Most people when they come to Japan, let alone Fuji, will visit the great big mountain that bestrides the country’s largest and most populous island, Honshu. It is truly a sight of majestic beauty that has inspired countless artists, most famously Katsushika Hokusai’s “Thirty-six Views of Mt. Fuji”. My family, however, are not most people.
Those who have been regaled with tales of our 2016 holiday to Japan will undoubtedly be familiar with our ill-fated trip to Fuji Q Highland. The name continues to loom large in our family lexicon, used to evoke a sense of calamity and urge circumspection whenever somebody suggests an ambitious and potentially fraught endeavour. A Clements family “Nakba” if you will.
Now, if that sounds a tad dramatic let me provide some context. Prior to our holiday, my dad had watched an interview with Jonathan Ross in which he enthused about a frightfully delightful experience he’d had at Fuji Q Highland’s “Super Scary Labyrinth of Fear”. He described a two-story hospital with 900 metres of puzzling maze teeming with ghosts and ghouls. When he said this was the scariest thing he’d ever done, my dad took notice; when he retold it to me and my brother, we did too.
Our Japan itinerary was packed but we’d planned to stay around Fuji for a night and had carved out the following morning to hit up the park before departing for Hakone that afternoon. We calculated that even with bad traffic we would have a good four hours to do the attraction. Plenty of time, right?
What we hadn’t accounted for was that we would be visiting on a bank holiday. The place was thronged with people; average wait times were estimated to be 2-3 hours per attraction. Yet only planning to do the one, we remained confident that we would have sufficient time. We just needed to be in the right line. This, we posited, would be easy enough because the park helpfully had coloured lines running through it denoting the paths to each attraction. Unfortunately, as we were to belatedly realise, multiple attractions ran along the same one and so, whilst we had correctly followed the red line, we had not followed it to our desired destination. Embarrassingly, we failed to realise this even after entering the wrong attraction – a maze, granted, but one that lacked even a modicum of spookiness. Confused and frustrated, we finished it only to notice on our way out that the red path continued for another 200 metres, leading as we feared to the horror hospital. Seeing the estimated wait time of two hours, we beseeched the ticket staff to fast-track us, but our entreaties fell on deaf ears.
We left utterly dejected. It was a crushing defeat and a blight on the rest of our trip. Since that fateful day, whenever somebody would invoke the name of Fuji Q, all present family members would respond in unison “too soon!”
Until today, because today I decided to cut the Gordian knot and finish what had been started all those years ago. And yet despite my determination not to allow history to repeat itself, my planning was piss-poor. I woke up late and extremely hungover, with no admission ticket to the park or any means of transportation. Further threatening to derail my plan was the accidental consumption of sesame seeds for lunch, which I duly expelled before they could induce an allergic reaction. It was a shaky start but after a hurried taxi to the bus station, an (im)patient wait thereafter because I’d missed my slot and then a two-hour drive, I’d finally made it to Fuji Q at around 16:00. By 16:30, I was in the park, where I was duly informed that the earliest admission for the attraction would be at 17:30. I’d optimistically bought a return ticket for 18:00, which would no longer be usable. Undeterred, I bought the 17:30 admission and hared back to the bus station to book the earliest ride to Tokyo which was now 20:15. Far from ideal but at least a means of return was secured.
I eagerly took my place in line for the attraction, sandwiched between groups of excitable Japanese schoolgirls; things were already boding extremely well. After the obligatory safety spiel, we were ushered into separate rooms, awaiting nervously to be told when it would be our fateful turn. Approaching the start with trepidation, I asked the attendant how long the attraction would take, to which he grinningly replied “ten seconds” as he gestured to a red exit door. I was soon to learn that this would be the first of many punctuating the attraction for those of faint heart. He handed me my flashlight and I ventured into the darkness alone, conjuring images of the horrors that awaited me.
Initially, I trod cautiously but after the first jolt I picked up the pace. The level of detail in the maze’s sprawling rooms was highly impressive and created a wonderfully lugubrious atmosphere. However, as I have come to appreciate in Japan, it’s not the country itself but the people that really add entertainment value. At my now brisk pace, I managed to catch up with another group which to my delight was what can only be described as a conga line of hysterical schoolgirls tiptoeing through a hallway yowling at pitches my ears didn’t know existed. I knew I’d hit the jackpot. After impishly sneaking up on them for an additional fright, I then switched gears and chivalrously offered to shepherd them through for a couple of minutes until I grew frustrated with their glacial pace and opted to soldier on alone. I attached myself to several unsuspecting groups throughout the journey, including of all people some Israelis who, despite notionally being battle-hardened, were as squeamish as everyone else I encountered. As always, I used my smattering of Hebrew to great effect as I “yashar yashar”’d them along. The entire experience had an air of Scooby-Doo to it, which I revelled in with childish glee.
Door to door, the thirty-minute attraction took me eleven hours.
Excessive? Yes. Ill-conceived? Foolishly so. Worth it? Absofuckinglutely.
