spirited away

Legend has it that the best cure for a hangover is a bowl of oily salty ramen and a dip in a 40 degree Onsen. Today I tried this out, and found it to be true.

I went with my Japanese language class to Dogo Onsen - one of the oldest Onsen in Japan and, it is said, the inspiration for the hot baths in the animated film Spirited Away. We drove for two hours deep into the isles of Shikoku. The town of Dogo was totally dinky. Old and well maintained, it definitely had a fantasy feel about it. The Onsen building (pic above) is situated at the top of Dogo hondori (a covered shopping arcade). When I first arrived in Japan I went to and wrote about Mihara Onsen but a visit to Dogo confirmed for me that the bright lights and electric zinging of Mihara Onsen is not what these traditional baths are all about. At Dogo, even though it is really famous and steeped in legend, the bath consists of only one relatively small room lined with shower fixtures and little wooden stools along three of the four walls. At its centre is a deep stone pool and at the centre of the pool is a delicate carved stone fountain chugging water. The pool has a lip that you sit in up to your waist. The stone is hot from the water and perfectly smooth and comfortable (decades of bums have worn it perfectly). The one wall that has no showers is dominated by a blue and white tiled mural. The water and the surrounding harmonize beautifully. You really do feel stress and toxins (and beer) just drain out of you into the water and away. I could only tolerate the heat for about ten minutes after which I trotted kaalgat to a shower stall and rinsed myself with ice cold water from a bamboo bucket.

Afterwards I admitted to a Japanese friend that I was craving ice-cream (I felt guilty wanting such a decadent thing after such a cleansing experience). Oh! she said, its very common to want something milky after going to an Onsen and to prove it to me she showed me the vending machines in the lobby - full of milk both plain and flavoured. She had something better in mind though and took us a little further outside the building to a swanky gelato place with crazy flavours. I had a sea salt soft serve. It was utterly delicious and faintly faintly gritty; a creamy electrolyte feast.

The shopping to be had on the hondori was very touristy and Onsen related. The look of the shops, the lighting and bright omiyage (souvenirs) were pitched to perfectly twang your consumer strings so I duly bought some orange jelly and special mochi balls (sweet rice) - both of which are particular to the region.

On the bus coming home I had a full tummy post Onsen nap. Ahhh, heaven.

are we amused?

I spent the school week doing not much at all. My students were writing exams, I had no classes to teach or papers to mark. I spent the days gently coaxing my ancient work laptop through the internet trying to simultaneously educate myself about the upcoming US election and the history of the Booker Prize. I learnt that even though Obama is a person with personality, once he starts talking economic policy, he's as boring as any other guy and that Booker fans get frighteningly Xenophobic when it comes to Indian winners (Mr Rushdie being the obvious exception). I also fell in love with the new Mac Book and the shiny yellow nano - both of which are on my shopping list - I do like being paid in Yen!

On friday, as an after-exam reward, the students were shipped off to an amusement park and the school kindly allowed me a break from the electioneering and mac perving so onto the bus went I. Amusement parks in Japan, it turns out, are exactly as tacky as amusement parks anywhere else in the world. The same pastiche all faded and rusty. It should look magical but it looks old and depressing. Consequently, all the time you are lying to yourself saying "I feel magical!" No dear, you feel old and depressed. The rides were cool I guess, I crapped my broeks just as I had been hoping - metaphorically of course. The setting of the park was the best thing about it; its in Okayama prefecture, high on a hill surrounded by sea and islands - the breathtaking view I have become so blase about these past couple of months. Seto inland sea? Thousands of islands connected by chugging ferries and bridges glimmering silver in the sun? yawn! I see it like every day!

The park, as some kind of nod to the Brazilian immigrant population of the area, had a mardi gras theme (see creepy guy in header photo - he's the equivalent of the boerish miner outside gold reef city making sure you're tall enough to go on rides). At lunch time everyone in the park made their way to the central arena with their bento or trashy fried foods (theme park food is the same the world over too) for a dancing performance by the parks' mascot - inexplicably its a mouse with an enormous pink head. The mouse danced mournfully to music provided by tinny speakers and a demented shirtless guy on bongos. Then the strangest thing happened - a statuesque Brazilian man came on stage in drag and hosted a bingo game, we had all received bingo score cards along with our entrance tickets. I guess a man in drag is not such a strange thing but his behaviour and how he was received was very strange indeed. He was very pushy and sexually aggressive particularly to the school boys in the audience. Whenever anyone had bingo he would totter towards them in his wedge heels and sit on their laps, flicking his wig in the face and rubbing his fake boobs on them. And everyone loved him! The teachers sitting away from the main area thought it was glorious fun to watch this enormous, muscly man humiliate their charges. I couldn't understand why this raunchy character didnt get up their nose, why he was so unanimously accepted. It felt like someone had hired a drunk prostitute to babysit the neighbourhood kids, and no one batted an eyelid.

I met the performers after the show (they tried to get on the bus and continue torturing kids again, who knows why) and they were all Brazilian nationals, really nice, really genki just trying to do their job. I thought about how I had spent my week at work, feeling mismanaged and spare and out of touch. It didn't seem so bad now, looking at these foreigners who had to wear hot pants and mouse suits in order to get their Japanese work permits. In so many ways Japan is Utopian - things run like clockwork, they think everything down to the last detail and every kind of work and play is structured and available. At some point though you start thinking that someone has to be losing out, all this perfection has got to be at someone's expense.


.

rice picking

On saturday I went rice picking. The farmer who employed us (I never find out his real name, everyone just called him farmer Bill) was a stylish man in his mid forties; short grey hair, shell toes and tan dungarees over a picasso-like stripey sweater. Farmer Bill has two small paddies ten minutes outside Onomichi city. The setting is ridiulously idyllic: mountains surrounding several dozen small farm holdings, each little road between the plots buffered by wild cosmos and other flowers offsetting the now golden rice fields. Farmer Bill sells his rice for premium price because it is hand planted and hand picked - this barely occurs anymore in Japan. He has been using JET labour for many years. I met a Scotsman there who was Onomichi's first JET, ten years ago. He is now married to the farmer's daughter and works at Onomichi university.

Using JET labour means farmer Bill gets free labour and we get the experience: symbiosis eveyones happy!

There were about ten of us JETS and as many Japanesees - locals from Onomichi town. The work was divided down gender lines: boys doing the scything, girls doing the gathering and tying. Once the field is scythed down and the rice stalks bundled, the boys set up metal tripods all the way down the field upon which are laid long, thick bamboo poles. You take a rice bundle and separate it half half, wedging the gap over a bamboo pole. When we stopped for lunch the field had been tranformed into corridors of hanging rice, rows upon rows much like the how they grew except now they are upside down. The work wasnt over strenuous but it was hard enough to make me realise why the Japanese eat every grain from their plate - rice is precious! When all the cutting, bundling and hanging was done we all went around the fields picking up every stalk of that had been left out - not a single grain was left unharvested! It took twenty of us a day to harvest two the small fields. The yeild farmer Bill told us is about 200kgs of rice, which is nothing: I have almost finished a two kilo bag on my own in under three months. And field only yeilds one crop a year.

Our payment for the day's labour was lunch cooked by the farmer's wife and served picnic style on the road below the fields. We started with a bowl of delicate Miso and veggie soup - white Miso I think (miso comes in white, red and black ranging from delicate to strong in flavour). then there were two enourmous piles of rice, one salty done with red Azuki beans, the other cooked with edamame beans which turned the rice a minty yellow. We ate the rice with boiled carrots from the farm and braaied salmon that we ripped straight from the carcas with our chopsticks. The carrots, we were told come out of the had been carved so each carrot piece was a heart. The salmon had been marinated in a strong sweet dressing and its juices had dripped down onto a bed of onions and aubergine. it was good. it was really good.

For dessert there were persimmons and as a final flourish the farmers wife brought out a three teir poppy seed cake decorated with frilly pink flowers... She sidled up to me (I was off down the lane having a smoke) and asked softly if anyone had had a birthday recently. Yes, I said, as a matter of fact two Jets just had birthdays.

She was pleased. The cake could now be a birthday cake! She pulled five little candles out of her pockets, placing them carefully and asking if I wouldnt mind walking behind and lighting them so we could sing happy birthday. Thats just what I have come to expect from locals I have met. Not only did the lady of the house do something cook a five star meal for ten gallumfing foreigners but then to think that maybe the beautiful tea cake should celebrate them, in all their gallumfing glory.


.