Akiu

Akiu is a small village just to the west of Sendai, with a junior high school of 91 students who learn English from my Torontonian friend Hung. That means that technically it must be part of Sendai, since he is a Sendai JET -- but technicalities aside, it is a half-hour bus ride into the mountains. Five of us met on Saturday morning at The Mall to catch the 9(ish) am bus; the ride began to satisfy our desire for trees and other green stuff (Sendai’s about three times better in this respect than any other Japanese city, but it still never lets you forget that you are in a city) within about ten minutes of leaving The Mall. The road grew narrower and narrower as it wound up and down the sides of the mountains; Hung assured us that it’s a lot of fun in thewinter when the roads get icy.

Upon arrival, we found ourselves overlooking a massive crack in the ground: the Rairai Canyon, which cuts down at least fifty metres and stretches for miles.We followed the path along the edge of the canyon for a while, stopping to take photos and to make friends with a group of Japanese tourists from Fukushima (who saw us in passing twice or three times in the course of the day, and never failed to wave and call out “Hello!”). When the view was clear from the riverat the bottom to the trees at the top, it was breathtaking. It looked likenothing I’ve ever seen in the west, but I felt like I recognized it, from the paintings I studied in first-year Art History -- an odd juxtaposition.

Our path eventually led us to the Akiu Craft Village, where a number of small shops sell various products made with local wood and costing anywhere from 1000yen ($10) to well over 100,000 yen ($1000). One of the shops is owned by the parents of two of Hung’s students -- so while we looked around in all of them,when it was time to buy our souvenirs/Christmas gifts for people back home/things you buy just because you’re in a specific place and you have to buy them, we chose that shop. Luckily for us, they also had the most reasonable prices.

The main attraction of the day was the opportunity to visit (for the first time for many of us) a traditional Japanese onsen. Onsen are communal (although nowusually gender-segregated) baths that are either geothermally-heated and naturally full of minerals, or that the resort heats and fills with minerals. Certain towns throughout Japan, including Akiu, have become touristdestinations based on the quality of their onsen resorts. Sakan, our onsen,was in what must have been a five-star hotel, with (among the amenities you might expect to find in such a hotel anywhere in the world) half a dozen yukata-clad women waiting outside the front door to welcome guests. To stay in the hotel costs about 20,000 yen ($200) per night, but day use of the onsenscost us only 2000 yen ($20) -- which included a fabulous lunch, although I’mgetting ahead of myself.

The outdoor onsen (this is apparently the best way to go, although I think I might prefer it once it gets chillier) was open only to men until 4 pm, so the three of us girls made our way to the “small” indoor baths. There were several steps to the pre-bathing process. First, we removed our shoes in order to stepinto the tatami changing room. Then, we placed our bags, clothing, jewelry,etc into wicker baskets along one wall. (This was much less awkward than anticipated, mostly because once I took my glasses off, everyone in the vicinity, including me, looked mostly like a flesh-colored blob.) Next, we entered semi-private showers and fully cleansed from top to bottom -- the baths are for soaking only and, since they are communal, it is considered extremelybad manners to fail to wash properly or fully rinse away the soap and shampoo.

Only then could we actually enter the baths. From there, it was pretty much what you would expect. The water was very hot. The minerals made me feeloddly half-buoyant. Any Japanese women who entered the room took one look at the three of us and headed for the other of the two baths. Their loss though,because our bath had circles of floating cypress wood that we had great fun playing with. After about thirty minutes, I was red as a lobster, Tara wasn’t far behind me, and all three of us were extremely relaxed and quite ready to have lunch.

My favourite part of the entire experience was the cold shower after getting out-- it felt really good, although it did little to help with the lobster-face look. The resort provided hairbrushes, towels, and lotions to assist in the re-dressing process.

We had arranged with the boys to meet for lunch at 1.15, since the in-house restaurant closed at 2. They were, naturally, late -- apparently because theywere getting foot massages from beautiful women (?). Luckily, everyone except me had paid 500 yen to upgrade to a traditional-style Japanese lunch, so we were able to order for them and speed up the process a little; we were starved by this point. I had a voucher for 840 yen towards anything on the menu, and in my opinion I did better than anyone else: I got my first fully-vegetarian, genuinely-Japanese meal. It was a huge bowl of soba noodles cooked with many vegetables in a miso broth, with an umeboshi (pickled plum) rice ball and two pickled somethings on the side. I did not have to pick anything out, turn a blind eye to fish pieces, or pretend there was no meat in the stock. It was extremely high quality, thoroughly delicious, vastly satisfying -- and remarkably cheap.

We finished lunch around 2.20, and discovered that the next bus to Akiu Waterfall, our planned next stop, wasn’t until 3.50. So we changed the plans and decided to go the waterfall on the next trip (in late October, the trees will be gorgeous, and the girls wish to come at a time of day when we can use the outdoor bath). We headed out on foot to what the map called a “NaturePark.” It was less a nature park and more of a garden, with koi ponds where wemet another group of friendly Japanese tourists (from Sendai this time) whoshared their fish food, Japanese-style tea tables made of rock, and an extremely amusing rock which you will have to wait for the Facebook photos to know -- it defies written description. It was perhaps less natural than the map’s name suggested, but it did have some gorgeous views of the mountains,including the one at whose base it was nestled.

We headed back to a different bus stop, across the street from our resort. We bought coffees at a combini and were perfectly content to wait on the bench forthe 35 minutes until the bus arrived -- but then it started to rain. After brief discussion, we decided that the resort wouldn’t mind if we took shelter on the wall under the trees along their side driveway. Well, they did, but notin the way you might expect: one business-suited man and two of the yukata-clad women came over and insisted that we sit and wait on the benches by the frontdoor. I don’t know if they recognized us from earlier as customers, or if itwas just bad for business to have the side driveway decorated with footsore, slightly sweaty foreigners, but the benches were more comfortable than the rockwall either way.

When we got back to Sendai, we were still not tired of each other and headed to Tsutaya, a large video store chain, to rent a movie. After much debate, we eventually ended up with “Letters from Iwo Jima.” We bought snacks at a nearby combini and headed to Hung’s, the closest apartment, to watch it. We forgot to turn on the English subtitles and watched it, with varying degrees ofcomprehension, for about twenty minutes, before Taylor ventured to ask whether we wanted to watch the whole thing in only Japanese. After that, it made much more sense to all of us, although as with most war movies, what I got out of it was: war is stupid and people die.

Kristin, who had planned to go to Akiu but accidentally promised one of her elementary-school teachers that she would go to a tea ceremony lesson that day,joined us partway through. After the movie, as she was telling us about thelesson, she managed to get herself wound up and overexcited (“genki”) in that way that can’t help but affect every other person in the room -- and so we went to karaoke. Somehow, it seemed an appropriately Japanese ending to the day.