A little trip

During spring break Masako and I decided we needed to get out of the house, so we tossed a couple of futons in the back of the microvan and hit the road for Kyoto.

I haven’t been to Kyoto since the beginning of my first stint in Japan (about ten years) and Masako hasn’t been back since she was a kid, although she used to go often (Kyoto is only about an hour or so by train from her family’s home). We took the expressway without much of a plan.

Along the way were reminders of the disasters that have befallen Japan. Electronic signs asking people to conserve gasoline, as it was needed by emergency vehicles (we were doing anything but conserving, but on the other hand our van has a 660cc engine and doesn’t use much). I filled up, just in case we ran into any real shortages, every time the needle hit the middle of the gauge. Every service station had a 20 liter limit (about 5.5 gallons), but since our van only has a 25-liter tank, this wasn’t a problem, either.

We spent some time walking around the vicinity of the Heiwa shrine, one of the largest and most famous Shinto monuments in Japan. I’m used to small shrines in our town; a couple hundred square feet of land, sanctuary, donation box, little tori gate and maybe a sacred tree or two. Heiwa covers something like a square mile and has beautiful buildings covered in red laquer, lovely gardens, and a sanctuary large enough to admit thousands. We could see into the inner sanctuary and there was a wedding going on… doubtless some very rich and well-connected families, everyone wearing beautiful traditional wedding gear. Masako just shook her head and proclaimed it torture to have to wear that stuff and sit stiffly for hours.

We then drove across town to Arashiyama, on the west end of the city. There’s a river, along with bridges, temples, and a lot of tourist-trappy shops. We had a good time wandering around some of the temple grounds. There’s also a bamboo forest with a path running through it- it’s very neat to hear the sound of wind rustling the bamboo, and the clack-clack of the stalks banging together. Like most things in Japan, though, the visual aesthetic was partly ruined by the presence of concrete power poles and power lines running along the path. Can’t put them somewhere else, huh? If you look in certain directions, or just close your eyes, though, the effect is magnificent.

We ate a good lunch at a tofu restaurant. Heading along some of the back streets, away from the tourist traps, we discovered a lot of little artisan studios and shops. We bought a noren (those curtains, split down the middle, that you see hanging in doorways) from one shop and a reading pillow (a cool and original wedge design that you can lay on forward or backward) from a pillow shop.

It was getting dark, so we headed to the middle of town, threading our way through tiny one-way streets, to Funaoka onsen. Up until about the 1960s, it was rare for Japanese apartments to have individual baths. City dwellers would bathe at their local onsen (hot spring) or sento (bath house). With the rise of individual private baths, most bath houses have closed, but a few, like Funaoka, survive. They’re a cool time capsule and a look back in time.

Here are some photos. I didn’t want to take my camera in, so these are taken from Google image search.  Thank you to JapanVisitor’s Flickr photostream, JapanInfoNet, and InsideJapanBlog for the images!  Check out the awesome tile work and all that old wood:

This Tengu decorates the ceiling:

Here’s the outside in daytime:

The lobby was cramped, the cashier wedged behind a counter loaded with shampoos, soaps, towels, razors, and other sundries. We paid out 410 yen (about $4.50) and headed in.

Funaoka was built in the 1920s and has gorgeous tile work and wood carvings. Most controversially, a major carving, added in the 1930s, celebrates the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and is still there for all to see. The problem for me was that said carving is located in the partition between the men’s and women’s changing areas. It’s an open-lattice carving, and being 6’6″ it’s very easy for me to look right through it and into the women’s side. So I stayed some distance away, checking it out while hopefully not looking like I was checking out the women on the other side.  Here’s a section of the carving in question (thanks to barry1959 on Flickr):

The baths were kind of small but the whole thing was laid out very well. You walk in through a tile corridor into the main bath where the washing stations and soaking baths are. They had a standard bath, medicine bath, electric shock bath, sauna, and a booth where a hard stream of water hits your shoulders. There was even a rotenburo (outdoor bath) in an inner courtyard, entirely made of cedar. I discovered that the tile corridor I walked through to get to the main bath was actually on a marble bridge, a pond with colorful carp swimming below it. The patrons were mostly older, but there were some young people from the various youth hostels as well. I heard a bunch of kids over on the women’s side as well. All in all, it seemed Funaoka was doing a good business and isn’t going anywhere.

We headed out of town, running into a snowstorm at Sekigahara, near Masako’s parents’ place, so we pulled off into a highway rest stop and bedded down in the back of the van. The cargo area is just the right size for a large futon, and with a bunch of blankets it makes for a cozy bed. We slept until dawn.

In the morning we climbed groggily out and found that we were surrounded by a flotilla of vehicles on their way north with loads of relief supplies and equipment- small earth movers, drills, diesel generators, household goods. They were all from Osaka; if their license plates hadn’t told me, their Kansai accents would have.

We got coffee and breakfast and headed for home. A short trip, but good to get out of the house.

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