4. Leaving Hokkaido and heading for the west coast of Honshu

just an elegant front

slumming it in a Shinkansen

With the six weeks we have available we don’t have to rush everywhere, although we often seem to do so.  As we left Hokkaido at about 8.15, we were heading south using trains again, express, Shinkansen, then another express, for what was a long day’s travelling to Akita, close to the west coast of Honshu.   Anyway Heather had booked a nice traditional place for a couple of days with the hot-pool Onsen, despite originally having trouble finding somewhere.   

mother and daughter

What could possibly go wrong ?   Well, we didn’t know exactly how to get to the hotel from the station and arrived at about 5.15 at the Tourist Information Desk to ask.  Turned out that the hotel was in Akita Prefecture, not Akita the town and lay about a hundred miles away close to where we’d passed three hours earlier on the train.  You should have heard us laugh.  Well, the two ladies in the information place (miserably understaffed by Japanese standards) sprang into action.  The difficulty Heather originally had booking somewhere was because a conference was underway and hotel rooms were as rare as hen’s teeth.   One of the ladies asked what our budget was and began phoning hotels, having first cancelled the booking at where we thought we were staying.  After about twenty minutes she’d found one right on our budget, a business style hotel only a five minute bus ride away.  Armed with directions for where the bus stop was, which number to get, a map with the route drawn on it and how much the fare would be, off we went.  As we walked in, the lobby was lightly populated with businessmen in suits and ties.  We however looked a little the worse for wear after nine hours travelling, with our walking boots, rucksacks on our backs and perversely, small backpacks on our fronts.  Three receptionists in classic very smart uniforms watched us walk up to the desk.   Just on one hour from when our train had pulled into Akita station we were showered and changed and ready for dinner.

 

Akita is where the Japanese dog breed originally came from.  We didn’t see any but why should we.  If you went to Airedale or Dalmatia would you expect to spot one of those there ?  We didn’t even really want to be in Akita but it was much bigger than Kakunodate, an old town with preserved Samurai class houses about thirty minutes train ride away which we had decided was worth a visit.  And so it was.  This area was really off the westerner’s tourist route.  

Our hotel restaurant had a
Japanese menu with no translation into anything else and one local restaurant, called Raclette (a Swiss cheese meal) which we looked at only served steak.  The only non-orientals we saw in the entire two days we were there were at the tourist office, one Russian man and one Egyptian woman.   In Kakunodate the following day we saw only two westerners, Kevin from Australia and a young English woman who actually asked for my blog address.  So if you did use it and you’re reading this, I’m talking about you, Lizzie. 

two shots of those old Samurai Class houses in Kakunodate

Kakunoadate was a very interesting little place with a whole street of preserved houses which you could just wander up to and look in but not enter.  These were the classic old Japanese houses with rush mats on the floors, screens between rooms and virtually no furniture.  They really are austere looking places but wonderfully elegant.  The only food available in the town was Japanese and we each had a snack to keep us going.  Mine really was sticky rice in that it was exactly that, rice on a stick with soy sauce on it, as delicious as it sounds, like eating Twiglet flavoured well set wallpaper paste on a stick.  Mmmm yummy.   Many, many places in Japan make a big thing about what they have to offer in cherry blossom season, which unsurprisingly is cherry blossom.  Kakunodate’s offering is a two kilometre walk along the river lined both sides with old pink flowered cherries in Spring and dark green leaved cherries in October in what was now fairly gloomy light.   It must look tremendous when in the pink.

Cosplay in Niigata

Many hotels the world over claim to have an environmental conscience which mostly consists of notices saying  something along the lines of “if you are happy not to have your towels changed just leave them hanging up” .  This is universally ignored and we have never failed to have towels changed wherever we hang them.  There was a new twist for the environment at our very smart Akita hotel.  If we agreed not to have our room serviced for one day by switching a light on outside our room, our reward was a bottle of water each.  So we put on the light, had a redeemable card left which reception exchanged for, yes you guessed it, two plastic bottles of water.  Priceless.

the Japanese spaghetti harvest

We do tend to push the boundaries of our comfort zone somewhat on these trips and in what are quite non touristy areas of Japan, there are no concessions made to non-Japanese speakers.   All writing is in one of the two Japanese scripts with no translations.  So we’ll sometimes decide which bus stop is which by recognising that a place ends with ‘half a coathanger and an A upside down with an extra line through it’ for example.  It is quite fun really – when it works.  That isn’t to say that people are difficult, we’ve found that everybody we’ve come across is desperate to help.  Sometimes too much, for they never want to say that they don’t know or cannot help, this would be ‘losing face’.   In one place when we were trying to get a meal, one restaurant owner, who spoke no English, ran fifty yards or so to another restaurant where the owner did speak a little English to get him to come to us.  The tourist office or train information staff are unfailingly helpful, seem delighted to help and they are absolutely red hot on knowing their stuff.

a few of the steps

Our route was in a vaguely south westerly direction along the coast of Honshu for a while, stopping for a day at Tsuruoka, in order to go on a walk up a Buddhist pilgrim’s path and see the various buildings and stuff along the way.  It was something like 450 metres climb and 2,200 steps to the top with the huge advantage that the scheduled bus service that took us to the bottom had a route which picked us up at the top.  There were some very impressive temples at the top, a service underway and the biggest bell I’ve ever seen.  The path was through woods the whole way and the flight of stone steps was very impressive in its own right.  It was quite a haul up though.

on that Pilgrim's Walk

one of the temples at the top of the Pilgrim's Walk

Bus maps and train maps here are complicated but understandable with a little application, assuming that destinations are in English but the quite regularly seen public maps in the street have to be checked carefully because north is at the top only occasionally.  Sometimes south is at the top, sometimes west and now and again SW or NE.   So while it is true to say that just because we’re wandering we’re not lost, sometimes there are times between not being lost where we’re not exactly certain where we are.

Now, anyone who has been to Japan and is reading this will know that at some time I would have to write about the lavatories because they’re so, well Japanese.   Almost every one we’ve seen is a technological wonder connected to an electricity supply, a sort of electric chair.  Seats are heated, sometimes almost to radiator temperature, sprays of warmed water cause eyebrows to rise as they hit you in the fundament or a nearby location, some then have warmed air to dry you off.  A series of buttons on a control panel are to operate all this lot.  We’ve seen the seats in shops at up to £900 each.   A couple of times we’ve come across ones where the top lid of the lavatory cistern is a small hand basin and as you flush, water begins to run from a tap into the plugless basin.  This is actually how the cistern is filled so that the water you use to wash your hands becomes slightly grey water for the next flush.   Being Japanese, there’s no room for soap which seems to be the Japanese way.

Well, I seem to have got to the bottom of this blog so I’ll sort out some photos to go with it and sign off.