November 23, 2006
It's odd how a long day like yesterday can fit into a short paragraph. Up not long after six, Mister Donuts for breakfast, out of the hotel by eight, into the subway with all the uniformed Japanese kids. Brief training of our associates (with improvised opening and closing speeches expressing my desire for harmonious collaboration and increased sales), lunch at a French restaurant, customer visit, business meeting, ride back to Tokyo by shinkansen with another boxed dinner, this time accompanied with a beer and frozen tangerines and musings of what might happen if it were possible to launch those tangerines out of the train, taxi and check-in around eleven.
I reluctantly set the alarm for five, because today was a Japanese holiday that I wanted to use for a trip to a hot bath my friend Marc-Etienne had recommended. Getting there alone merits a few lines.
I took the metro to Tokyo station and the shinkansen to Atami from there. In Atami, a station on the seaside between two tunnels, I changed to the Ito line, which I took all the way to the terminal station, Izukyuu-Shimoda. By that time I could no longer fight the effects of acute lack of sleep and dozed from station to station. I woke briefly before Izu-Atagawa, a hot spring resort that announces its main draw with billows of steam from wooden superstructures above the springs. (On a side note, the 14th International Colloquium on Scanning Probe Microscopy will take place in Izu-Atagawa - I bet it'll be a particularly hot and steamy session.)
Had I known that Rendaiji would have offered a possibility of getting on the same bus as in Izukyuu-Shimoda, I might have been able to rouse myself and get out there, but instead I just barely missed the bus in Shimoda and got to wander around the sleepy station area for half an hour. The bus driver not only explained to me where to get off, but also was thoughtful enough to draw a map of how to get to the hot bath. I stayed awake through the whole drive, enjoying the patchwork autumn colors (the famed kouyou) of the Izu peninsula at 40 kilometers an hour, and occasionally reading. To my surprise, we passed a youth hostel on the way, the Sanyoso youth hostel - as the directions indicate, 50 minutes by bus from the nearest train station. If you want to see a quiet side of Japan, away from the big cities, this may be a good bet.
A few minutes later we arrived at my stop and a ten-minute walk took me to the Sawada-Koen Rotenburo. The attendant snapped to attention, asked for 500 yen entrance fee (getting there and back cost me around 12000 yen, not counting food), and in reply to my question informed me that up until then he'd had a total of five visitors. The parking lot allows for about twenty cars at most, but their passengers would never fit into the hot bath at once, nor would the one toilet stall per gender suffice. (The writing on the stall says Kitagawa Onsen is also berii guddo - I need to research that.)
I came upon an empty bath, and just as I stripped, I heard this female voice that sounded uncomfortably close. A few seconds later, a tour boat chugged into view, the audio-guide chirping her cheery announcements at a volume that must have nearly deafened the elderly tourists peering up at the steep cliffs atop of which stood yours truly in a changing room. Trusting they didn't carry binoculars, I carried on and lowered myself into the marvellously warm water. The overflow I caused gurgled down the drain, the only sound other than the gentle swish of waves below and some angry-sounding bird. At odds with the weather forecast, the sun even poked through the clouds and warmed the cliffs.
After a while, two guys from Saitama joined me and together we waved to the next tour boat. When a quartet of students from Yokohama with their carefully coiffed shoulder-length metro hairdos (ok, one had a buzz cut) arrived, the bath began to get cozy. I doubt it could fit ten people. The weather was warm enough to pleasantly air-dry (I'd forgotten my towel) with a warm breeze caressing me as I sat leaning against the wooden enclosure overlooking the cliffs and rugged islands. It felt like for once on this trip I'd stepped out of time, enjoying one of the best things creation has to offer (when you help it along with some piping and construction). Unfortunately, the other guys destroyed my notion that hot baths are conducive to a pure mindset of relaxation by trying to peep through what seemed to be holes in the partitioning between the female side.
The four Yokohama striplings left first, and the Saitama guys offered me a ride to the next town, Dougashima, where we explored the jutting peninsula with its overhanging cliffs and its network of cave passages with the central (natural) skylight. The sandy rock made me wonder how many accidents occur each year. The peninsula would make a great backdrop for a detective novel for teenagers.
We had an ice cream together, and then the Saitama guys went on their way, while I ate something a little more substantial and waited for the bus to Mishima. The bus wound its way along the rugged coastline past little villages crammed into tiny inlets and connected to the main road by access roads that would have demanded extreme driving skill had the bus wanted to have a hope of getting down there. Once again, an ideal spot for a retreat, and once again, a youth hostel stands in that area. After that I dozed off for the rest of the two-hour bus ride.
One thing I liked about the highway buses down there was that they indicated coming turns with a flashing sign above the main passageway.
At Mishima, I just missed a shinkansen back to Tokyo, but had I caught that train I would never have noticed that a hole in the clouds revealed a snowy Mount Fuji off in the distance. Today should have been rainy by mid-morning, but for some reason God chose to reward my stubbornness and inflexibility in wonderful ways. Every time I see Mount Fuji, I am reminded why this mountain is so special to the Japanese. In its near-perfect cone shape it towers above all surrounding mountains at almost twice their height, conveying a sense of majesty and authority and - it's odd to say about a mountain - self-confidence that eludes even the higher jagged peaks of the Alps. Even so, it wasn't Mount Fuji that brought tears to my eyes, it was the wasabi peas.
I'd intended to meet a friend this evening, but his mother had fallen sick and so he'd spent most of the day at the hospital. It seems she's already on the upswing. I bought bread and blue cheese at the bakery near the Nakano station where we were to meet, perhaps as a compensation for having discovered that my treasured Hiestand bakery in Harajuku had shut its doors and been replaced by a cell phone store. What is this world coming to? I also bought a bottle of the Beaujolais Nouveau that causes such commotion every year in Japan and can't quite figure out what the hubbub is about. And, obviously in a spending mood, I bought a few CDs, mostly just to get some song other than "Total Eclipse of the Heart" to run through my head all day. Now I can listen to Japanese ska, sung in an English I can only decode with the lyrics sheet.
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