2001-10-10 - 10:31 p.m.
Last night I had a dream that I was in Afghanistan in a building that was being bombed -- I awoke startled, and felt the room shaking. I grabbed my flashlight thinking that there was an earthquake, but then almost as soon as I was aware of being awake, I realized that I had dreamt the earthquake as well. I lay awake for a while, planning earthquake exit strategies -- what to grab and where to go -- until I finally drifted off to sleep.
Last weekend was pleasantly free of both natural and Bush-related disaster fears. Eager to escape the Tokyo/Chiba concrete jungle, Lela, Izzy and I went to Izu, a peninsula jutting out into the Pacific Ocean just south of Mt. Fuji. We departed from Tokyo on Saturday afternoon, and after about 3.5 hours on trains, we got to the small beach town of Shimoda. Shimoda had everything that I have been missing since I’ve been in Japan: tree-lined streets, cozy cafes and shops, a small-town feel, and the opportunity to walk 10 feet without seeing a conbini (convenience store). We ate dinner at a small traditional Japanese restaurant (sitting on the tatami-mat floor) and with our collective reading skills managed to order from the menu which was written in Japanese and had NO pictures. We then headed back to the train station to take a bus to a nearby youth hostel where we were planning to stay for the night. We had the brilliant idea to call and ask about the vacancy before getting on the bus, and even with our limited Japanese it was clear that the hostel had no beds for the night. No fear, we had my trusty Lonely Planet guide which is so obsessively detailed that I wonder if I wrote it in a past life. We found a listing for a nearby ryokan (traditional Japanese inn) which was described as “aging but interesting.” Taking the advice of the Lonely Planet, we found a local -- a very friendly bus driver -- to call ahead and talk to the innkeeper on our behalf. The bus driver drew us a map, pushed us in the right direction, and after a 15-minute walk, we found the inn. After about 5 minutes of deliberation as to which of the dozen or so doors was the front door, we picked one and entered. A man of about 95 years came out to greet us, talking rapidly in Japanese and putting out slippers for us to wear. He showed us the bath, which was a tiled onsen (hot spring) and then lead us upstairs to our room. The house felt like a grandparent’s house -- full of old furniture and knickknacks, dark and worn carpets, portraits of old relatives on the walls. Our room had tatami mats, a coffee table, and futons to sleep on. It was only 8:30, but we were unsure whether it would be okay to leave and come back in, so we decided to take a bath and call it a night. We put on our yukata (cotton robes) and padded downstairs to the onsen.
(Me in my yukata)
We washed outside the bath with washcloths, soap and bowls of hot water scooped from the bath itself. After rinsing off, we eased ourselves into the bath, which was VERY hot. The bathroom itself had a wall of tall windows, with privacy provided by a row of trees, giving the effect of bathing in a garden. We could only stand the heat for so long, so we dried off & went to bed, asleep by 10.
The next morning, we got up at 7:30 to get an early start on the day. We walked to two nearby temples, much smaller than those we’d seen in Kamakura and without the crowds. The road to the temples had a canal and narrow arched bridges, lined with weeping willows whose leaves nearly skimmed the water. At the second temple we visited, there was a small museum explaining the history of Shimoda. The infamous American commander, Commodore Perry came to Shimoda in 1853 and initiated the signing of the first peace treaty between the U.S. and Japan. The first American consul general, Townsend Harris, made a local 17 year-old girl named Okichi-san his personal maid-servant/prostitute. However, Okichi-san was already in love with a local man at the time, and this love tormented her until she took her own life at the age of 50. Okichi-san was simultaneously revered as a patriot and reviled as a whore, and much of the museum is dedicated to representations of her life. After leaving the museum, we stumbled upon a small pottery shop on the way back to the station. Though the shop itself was no bigger than an American walk-in closet, it had a small, cluttered back room where an elderly man and his wife sat at a table eating breakfast. The woman immediately offered us coffee and a seat on the chairs placed around the shop. Again stretching the limits of our collective Japanese ability, along with the minimal English of our host, we managed to have a nice conversation for nearly 30 minutes. The woman was refreshingly genki (friendly & lively) and all three of us walked out in a great mood with some new pottery to boot.
From Shimoda station we took an hour-long bus ride to the western coast of the Izu peninsula. The ride wound through the mountains, past farms and small towns and houses with red and blue tiled roofs. We knew that we were close to our destination, Dogashima, when we saw the ocean for the first time. Luckily we got a rare beautiful day -- not even a gray, non-rainy day, but an actual blue sky. Dogashima is famous for its striking rock formations -- sharp, pale peaks and cliffs rising out of the ocean, forming chains and caves.
Pics of Dogashima taken on my cell phone:
Dogashima was full of tourists, but the scenery was so beautiful and so vast that it didn’t really matter. We climbed about on the rocks for a while and then made tracks for an outdoor onsen we’d read about in Lonely Planet. After walking along a road, past a beach, cutting through a small fishing village, passing a small marina and a short uphill hike, we found what we were looking for. The onsen was tiny -- a shack at the top of a cliff for changing and then a small stone pool, maybe 8 feet in diameter, overlooking the Pacific. The water was warm but not too hot -- perfect for soaking and admiring the scenery.
After our onsen, we sat by the beach for a while before catching a high-speed ferry up the coast. The ferry took us for about an hour and a half to a non-descript marina town with a train line. From there we made our way back to Chiba. In less than 2 days, I took 6 trains, 3 buses, and one ferry, but the trip was so enjoyable that the traveling didn’t bother me in the slightest. I had real cognitive dissonance sitting in that onsen, looking out at the ocean -- this was Japan? The same Japan where I go to work everyday, do grocery shopping, and set my rice cooker before bed? My daily life in Kimitsu has become so routine that going to Izu felt like going on vacation to an exotic foreign country. A Pacific resort only half a day away? I could get used to this.
