I've been to Shimane Prefecture twice. On both occasions my destination was Izumo but the first time I took the bus and the second time I made the journey by train. I got a gig as a wedding preacher. No, not a singer, a preacher. In Japan, performing Christian style weddings is one of the niche jobs that are available to those with the right look and who are willing. I was blessed with more will than looks but it was enough to get me a couple of jobs in a chapel in Izumo.
The first time I went my bankroll was on the low side and you don't get paid for the wedding until a month after the event so I took the cheapest way, which happened to be the bus. Now, I was no stranger to over the road busses. I had done the 20 hour 3 stopover New York City to Rochester run in the U.S. and the 5 hour no guardrails jeepney run from Cebu City to Kawasan Falls in the Philippines, so I knew I had this one beat. The busfare was around 9000 JPY roundtrip and departed from Tenmaya Bus Terminal in Okayama. We got underway in the early evening and I began my first long journey north.
The first thing I realized that the trip was indeed long. We were on the road for a few hours before we stopped to pick people up on a highway somewhere. It was a whistlestop with no whistles. The first signs of civilization came when we got to the impressively cosmopolitan Yonago City in Tottori Prefecture. We pressed on and made it into Matsue, another cosmopolitan town on the Japan Sea side of the Chugoku area. I got flashbacks of my Rochester run over a decade ago. Matsue's promenade naturally follows the coastline as if it has always been there.
The Japan Sea dominates the scenery just as Lake Ontario does along its shores. From the bus window I saw a hairstylist opening up shop for the day, a scene I had witnessed so many times in Okayama. We picked up passengers in front of the Koizumi Yakumo museum (a 19th century naturalized Japanese citizen from the U.S.).
We finally made it to Izumo, Chugoku's windy city and the location of one of Japan's earliest Yayoi settlements. The land seemed wider than Okayama, the sky bigger, the sea more dominating and the wind sharper. I suddenly remembered that I had to work on my lines. After all I was a novice. "We are gathered here today to bear witness of the union of this couple....
