Sons of Loki

The Wire. Hell, what can I say about The Wire which hasn’t already been said a thousand times on a thousand blogs? It was always one of those series which I meant to watch until I actually got around to watching it… and that was it, had no choice but to burn through the first series in a week. It’s worse than crack, but it’s undoubtedly the best television series ever made. No question.

So apart from spending my last few days in Japan (Day 294/307 – 12 days left) watching a series I can watch anywhere, what have I been up to since climbing that monster-ass Fuji?

The day after we got back, I said goodbye to my dear friend and renowned jazz trumpeter Miles Davies, who is even as I write far away in gloomy Brum serving up creamy desserts to Cadbury’s World patrons, or whatever it is he does.

Then I’m not sure what I did next. Like McNulty and co., I am reduced to sifting through photographs, old text messages, and Facebook updates to try to undercover the story of what happened.

The Sunday after, we visited Harajuku … or we tried to. Yeah, been here ten months, and I still forget that Harajuku is north of Shibuya up Meiji-dori, not south. So we walked for a long time, wound up in Ebisu tired and confused, and eventually just got the Yamanote Line to Harajuku, which we should have done in the first place. We found a cool little shop called Chicago that sells all kinds of second-hand clothing, including cheap kimonos. I agonised for about ten seconds before setting 7,000 yen down on a supremely manly brown silk kimono, juban (undershirt), obi (belt) and happi (overcoat used for festivals). Now I have one, I obviously need to hit a few summer matsuri to show the thing off. I’m hoping the Sumidagawa Fireworks Festival – on the very final Saturday before we fly out on Monday – will be a beautiful experience.

On Wednesday, I packed Jade off to a wicked little guesthouse/hotel in Koenji- dirt cheap and got everything you need. There’s even a Tesco’s nearby, which proves that Tesco have got stores everywhere. (Seriously, never seen one in Japan before.)

We had a wander around the cosy little district around there, which is a world away from the dispassionate bulk of Shinjuku or the straight-laced streets of Fuchu. Koenji is sort of old and dirty, but vibrant and beautiful at the same time. We headed a little way down the line to find the Asagaya Art College.

We also did some good planning for the final few weeks here. It will be hard to cram everything in, but I want to try. I’m going to attempt a jaunt to Osaka/Kyoto in the final week via night bus and capsule hotel, which should be a lark.

I had a big old clear out in preparation for leaving, dumping all these old receipts and worksheets I had no use for. Felt good.

Friday I met Rob, Hime, and Rob’s デカイ Russian friend Alex for lunch at this funky Russian restaurant in Kichijoji. Funnily enough, it’s the second Russian restaurant I’ve been to, but the first time I’ve had Russian cuisine.

Ah, it was so good. Beetroot soup, sweet and warming; a Cornish pasty-like side, and a kind of salmon omelette. Really tasty. After that, karaoke with a few more friends, and finally pizza at Shakey’s, a few beers, and MANLY CONVERSATION.

Saturday we’d planned to visit the Oedo Onsen Monogatari, but lack of persons postponed that to Sunday. Instead, Jade and I visited Tokyo Dome City to try and find where these cosplayers be at. Unfortunately, garishly-dressed fans were nowhere to be seen. Instead, the place was packed with air-headed KAT-TUN fans, killing time until his (edit: oh wait its a band lol) big concert at the Dome that night, taking photos and waving fans (the kind you cool yourself down with, not people) with pictures of them pretty-boys on them. I felt sorry for the handful of boyfriends dragged along.

It was kinda cool to be back in that area. My first destination in Tokyo way back in 2007 was Jimbocho – I have a strong memory of going for a walk on my first night and ending up at the Dome late at night, playing Taiko no Tatsujin alone. So long ago. Plus, I got to see the big LaQua roller coaster I rode all that time ago, in my last week in Tokyo.

Almost bought a Hanshin Tigers jersey at the baseball store. (I have a secret love for the Tigers because they never, ever win. Funnily enough, a few days later I sat next to a Tigers fan decked out in every bit of merchandise imaginable on the Metro.)


Later we met up with our old friend Yudai for a few drinks in an izakaya – Jade’s introduction to these wonderful little places. After Rob and I had downed a few massive pitchers of beer, we met up with Risako and hit a brand-new Karaoke-Kan for a few songs. They had a great selection of songs, including – a first! – Pizzicato Five’s Twiggy-Twiggy, my first introduction to j-pop years and years ago. Shame we only had an hour there.

On Sunday, we took the train out to Odaiba over the Rainbow Bridge (again!) to visit the old Oedo Onsen, a kind of theme-park-hot-baths complex near the Telecom Center. We met up with Yudai and Kaz, ate some chicken at the Miraikan Lotteria, then met Risako and Rob to hit the onsen.
We went before in October, so it’s nice to bookend our trip there. Hit the hot baths – hit the sauna – hit the cold, cold bath. Ate ramen. I got ice cream. It’s a really nice place, and if you go after 6pm, it’s only 1,600 yen. Plus you get a faux-Edo period street full of people clattering about in yukata, which is cheesy fun.

Odaiba’s further than I thought. I’d missed the last train on the Seibu Line, so Jade and I walked from Higashi-Koganei, through the empty streets of Koganei back to Tama station. (Can you imagine walking through the dark streets of a British city at 1am and not running into something? Eh, maybe I’m just paranoid.) It was strangely beautiful, getting somewhat lost and then running across the enormous metal pylons of the Seibu Tamagawa Line, like disturbing Cold War brainwashing antennas in the middle of a entirely dead suburb of Tokyo.

Can you tell I am beginning to tire of this blog post? I need another fix of the Wire, but I don’t want to start the season 2 shit straight off … gotta space that shit out, bro.

Yesterday was Umi no Hi (Sea Day), another wonderful public holiday in Japan where everyone goes to the beach. Or goes to Harajuku to hit the sales (I roughly estimate a third of pedestrians were carrying a bag from Laforet – no lie).

It was a beautifully clear day, and we wanted to hit a few of the art galleries around the Omotesando area.

Sadly, one was closed for the holiday, and another was 1,000 yen for entry, so we saved our money and went to see exhibition of Hokusai’s famous Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjūrokkei (富嶽三十六景)) at the Oota woodcut gallery. Hard to believe a gallery of such classically Japanese art is squirreled away behind a Softbank in ultra-hip Harajuku, but there’s that mix of ancient-and-modern that lazy travel journalists like to claim Japan is uniquely comprised of every single time they do a piece on Japan. (Unique my ass. Go to any British city and see a branch of Tescos next to a centuries-old cathedral, or a similar thing in any country in the world.)

Anyway, as a guy who owns a (very beat-up) jumbo A1-size poster of the famous Great Wave of Kanagawa, it was strange to see the real thing – a tiny square of thin paper with that incredible curve, the sprawling tentacles of foam, the crescent of the fishermen’s boat.

Ah, but is it the “real thing” at all? It’s a woodblock print, and thousands were made. There’s probably some point in there about what constitutes art, but it’s getting late and I think the point here is obvious.

As always, there’s the one everybody thinks of, but some of the less seen prints are more splendid. The thing about the woodblock printing technique is that the paper becomes 3D – gradients are infinitely smooth, characters pop out, fabrics are decorated with actually embossed patterns. They’re nothing short of breathtaking.

It occurred to me a nice little place I could show Jade – the Harajuku Chamamo Cat Cafe – so we went up to the little room on the fifth floor I visited some months ago and bothered the cats for an hour. It’s so relaxing, just watching them curled up. I had a chat with the owner in pretty decent Japanese, which was fun.

A long walk getting lost in Yoyogi Park in the still-hot twilight led me to feeling a tad heat-struck. I was feeling dog-tired by the time I stumbled back to my room, and I still don’t feel great.

It’s got to the point where I really don’t have any time left to do anything. I want to hit a festival this weekend (after we visit Hakone), and go to the beach, and see Osaka, and say goodbye to people, and pack, and finish this translation I’m doing, and post things home, and I’m still not sure if I can do it all in a measly twelve days. But … I guess I must persevere.

So, until next time, here’s what we all came to see: beautiful puddycats.

…which is the only Beatles track to feature Yoko Ono on vocals, incidentally.

I’m a completionist at heart. Or something like that. I never like to leave anything out, and I always fear I’m gonna forget interesting stuff, and I have to blog obsessionally lest a part of my life go unrecorded. So here’s basically what’s happened the last couple days:

• Visited scenic Meiji Shrine in Yoyogi Park for the first time and had a look at all the prayers written on the wooden tablets. Most of them wished for providence in family health, for fame(!), and for success in job hunting (and there’s a good rundown of the basic Japanese ambitions), except for one nasty one in English which spoke glowingly of Jesus’s coming wrath and destruction of the unbelievers. (Ugh.)



• And Meiji Shrine provides easy access to weird and wonderful Harajuku, which continues to be unpredictable. We stumbled across a massive St Patrick’s Day parade, which was a confusing moment of green and Guinness in the midst of downtown Tokyo, but probably the closest we’ll ever get to a Gaikokujin Festival.



• On the road to Shibuya we stopped off in Design Tshirts Store graniph, which makes the kind of t-shirts I find irresistible (except for the price tag); plain colours, Helvetica font, bold slogans, very po-mo. (Or plain modernist. I don’t know.) And the documentary Helvetica on DVD.

And rather wonderfully (in a post-modern modernist in-joke) a t-shirt with just the word ‘Helvetica’ rendered in Helvetica.
We also saw a cat cafe, a particular kind of drinking establishment unique to Japan where one drinks coffee and pets cats. I was missing cats, seeing as all the cats in Japan run away when you approach them.


• After that we went for delicious MEAT at a BBQ joint in Shibuya and had horse sashima (mmm, taboo meats). After chatting to a drunk guy about my weird-ass 魔手・蛇乱道 hoodie and eating old-timey cabbage in awesome Showa-period theme bar Hanbey
  we returned to our abodes.
  
• The next day we went down to Kamakura, a nice little beach resort/temple place I’ve written about previously. We visited the pigeon temple (fulla pigeons, dontcha know) and stumbled across a beautiful little coffee shop, Thomnecogo, in the middle of a residential area with high-class jazz and freshly ground coffee (that I might give a write-up, me being such an internationally renowned journo now).
  
  
  
  
• Next, Odaiba on the Yurikamome monorail (cool as ever) and back on the plain old JR line to Shinjuku.
  
  
• Yesterday we went to Takao, the mountain that marks the end of the massive 35 million people Chiba-Tokyo-Yokohama (千東横?) sprawl. It’s a nice little day trip from Tokyo, a bit of a hike in the autumn air.
  
  
  
  
  
• And today we have come to Hakone, which is my third time here. No coin lockers at the station, so we came straight to the Fuji-Hakone Guesthouse where I chatted in Japanese to the staff about having come in January and name-dropping my famous friend, Ella May Blake, who’d just stayed a week or two ago. Then a bus to Gora, where we ate in an out of the way restaurant; this guy started chatting to us in that way old Japanese guys do, but he was a real laugh, a true ojiisan, and it was great to practice my Japanese with him. He made me promise to come back before I leave, and I really will.I’m getting so much practice guiding these guys around! If only to show off, I seem to be getting in more conversations and the fact is I’m fine in most any conversation. And it’s so much fun, such a good feeling to successfully have a chat with a complete stranger and understand and be understood. If there’s anything I want to keep studying for, it’s stuff like this.

  Anyway, by the time we’d finished it was raining. The obaachan gave us some little tea cups as a present (so kind!) and an umbrella, and we hurried out of that little wonderful den of hospitality into the rain and got the cable car and ropeway up to Owakudani, which today was a pretty close approximation to hell: rain, ice, gales, smoke, and sulphur. I’d never come the reverse route on the ropeway from Gora before, and so it’s quite a surprise when you crest a hill and come out over … absolutely nothing, just a distant quarry below you, the cablecar swaying violently in the wind and rain pelting the windows. These photos do not do it justice.
  
  
  Anyway, there was no point freezing our asses off there, so we went inside and I failed terribly at the gruelling Kagekiyo

(truly the “Through the Fire and Flames” of Taiko no Tatsujin and drank some milk tea (fun fact: first time I ever drank milk tea was Owakudani, 2007) and then we sensibly went back down to Togendai and arrived back at the hotel after shopping at Lawson (which had a poster up detailing all the appearances of Hakone in Neon Genesis Evangelion, from the ropeway to gorgeous Tokyo-3 (compared to a image of the real-life area as it is) and even Hakone-Yumoto station (where Misato comes to find Shinji in episode four(?) – I think if you told my 14-year old self as he watched his prized Evangelion VHS second volume (ordered from MCV, back in the day) with that scene that one day he would pass through that very station, he wouldn’t have believed you) It’s weird how Evangelion has ballooned over the last couple of years from a landmark/slightly niche/incredibly deep and philosophical/deeply twisted and dark anime series made by a crazed auteur coming off four years of clinical depression into a catch-all media franchise, from pachinko to sexy pin-ups to tourist marketing boards, but that’s commericalism for you.).

• Anyway, that was a long digression. Tomorrow, Osaka beckons on the shinkansen. Ah, my beloved New Trunk Line. Exciting times.

On Christmas Day I unwrapped my presents – ah, precious books! in English! – and caught a train to Shibuya for a bit of a wander and a hunt for lunch. A good roast was out of the question, so I decided to settle for a big old katsu kare – only to find that there were no kare joints to be found. Eventually I settled for katsu rice with a big old bowl of noodles, which is hardly traditional Christmas fare, but filled me up good.
I kept seeing other gaijin in the streets: wondering why they were alone in Tokyo today, wondering if they were thinking the same about me. (Ah, the loneliness of the long distance Tokyo ex-pat.)
Luckily I curtailed this aimless wo/andering with a trip to Akiba to meet up with my dear buddy James, up from Kobe Konan for a few days. We hit one of the multi-floor games stores, where I debated for a looong time whether to buy a “junk” second-hand PS2 for ¥2000 (£13) before ultimately deciding I should save my money, because it probably wouldn’t work.
Having shown James what the inside of a games store looks like, he asked me if there wasn’t anywhere more interesting to go in Tokyo, and so I finally settled on Odaiba for want of anything else.
Oh, crazy Odaiba. We went to Venus Fort, which is a recently-refurbished shopping mall and destination for a squillion couples who were enjoying a Christmas Day date (the traditional yuletide activity in Japan). Oh, and me and James. We’re totally not a couple. Ahahaha.


After a wander about and gunning down a few zombies on the Silent Hill arcade shooter (is it zombies in Silent Hill? I confess to never playing the games) we headed along to the excitingly named TOKYO TELEPORT, which in my mind very strongly reminds me of some Halo level. It looks like arcs of blue plasma should be pulsing from the top, don’t you think?


We got the train from TOKYO TELEPORT! back to the Shinj, where we met Satomi and went to the Tokyo Metropolitan Building’s free observatory deck (the perfect place for skint people like myself to bring visitors!). And so Christmas Day wound up in an izakaya with Jay and Si (my Leeds coursemates, also at Kobe), a plate of chips and some dirt-cheap gintoniks. Heavenly.

Yesterday James, Miles and I made a long overdue visit to an Akihabara maid cafe.
Okay. Maid cafes. You go there, pay a 500 yen cover charge. The staff are all cute young girls dressed as maids. They speak to you in squeaky voices and very polite Japanese and call you “master” and bring you drinks and stir your coffee (“stir your coffee” – I believe this calls for a Pythonesque nudge nudge) and make pretty ketchup designs on your omerice. You can have your picture taken with them.
All this will ring alarm bells for most people – Westerners at least – and I have to say I was really put off by what I thought was the sleaziness of these places. Until, that is, I read up a little more on them, and finally felt slightly more comfortable about visiting one. You know what? They aren’t really that sleazy at all.
Yes, a lot of the customers are otaku, but there were more than a few girls there. One guy had brought his girlfriend (or had she brought him?). The overriding aesthetic (at least at the place we went to) is cute, not sexy. Everything is so sugary sweet that the impressions of some kind of weird hostess bar couldn’t be further from your mind. It is moe, more a pure appreciation of cute kawaii femininity than a leery, pervy lust. At least that’s how I saw it.
I got a cake with a bunny rabbit drawn in chocolate and strawberry sauce. When we ordered pizza, we had to do this ancient Japanese purification ritual (possibly) of making the heart shape with our hands and waving them about while chanting in Japanese. Someone ordered a cocktail, and the poor guy got dragged up on stage while the maid sang a mixing song, waving a cocktail shaker around.
(I had this awesome idea for this Densha Otoko-style romance called Daidokoro Onna – Kitchen Girl about a plain-looking girl who works in the kitchen of a maid cafe and falls in love in one of the patrons, an unusually hunky otaku, but because she’s too ugly to work as a maid she never gets to talk to him until Episode 6 when she has a makeover and in ancient anime tradition merely has to take off her glasses and immediately becomes gorgeous and the rest of the series is about them falling in love and then there’d be a second series but it would be crap.)

With our wallets considerably lightened we met back up with the guys and girls and headed back to Odaiba along the lovely Rainbow Bridge.


We ate at a weird restaurant in Venus Fort, apparently themed in a vague 1930s Hong Kong style with crumbling brickwork and flyers pasted over the walls outside and a kind of Orientalist red-and-black interior. Food was alright, though my portion of chicken and cashew nuts was tiny. Later, ice cream, and then Miles and I said our farewells and got the train back to Shinjuku. I can’t wait to head to Kobe to see those guys in their native environment.

Playing a stolen guitar along to an old Brian Eno track, and it is Christmas! Tokyo has gone in for it in a mildly big way: there are lights everywhere, and Christmas cheer, and Mariah Carey bellows forth from every shop. The day itself here is more of a thing for couples to get together and go down to Odaiba or Shibuya or wherever, which is kind of sweet, even for hopeless singles like myself.

So while my stomach has been grumbling for roast pig and potatoes and stuffing and gravy and carrots and maybe peas and trying to cram ourselves round a tiny table in a room that is slightly too cold with 60s Christmas hits playing and everyone’s wearing hats and reading out lame jokes before the customary slouch in the living room watching whatever crap’s on and gorging on more food – ah, Christmas! – my friend Zo’s been visiting from Leeds and sleeping on my floor and other people have come in from other parts of the country and it’s been an exciting and very expensive week.

Saturday saw a trip to Shinjuku with Rob and Zo, where we dined on fine okonomiyaki (Japanese omelette-y fried noodles … like a pancake … or maybe pizza but not really anything like pizza) in a fine-enough department-store food-court establishment. My coursemates Hugo and James had made the trip up from Nagoya, and our friend Emily was in from England staying with her relatives, and then Kaz turned up, and it was like old times.

Then up to 5F in a nondescript tower to a branch of Hub to meet up with Zo again, who was with a few of his friends – Hosei graduates who came to Leeds a few years back. Zo’s been at Leeds for six or seven years now on various degrees, so he’s like a constant Methuselah of the Japanese Society, familiar with many years of graduates.
I couldn’t help but be amused by an incident in the lift as we left, when it stopped on 3F and we were confronted by a Hooters-style semi-girlie-bar, with scantily-clad waitresses and two Japanese men waiting for the lift. There were a few comedic seconds of silence at we stared at each other, each bamboozled by the scene before our eyes – the apparent respectability of the two men, the half-naked waitress, the lift packed with gaijin sardines – before both sides of the divide erupted into astonished conversation and the doors mercifully closed.

On Monday we all met up again in Akihabara, for some serious geekage. In Yodobashi Camera, I played an electronic guitar with no strings (verdict: the most pointless instrument in the world) and made Bach-aficionado Hugo play the JR station jingles from a book of sheet music we found in the keyboard section. Then a wander round the hobby section, where the rows and rows of Gundam models stirred some long-forgotten otakuness in me, but ultimately failed to cause a relapse of my condition, thankfully.

We then headed to Odaiba, the Tokyo waterfront area, which I must admit is growing on me. We had a wander around the shops, a gaze at the skyscrapers of Minato Ward glittering across the Bay, and then (in bitterly cold windswept conditions) watched the waterfront lightshow, which was pretty cool (even if it is essentially a sprinkler on a pier with a projector pointed at it).

Tuesday saw a trip with Zo to the famous Starbucks over Shibuya Crossing for a eclair latte thing(?).

After I bought a polarising filter for my camera, Zo split off to elsewhere and I met Emily and the guys to watch the new One Piece film with the guys in Shibuya (coincidentally at the very same cinema I saw Evangelion 1.0 at two years ago). Knowing absolutely nothing about One Piece, and knowing not so much Japanese either, I wasn’t sure how much I’d get but it was an enjoyable romp, for sure. The others didn’t seem to like it so much (being One Piece fans, I imagine they find that the franchise is running a little out of steam) but I’m looking forward to starting on the manga that sits upon my shelf.

After that we met back up with Zo and assaulted a local game centre, where much fighting occurred and I played Taiko no Tatsujin (high score!) and Drummania (sort of getting the hang of it, even if I got a ‘E’ on “Through The Fire and Flames”).


We also bought some cream shoes (I am entirely unsure of the proper name, but that’s the katakana for you) in Shibuya, which are basically incredibly unhealthy cream puffs sold from a place by the station which cost ¥150 and are oh god so delicious, so sugary on the outside and so pastry-y in the middle and then so sweet sweet cream on the inside.

Finally, Zo, Miles and I wound up in Kichijoji to meet Kaz, who has a car, and promised to drive us aimlessly around Tokyo until the wee hours. He sped off on his Triumph to get his car:


while we loitered dangerously in a local Family Mart and laughed at the merchandise.

Kaz came back with his Toyota and we drove into Shinjuku – so cool – and picked up Rob and went barrelling downtown just as “All The Small Things” came on and it was sweet.


Tokyo was being gorgeous as ever, the endless streets, endless stores, endless people on their errands – it occurred to me that there are oh so many stories in the naked city – and I realised that you don’t really get as good a sense of the sheer mindblowing size of the Chiba-Tokyo-Yokohama megacity from a train as you do from a car, where it’s obvious just how it keeps going, and going, and going, and every street you cross over at a junction has its own shops and homes and people just like the one you’re driving down, and then there are a hundred other streets after that one; and you slowly begin to build the resulting grid of streets up in your mind and you realise that this city is the biggest place you’ll ever see and it is beautiful. It made me go all funny inside, to see the salarymen and the taxi drivers and the couples flashing past in an instant, like I wanted to find the words to describe the beauty and the lonely existentialism of the night as we flashed across the Arakawa but just couldn’t. We put on the Akira soundtrack, which was great as the skyscrapers went by, and then the Teriyaki Boyz’ “Tokyo Drift” as we got into Ginza, which was good dumb fun, and then bellowed “LINDA LINDA!!” along with the Blue Hearts as we headed down to Yokohama. Yokohama seemed pretty nice: surprisingly different to neighbouring Tokyo, more open, more modern.

Friday we had the big ol’ welcome party #2, which was fun. Spoke a bunch of Japanese to a bunch of people, leant my speakers (possibly unwisely, although they survived in the end) for Tom to do some DJing (must learn Ableton), was ridiculously excited when he put some Shinichi Osawa on (apparently he’s gonna be appearing in Shibuya sometime next month, which is a must-see) and was going to go to that holy-of-holies WOMB Shibuya until I realised that the increasing fatigue would not see me through ’til 5am. So I went to bed, which was probably the more sensible option.

In the morning I watched a game of American football from my balcony, which was actually rather fun to see. I don’t know why I harbour a secret love for gridiron – the action and aggression, the intricate chess-like strategies, the relative unpopularity of it in the UK, or the whole homoerotic machismo thing of it all – but I wandered down on my way to the supermarket and got a few action shots.

Later, after making a tuna pasta salad thing (is tuna expensive or what?) I decided, what with a free afternoon, to head to my old haunt of Akihabara and check out the prices on second-hand DSLRs. I’m realising that after two years of loyal service and one river dunking, my trusty S3 IS just isn’t as good as it was, and given how much I enjoy photography, it only makes sense to upgrade to a proper SLR. Judging by the cameras in the second-hand stores, I can get some nice kit for a reasonable price – currently I’m torn between the Sony a300 for 37,000 yen, or a real bargain: the Olympus E-510 for 26000 yen (which will probably be gone soon). Or I can head upwards to the mid-low-range SLRs, like the Canon EOS Kiss F (EOS 1000D in the West) for 44,000 yen – a little expensive but I do trust Canon for good cameras.

It was raining yesterday. Tokyo’s always best in the rain.



(blergggh, ISO noise)

I was in Yodobashi Camera when Rob gave me a ring, saying that they was hoping to head down to Odaiba to visit this onsen (Japanese bathhouse) with Kazuhisa (whom we know from Leeds last year), so I made a miserable journey in the rain down to Shimbashi station and caught the train with them across the Rainbow Bridge (upon which it was pretty bright tonight*) to Odaiba, the weird artificial island/waterfront district.
The onsen was pretty cool, though obviously more commercial than the little traditional ones. You got a choice of yukata and, like my beloved Seoul jjimjilbang, they had a communal area with restaurants and shops and amusements and such. (Not as good as the Dragon Hill Spa, but then what is?) The baths were extremely pleasant. We chilled/boiled in the outside bath, our bottom halves at a scorching ~40 degrees, our top halves pelted by the rain – consequently, we were quite comfortable overall. I took a plunge in the 20 degree pool (I can stand cold much more than hot, apparently) and then wound up with five minutes in the nicest bath of all, the one that was … just right.

Then ice cream. A lovely trip (even if it did bankrupt me).

* Belle & Sebastian, “Wrapped Up In Books”