me, every monday and tuesday working on this

A lot of personal growth and self-discovery this episode, an old friend back for a short appearance, and suddenly Yuru Camp tutorials, though Aoi’s narrating this time instead of Snake. Also, suffering. Coffee’s a helluva drug.

Torrent | Magnet

Notes:

Wahoo, we’ve got a lot again.

The first line in this episode is a haiku. The Japanese, in case you want to look it up, is 秋深き / 隣は何を / する人ぞ, by one Matsuo Bashou, the prototypical master of the artform. Very classic autumn poem. If you like: ‘In a yellow wood, the path diverged into two; I took the less trod.’.

The Japanese (or, some of them, anyway) divide coffee into eight roast levels; ‘high roast’ (ハイロースト) is the fourth of these, in ascending roastedness order. The full list is light, cinnamon, medium, high, city, full city, French, and Italian, where {light, cinnamon} compose the light roasts, {medium, high, city} the medium, and {full city, French, Italian} the dark. I struggled to find standard English equivalents (‘high’ doesn’t appear to be a real English term, unlike last episode’s somewhat attested ‘bright’), and so I left it in as the odd Japanese ‘high’. To expand on that, English terminology doesn’t seem settled on eight divisions (I saw eight, six, five, and three), nor are the names always in the same order. Usually, between ‘cinnamon’ and ‘city’ (which I presume are the same in English and Japanese, given their names; potentially bad assumption) lie ‘medium’ or maybe ‘American’, but the order didn’t seem consistent. Temperature levels aren’t standard either. If you put a gun to my head I’d translate ‘high roast’ as ‘American roast’, but I thought I’d as well just leave it in as it was. In any case, ‘high’ roast is certainly a medium roast (agreed to lie between first and second crack), and if you’re not some kind of coffee expert (I, for example, prefer McDonald’s’), that’s probably good enough.

The Kanto Eight Provinces (関八州, ‘Kanhasshuu’; directly, as given, but also ‘Eight Kanto Provinces’ or ‘Eight Provinces of Kanto’ or use whatever land-division term you want instead of ‘province’) are one of the historical definitions of ‘Kanto’. Prior to the Restoration (which established the current prefectural divisions, called 県 (except for Kyoto and Osaka (府), Hokkaido (道), and Tokyo (都))), Japan was divided into ‘provinces’ (or, again, whatever you like), typically denoted 国 (‘kuni’) or 州 (‘shuu’). The Eight (Sagami, Musashi, Awa, Kazusa, Shimousa, Hitachi, Kouzuke, and Shimotsuke) were what were considered to compose Kanto. Their overall boundaries, of course, more or less match the current prefectures’ (Ibaraki, Tochigi, Gunma, Saitama, Chiba, Tokyo, and Kanagawa). Anyway, it’s basically another name for ‘the Kanto region’.

Acala is a Buddhist deity, chief of the five Wisdom Kings (明王). Acala means ‘immovable’ in Sanskrit, and he’s consequently known as 不動 (‘fudou’, meaning ‘immovable’) in Chinese, and Japanese by extension.

Takayama Fudouson (高山不動尊) thus runs something along the lines of ‘Takayama Acala Worship’, meaning ‘temple that worships Acala in Takayama’. It’s effectively a proper name, though, and so was left as such. You’ll also see ‘Takayama Fudou’ on a sign somewhere, with the ‘son’ (尊) dropped; it’s the same thing. It is, indeed, super old: established in 654.

The Three Great Kanto Temples of Acala (三大関東不動) are, you guessed it, three great temples of Acala in the Kanto region. While Chiba’s Narita (成田不動) and Tokyo’s Takahata (高幡不動) are always included, the third is up for debate between three temples in Saitama (Fudougaoka (不動ケ岡不動), Takayama (高山不動), and Daisagami (大相模不動)) and one in Kanagawa (Ooyama (大山不動)).

The Kanto Friendship Trail (関東ふれあいの道) is a long (1800 km) trail that winds over the whole of Kanto, passing through all seven prefectures. It’s mostly a nature trail, though given the density of Japan, it ends up being a historical and cultural trail as well.

The Japanese Environment Agency (環境庁) no longer exists, having been upgraded to the Ministry of the Environment (環境省) back in 2001.