I haven’t quite had so much fun in forever. Autumn in Japan is positively riddled with 3 day weekends. Which means we celebrated Culture Day last Friday by getting out for one last pre-snow huzzah. Chris went down to Tokyo on Wednesday for work related happiness (and, I later found out, to buy a 1kg block of cheddar cheese). Meanwhile, I joined some JETs in Takanosu for some nomihodai carousing.
For the uninitiated, a nomihodai is an all you can drink per given amount of time sort of thing. A usual deal is about $20 for 2 hours, during which your job is to drink all the colors of the rainbow. I got through yellow, blue, green, and orangey-purple before my time was up. Nomihodai in Japan is lovely, because you can order all sorts of pretty and frufy drinks, instead of shots of tequila or some equivalently horrible hooch.
Afterwards, we hit the karaoke bar down the street, during which I discovered the karaoke song I was meant, no born, to sing: “Californication” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Everyone needs one of those in their repertoire. ;) I sing in a dusky alto voice so no one ever suspects the fussy classical soprano hiding just under the surface.
Several of us retired to Futatsui to crash until the alcohol fled from our systems. We employed the marvelous services of the daiko, a brilliant Japanese innovation. Imagine a taxi containing two drivers: one for you and one for your car, which also needs a ride home. Thus the magic of the daiko. We prattled on and on to our driver in broken Japanese, hopefully entertaining rather than annoying him. The only true moment of communication I recall was when he found out we had been karaokeing, and asked us what our favorite Japanese songs were. We were all stumped, and could only answer by humming a few bars of a) the local festival music or b) the local department store music. Both of which were amusingly familiar to the driver.
Once home, we laughed, we cried, we drank tea. And then at 3am, an insatiable hunger struck all 4 of us at once, and we made a midnight walk to the 24-hour Lawson convenience store, where they made us “fresh” fried chicken. A better midnight snack I cannot name. We discovered that one of the health tonics sold there contains nicotine, as much of the drug, we calculated, as 3 packs of cigarettes. And with that intellectual itch scratched, we headed home in near-freezing temperatures to finally fall asleep on the floor with full bellies at 4 in the morning.
Saturday morning I was off in my car to Tazawako (Japan’s deepest lake! Go Akita!) where I would meet Chris, who was simultaneously Shinkansening up from Tokyo. We found a beautiful lake free from crowds, where we could enjoy the last gasping throes of autumn.
We had a brief confusing encounter with the Tazawako hostel owner. Upon arrival, she shooed us away, claiming (we thought) that the hostel was down the street. We left and searched and asked around, but everyone kept pointing us back to the same building where we began, the one with the discrete Youth Hostel sign. Frustrated and bewildered, we ended up back at the youth hostel, where we finally realized that she had only been asking us to move our car to the next lot over. So much for my steadily improving Japanese language skills.
The hostel was definitely a bare bones arrangement, and not exactly worth the exorbitant price (only in Japan are the hostels $50 a night!). However, everything was Japanese style, so this was fun in its own way. The baths were public style. We slept on futons on a tatami floor in an unheated room, save for the space heater we desperately huddled around. We thought we were going to freeze, but no, everything ended up being nice and cozy. The owner’s granddaughters were frolicking around the joint like mad, running wind sprints outside to keep warm. They were fun to talk to and added to the general familial atmosphere. We were the only foreigners in the joint. As a matter of fact, we didn’t see any foreigners for days, which was kind of exciting. This happens in Noshiro too, but I know where all the gaijins live, so it doesn’t seem quite as exciting.
The next morning we found, to our delight, a little honey shop complete with creampuffs and all you can drink expresso. The all you can drink phenomenon has not widely caught on here, so this was a huge find for us. We had planned to do a bunch of hiking around the lake that morning, but this doesn’t seem to be a big option at Tazawako. So after making the trek to a famous golden gal, the big arches, and mirror rock, we hightailed it out to Kakunodate, where we stopped to stroll awhile down cherry tree lined samurai streets.
That evening we crashed in Akita at a Comfort Inn, where the concierge spoke the most startlingly fluent English I’ve heard in quite some time. Her English is better than the English teachers I work with at school! She would throw out colloquial phrases like “Just kidding!” whenever she made a mistake. I was thrilled. No, enraptured. I wanted to sit and monopolize her all night, and we almost invited her to our Halloween party, but eventually left the poor woman alone.
The hotel was remarkably a reassuring and comfortable place to stay (at the same price as the hostel!). I never really thought I cared much about bathroom set up before, but now that I’ve been in Japan for 3 months, I realized what a relief it was to get in a bathtub that’s just the right depth. I mean, the Japanese ones are fun too… much deeper than the ones you’re used to at home, fill it up to your neck until it takes a little extra effort to breathe and then let the water run up and out over the side onto the floor and into the drain because you can! Wheeeeee! But familiarity is fun too. And, it was an absolute pleasure to find that the toilet was in the same room as the shower, that I didn’t have to watch myself bathe, and that the bathroom mirror was larger than your average book. Simply thrilling.
And then, the next day, I saw Vishnu in the form of chana masala for lunch. Akita City has Indian Food and they will even make it Spicy for you. I could not contain the happiness I felt as I consumed the closest physical manifestation of bliss I could imagine. It was that good.
We rounded out the weekend with an ikebana exhibition in Akita, to which I had procured free tickets. I wish I had known more about the ins and outs of the trade, because mostly I just saw crazy flower arrangements. I’m sure they all represented the samurai’s plight in the x-teenth century or made striking commentaries on the fleetingness of life or something. But I had to settle for thinking “ooooh. pretty…”
