As jet lag would have it, I was wide awake at 4 AM, so I got dressed and went out for a walk. No one else was stirring in camp.

I walked up the road to where I could get a better look at the summit of Aso Mountain. Although it appears to be a volcano, it’s actually part of the wall of an enormous ancient volcanic caldera that includes the mountains on the other side of the valley where Aso town lies.

The mountains that form the other side of the caldera, with Aso City below.

View of camp as I headed back down the hill.

The driveway into the festival.

I shivered in my bed my first night in an unheated room high on a mountain
with no electricity and no running water, and I remembered the old way to heat a bed with stones warmed in a fireplace. So I borrowed some bricks, bought some small towels, and heated the bricks by the campfire the following night, wrapped them in the towels and had a warm bed for the rest of the festival.

The Matsuis, ever the gracious hosts, added their beautiful yutampo, and old-Japanese-style hot water bottle, wrapped in a fabric from India, to my bed warming equipment, to place under the back of my knees. Elevating the knees makes the neck flat, eliminating the need for a pillow.

Mikiko Sato, who will be hosting a concert and workshop in June for me and Sachiho at her place in Sendai, Tohoku prefecture, also lent me her yutampo, which is made of metal, like a canteen, and has a quilted cover. The two hot water bottles also provided me with a supply of warm water with which to wash myself in the morning.

Mikiko (on the left) working in the pre-festival camp kitchen. She teaches classes for parents and children together doing Steiner pre-school activities.

The way I got clean most days of the festival was catch a ride into Aso town with friends and bathe before soaking at a hot springs bath house. On this day, Sachiho and I squeezed into a van with Yu and Saori and four other friends for a whole day of fun that included soaking at an on-sen (hot springs bath house) dedicated to Benzaiten (the Japanese goddess of music and wealth who parallels the Hindu goddess Saraswati), followed by a delicous soup at a noodle house. We would also do a ceremony to Benzaiten at a shrine in her honor at a Shinto temple on the same road as the festival grounds, about a mile down the hill. Eight of us crowded into a van for this outing, and we made music while we traveled.

View of the mountains from Aso town.

Cherry blossoms (sakura) in Aso town.

Sign at the entrance to the hot springs bath house.

The bath house from the street.

The shrine to Benzaiten on the path from the office to the baths. Everyone took a moment to offer a little prayer.

Painting of Benzaiten on the entrance to the women’s section of the hot springs.

Painting of Ebisu, the god of fishing and merchants, on the entrance to the men’s section of the hot springs.

Sachiho soaking in the hot springs.

On our way home, we stopped to offer prayers to the goddess of music for our upcoming performances at the festival. We pass under the torii at the entrance of the Benzaiten shrine on Aso Mountain.

Stairs to the Benzaiten shrine.

The Benzaiten altar.

The famous pair of albino snakes who live at the Benzaiten altar. Yes, those are real snakes, and they are alive.

Sachiho leads prayers at the Benzaiten shrine.

Shrine to the seven fortune gods (of which Benzaiten is one) at the Benzaiten shrine.

When I arrived at Kumamoto Airport in southern Kyushu Island, from Haneda Airport in Tokyo, I knew I would wait for Sachiho and her sons to arrive from Okinawa, but I didn’t know anyone would be waiting for me. When I came out of the baggage claim, there was a long-haired young man in a purple shirt, and I thought, “That must be one of my people.” In fact, it was the bass player in my band for the festival. His name is Daisuke, and he is 22 years old. Beside him stood Auta, the 12-year-old drummer who amazed me at Happy Flower Beach Party Music Festival last October. That made sense. Auta’s father, Rokuro Matsui, is the organizer of the Rainbow Festival.

An hour or so later, Sachiho Kojima, leader for 10 years of the all-woman trance trio, Amana, former punk rock bass player and leader for 17 years of the famous girl band, Zelda, widow of New Wave rock superstar, Donto, spiritual teacher, and mother of Donto’s two young musician sons, Nara (named for the ancient capital of Japan, and pronounced “Nala”) age 12, and Laki (pronounced “Lucky”), soon to be 17-year-old rock lead guitarist/singer/songwriter. Born in New York City while Donto was recording there, he was personally named Lakita by his godfather, his dad’s guru, Bo Diddley.

Daisuke drove us from Kumamoto city to the town of Aso, and up to the mountain meadow where the festival area was under construction. Rokuro Matsui and his wife, Tako, have a business making tipis, and quite a few housed their guests at the festival. Today, four days before the beginning of the festival, they erect the first few.

This gorgeous tipi is where Sachiho and her sons lived during the festival.

I lodged in a portable cabin which doubled as the musical instrument storage for Amana’s instruments and as my shop for selling books, CDs and t-shirts. Those are bamboo tipi poles leaning on the roof. Talk about East meets West.

The first people to turn up at my cabin were improvisational multi-instrumentalist Yu and and his lady, Saori, my friends from Happy Flower Beach Party Music Festival last October in Okinawa, and who have arranged for my concert June 3 at Hobbit Theatre in Tokyo.

They gave me a stack of the flier they’d prepared to publicize the concert, which I offered in my store, along with fliers for Aya Noguchi’s beautiful Living on the Earth clothing line.

A mandala sunset over Rainbow City…

And a gibbous moon over Aso Mountain.

I spent April 25 and 26 flying from LA to Tokyo, and was kindly met at Narita International Airport by my friend Koki Aso. Between the gasoline and toll roads, the round trip cost him about $70. I pressed newly minted yen from the airport money changer into his hands, but he took little of it. The patience and generosity of this man is monumental. Upon awakening from eight hours of deep slumber on a floor futon in Koki’s home office, I dug the view of the ocean and hills of Hayama (HI-ah-mah) from Koki and Ayako’s second floor balcony. They live in a very Japanese house on a steep hill, only two blocks from the beach. I love it here already.

The Japanese take their cherry blossoms (which they call SAK-ur-ah) very seriously. Even the animation on my rental cell phone screen shows a young couple bicycling through a shower of cherry blossoms, and Ayako thinks that, as the seasons change, the animation will be changed to match.

The cherry tree in front of Koki and Ayako’s house is blooming a little later in the season than most. They are pleased I came in time to see it.

The plums bloom in March, and already there are ume (pronounced OO-may) (plums) that Ayako will use to make umeboshi (salted pickled plums), a fabulous condiment whose vinegar I use to make tofu taste like cottage cheese or yogurt (depending on the texture of the tofu).

I couldn’t wait to take a walk around the neighborhood, and Ayako kindly obliged me with a tour.

At the end of the street where they live, a Shinto shrine (called a JIN-ja) overlooks the ocean.

The red torii (TOHD-ee-ee) (gate) is the dead giveaway it’s a Shinto shrine rather than a Buddhist temple, although some places of worship in Japan combine both religions.

Ayako was as stumped as I was as to why the shrine’s funerary statues wore red bibs.

I picked up where I left off last trip to Japan, photographing their creatively designed manhole covers. Have you ever seen one in the USA with cherry blossoms on it? Hayama’s got ‘em.

Lordy, here’s one with an alien on it!

Looking down from the seafront street, we gaze upon gardens of sea plants swaying in the amazingly clear water (considering that Hayama is one of the closest beaches to the mega-metropolis of Tokyo).

And, across the water, snow-capped Mount Fuji rises above the clouds. I had to disproportionately increase the color depth on this shot to make it more visible, since the air was hazy. But, I mean, isn’t it, like, HUGE?

We walked in Standing Stone Beach Park.

A smiling lady dressed in farming clothes was out gathering shells.

Mount Fuji is vaguely visible from the beach park…

…and beloved Oshima island is barely visible on the horizon as well.

Ayako prepared us a gorgeous, healthful breakfast when we returned to her house: grilled saba fish, freshly picked cherry tomatoes and peapods from their garden, nattoh (sticky fermented soybeans, an excellent fortifier), a richly flavored tea made from roasted black soybeans from Hokkaido, and miso soup with daikon (long white radish) in it. When I eat traditional Japanese food, I feel so good that taking vitamins and other supplements becomes superfluous.

The next morning, Ayako sent me off to Haneda airport with a packed picnic lunch of individually wrapped small treats on a small tray wrapped in an elegantly printed large cloth napkin: pickled cabbage, homemade umeboshi, two cherry tomatoes and three peapods, half a hard boiled egg, two rice balls riddled with sea vegetables, and a small portion of grilled chicken. Ohashi (chopsticks) included!

Mari (on left), Ayako’s friend, came over, and they went out for a while together, leaving me alone to practice vocal technique exercises without disturbing anyone (Koki’s at work today).

Ayako’s husband, Koki Aso, is the journalist who came to Hawaii to interview me for Be Pal outdoor living magazine in May 2005 and determined to help me tour here in 2006. He managed to convince the people at Artist Power Bank, an environmental arts organization in Tokyo, to fund my trip and put on two concerts and a workshop for me.

I then contacted my other friends in the music business in Japan and cobbled together a four-week, eight-concert tour in October 2006, all of which is journaled on this blog. During the October trip, I met the organizers of two music festivals, who each invited me to play at them this May, so this time I bought my own plane ticket and am performing sixteen times in seven weeks, selling the Japanese editions of my books and CDs as I go.