did you know that?"
Me: "Ha ha ha.  No, no I didn't know that.  Heh."
J: "No, really, it's still alive.  Look..."
With that, he picks up his chopstick and pokes at the foot of his awabi.  It starts slowly expanding and wriggling all over the place like the giant flapping muscle-thing that it is.
CUT TO scene of Andy turning green as he pokes at his awabi to find out that it wasn't a fluke, and that, yes, his too is alive.  Scene lasts five minutes, in which the audiance hears him say "I can't fucking believe this" no fewer than 12 times.

Well, after all the shit I give to my friends about trying new things, I just had to give it a shot.  After awhile, the hostess-women, dressed in Kimonos, turned on the stove (and flipped the thing on it's foot so that we couldn't see it wriggling all over while it fried), and in 12 minutes and 2 flips the thing was significantly dead and even almost cooked.  They cut it up in front of me (this was the same for the other 100+ people at the enkai), and I ate two or three small pieces.  Truth be told, the thing was pretty delicious.  Only problem was that I was it before it was cooked, so I couldn't get rid of the thought that I was chewing on the texture-equivalent of somebody's ear.
Anyway, the toasts were made, and soon people began eating and drinking. Some people (not the hostesses, but the other village office people) picked up bottles of nihonshuu (sake) and poured it for the village office elders who were sitting in front of everyone (assistant mayor, village superintendent, those sort of people and their wives).  Maybe 5 minutes later the chaos begun:  People getting up everywhere, whether they had finished eating or not, and started running for the rice wine so that they could pour wine for each other and drink one kampai after another.  All semblance of who was sitting where totally vanished as people, in an effort to make new friends or just talk with old friends, poured wine for each other and offered each other their food.  I must have drank toasts with over half of the people there (I did my fair share of pouring as well).  Right at the point that the world started getting really... HIC... goofy, it was time for Karaoke on the big monitor and stage in the back of the room.  I entertained with my half-naked white boy version of Billie Jean.  After that, Hosono, Yoshi and I sang Jamiriquois' Virtual Insanity- complete with skittering about the stage like it was the moving set in the video.  Unfortunately, I had completely forgotten what the song sounded like (except for the chorus) so Hosono saved my ass.
After I came off the stage from that one, I surveyed the chaos:  Tables and pillows everywhere, people in all stages of innebriation falling all over each other, one of the guys from the bus had dropped his pants and was... well... sticking out his ass, one of the village elders looked like he was sitting in the lotus position, but was tipped on his side and sleeping like that right in the middle of all the noise and chaos.
In brief, I knew I had found a new home.
Soon after that, my friends and I spent the rest of the evening running about the hotel, going outside to watch the hotel Taiko group perform, which was followed by fireworks, going to a karaoke room, eating nasty ramen to quell our killer munchies, talking "guy talk", that sort of thing.  After they went to bed I went to check out the hot baths.  I immersed myself in the 42 degree (C) water and made a time of it.  It was rather nice, actually- there was an outdoor section of the baths, from which you could see Mt. Fuji.  After that hot bath, I showered up, put on some complimentary hair tonic, and headed back to my room.  On the way, I passed these "electric message chairs"- you know, the kind like at The Sharper Image.  I sat in the thing for like 30 minutes, letting my body be pummeled into bioelecrtic ecstacy.  I returned to my room and was soon asleep on the big, puffy futon that the hotel staff had earlier set up for us.
The next day was rather uneventful.  Woke up feeling great (even on 3 hours of sleep), hit the baths again, then went to the breakfast buffet and ate far too much food that I probably couldn't normally comfortably afford.
Once we were gack on the bus, we actually made our way to up Fuji.  Not to the top, mind you- rather we went to The Fifth Station (gogome), the halfway point that consisted of restaraunts and shops, shops, shops to buy all sorts of souveneirs.
The only interesting thing that happened there was that I met this Korean guy about my age who was an English major in college and also a part of a group of International Boy Scout contingent that was attending some sort of Jamboree in Japan.  He wanted my help in finding an international phone.  Couldn't help him, but we did end up talking for a good 20 minutes or so about Scouts, America and Korea.
Interestingly enough, I ran into the Gunma JETs up there as well (and a couple of times at Rest Stations on the way home).  They had just come down from Mt. Fuji (it was about 2 in the afternoon and they had started up at 8:00 the night before), and they looked and talked like a clan of degenerate walking corpses.   I was very glad that I didn't go on the trip after all.  It sounded like everyone got a fair dose of altitude sickness, sunburn, dehydration, frostbite, and if they didn't get lost on the way down the only thing they had to look forward to was an overcrowded bus ride home.
MY bus ride home was rather uneventful, save that I watched Aladdin in Japanese.  The translation was pretty good, too, until someone in the movie started singing a song- at that point, it seemed Disney reluctantly agreed to go with anything that would rhyme in Japanese without sounding too ridiculous.