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Originally, I was going to go to an onsen (hot spring bath) today, with
Ellie and Rinosan (the girl who I met at the party last week).
Unfortunately, when Rinosan came and picked us up, she said that she had a
cold and so she couldn’t go into the onsen (Japanese people are paranoid
about taking baths when they’re ill). So instead, she suggested we go for
a little drive in Aso (the mountainous part of Kumamoto) and have lunch
somewhere.
Well, when we got there, the first thing Rinosan did was take us to some
ethnic/new agey type shops that were slap bang in the middle of the
mountains. I’m not so keen on ethnic fashion, so I wasn’t particularly
enthralled. I was already a little grumpy because it was morning, and
because I was ever-so-slightly hung over from the night before, not to
mention disappointed about not going to the onsen, so the whole situation
began to annoy me – how can someone go to a beautiful place in the middle
of nowhere and spend about an hour shopping, which you could do in town?
In fact, no matter how much I love Japan, that’s something I’ll never get
over – the casual way the Japanese seem to treat nature as an amusement
park rather than something living and precious and special; Mt. Aso itself
is full of gift shops, all selling the same expensive, somewhat tacky
goods.
However, after this little shopping trip, we went to a little restaurant,
in this is where I started to enjoy myself, probably cause getting some
decent food in me helped me recover from my hangover. The restaurant
itself was fantastic. It was very traditional style, with a wooden
floorboard and beams. It was the type of restaurant where you cook the
food yourself, on a little barbeque-style cooker. So, we dined upon
grilled beef, chicken, sweet potato, pumpkin and onigiri, and it was
delicious, as well as fun to make. The atmosphere too was wonderful – the
restaurant has a wonderful view of the surrounding mountains, and as the
weather was so good today the scenery was beautiful.
But, possibly the
must astonishing thing of all was the toilet – it was located in a very
large room, complete with waterfalls, a miniature pond and stepping
stones!
After that, Rinosan took us somewhere pretty familiar – Mt. Aso, the
precise location we visited on our first week here. But at first, I could
hardly recognise it; Mt. Komekuza, the perfectly conical peak which had in
early October been completely green, had now changed totally brown. They
certainly don’t exaggerate the drastic nature of seasonal change in Japan.
Mt. Aso has not been completely spoilt by human habitation, and it’s still
beautiful and mysterious, from the anthropic landscape to the smoking
volcano to the strange, still lakes. However, the extent to which people
have colonised the landscape (not that you can blame them, Japan doesn’t
have a lot of space!) did upset me a little. To me, to see people treating
nature in this way is rather spiritually draining, like turning a church
into bouncy castle.
What touched me most of all was, on the way back, Rinosan said she wanted
to show us something exciting and surprising. She stopped the car halfway
down the mountain at a little spot which is her “secret place,” and
completely stopped the engine. Because there were no other cars on the
road, everything was completely silence. “Listen! You can’t hear
anything,” she said, “This place always surprises my friends! I always
like to stop here!” That really touched me – the fact that silence is so
rare in the packed and ever-busy Japan, savouring total silence is a
precious experience. We may think we’re packed in England, but there’s
still several places you can go and completely escape human contact.
After “listening” to this silence, Rinosan got out of the car and produced
a bottle of bubble mixture. We had a whale of a time acting like little
kids, blowing bubbles everywhere and seeing how large we could make them!
Rinosan said, she always brings bubble mixture to Mt. Aso, it’s one of her
favourite things to do here. And it was pretty fun!
So, despite a disappointing start, it was a fantastic day, and very
refreshing to get out of the city. And Rinosan is a really nice person,
great to talk to and exceptionally kind. At the end of the day, when Ellie
and I came round to giving her the money for the restaurant, she told us
to just give her 1000 yen each – even though I know the price between us
was something more like 4000 yen, not 3000. And it was really nice of her
to still take us out, even though she had a cold. As usual, I feel humbled
by overwhelming Japanese kindness! And she was sure to speak Japanese
really slowly and use simple words so I could understand her and not feel
like an idiot. The day was a very good experience Japanese-wise too,
because I spoke Japanese to her the whole time. So, I told her that in
England, it’s customary to buy someone a drink at a pub if they’ve been
especially nice to you, so that’s what we’ll do when we next meet!
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