10. Takayama to the end of the trip

The snowy Japanese Alps from Takayama

Hida Kokubunji Temple,
Takayama

We were headed for Takayama for reasons which I can’t remember now but would doubtless have been to do with old houses and temples.   Heather had managed to get us a town centre hotel with parking, for some way under our target budget figure.  So, top marks there.  After the snow of yesterday which fell as rain lower down, we awoke the following morning to a brilliant crisp day with now, snow-capped mountains all around.   Takayama turned out to be an attractive town in that it wasn’t all high rise.  It had a museum of reconstructed houses and other buildings a mile or so from the city centre which we decided had to be visited.  Despite having a car we walked to the museum and as we climbed the hill to it, the whole vista of snowy mountains opened up behind us.   This town is also noted for a neighbourhood of old private houses which we visited along with a couple of million other tourists.  I don’t think I’ve mentioned that everywhere In Japan that there’s a pool of water, there are ornamental carp, Koi in Japanese.  They’re usually big, between a foot and two feet long, sometimes bigger and here in Takayama they swim freely in the river, looking for all the world like giant goldfish. 

The Great Bell in the Folk Village

Money, credit cards and documents tend not to be passed from hand to hand in Japan but via a small tray.  You put your money etc. in the tray, the other person takes it and returns change etc. in the same tray.  The tray, and money if it is passed directly is with both hands.  Oh, and drink vending machines are everywhere, and I mean everywhere.  The places you would expect like outside shops or in stations of course but here standing in the street or even the countryside outside houses.  They have hot and cold drinks and are lit up 24 hours a day.  The Japanese are not big on environmental issues despite the odd mention in hotels and multiple plastic bags are used at every opportunity

With another attractive old town a few miles away we decided to extend our stay to three nights and drove off to Hida, a town almost totally destroyed in a fire in the early twentieth century.  Hida has a pleasantly calm atmosphere and was well worth going to.   It had what they called a canal running through the town but it was really a fast flowing walled stream only about six feet wide.  However, there were big Koi everywhere in it.  According to the notices, a thousand of them which are all removed in the winter and spend until the following spring in ponds.  This is a town which has one of the annual parades which Japan is famous for with extravagantly decorated floats.  These floats have a base about 8 feet wide and twice that in depth and they stand about twenty feet high.  Each has puppets controlled by puppet-masters (as they call them) and from the film we saw it would be really something to see the parade actually taking place.  In the museum displaying three of the floats (temperature and humidity controlled environments for the floats).  One of the floats had been destroyed in a fire in the late nineteenth century and a temporary one labelled ‘leave of absence’ appears in its place each year.  They play the long-game here.

the special Coffee Shop

Hida was where we had one of those unforgettable experiences 
that crop up from time to time.  Fancying a coffee and seeing a place marked on our map, we ducked under the standard half curtain over the door with a Trip Advisor sign on it and realised that it was not a coffee shop but a private house.  Before we could run for it, the owner appeared and it was indeed a place for coffee.  It was a really lovely traditional Japanese House with Tatami mats, delicate wood and paper screens, antique lacquerware and a small courtyard garden.  Having taken off our boots we were ushered to a small table next to a window by the garden and while we ordered, our hostess sat on her heels at our feet.  When it arrived it was served, again from a kneeling position with great ceremony, the cake forks for the cheesecake (delicious) were carefully placed at the right angle on the plate before being put in front of us.  The coffee (also delicious) and the pot were similarly carefully placed.  I think the kneeling is something to do with keeping your head below that of guests to show respect.  She explained that the cups and saucers were 150 years old and the plates were 200 years old.  So no worries there then.  It turned out that the place doubled as a

Silver !

sort of museum and the coffee and cake was the most expensive I’d ever had – but worth it.  As we were leaving and being carefully shown out, Heather noticed a certificate on a stand.   Our host had, for the first time, entered some marmalade in the International Marmalade Awards in Cumbria in 2017 and got a Silver.

On the day we’re due to leave Takayama, it’s cold and wet and rather than just drive to Nagoya and get to our hotel earlier, we decide to go the highly praised Glass Museum.  They advertise that they have their own London Bus to ferry visitors from the station.  Well, it is a Red Bus but it certainly was never a London Bus.  The museum itself is a wonderfully designed modern building of concrete and glass with large shallow pools of water on a bed of potato sized pebbles under only a couple of inches of water.  The pools run right up to the walls of the building.  Inside there were some fabulous pieces of work.  A lot by Lalique and Tiffany, one by Chihuly and lots of other great pieces by glassmakers I’d not heard of.  They also had a whole Charles Rennie Macintosh dining room set up and I have to say the whole thing was set in a most unexpected location for what seemed to be a world class collection.  Oh, and on this cold, wet day we were the only visitors.

Takayama

We’re turning for home really and drive south from the Alps towards Nagoya on this wet and gloomy day.  It turned out to be a very atmospheric ride through the very hilly and autumnal coloured forested countryside with mist oozing from the woods high above us.  Very muted colours in thus weather but impressive nonetheless.  I’ve written about the speed of the trains here and that is just highlighted by how slow driving is.  On the equivalent of Motorways or Interstate Highways the speed limit is 80.  But that’s kilometres not miles per hour, so 50 mph on the fastest roads.  Occasionally on others the limit is 40 mph but almost everywhere even in completely empty countryside the limit is 30 mph so the average journey time turns out to be about 20 mph.  In quite a few towns the limit drops to 25 mph and sometimes as low as 18 mph.  It can get very tedious and it is difficult to keep the speed down.  For our time in the Alps we had a Hybrid Honda, running on petrol but pushing power from the engine and braking into a battery system for efficiency.  We got over 68 mpg with quite a lot of mountain driving so I think that is pretty efficient.

There are only a couple of days left when Heather realises that we’re leaving from a different Tokyo airport than the one we arrived at.  Very fortunate too, we would never have had time to get from one to the other in time if we had gone to the wrong one.  It really has been a great trip, a very different and fascinating culture, city centres to wonder at and really lovely people.   We just wonder how many Japanese tourists are on their way home thinking "I could just murder a nice bit of raw fish and some seaweed".

So we drop the car and leave Nagoya for Tokyo on our last Shinkansen ride, this time we’ve paid directly for the tickets because our Rail Passes ran out a week ago and we’re on the Nozomi.  This is the same rolling stock as the others but the fastest ride with fewer stops.  Before we came to Japan we thought that the bullet trains would be reasonably uncommon but they certainly are not.  While we’re waiting for our Shinkansen ‘Nozomi’ to arrive we just check the board and find that there are twelve an hour going just from Nagoya to Tokyo.  The bullet trains have either eight or sixteen carriages, each of which carries a hundred sitting passengers.  They still have the same voices doing the messages though, with one woman sounding exactly like a breathless Marilyn Monroe impersonator.  You half expect an announcement to end “bo bo di bo”.  With two stops included, our Nozomi averaged a bit over 122 mph.  We’re in our left hand side booked seats and as we power out of a tunnel at 125 mph or so, there, there on our left is the iconic snow-capped cone of Mount Fuji !  Looking much closer than we expected and with a cloud free summit it really is very impressive.  As we speed past, the clouds drift in and obscure the entire mountain so if the train had been one minute later we would never have known it was there. 

Bunce luck holds again !

Mount Fuji hiding behind a bridge

STOP PRESS !

As we sit in Munich airport with a delay announced for our connecting flight we check the news on the BBC to find a story about the good ol’ bullet train.   Management of one train company (there are a number running different services) have apologised “for any inconvenience caused” because a Tokyo to Tsukuba Shinkansen train left at 09.44.20 instead of 09.44.40.  Twenty seconds early !  No passengers had complained.

9. Heading for the hills, well The Alps

Autumnal Acer, Ginkgo and a Japanese sky

As we headed north out of Nagoya we were aiming for a traditional Japanese Hotel for a couple of nights.  Navigating is difficult with many signs only in Japanese but we had been told when we got our first car in what seems like an age ago on Hokkaido, that if we put in the phone number of our destination in the satnav, we would get directions.  An English sat nav by the way means that directions are spoken in English, places on the screen are still in Japanese script.  Anyway the phone number solved it for us and when we had no real destination we’d just key in the number of the Tourist Office which worked just fine.  We’d still back this up with the best map we could find which was often somewhat useless. 

Anyway, thanks to phone number and satnav we arrived at a remote location with a big curved fronted hotel lobby and a reception that was the usual warm one by a receptionist who didn’t have one word of English.  Even I know three Japanese words.  A couple of younger Japanese women did

Our room at Iwasuso Hotel

speak enough English for us and all the staff were wonderfully friendly.  When we arrived we were offered refreshment, tea (hot or cold), a couple of different coffees, a soft drink or a whisky.  When we left we were offered the same while our bill was prepared.   The traditional room is minimalist to the point of being bare.  There’s a small lobby where shoes are changed for slippers, a lavatory with lavatory slippers and a washing area.  The living room/bedroom had a built in cupboard, a wide window sill which could be sat on, a couple of cushions and a three foot square table about fifteen inches high.  The floor was covered in tatami which are half inch thick woven rush mats.   That’s it.  The cupboard contained all the bedding, which while I was off leaving dinner mysteriously arranged itself as a bed on the floor.  In the morning, the staff pack it all away again which is an awful lot of work.  The appeal wasn’t just to stay in a traditional hotel (and I found it as uncomfortable as it sounds) but the various onsens available.  There were two public ones, men’s and women’s, a private indoor one and a partly outdoor one which had to be booked.  It was so hot, I swear you could have boiled an egg in the partly outdoor onsen and had I had an egg, I would have, I was starving.   Our stay was all rather delightful, apart from the food and being so uncomfortable but that’s our fault, this was a traditional Japanese hotel and I’m a westerner unused to it.

Not enjoying dinner
as much as I seem to be 

Well, I can’t take Japanese food but I can leave it and I do try to avoid it if I can.  I have given some of it a good try and even Heather says she’s been impressed at times but no, not for me.  A lot of the vegetable bits I find just don’t really taste of much and the fishy bits for every meal of the day don’t appeal any more than noodles slopping about in a meat or fish stock.  What has got me through are the occasional Italian or even Indian Restaurants although they take after the Japanese style of having a few bits in a soup so that a curry is mainly sauce.   The best meals have been some of the hotel restaurant buffets which usually offer a mix of Japanese and western food and are very good value especially at lunchtime when prices are invariably lower.  I confess to packing away a few currant buns, well quite a few actually, from the odd bakery we’ve come across.  What is noticeably lacking here are dairy products and on the very rare occasions when we’ve seen cheese in the shops it is astoundingly expensive.  In fact in our journey around Japan, which if you’ve read the previous blogs you’ll know has been extensive, we’ve seen very few farm animals at all.  Some horses, a few goats and cows but no pigs, sheep or poultry.  I include horses here because we have seen horsemeat on menus, sometimes raw !   So I expect to come home a little lighter but not much.  In the traditional Japanese hotel I mentioned above we met a delightful lady called Judy who lives on Vancouver Island and visits Japan regularly.  She has an Englishman friend who has lived and worked in Japan for 35 years and who still has an aversion for (in his words) “all that slippery, slimy stuff”.  A perfect summary if you ask me.

part of the paved Post Route

The biggest attraction in the area is walking part of one of the old post roads, much of which are now National Highways but in this area some sections still exist as stone topped track.  We started at Magome and at Judy’s suggestion walked in the less favoured direction away from the village.  One of the joys of travelling as we do is, for us that we can meet someone, learn something and change our plans.  Just before we left our car after arriving at Magome, four coachloads of people were heading  the ‘normal’ way into the narrow street.  Our route was almost deserted and ran through a lightly farmed area and then onto paved path through woodland.  It was the first proper walk we’d had and it was lovely.  Back at Magome, the crowds were still around this old narrow village when we got back.  The path through was pedestrian only and it was inevitably aimed at tourists but it was pretty discreetly done.  It was a very attractive place with views of the distant mountains shrouded in light mist while we ambled about in the sunshine.

Magome

In an idle moment I checked the various latitudes we were at against other parts of the world (well, doesn’t everyone do that ?) so I could put Japan into positional context as it were.  So for your information, at Sapporo which is almost as far north as we went, we were on the same latitude as Nice and Montpelier, Vermont.  In Kagoshima, almost our southernmost point we on the same latitude as Marrakech and El Paso, New Mexico.   It gets so cold here in the winter because of the NW winds from Siberia and the mass of ice flowing out of the Russian rivers.  It never ceases to amaze me that despite being so far north, how warm we are in the UK because of the North Atlantic Drift of warm water.

along the Post Route

I’ve previously mentioned how small many of the hotel rooms are and it means that our experiences of motorhoming come in very handy.  Our mantra is “a tidy van is a happy van” and the same goes for the hotel rooms.  As it happens I rarely unpack more than the absolute minimum anyway on the basis that if you don’t unpack it you can’t leave it behind.  I don’t need hangers or cupboard space, just enough room to lay my bag on the floor.  Heather does unpack more than me but really not that much more although hangers are usually utilised.

As a nation the Japanese seem to be a quiet people, voices are kept low, I doubt I heard anyone shout in our whole six weeks and a car horn is used very rarely.  People talk quietly on mobile phones and in trains they will leave their seats and stand between coaches in the corridor to make or take a call.  To counter this though is the general noise level.  There’s the usual bing-bong we’re used to when a lift arrives and so on but everywhere we go there are jingles being played, even sometimes when we’re walking round a garden they will be speakers playing something.   In the Glover garden in Nagasaki it was what sounded like an Irish Pub band fiddling away.  At pedestrian crossings too, music is often played when it’s time to cross.  In one town it was “coming through the rye” !   Early on we heard birds in many stations and then realised it was a recording playing all the time.   Now in mid-November, it was Christmassy songs on an endless loop playing in the streets.

Incidentally, the Glover Garden mentioned above is on a hill and a series of travellators took you to the top so that you could gently walk down.

Well, we’re in the Japanese Alps and want to see some snow and mountains and fortunately there are some in the way of where we want to go next.  The cable car we’re headed for closes in mid-November so we don’t know if it is still running.  As we drive upwards we do start to leave autumn behind and we have seen some fantastic colour at various times all over Japan.  Climbing further we start to be convinced that the cable car has finished because the road looks less used and we don’t see any other traffic.  Well, hey ho, let’s carry on anyway.  We see mist rolling in from one viewpoint and then just as we reach the yes, closed cable car it starts to snow.  It wasn’t mist after all.  Coming down a different way the Satnav wasn’t as clear as you might wish in such circumstances but eventually we got to where we wanted to be.  At one point we realised that we hadn’t seen another vehicle for an hour and a half.

part of the garden at Iwasuso Hotel

8. Circuitous - but Tokyo bound

Stone Lanterns at Kasuga Taisha, Nara

With a little over a week to go even we have to look at what we would like to do and what we can do in practical terms without spending an awful lot of time travelling.  Coupled with this is that our wonderful JR Rail Passes run out in about three or four days.   So we’ve decided that we’ll have a car for the last few days in the Japanese Alps.

This means we can fit in a trip back to the north coast to a place called Matsue for a couple of gardens.    The main line Shinkansen is closer to the southern coast so we head away eastwards from Nagasaki to Okayama, then change to an express heading north.  This runs through some of the best scenery we’ve seen from the train because it has to go through some very hilly sections on the way to Matsue.  As always our first port of call was the Tourist Information Office who are always unfailingly eager and helpful with a stack of free maps and information.  An added bonus is that they’re nearly always set in or very close to the railway station.   Here at Matsue we were shown a leaflet about the Yuushien Garden which for this week had an illuminated light display.  Shall we, or shan’t we ?  We had been travelling for quite some time and it was past 4.00.  So we checked into our accommodation which was about 400 yards from the station and was our third Airbnb.  Japanese ones aren’t up to the standard of the few others we’ve used elsewhere or heard first-hand about.  This one was a small one room apartment split into two with a screen, floor level Japanese style mattresses, a tiny bathroom and a kitchen sink with a one plate electric hob for boiling a kettle.  We weren’t planning on cooking so it didn’t matter but the main thing is that while it didn’t have 100 thread Egyptian Cotton sheets  it was clean.  I think it had two plates of different size, a knife, and several other odd pieces of kitchen ware.   It was advertised as ‘sleeping up to seven’.     This would have to be seven who were on extremely friendly terms or who took it in turns to be out.  Still it was good enough for us and very convenient.  We were only here because Heather couldn’t find any available hotels in the town.

So really we did nothing much more than have a cuppa, dump our bags and then we legged it back to the station for the 5.30 free shuttle which we had assumed would be a five minute ride to the garden.  So we and an old Japanese couple were the only passengers on what turned out to be at least a half hour journey.   We pulled up in a darkish car park with a couple of dozen cars, were waved across the road by two uniformed men with light batons and into what can only be described as a Serendipitous event.  It was lowish key to begin with, Acers and cloud pruned conifers lit quite discreetly, a bit of artificial mist, then a display of backlit coloured parasols and a brightly lit entrance way.  Well, inside the rest of the garden it was absolutely stunning.  It was eat-your- heart-out Mr Disney stunning.  There must have been hundreds of thousands of lights in what was obviously a computer controlled display of shapes, colour and pattern.  Mount Fuji, the moon and a bright red Torii arch in lights appeared regularly.  Neither of us had ever seen anything like it before.  After the extravagance of the main displays we were back into a more low key set of lighting again of red bridges, pools, more Acers and conifers.  Then our free shuttle bus back, just us and the old Japanese couple.  Magnificent, and I have to say one of the highlights of the trip (no pun intended).

Yuushien Garden

We even found a decent restaurant next to the station where once more we were in a fractured conversation and photo opportunity with a Japanese family.  This does happen frequently.  On one train we were in a fairly difficult conversation and somehow we found out that our Japanese conversee played the trombone, loved British Brass Bands but his favourites were the Japanese

ensemble, The Fukuoka Flourish Brass Band.   Incidentally I remember a story from years back that the famous Black Dyke Mills Brass Band had to have a name change for a USA tour for linguistic reasons.  For my US reader, a dyke in northern England is a ditch or a wall and the black probably refers to the colour of peaty soil.

Adachi Museum of Art Garden

The garden I’d wanted to see was at the Adachi Museum of Art, gravel, water, clipped trees, classic Japanese styling with no lawns and some ‘borrowed’ scenery.  It was a stunner and had been named Best Garden in Japan by the Journal of Japanese Gardening.   Assuming the Journal wasn’t funded by the owners of the garden, it was a pretty good endorsement.   This garden was a train ride and another free shuttle bus ride away from Matsue.

Adachi Museum of Art Garden

We liked Matsue as a city as well as the two tremendously impressive gardens.   Set next to two big lakes that could easily be the sea, one of the things to do is to watch the sunset over one particular island.  We were nearby at the right sort of time and toddled along, along with about a hundred other cameras.   The setting was lovely, with two water set Buddhas and as the sun finally dipped a smattering of applause broke out.

Japan has a falling birthrate, the population is declining and it’s suggested that they will have to relax their immigration laws to keep the workforce big enough.   From our limited experience of the country it appears there’s a much simpler answer and that’s to do away with all the non-jobs or wild overmanning that is apparent everywhere we’ve been.   I wrote about the security guards in an earlier blog but it’s common to see people whose job appears to be waving people across the road when there are green lights to let you know when to cross or to wave people out of the way in a tourist area when a car is coming.  Other specific examples are seven staff in the tourist office at Sapporo on a Sunday morning when we were the only customers.  For us tourists having the information offices open 9.00 am to 6.00 pm seven days a week is great but at what cost ?  On one train ride while waiting for a connection I went into a very small station shop to buy a drink and when I turned to the cash desk there were four staff, shoulder to shoulder all looking expectantly at me.   In the town we’re in now, we walked to some old houses about 9.00 on a Sunday morning and in a garage/gas station there were eleven (yes, eleven) staff in uniforms waiting on the forecourt for a vehicle to refuel.

You might well imagine that a lot of rice is grown here and you’d be correct, we’ve seen it in many places but it does seem to be highly labour intensive.  Many fields are very small, by my estimate some down to under a quarter of an acre.  This is due to the annoying property of water for rice growers of flowing downhill which means that paddy fields have to be very flat, hence often very small.   More rice can be grown in a given area than the type of grain favoured in Europe and I’ve read that this is one possible cause of the Industrial Revolution happening in the west rather than the east.  If you can feed a bigger population from a smaller cultivated area you have an ample supply of manual workers.  Throughout much of the last 1500 years, technology in many areas was  more advanced in the east than the west but this never developed into their Industrial Revolution.

After another spectacular journey south through the hills to the huge built up areas around Kyoto/Osaka we have two night in Osaka and plan to visit Nara, a much publicised and temple strewn place a little further east.   First though, on the evening of our arrival we head to an exhibition which we’d seen advertised in Kyoto nearly a fortnight ago and thought we wouldn’t be able to get to.   It was a whole exhibition of Hokusai, who even if you don’t know the name you’re

almost certain to have seen some of his work, probably one of his classic Views of Mount Fuji.  Matching up to my view that the Japanese know how to live in a city in three dimensions, the gallery was on the fifteenth floor of a huge block.  Unfortunately, it was teeming with people, some with binoculars or monoculars to help them see the pictures through the crowds shuffling past.  Fortunately for me, I had an extra six inches of height to help me.   It was an exhibition well worth seeing and possibly even more crowded than a Royal Academy exhib. at peak time – but cheaper.

This tame !

Nara, the next day was very different for us.  Apart from the edge of Typhoons in one evening each at Kyoto and Hiroshima, I think it was the first time in our five weeks so far that it was raining when we wanted to visit somewhere.   Apart from the temples and a very impressive hall containing a huge Buddha, Nara is noted for tame deer.  Very tame deer.   They can be stroked, have absolutely no fear of humans and naturally are encouraged by being fed.  People buy biscuits for them and then seem to panic when the deer see what they have and get a bit pushy.   To give some indication of how old the cultural background is here, the five storey Pagoda was constructed in 730 and a reconstruction was completed 696 years later in 1426, a mere 591 years ago, so it’s 105 years til the next one then.  

The Great Buddha

The Great Buddha Hall, almost brand new having been rebuilt only in 1709 is the largest wooden building in the world and even so is only two-thirds the size of the original wooden building it replaced.  The Buddha is just over 52 feet high and is made of 432 tonnes of bronze and132 kg of gold

On our last JR Railpass day we travel to Nagoya to pick up a car for six days in the Japanese Alps, making sure to book our seats for the return to Tokyo on the left side of the train.  The left is the Mount Fuji side and we’re hoping for clear weather.

2. A bit more Tokyo, then south before heading to the far north

I imagine that a number of customs and behaviours which seemed at first strange to us will rapidly became invisible as we spend longer in Japan and more and more becomes ‘normal’ to us, so topics will appear as if by random in these blogs.  That’ll be because I’ve just remembered something, which to be fair, is about as random as anything can get. 

All of which is a preamble to a number of observations, the first of which is Security Guards.  I have never seen so many.  They are almost without exception quite old men (my age) wear very smart uniforms of dark blue trousers, lighter blue shirts, peaked military style caps or hard hats and carry a truncheon, often dayglo orange.  We’ll be walking past a small building site with nothing on it and there will be three of them, one on each side of the entrance and one by the road.  Their function appears to be to guide lorries in and out and bow to any pedestrian who catches their eye.   Others will be each side of a road to hold up either traffic or walkers so that walkers or traffic get priority.  If this doesn’t really make sense then I’ve written it accurately. 

London Cab Wedding Car 

Now we’ve found that drivers are as polite as people not in vehicles and I will write about those later but drivers have been stopping to let us across the road every time we’re near a crossing and if we’re walking along a narrow road and a car comes up behind us it just follows slowly, no horn , no revving, no effing, until we notice it and sidle out of the way.  Cyclists however are like many cyclists the world over, nutters, and I speak as someone whose number 1 son is a serious cyclist and therefore not a nutter.   Cyclists are allowed to ride on pavements here which are often marked half for pedestrians and half for cyclists.  This is clearly merely optional and furious cycling while weaving in and out of groups of walkers is the norm.  In the road against the traffic is fine.  In the road at night against the traffic with a child on the back and no lights is also fine.

Traditional Wedding

The most obvious thing to notice though is that the vast majority of the people we see are oriental and probably Japanese.  I’ve read that 98.5% of Japan’s population is ethnically Japanese but I’m talking about Tokyo and we’re going to touristy places.  The language is not tonal and all the sounds are used in English (I understand) but emphasis on different syllables can mean different things.  Japanese characters are just impossible.  Anyway, I’m not having any problems learning  Japanese because I’m just not learning Japanese.  A word or two here and there perhaps but it would be ridiculous to try and pick up anything of substance.   I‘ll just have to stick to prostrating myself and wailing that I’m just a barbarian westerner who wants something that I can eat.  You can be served raw horsemeat in some restaurants and Heather has found some information on a shop that sells ice cream in squid ink or sea-urchin flavour.  Even so, I feel the same way about Pork Scratchins’.

Actually we both really like Tokyo and may well come back at the end of our trip, it will be interesting to see how much cooler it is in five weeks.  At present the weather is just like their rice, warm and sticky.

However, before we left Tokyo we spent Sunday around two areas called Shibuya and Harajuka.  Shibuya has a famous extra busy pedestrian and road junction.  When the crossing man goes green

Shibuya Crossing, Sunday morning

(nobody but nobody crosses until he does), people stream 





across each of the roads entering the junction and diagonally across the junction in their hundreds.  Then the crossing police wave stragglers out of the way and the traffic thunders through for a while.  Quite a sight.  Nobody seems to bump into anybody else but I understand that the Japanese are particularly adept at making sure that they don’t.  As a digression, I’d recommend a book called Watching The English by a social anthropologist called Kate Fox which is a look at how we English behave.  One of her experiments was that she tested bumping into people deliberately, which she admits she found personally difficult, and seeing how many of them apologised to her.  Then she did the same in various other countries but found it very difficult to even bump into the Japanese because they’re so skilled at swerving out of the way.

This puppy only £4,800

Harajuka is a very expensive shopping area with loads of Designer Label shops where fashionable people hang out, so being fashionistas ourselves we sashayed along in our walking boots and walking gear to strut our stuff.  We had found the Japanese very quiet but a couple of million of them all out shopping together do make a formidable racket.  There is a very odd style, prevalent here, of strange clothing matched up, a sort of grotesque ‘cute’ schoolgirl/adult look.  Perhaps jeans with a
see through lace tutu topped off with a multi-coloured crochet top with hair in bunches at the side. Plus make up laid on with a trowel.  All a little creepy really.   We did however see a Japanese Jack Sparrow chatting to some Orthodox Jews in their traditional clothes which was wonderfully bizarre.

So, validating our first Japan Rail Pass and heading south to Hakone on the bullet train was the plan.   This wasn’t the whole country rail pass but covered the east and north and we’d got it because we could pick six days out of fifteen to use it instead of the consecutive days on the country wide pass. Got that ?  Anyway, it wasn’t valid for the bullet train to Hakone so we worked out how to get there on the ordinary train instead.  The reason we had thought it was valid is that the map they send you with the tickets when you buy them in England includes the Shinkansen to Hakone.  So it wasn’t unreasonable etc.. etc…

Hakone is a hilly, densely wooded landscape which we got to after changing trains to a slow local one climbing the steep hillside by zig zagging upwards.  We would come to a halt and then chug back almost the way we’d come, performing a number of giant Z’s to get to Gora at the end of the line.  Then steeply upwards carrying our backpacks to the hotel which was set in what seemed to be a residential area with no other facilities.  It did have one, just the one, extraordinary facility about 400 yards further on.  It  was the most wonderful Italian Restaurant, run by Japanese who had lived in Italy.  We had dinner there twice for there was nowhere else.   On the second evening the woman who we took to be the owner and waitress asked to take our photo on her I-Pad.  We smiled and thought no more about it until Heather’s appetiser arrived.  It was on a clingfilm covered I-Pad displaying our photograph.   Cue merriment all round.

We were in a traditional hotel with western and Japanese rooms, very little English spoken, a restaurant with no concession outside Japanese food for dinner or breakfast and a very pleasant piece of lift style classical music playing softly where the internet signal was obtainable.  It was pleasant background music until you suddenly realised it actually only lasted about twenty seconds and then repeated again and again.  Once realised, it was maddening.  

The most obvious part of the traditional here was the careful use of slippers.  Shoes are left at the entrance lobby and you choose a pair of slippers to walk into the hotel.  In our room, there was another pair to change into which are only used in the lavatory and then you change back into your general hotel slippers.  The best part of the hotel though was that it had an Onsen, a spring fed hot water bath heated by local volcanic activity.   Use of the onsen has an etiquette like so much of Japanese culture and there was a men’s and a women’s onsen here so you bathe naked.  You shower well next to the bath which was about fifteen feet by six and about two feet deep and then lower yourself gently into very hot water.  It is an onsen social faux pas to drop your tiny towel into the water so it sits folded on top of your head.  About ten minutes was enough and I certainly didn’t use the even hotter sauna which was next to it.  It was as you might expect very relaxing.

Hakone-en from the lake

One of the big tourist attractions in the area is a circuit starting with a funicular and then cable car over a big hill and volcanic crater, down to a lake for a ride of about five to ten miles to the other end on a pirate ship, then a bus and finishing with a return on the ziggy-zag train we arrived on.  It was a day we were five minutes late for everything.   The cable car really did go across a steaming volcanic crater and we were solemnly issued with a ‘protection against fumes’ pack which was a medically sealed plastic bag containing a wet cloth to hold across our faces if the smell  got too bad.  There was also a notice pointing out that the volcano was beyond their control which we thought was fair enough as people seem to expect everything to be tamed and Disneyfied these days.  We thought we would be going higher and could have a bit of a hike at the top but no such luck and frankly it was all a bit tame.

At Hakone Open-Air Museum

The big attraction for us in the area was The Hakone Outdoor Museum which was the most
impressive parkland full of top notch sculpture set in a landscape of dramatically wooded hills.  We were lucky to have it bathed in sunshine as well.   Even the entrance was impressive, going down by escalator, along a short tunnel and out in the park with sculpture in plenty of space all around.   There was also a Picasso gallery with some particularly good stuff (as us aficionados call it) on display.  Then just as we left, I realised 
my faithful walking pole had been left 
behind somewhere.  

So I went back in, thought about it, remembering the last place I knew I had it and hotfooted it to the café, a great modern glass affair.  There was my pole just where I’d left it leaning against the corner of two glass walls glued together.  It had been there for three hours.