A different kind of Easter

It has been years since I went to a sunrise service on Easter, but it’s a tradition for many Christians on this holiest day of the year. There are many things in nature that inspire awe for me. It happens nearly every day, in fact. But today, on Easter morning, it reached a new pinnacle. Carolyn and I set our alarm for 5 am so that we would be up when the sun rose. We were staying in a hotel on the northwestern-most point of the Izu Peninsula, looking across the Suruga Bay at Mount Fuji. At 5 am, I got up, looked outside, and it had begun to get light, but, sadly, it was cloudy – too cloudy to see Mount Fuji. We still had a great view of the Bay, and we were hopeful – hopeful that the clouds would burn off or blow away as the morning went on.

Well, they did. Slowly emerging from the mists, Fuji-san (as it is known by the Japanese) began to make its presence known. Mysteriously, powerfully, quietly, majestically – actually, in a way that kind of rocks your world. We’d had a few other glimpses of Fuji since being in Japan this time, but usually from speeding trains on the Tokkaido Line or Shinkansen. Carolyn had one main goal for our time in Japan this time – go to Mount Fuji, which is to say, go somewhere we you get a really, really good look at her.

This weekend was our last chance to do that. We had made reservations for Monday and Tuesday after Easter to go to the north side of Fuji and stay in a Japanese style hotel with a bath that looks out over Fuji – the kind of place you see in all the tourist brochures. It was also about a four-hour trip on three different trains (through Tokyo) to get there. But when we checked the weather forecast a few days ago, we saw that Monday would be partly cloudy, and Tuesday cloudy. Gotta cancel those reservations!!

So instead, we rented a car on Saturday, and we started following our noses up the west coast of the Izu Peninsula to the nearest place we could get to Fuji, which isn’t really all that far at all. In fact, this is one of the best places from which to view Fuji, and yet, from the lack of traffic we encountered on this beautiful, cherry blossom, picture-perfect weekend, it must be a very well-kept secret.


We ventured off the beaten track, and onto some very small roads in the extreme northwest corner of Izu. In fact, the road is only one lane in places. Instead of tunnels through the mountains, it has long winding switchbacks up and down the sides of the hills along the coast. Cherry blossoms are everywhere and in full bloom.

Now I know that I have made some pretty extreme claims for the beauty of other places we have recently been here in Japan (like Irozaki, for example), but I have to say there is no more beautiful place that we have either one been on the face of the earth than the west coast of the Izu Peninsula. Carolyn says she finally understands all of that exotic Japanese art she has seen all of her life, but didn’t really believe had any basis in actual places or in nature. She now knows that it does. On the Izu Peninsula. Between the clear, deep beautiful blue ocean with picturesque bays small and large, the exotic rock formations along the rugged coast, the green pine boughs and the delicate, omnipresent cherry blossoms, passing through quaint little towns and pristine countryside, much of it high above the coastline just below, it was a jaw-dropping experience. About halfway up the coast, we had our first sighting of Mount Fuji, buried in the mists on the horizon to the north and slightly to the west across the pure blue bay. We didn’t have a hotel reservation, and had planned on this being just a day’s outing, but we couldn’t imagine now not taking full advantage of this opportunity. So, we found a hotel on Izu’s closest point to Fuji – at Osezaki. The only thing between our hotel room and Mount Fuji was a little spit of land with a beautiful Shinto shrine on it, and the Suruga Bay.

By the time we checked in, Fuji was beginning to fade back into the mists. We had an elegant full Japanese dinner, with sashimi and a variety of steamed mollusks and other sea creatures, and later tempura with all the accompanying little dishes of pickles, fish pastes, whale fat noodles, and various exotic seaweeds and the like. Not only were we the only foreign guests at the hotel – we were apparently also the only people who were not there for deep-sea diving school. Over a hundred mostly young people (roughly college age and older) were on the beach for diving classes, including underwater photography. You wouldn’t believe all the equipment up and down the beach. Some were out late at night and then back up before dawn. It was all very interesting to see.

But this morning, at around 6:30 am, we finally got our first Easter morning glimpse of Mount Fuji from our room. We immediately set out for a walk to the little spit of land. It was a breathtaking experience to go to the far shore and look across to see Fuji-san standing there – still, silent, snow-capped from the winter, peering at us from beyond. It was not a crystal clear kind of day, but one that in some unique way lent itself more fully to the sense of mystery and awe inspired by things like Mount Fuji than if it had been. Kind of like I imagine it was with Jesus appearing to the disciples.

It was a different kind of Easter. There were no church services for us (although, I have to say that I was thinking almost hour by hour about what was surely happening back in Andover – thirteen hours behind us here. In fact, as I write this at 9 pm on Sunday evening here, the 8 am Easter service is just beginning there.) After a very full Japanese breakfast, we began our trip back down the coast toward “home.” There would be many stops along the way to glance back at yet another amazing view of Fuji-san or other eye-popping scenery – and yes, to take yet more pictures.

As I mentioned to someone in an email a short while ago, the whole experience of Holy Week and Easter has been very different for me this year. It has been odd, in that it has been totally disconnected from church, from the liturgies I so love, from hearing the lessons read aloud, from being together with others to celebrate the holy mysteries – from Communion. I have missed all of that. And yet, because of being in such a different place, it has been framed differently for me here and allows me to see it all with different eyes. It’s odd just being in a place where hardly anyone even knows that it’s Easter – or what Easter is. (Although we did see one man walking through one of the small towns through which we passed dressed in a black suit with a bouquet of lilies in his hand. I suspected he had been to church this morning.)

I’m thinking a lot about what the past four weeks have meant for me. The first week was a kind of “pinch me, I’m here!” experience. The second week involved Carolyn’s arrival, getting her acclimated, and establishing a routine together. The third week was bracketed by a trip to Tokyo and then the visit of Junko and her family. The fourth week has been different. I was very conscious of it being Holy Week, but parallel to that I was very aware that being here was beginning to feel “ordinary” in some strange way. It had become “home.” We spent more time at our house, and less time running into town, having seen most of what we have wanted to see and experience there. We did lots of reading (Carolyn is now on her eleventh book since she came – I’m on about my sixth), walked to the beaches, did chores, cooked, ate and slept. Even took an occasional nap.

Now I’m finding that I’m thinking a lot about what comes next – leaving Japan, arrival in Vancouver, BC, and a bike trip down the Pacific Coast with George beginning later this week. Wow. Wonder if that will start to feel like home.

One of the books I’ve been reading is Matsuo Basho’s Narrow Road to the Interior. Basho is a 17th century Japanese poet and wanderer who routinely set out on walking journeys of hundreds or even a thousand or more miles. In the opening words of this book he writes, “The moon and sun are eternal travelers. Even the years wander on. A lifetime adrift in a boat, or in old age leading a tired horse into the years, every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.”

I’m not sure exactly what that means for me right now. I do know that if I thought I was getting away from myself by taking such a long journey, I was dead wrong. I keep bumping into this Jeff Gill guy here, too. I’m the same person I was, for better or for worse. But the “home” part of it all is a bigger place than it was. What “home” means to me keeps getting bigger and bigger, sometimes forcing me out of comfortable places into unknown ones that eventually become, well, home. They become part of me. Familiar. Kind of like family.

I think I have begun to ramble. I know this because my word count is now 1,651 – just about the normal length of one of my sermons. (DON’T say it!) So, I’m gonna stop here. Lots still to ponder. Lots of mystery today – Mount Fuji on Easter morning. Lots of nostalgia beginning to build as we prepare to leave a place we have grown to love. The journey continues.