Golden Week Travels

Hello! I guess I should write about Golden Week now. I am in my last week of classes at the moment, which means that next week is finals. Thankfully I only actually have exams in my 2 Japanese classes and that's it, since I just have an essay in my literature class, and you can't really test ceramics.

Anyway, Golden Week was pretty relaxing, and it went by quickly. Sadly I got a small cold during that time, which began with a runny nose and sneezing, and culminated in a couple of days in which my throat felt funny in the mornings. It wasn't too much to complain about, but anyway it's pretty much gone now. Anyway, my 2 main trips included visits to Iga and Arima.



A trio of young ninja women

At the beginning of Golden Week, on Saturday May 1st, Alex and I went to Iga, which is a smallish city in Mie Prefecture. We had heard about it because his host family's son lives there and recommended that we visit, and had brought him a flier with a map of the city and a guide to restaurants and shops. Iga is mainly famous for being home to Iga-ryu, which is the Iga school of ninja-ism. As such, its tourist attractions mainly include ninja-themed parks, museums, demonstrations, and shops, as well as the Iga Ueno Castle.

We initially estimated that it would take us about 1.5 to 2 hours to get there by train, but it actually ended up taking about 3 hours, ending with a 20-minute ride on a rickety 2-car local train with worn ninja stickers on the windows.



A cute ninja kid

One of the first noticeable things about Iga was all the people dressed up in ninja costumes. I can only assume that the people in the costumes were tourists from other places in Japan who had come to visit, or else maybe people living there just dress up like that every day. The cutest were the plethora of babies and little kids running around in full ninja outfit, complete with a foam sword tucked across their back. They sold ninja costumes in a variety of colors in all of the shops, although to my dismay I found that all adult ninja costumes cost at least $100--so much for my Halloween costume.



A ninja mannequin preparing to attack sushi restaurant customers

Okay, I admit the city was a little cheesy, but that didn't take away from the experience. In addition to the ninja costumes, they also had mannequins dressed up in ninja costumes hiding around every corner throughout the city, wherever you least expected it. Actually, everything that you could think of was ninja-themed.



Ninja Hello Kitty

Once we got off of the train at Iga, the first thing we did was head to the ninja park. About 5 minutes from the station was kind of a fairground-like deal with a lot of trees and stands selling shaved ice and other snack goods like takoyaki and fried chicken. First we went into the ninja gift shop, selling memorabilia such as a ninja Hello Kitty, ninja key chains, fake shuriken (ninja stars), and local foods. We settled on buying the pack of tickets that would get us into all of the notable museums in the area.



Ninja manhole covers

First we went into a house that was set up to demonstrate special ninja techniques. There was a young woman who presented it to us, "us" meaning Alex and me plus 2 families with cute little kids, and she demonstrated the use of various trap doors, secret passageways, hidden staircases, and secret storage spaces. Once we were done with the tour of the house, we were led underground to a museum that included ninja clothing, tools, and weaponry, with videos showing their uses, and also explained elements of the ninja lifestyle. (Almost everything had explanations in both Japanese and English.)

From there we went to the main ninja museum, whose focus was more on the history and techniques of the ninja. It left the history and origins of ninjas pretty obscure, but it claimed that ninjas no longer exist. (Yeah right! How else do you explain all those cute kids?) It also had some ninja scrolls that I couldn't read, but more amusing were secret ninja techniques for doing things like predicting weather and finding water, and their secret methods of communication using knots of rope and colored grains of rice.



Ninja toilet signs

The rest of Iga was not quite as exciting. We got to visit the Iga Ueno Castle, originally built in the late-1500's, and which now preserves information about the area's history. It seems that there is a pretty active ceramics culture in the area, judging from the number of vases and bowls they had on display. After that we spent a long time looking around for ninja-themed things to buy, and ended up getting a little lost while looking for somewhere to eat. Eventually I got home at around 11:30 pm.



Garden of a temple on Otoko yama

The next few days were pretty uneventful. I should have been studying, but it was really hot, so it was hard to get myself to do much. My host mother and I took a visit to a nearby shrine and temple on Otoko yama, which were really nice now that the plants are in bloom.



A nice Kobe neighborhood with Rokko mountains in the background

On Tuesday I went to Mount Rokko with 2 friends and started hiking. We had seen a recommended hiking path in a book that would lead us from an area of Hyogo Prefecture near Kobe through the mountains to Arima, one of Japan's most famous onsen (hot springs). We arrived near the foot of the path at around noon, and it was already quite hot by the time we got there. The book did not have any pictures, but advertised a lot of scenery and wild boars.



A slice of the view from the top of Rokko Mountain

In short, the hike turned out to be a lot harder than we thought. I think that "mountain climb" would be a more apt name, considering that on average, I estimate that 70% of the path was equivalent to a climb up steep stairs. Occasionally there would be climbs over rocky faces so steep that you had to hang onto chains hung from above to pull yourself up, since there were no footholds or anything anywhere. We went on like that for a total of 6 hours, and only for the last half hour or so did we actually get any real downhill. Most of the path was covered with trees, but it was still pretty hot and muggy the whole time, and in the end I must have had to stop and rest every 3 or 4 minutes because it was just so tiring. We did, however, get some really great views over the cities of Kobe and Osaka, and thankfully we passed by a number of chilly and refreshing mountain streams.



Warning not to feed the boars

We must have passed by about 20 signs warning about the wild boars, or Inoshishi. I was really excited to see them. We did not see a single one for a long time, though, and we were starting to wonder if we would actually see any, when we came across...



Little boar

First a little one, and then...



BIG BOAR

A big boar! They were pretty mellow and tame, although we didn't try to touch them or feed them or anything. They mostly seemed to be sitting around and digging for food, and they let people come up pretty close to them to take pictures.



Rokko Mountain scenery

There isn't too much to say about the rest of the hike, except that it was really tiring, which was exacerbated by the fact that we weren't sure how far away Arima was, or whether we'd even be able to make it there in the end. We did in fact get there at around 6 pm, though, thankfully! We were so tired.



A golden water bath at Arima Onsen

Hot springs are pretty popular in Japan as a place to go and soak, and the minerals in the water are thought to have a number of health benefits. We went into a bath house that featured Arima's naturally occurring "golden water" (in fact it was rather rust-colored). That in and of itself was pretty interesting. Public bath houses are a big part of Japanese culture, but I had not experienced one yet, and this was essentially the same thing except for the special water. At the entrance to the bath house you take off your shoes and put them in a little locker, and then you buy a ticket from a machine. From there, you pass by a desk that takes your ticket and gives you a key to a locker, and head up a staircase. At the top were either red or blue curtains to pass through to go to the women's or men's baths. First is the locker room where you leave your clothes, and then you go through a door into the large room with the baths. First you sit down and take a shower at one of the several stations lining the wall to the right, and then there were 3 actual baths that you could get into. In the middle of the room was basically a hot tub with regular tap water in it, and then on the left were 2 "golden water" baths the area of small swimming pools, one at 42 degrees Celsius, and the other at 44 degrees (that's like 111 degrees Fahrenheit). I don't know how anyone could take the 44 degree bath as my skin was already tingling from the heat in the 42 degree one. Then you just soak in the bath for as long as you want, and then you can rinse yourself off in the shower again if you want. I was already really hot and dehydrated from the day's hiking (in spite of the 4 or 5 water bottles' worth of fluids I must have consumed during the day), so I only lasted for about 10 minutes before I decided to get out, before I started feeling too woozy. After the changing room, there was also a room with mirrors and sinks and hair dryers where many women were anxiously re-applying their makeup, and then I went back downstairs. In the lobby were a number of vending machines, not to mention coin-operated foot massages and massage chairs. (Even though we're in Japan, the part of the chair that was supposed to be massaging my neck was still massaging the back of my head...)

We were planning on spending Wednesday exploring the city of Kobe itself, but we found in the morning that our legs were still so sore and tired that spending all day walking around a city was just not going to work, so I ended up spending most of Wednesday afternoon crashed at home.


That's it for Golden Week. A week from now I'll be done with finals. Crazy.