A visit to Morioka

With Takumi and the others on their way to other parts of Japan, Friday morning Tetsu and I took off for Morioka, his hometown and the city where I first lived when coming to Japan.  40 years ago there was still no Bullet Train and the foreigners were few and far between.  Now it is rather a bustling city.

But we weren't going up to Morioka by Bullet Train, instead we drove the 6 hours on the expressway making rest stops along the way.  My neighbors agreed to take care of the cats for me but we bundled Choco and her kennel into the car and she joined us on the trip.  I'm not sure how much Choco likes traveling as she has to spend all that time in her kennel... but she can see out the window and I slipped her treats occasionally.  There are very nice dog runs at the different service areas along route.

The reason for going to Morioka was...  to see friends, to pay an annual visit to the church where we are members, to visit our family's grave. All three reasons are true, but to Japanese, only the last one really makes any sense. Anybody and everybody makes annual, bi-annual treks to their hometowns to visit their family grave...  It is a major part of filial piety!  I always find this a bit difficult to understand as in America I never had the custom of grave visiting.  I have never visited my grandparents graves (in Indiana and Illinois) and my father's ashes were spread at sea so there's no place to visit there either...

The first stop we made in Morioka was at a garden and hardware store to pick up some decorative stones for our grave site.   With only a yearly visit, we knew that the first job was going to be pulling weeds and raking up the area.  The Christian cemetery is up on a hillside (rather than on Buddhist temple grounds) and each grave is cared for by each family so little maintenance gets done. Once we'd loaded bags of gravel and stones we headed for the small business hotel in the middle of downtown Morioka for the night.  (Choco slept in the car.)

The next morning we treated Choco to a romp around the city park which is located on castle ruins...  and then off we went to the cemetery.

 The bridge crossing a dry castle moat.

Japanese castle walls are a fascinating interlocking of large and small stones.  They are constructed so that they hold up even with the strong earthquakes we get (as proven by the Kumamoto castle which managed to survive the 7.0 strength earthquake last year with the corner stones just barely holding the castle weight).

 Yep...  Choco looks like she's glad she was included on our trip.

The cherry blossoms were just beginning to bloom.

Tetsu and I did a bunch of weeding and then spread out our stones and washed down the grave stone. We'd also bought some measly flowers at a local supermarket when....

 Da-da-da-da!  My friend Nobuko-san arrived at the cemetery laden with flowers from her garden!

Nobuko-san was my first friend when I arrived in Japan and as I couldn't yet speak Japanese I chattered away at her in English and she chattered back at me in Japanese and somehow we made a lasting friendship. 

Our family grave... It is our immediate family's grave for one reason because Tetsu isn't the eldest son and his ancestor's grave is somewhere else (generations and generations of ashes are kept in the same grave). It is also our own grave as we are Christian whereas the rest of Tetsu's family is Buddhist.  Their grave is on a temple ground.  And this is our family grave because it already holds the ashes of our first born child, Maya-chan who died at two months of age.  Though Tetsu and I were young, we were "given" a small portion of land in our church's section of the Christian cemetery and we were able to start our own "family" grave.  The inscription (besides our family name) is from Exodus 15:2.

"The Lord is my strength and my song,

And He has become my salvation."

While Tetsu swept and scrubbed, Nobuko-san and I sat at the grave and got caught up on the last year.  You can tell a good friend when she even enjoys a visit with you at a CEMETERY!  We also wandered around looking at gravestones and "visiting" church friends whom we knew.
We said good-bye to Nobuko-san and then headed over to Tetsu's high school friend's house meeting up with yet another friend. 

We spent 7 hours chatting with these friends and munching on local foods that Tetsu remembers and loves so much. 

Part way through I started teaching the wife how to do tatting as I'd cleverly brought along a couple of tatting shuttles on the trip north.

 Tetsu's friend had a very cute dog!

Good times with good friends. 

Grave visit, checked off..  Visiting with friends, checked off.  Last purpose... getting to the church, to be done on the morrow.