An hour later, a crowd of exuberant hoydens, their firm bodies tightly wrapped in yukata, wet black hair hanging in strings above lively brown eyes, gambol about the games room outside the ofuro. Chattering, laughing and playing electronic Star Wars games, they do not even notice the streaming pink body of a thwarted Humbert Humbert (of Lolita fame) stalking through their midst, grumbling about the loss of Japanese customs in the hotel.
Back again in mufti, I wander the few streets of the town, peering into soba (noodle) stalls, poking among the mementos. A life-size wooden carving of a urinating bear forms an ursine fountain at the entrance of a souvenir shop. On a side street, crude paintings touting a strip show portray naked women with enormous mammaries, putting to rest that misguided notion about breast worship being singularly American.
Middle-aged Japanese couples (I am the only gaijin, or foreigner, in town), now in heavy brown outdoor kimono, clatter along on wooden geta (clogs). It is the sound I once heard from my paper-walled apartment in Meidaemai, in Tokyo, lying awake on the tatami floors. The little house was across the street from the neighborhood public bath, and every evening the noodle cooks, just finishing their shifts, would clop-clop down the road (dragging their feet for maximum effect) for their baths. On cold winter nights, I would see them leaving the bath, steam rising from their reddened bodies as they tottered home in high spirits.
Reluctant to repeat my performance of the previous night with the $5 beer, I buy a cup of sake from a dispensing machine in the street and heat it under the hot water tap in my sink. Then I return to the novel that Nemoto-san has given me for this journey: Junichiro Tanizaki’s classic Diary of a Mad Old Man. It is the story of an elderly gentleman’s obsession with his young daughter-in-law, a sort of Japanese Lolita. I read:
“Today, you can kiss me.” The shower stopped. A leg appeared between the curtains.
“Nothing above the knee…” Then she added: “Today, I’ll let you use your tongue, too.”
Noborogetsu Spa, the most famous in the country, sits 200 meters up in the mountains. Nestled in a large ravine of the Kasurisambetsu River, walled in by timbered mountains, the spa is said to contain 11 springs of various kinds, with temperatures ranging from 45 to 93 C. My guidebook assures me it is one of the few remaining mixed bathing places in Japan.
A half-kilometer from my hotel, the Takimoto, the Jigakundani (Valley of Hell) festers and bubbles in the miasma of a backed-up toilet. Fierce red devil statues guarding the road add to the impression of entering a hell, which on this breezy day attracts a number of visitors. In the floor of the valley, honeymooning couples pose amid the bubbling, steamy, dirty, stinking sulfur pools. Wind whips sand from the cliffs, and between the sulfur steam and dust gritting in my eyes, I feel like I need a bath.
The Takimoto ofuro is a small, unimpressive affair, so after a perfunctory soak, I cross the street to its sister establishment, the Daichi (or big number one) Takimoto. True to its name, this has the largest bath in the country, some 40 tubs and pools and 10 different kinds of water so bathers can select that which is best for what ails them.
Faded photographs outside the bath show water nymphs disporting themselves in the mineral waters, ignored by men performing their ablutions along the wall. This, finally, is the place. I undress in the locker room, tended by an old woman inured to even the strange sight of foreign flesh, and enter Japan’s largest bathroom.
It is a massive, steamy tiled cavern, noxious fumes rising from the many tubs, rows of washing places along the wall, a swimming pool with a slide running into cold water. Each pool is identified by a small sign in Japanese, listing its curative properties. Wrinkled elderly men go from one to another, sampling the waters like wine connoisseurs.
At the far end, a tiled wall some three or four feet high blocks the view. A scrawny septuagenarian in flimsy shorts and head band walks along the wall, the only man in an all-female world. I move over to the pools near the wall to test the waters with my toes, trying not to be too obvious. Across the effluvia of the bath, I catch a quick glimpse of female flesh, cursing my lack of peripheral vision as I slide into the stinking water.
How old are those photographs outside the bath? Nemoto-san, you old rogue, how long is it since you were here? Customs change, even in the Land of the Rising Sun. I have taken a dozen baths in three days; my skin is wrinkled and I feel like a waterlogged rat. But I am protected from atonic dyspepsia and even chronic stomach catarrh. It is time to go home.
I meet Nemoto-san again in our favorite sushi and sake shop where I relate my failures in the onsens. Nemoto-san selects a piece of raw tuna, shakes his head at my Western timidity as I tell him of the big bath and the low wall. “Ah, Marchant-san,” he remonstrates, “but why didn’t you climb over the fence?”
NAGANO
The Mysterious Disappearing Matsumoto Ball
June, 1994
BY day three of the official North American Press Tour to the Japan Alps, we are laden with gifts and our wallets are thick as Japanese toast with business cards, but we have seen precious little of the region’s attractions and nothing of the ski slopes we came for.
As official guests of the Japan National Tourist Organization, we four visiting scribes quickly learn the truth of the old Japanese adage, “There is no such thing as a free bento (box lunch).”
Nagano Prefecture in central Japan has invited us to publicize its bid for the 1998 Winter Olympic Games (the largest international event marking the end of the century) and to show off its winter sports facilities.
But this is no casual jaunt around picturesque, pastoral Japan. The tourism officials meeting us at the Matsumoto city train station set the tone of the tour: “At 12:40 we will have lunch. At 1:45 we will meet the mayor, then sightseeing. At 5:40 we will arrive at the hotel and at 6:30 we will have dinner.”
The hospitality is grandly bounteous, if structured. The “noodle shop” on the itinerary is a stylish Japanese specialty restaurant with low tables made from foot-thick slices of an oak tree. Lunch in the private tatami room upstairs is somewhat demanding for first time foreign visitors; roasted, sugared bees (the town specialty), horse meat sausage and rainbow trout soaked in soya and smoked.
National tourist organizations habitually ply visiting travel press with the finest of food and drink. In Japan, it is local delicacies such as potatoes smeared with a kind of custard that makes our lips itch, alien tubers and strange sealife and grasshoppers in a tiny sake cup. After a few days, we long for a simple bowl of soba noodles.
At Matsumoto city hall, where Japanese, American and Canadian flags poke from a tabletop stand, there is much exchanging of cards and bowing with local officials. When the mayor and his entourage enter, the ceremony is repeated.
We are celebrities, or at least curiosities, here in the hinterland. TV crews, news photographers and reporters crowd into the board room, strobe lights flashing as they photograph us like eager paparazzi. The reporters have become the news, the watchers the watched.
The mayor extols the virtues of the region’s mountains and facilities, and joshes gently with a Salt Lake City, Utah, reporter because his city is also bidding for the Games. The brief press conference introduction over, we pose questions over ritual green tea.
Calgary applied for 17 years before it got the 1988 Games. Will Nagano bid again if they do not get the 1998 Games? The mayor does not anticipate failing (and Nagano does win the right to host the Games).
What budget have they set aside for hosting the Games? Financial details are not yet decided.
The traditional Japanese gift-giving rite follows, with our generous hosts bestowing on us an embroidered bag, 500 yen telephone calling card, carved hand mirror and a glossy souvenir book of the region. We have shamefully neglected to bring even national lapel pins of our homelands.
Finally, we traipse off to visit the six-story stone castle, oldest of four designated as National Treasures, trailing the local media who photograph us photographing the sights.
With all the formalities, there is little time for the sightseeing that is so crucial to travel writers. Our visits to the important sites are not serious research but Japanese-style, token gestures, the way they visit a temple, clap, bow, buy a small memento and depart, chalking it up on a list. At the Ukiyoe museum, with the world’s greatest collection of 100,000 wood block prints, we admire Hokkusai and Kuniyoshi masterpieces before the curator rushes us to a slide show of these very prints, with taped Japanese and English explanation. He then distributes books on wood block prints, in Japanese.
Following a perfunctory tour of the Sasai Sake Brewing Company, an industrial plant of vats and pipes and drying rice, we retire to a small tatami room to discuss and sample the wares. It is like a European wine tasting, without the vulgar spitting. The beaming brewmaster bestows on each of us a bottle of the expensive house brand to add to our booty. The Utah Mormon offers to exchange his for one of the silk ties we picked up on the way.
Dinners, where all of the Japanese and none of the foreigners wear ties, are long, liquid and loquacious, with copious sake and beer and endless polite introductory speeches. Mr. Sato from the San Francisco JNTO office, our overseer, introduces each of us in a ceremonial litany. “Rynn Ferrin-san, Motorland Magashine -- Petah Callahan-san, Travelage Westo … Jerry John-stone-san, Salt Lake City shimbun … Marchant-o san, Bancouber Magazine…” We now appreciate that much of Japanese food is not heated because it would turn cold anyway during the endless obligatory discourses.
Between speeches and liberal mutual pouring of drinks, our hosts present their cards: the chairman of the village council, treasurer, vice mayor, director of the Nagano prefecture, director of tourism for the prefecture, principal of the ski school, chairman of the tourism committee, president of the tourism association, manager of the tourism division …
Later, the party gets somewhat ribald, with the flushed senior bureaucrat filling my tiny sake cup suggesting with a wink and a nudge that I should see the Ukiyoe museum special prints, “For adult people.”
Donning lime-green happi coats, we perform a fan-waving, hand-clapping festival dance around the tables, chanting choruses of the “Matsumoto Bonbon” song. Tonight’s gifts include the happi coat, a cassette of the festival song and the town trademark souvenir, the Matsumoto Temari (hand ball) a basketball-sized, silk-embroidered ball on a wooden stand. My concupiscent male dinner companion slips it under an American writer’s happi coat, like a giant breast, shocking her speechless in a lively cross-cultural encounter.
After much drinking and camaraderie, our hosts dismiss the women, saying they should rest, and take us to a karaoke bar for whiskey, beer, and singing of national songs. They have nothing Canadian, so I escape performing, (although I do hear Paul Anka’s Diana played later). Late in the night, the Mormon reporter sings a touching Tennessee Waltz.
Over a Western breakfast of bacon, eggs and salad, Sato-san distributes two local newspaper clippings with photographs of the visiting foreign press.
At checkout, an earnest housemaid shuffles to the lobby with the bulky Matsumoto ball, which I have thoughtlessly left behind. On the crowded train higher into the mountains, I shove the hatbox-sized container safely behind the seat and settle back to savor the view. Twisted, stark apple trees flit by, and rustic homes with shiny blue and grey tile roofs, fed with messy tangles of power and telephone wires. Straw, kindling, and round, vermilion-red daruma wish dolls, both eyes blackened in, are piled up in frosty fields ready for Bonfire Festival burning.
In Nagano, I am first off the train and down the platform, but a skier chases me with the large box I had somehow forgotten.
Our new retinue includes three driver/escorts and Sarah, an American who works for the prefecture. Sarah, who appreciates all things Japanese, expresses admiration for the ungainly Matsumoto ball I still clutch, but declines the offer of it as a gift.
First stop is the city hall board room, crowded with more officials and local press, for introductions and card exchanges (Wago-san, Yamazaki-san, Usui-san…). Available light fades over the temples and castles we wish to photograph as the speeches and a few polite questions (nothing pointed now) drone on. Finally, they bestow their largesse: an international digital time zone clock, cassette tape, Japanese noren door curtain and press kits with musical guidebooks which play a Nagano song when opened. By now, the tiny closets in our hotel rooms are piled high with souvenirs.
In three cars, we take to the countryside, our Japanese companions desperately chewing gum to avoid upsetting the gaijins (foreigners), who, they understand, do not like cigarette smoke.
In Obuse, the town that artist Hokkusai visited for inspiration, we admire what has been designated as one of the country’s 10 best toilets. It is closed for the winter, so we do not experience it.
Near the town temple, we happen on a winter festival, with food kiosks and souvenir tents displaying blank-eyed, legless daruma dolls from the size of a fist to bigger than a beach ball. When we separate to wander on our own briefly, our guides, armed with walkie talkies, follow each of us, concerned we might get lost, while also exhibiting the Japanese love of hightech gadgetry. There will be a traditional parade and fire-walking ceremony within the hour, but we have to move on. It is not on the itinerary.
At Nozawa Onsen village, a scenic ski resort town, the skiers look longingly at the slopes as we are ushered into city hall for tea and talk. A resort official explains that of Japan’s 650 ski resorts, including 107 in Nagano prefecture, Nozawa Onsen has the finest facilities, with 23 hot springs, two gondolas and 30 lift systems. With 26 ryokans and 360 minshukus (family run inns), the town accommodates 20,000 skiers, or about 800,000 a season.
The mayor (his card identifies him as the burgermeister) then hands out peach-colored silk scarves for the ladies and moss-green ties for the men, as well as life-sized woven pigeons on wheels. A printed explanation of their legend points out that the straw birds are designated as a number one craft in Japan.
On this, our last day, it appears the outdoor writers will finally get on the slopes when the chief ski instructor and village officials lead us past long lineups to jump queue onto the gondolas for the 18-minute climb up Mount Kenashi.
At the summit, they lead us past the lifts, straight to the lodge. Looking longingly at the cafeteria yakisoba, curry rice and other basic dishes, we are ushered into a private room for the official lunch, an exotic Western hybrid of oyster soup and tender steak accompanied by a local mashed radish and onion dip. During the gift-giving (head bands and gloves for tonight’s festival), Sato-san mentions that he has received a telephone call that a Matsumoto ball was found in our Nagano hotel, and will be returned. Welcoming speeches, lunch and card-passing leaves just a few hours for the visiting skiers to get on the slopes, finally.
Tonight is the Himatsuri Bonfire Festival, held every January 15 since 1839 to eliminate evil spirits and honor the male offspring born that year.
In the evening, a restive air of excitement hangs over the town, with roving revelers getting into the festival spirits. A group of wandering minstrels sings “Sake is my Friend,” a long paean to the rice wine with much hand-clapping and jolly, red-faced drunkenness. Men in head-bands appear bearing straw torches the size of apprentice sumo wrestlers, like blazing, smoking battering rams. Reeling down the narrow streets, they pass liter boxes of iced sake to shopkeepers and bystanders to sip from.
Despite the sub-zero temperatures, 8,000 excited skiers and townsfolk jam the town square. From the press stands, where they have set aside a section for us, we look down to a floodlit, three-story tower of sticks and branches standing on a small, icy rise. Where it spreads out slightly at the top, dozens of the town’s 42-year-old men are jammed together as though on a front row balcony. Clad in hard hats and blue coveralls, they wave white Japanese-style paper lanterns, clap white-gloved hands and sing.
Several dozen 25-year-olds, the defenders, circle the base of the tower, while the attackers gath
er round a giant bonfire several hundred feet away.
When I try to slip away by myself, one of our guides, armed with his walkie-talkie, escorts me through the dense crowd to the public toilet where municipal workers squat on the ground swigging sake. Standing in the cubicle, I hear him hollering into his radio, “Ahhh, Marchant-o san …” The media gathered on the platform get a full report of my progress.
The festival is a fierce mock battle with bands of young men charging the tower with flaming torches. The defenders beat them off with kicks, punches and shoves, throwing the attackers down the hill, and thrashing at the flames with pine branches. The men atop sing, and chant, wave the lanterns and taunt the attackers, throwing down long bundles of sticks to give them more firewood. From back here, it appears vicious, with the attackers shoving flaming torches in the defenders’ faces.
The crowd roars whenever the tower catches fire. Huge billows of smoke, cinders and sparks rise into the black night, and flames lick up around the men on the tower who appear to chant even more vigorously. The battle wages for hours until, when it appears that the men on the tower will be grilled like human yakitori, they exit down a ladder out back.
With the tower blazing like a steam locomotive’s boiler, flames and cinders rising hundreds of feet in the air, our guides abruptly announce, “Let’s go,” and we head back to the cars.
Forty minutes later, we arrive back at our hotel in nearby Iiyama. The itinerary I got weeks ago in Vancouver said “22:40 Transfer to your accommodation. Arrive at 11:20.” Tumbling out of the car, I spot the clock on the front of the hotel. It says 11:22.
Next morning, the foreign press all have lighter luggage, while Sarah’s duffel bag looks suspiciously like a ripe pod bearing three peas. We bow our last good-byes to her and the relieved prefecture officials, who frantically light up Hope cigarettes as soon as we turn to board the Tokyo train. It has been an educational and useful trip, we all agree.
The Peace Correspondent Page 2