bellwether

word of the day:
bellwether. Means leadership or forefront of a movement.

taketorinoyu

In other spa news, my mom, sister, and I dipped into Taketorinoyu in Nagayama on the Odakyu line. More traditional than Yunessun, this place is still going for an upscale-resort feel, with many different types of baths and saunas, and various restaurants, massage services, and other amusing pursuits.
I especially enjoyed the ondol-heated floor relaxation room, with doorways into the various hot sauna rooms - salt, stone, fire, etc. This area was co-ed, with everyone wandering around in their snazzy spa pajamas.
A downside was the smokiness of the common areas. I don't want to go to a refreshing, cleansing spa and leave smelling like a club.

the Yokohama Museum of Art

I went to check out the Yokohama Museum of Art for the first time for the Nihonga exhibit - Japanese style painting by modern artists.

The museum is located pretty close to Sakuragicho station as well as Minato Mirai, and is in a pleasant walking area. Inside, there's a refreshing generosity of space that is often lacking in Japan, especially in the smaller specialty museums and galleries - but a large open entrance hall was welcoming.

The exhibit was really neat - all of the artist were interesting in their way, and included a pretty eclectic mix: a famous comic strip artist, someone who worked with big abstract blocks of color, a woman who painted beautiful screen-style nature paintins with a twist.

My favorite was Fujii Rai, an artist who draws Japanese scroll-style paintings, but does so on the back of standard letter-sized envelopes. He has mailed more than 500 to the museum, each part of a continuous series, each envelope connected to the last.

Yunessun and Hakone

Trying to inject some non-Tokyokohama culture into the Germans' lives, we decided to visit Hakone for a smaller town vibe and a trip to the onsen. The hang-up was: cheaper beautiful old traditional onsen, sex separate, totally nudical; or more exciting, themepark-y coed swimsuit-wearing and considerably more expensive bathing complex?

The drive to Hakone from Yokohama is quite easy; taking the Tomei, it's only about an hour and a couple thousand yen in tolls, at least to Hakone-Yumoto, the location of many nice onsen. We bypassed the town and made for Ashinoko, the lovely lake from which Mt. Fuji can be seen on a nice day. Also the site of Hakone shrine and the floating torii, Cryptomeria avenue, the old Edo checkpoint, and most alluring: swan pedal boats.

Alas, it was not to be! The stupid swans are so expensive... 1500 yen for 30 minutes. You can't even get going before you have to come back and pay more. We comforted ourselves by choosing the more expensive spa and walking around the lake eating chestnut flavored soft cream. Fuji showed its ugly brown summer shoulders, and a breeze blew pleasantly over the water as we strolled over to the vermilion-red floating torii.

Yunessun is a sight to behold. It's very large - the parking lot extends for ages - and boasts 25+ different baths and attractions - a big tide pool, waterfall baths, baths of coffee, wine, sake, charcoal, tea, curry, and many more. There are even waterslides. Most interesting is the Dr. Fish bath, where flesh-eating fish nibble at the dead skin on your feet for an exfoliatory experience.

Massage is available for an extra fee, and the spa uses an electronic wristband system that you can swipe at various locations as a kind of credit card - grab a soda this way from a machine and pay for it at the end of your stay.

Don't forget to download the coupon on their website for 400 yen off, bringing the admission price down to 3100.

I greatly enjoy the traditional onsen, but this is really fun for a change and especially good if you're keen to go co-ed. Note: as with many onsen, they have a no-tattoo rule, but the girl at reception let us in after making I. promise to wear a tshirt that covered most of his upper-arm sleeves.

萌え

Word of the day: Moe.
Some German friends are visiting us, and they have been spending some time in Akihabara, buying gadgets and cruising the goods. Morriz, 19, became enamored of a black shirt with bright pink lettering stating: 萌え アキバ in TOKYO, and bought it without really knowing what it meant.
I wasn't familiar with that character, and that night we went to the okonomiyaki shop across the street from our mansion. The owners, after serving our food and taking our money, started to exclaim at the shirt.
"Ha ha ha!" they said. "Moe!!"
Apparantly moe is a word meaning "crush" or "fascination", and is commonly used by otaku in manga/anime subcultures. This was highly amusing to the shopkeepers.

And a nice phrase brought to you by the same German guests:
It began to rain, just a sprinkle, on the night that they arrived. Of course, at the slightest hint of precipitation - raining or not - Japanese people will pull out umbrellas. Many a time I have seen people huddling under their umbrellas with nary a raindrop in sight, but only a smallish raincloud hovering overhead.
Accustomed to this attitude, I offered umbrellas to the new arrivals.
"Nah", they said. "We are not made of sugar."
This is reportedly a common phrase used in Germany and I like it a lot.

Kamakura

This sunny Monday found us heading for the beach at Kamakura. Yuigahama, to be specific, a city beach located just off a noisy road; happily less polluted than the beach at Sumoto, we spent a few merry hours frolicking in the waves and ordering takeout food and cokes from one of the many beach shacks equipped with rudimentary kitchens and toilets. Beware - boogie board rental is so expensive! Better to buy your own at Don Quixote than to pay 1000 yen to borrow them for two hours from the extortionists.

Having swum our fill, we ventured back to the main city to see what we could manage to in the early evening - which turned out to be not much. We were able to wander around a temple or two, though. I prefer the Shinto shrines, especially at night. Pared down, lantern lit. Buddhist temples are bright and gaudily colorful, though, presenting quite an entertaining pantheon of gods and guards, deities and devils.

狡い

Word of the day: zurui. Some of my students use this on each other when they're messing around before class, playing games.
It means sneaky.

heading back

Kobe is such a shorter distance from Yokohama than Takamatsu, so we got a late 10am start.
Friend Edmund was spotted in Maibara - someone had obviously stood on that very spot some months before...
Unfortunately, we missed some of our rapid connections and rode way too many locals, finally landing in Azamino about 930 pm. A long day to end our trip.

Awaji-shima and Kobe

Interested in Awaji-shima, the island between Tokushima and Kobe, we had asked the front desk clerk for bus schedule information as the island has no train service. After a lengthy wait, she produced a bus schedule that showed the route from Tokushima station to the terminus in Sumoto. And so the next morning, there we went.
The bus was about 1800 yen and passed through the town of Naruto, past the famous Naruto whirlpools. Awaji island seems to be a sparsely populated tree covered rock, with a freeway running the length of it, linking Honshu to Shikoku.

We alit in Sumoto city. As the LP barely mentions Awaji at all, we had no real idea of where to go. I had a rough idea of the geography of the island, but not even a good grip on what cities or towns might be present. Wandering over to the information counter, I perused the maps and flyers on offer. The two workers manning (and womanning) the station studiously ignored me. Finally, I said Sumimasen! and the person sitting farther away, a slightly portly younger-middle aged man, jumped to attention. I asked him about beaches and told him that I wanted to be in Kobe in the evening. He seemed very relieved that I was speaking Japanese - I think they ignored me because they didn't know what to do. Though there was a beach that sounded lovely on the far side of the island, we opted for one that happened to be only a 5 minute walk from the bus terminal - Ohama.

The sun was brutally hot, and after settling onto our stripped-off Tshirts, we slathered on the sunblock. The sand was incendiary, and the water pleasantly cool. There were even little fish swimming around in the shallows, and the view was decent. However, there was a fair amount of trash floating just off the shore. Unfortunately, it marred the beach experience for me considerably. I hear that this is a common problem in the inland sea.

After a couple of hours, we had had quite enough of the noonday sun and hightailed it back to the bus station, slightly burnt despite our sunblocking ministrations. We purchased tickets for the next bus to Kobe and stocked up on Awaji omiyage, things like sweet potato caramels and sables and sudachi candies.

It took another hour or so to get to Kobe. I had never before been to this city, site of the great earthquake a few years ago and birthplace of Haruki Murakami. We oriented ourselves and located our next Toyoko Inn. Then we set out to look around the city and find something to eat.

Not far from the station, we found a swanky looking dining bar, King Dining O-ja, with fancy high tables, leather zippered walls, and a posh staff. The yobidashi girl standing out front didn't bother to yobi us... I felt a little affronted. Don't foreigners have to eat too?
The atmosphere inside was pretty neat, albeit smoky, and the food was decent and not very expensive. However, the rest of the staff followed the yobidashi girl's example and were patently unfriendly. Based on the shitty service, I would recommend NOT going there and finding culinary refuge in one of the many many other like establishments lining the streets.

After dinner it was getting dark enough to proceed to my mom's suggestion: Mt. Rokke. She had been 20+ years ago and mentioned that it might be worth checking out - so we rode the subway to the ropeway substation and rode the long cable to the top.
Kobe is beautiful at night! Surrounding the harbor in a colorful array of lights, the smallish city glows invitingly from the heights, and the other ropeway pods, lined with blue lights, look like alien ships passing in the night. The herb garden below lends to the otherworldly feeling, with the glass greenhouses eerily emitting unearthly light.

Once at the top, we found it was too late to walk down the mountain through the herb garden - a shame, because it looked so pretty from above. However, the shop was still open for a few minutes and I got some lovely teas, seeds, rose hip candies, and lavender cookies. We wandered around the patio buildings, peering over the edge of the retaining wall at the city below and exploring curlicued ironwork balconies. Lit with small white lights and sparsely scattered with visitors at 9pm, it was a wonderful place to visit.
After a short rest and some more city-gazing, we boarded the ropeway for the descent into nighttime Kobe.