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Chapter 3: It's a Japanese Thing

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Mashuko YH, Mashuko, Hokkaido
Mon 02 Oct 2000 08:46

Yesterday the 4-Gyaru team was broken up, with one staying at Shiretoko, one heading for Abashiri alone and two going towards Mashuko: the last of these was exactly the direction I'd been contemplating, so I joined in the fun. After extensive deliberations we opted to rent a car, so after getting a ride to Shari courtesy of the youth hostel, Junko, Ayako and I commandeered a white Toyota Familia and headed south.

The first stop on the tour was Kaminoko-ike (Child-of-God Pond), a tiny lake in the middle of the woods, reachable only by a long dirt track. The place is well known by most Japanese (at least those traveling in Hokkaido), but not listed in any English guide that I know of. What separates the child-of-god pond from an ordinary pond is the fact that its water is blue: not a normal reflected skylight blue but a truly unearthly transparent sapphire blue. Several fallen tree trunks crisscross the bottom and small black fish swim about the bubbling waters... truly weird, and with a breeze breaking the surface into ripples my pictures ended up looking more like oil paintings. (FYI, Kami-no-ko Ike is a few km north of the Ura-Mashuko lookout point on the "other" side of the lake.)

Ripples on the surface of Kaminoike Pond

There's cows in them thar hills

We descended from the mountains into the wide open farm country of eastern Hokkaido, cows merrily munching grass here and there. The girls were in ecstasy and the constant chorus of Kirei! Kawaii! Ureshii! Shiawase! (pretty, cute, happy and lucky, respectively) started to get a tiny bit tiresome. Ah well, that's Japan... and so was lunch, which consisted of beef curry with cottage cheese, squid ink bread filled with butter and red bean paste, plus some wormwood (absinthe) ice cream. Chopstick-licking good!

	Edgar Allan Poe would've liked the view
A Jacob's Ladder at sunset	Ayako & Junko	Obatarian attack!

We then looped back towards our actual destination, the pristine mountain lake of Mashuko, located entirely within a national park and off limits to all construction, access being only through three observation points suspended high above the deep caldera. After a beautiful day clouds had started to gather, close to nightfall the wind was bitterly cold and the scene was desolate but beautiful.

We returned the car and were picked up by the hostel's minibus at the station. Mashuko YH is somewhat awkwardly located halfway between the city and the lake (10 km apart), but it made up for this by having excellent facilities, offering free homemade cakes and yogurt after dinner and cow juice straight from the udder in the morning, and -- above all -- by being the first place on this entire trip that accepted VISA! Kirei, kawaii, shiawase, ureshii!

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Wakoto Hantou Campground, Kussharoko, Hokkaido
Mon 02 Oct 2000 12:22

Junko left for Kushiro airport and her flight home to Kobe, so Za Gyaru were whittled down to one. Ayako and I inveigled our way onto a car headed for the nearby lake of Kussharoko, along the way we managed to not only finally obtain a cartridge of Captain Stag^(TM) brand gas for my camp stove but get an ineptly made car key copy stuck in the ignition. The driver apologized for the delay, we apologized for making him worry, the Toyota repairman who solved the problem in 30 seconds with a well-aimed squirt of oil apologized for entering the car, we all apologized for his hard work, and the poor keymaker whose key caused all the trouble apologized more than everybody else combined.

At any rate, after this little diversion Ayako and the driver headed off to a ludicrously priced canoe trip down the Kushiro River (Y5,500 for 90 minutes!). I decided to compensate for yesterday's excesses and, acting on a tip from Suzuki-san at Shiretoko, was dropped off at the Wakoto campground. The place is evidently considered so scenic that there are not one but two photo shoots going on nearby, one for outdoor clothing, one for Nissan's latest 4x4 with a bleached blond guy and a a pigtailed cutie in pink plastic noisily driving around the beach as photographers with Nikon D1s and telephoto lenses than would make John Holmes blanch snap away. Jealous? Who, me? The other annoyance is that there are clouds of miniature insects swarming about. They appear to be harmless in that they don't bite, but they have an uncanny skill at finding their way in through the tent's mesh netting... grr.

The campground beach

The Oyakotsu Hell

Woods along the trail

Kussharoko is also a caldera, and the campground is located on a peninsula formed when a new volcano erupted on the edge of the caldera. Wakoto-san is a tiddler at 266m, but it's still thermally active enough to heat up the whole place: the cliffs on the north side (the Oyakotsu Jigoku, ie. Hell) steam with warm sulphurous gases and the hot water is piped into two completely free baths, one indoor, one outdoor. Kamuiwakka was too chilly, the indoor bath a few minutes away was too hot, but the outdoor rotenburo next to the campground is just right... and it's also the first mixed & naked bath I've been to in Japan, Kamuiwakka used to be in the old days but now most ladies bring bathing suits (boo!). On the minus side, the Wakoto rotenburo has also has a mild whiff of rotten egg, there are no fresh-water showers (although hardy souls could go for a dip in the lake) and the female age distribution had a yawning gap between 5 and 65. Nevertheless, definitely the best one so far, especially at sunset when the air is chilly but the water is warm, and the surrounding mountains fade into the mist... and also at sunrise when it's COLD! Although at sunrise the rotenburo becomes the local old fogeys' social club, everybody in the bunch I listened to (including the women) referred to themselves as oraa, others as omee and animatedly discussed whether wild mushrooms were growing at a boribori speed or merely shubushubu. For the first few moments I thought they were speaking Ainu, not Japanese...

Today's total cost Y1300: 400 yen to get into campground and 600 yen for an excellent miso ramen for lunch. Dinner was cheapo curry with preboiled rice, Y300 for two bowls, heated courtesy of the miniature stove. This averages out to 5000 yen a day for the last week: half what I spent on my previous trips in Japan and less than twice what a normal day in Tokyo would cost me. And here I sit, stomach full, still nice and warm after my evening bath, listening to Kenichiro Hoshi's "A Shade of Bamboo" mixed with lapping waves c/o DJ Mama Nature, stealing electricity from the laundry shed to power the laptop. I have little idea where I'm heading tomorrow and no idea who I'll meet, all I know is that the last week has been amazing and there's still lots more to go...

[Still wondering what on earth that title meant? ÏÂ¶× (Wakoto) really means Harmonious Harp (as in the instrument), but it could also be interpreted as a Japanese Thing.]

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Bihoro Touge, Hokkaido
Tue 3 Oct 2000 09:30

Unsurprisingly, there was a price to be paid for remarks like that. When leaving Wakoto the first car driving by, a couple from Shikoku on their honeymoon, offered me a ride to Bihoro Pass, high up in the mountains around Kussharoko. Beautiful views, yes, but it's also bloody cold and now the rain started pissing down, there is no sheltered place to hitch and the next bus towards Bihoro goes at 13:00. Traffic is light and mostly sightseeing buses at that. There's not much I can do, other than wait and hope the rain stops, although the ever-handy i-mode informs me that the probability of rain is 90%, 80% and 60% for the next three 6-hour periods. Starting tomorrow the weather should improve -- maybe I should have camped one more night...

Kussharoko, as seen from the pass

Fields of kumazasa grass

JR Bihoro station

Or maybe not. The weather kept getting worse, in addition to the rain the clouds descended, wrapping the pass in fog and entirely obscuring the views that are the sole selling point of this place, so the traffic dwindled to almost zero. I spent two miserable hours shivering outside under a tarp, listening to the infinite loop of the mournful "Bihoro Touge" enka song sighing about how beautiful the place is and wondering who on earth buys 10-cm glow-in-the-dark plastic squid keyrings as souvenirs. For lunch, I almost made the mistake of buying my noodles from the outside window, when I realized that there was also a sit-down restaurant upstairs, with the same prices, heating and a power outlet to boot. An hour and a half to go until the bus: no more hitching today, methinks. And after noticing that I'd been sitting there for quite a while (and news of my story had percolated from downstairs, where I'd chatted with a roasted corn seller), the waitress brought over a thermos of hot kumazasa-leaf tea (·§ºûÃã), the local specialty sold at Y1000 per 10 bags downstairs) and ordered me to drink as much as I want. Obscenely good stuff too, I have to find some in Tokyo...

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Minshuku Tarou-an, Bihoro, Hokkaido
Tue 3 Oct 2000 14:47

Good God. I may have said that I have little idea where I'm going, but I still can't believe I'm about to spend an entire day in the utterly obscure town of Bihoro. But my planned destination, Rubeshibe YH, isn't answering the phone and any other places that I have any certainty about are in entirely the wrong direction. Staying here will set me back a little less (!) than the youth hostel, it's right opposite the station instead of 3 km away on foot, and I suspect the owners will refuse to believe me and experimentally verify that the foreigner can, indeed, eat sashimi.

Which leaves me with the question of what, exactly, I'm suppose to do with the remains of the day. After Bihoro Pass, which I've already experienced in excruciating detail, the tourist office's happy pamphlet suggests the Bihoro Wood Industry Museum (ÈþËÚºà¶È´Û), the Bihoro Public Transport Memorial Hall (ÈþËÚ¸òÄ̵­Ç°´Û) and, for some unfathomable reason, the Bihoro Agricultural High School (ÈþËÚÇÀ¶È¹â¹»). Even the nearest onsen is kilometers away... Ah well. Time to do the unthinkable and actually do some research (gasp!) with all the gear I brought along.

Chapter 4: Forest for Oysters >>