Saturday, 12 April 2008
Don’t let anyone try to tell you that it’s impossible to get a good night’s sleep on a futon.
Not the futon they’ll sell you in your local downtown furniture store, one with four legs, a metal frame and a basic mattress. I’m talking the bed on the floor routine with a good layer of insulation over the top to keep out the Kitakami chill.
I slept like a log (and probably sawed a few) before rising ultra-fashionably late on a day when the first item on the agenda was attending to the laundry.
Once we’d arranged the washing on the upstairs balcony, the thoughts turned to sightseeing.
It was around eleven when two Japanese women, one large hairy foreigner and one small hairy dog found themselves en route to the gorge at Genbi. I was told we were there for flying dumplings, which I assumed would be lunch.
I wasn't overly sure what was in store since I’d heard a variety of pronunciations, flying, frying, dumplings and dungo.
And I was kept in suspense since, immediately after parking we plunged into the Sahara Glass Hall, a store selling glass objects in multitudinous forms.
This, I gathered, was a stratagem to avoid paying for parking.
Having established our status as at-least-potential-customers, the Grog Dog was retrieved from the car, and we set off for the gorge, which was a short stroll away.
A bridge took us over the stream, and a right-hand turn had us headed directly towards flying dumpling territory.
I had assumed flying dumplings were not, as the name suggested, something resembling a food fight. ‘Er Indoors suspected we were headed somewhere we would be throwing items, possibly as some sort of ritual.
Neither of us was any the wiser when our host knelt down, placed some money in a small basket and used a wooden mallet to tap a wooden object (twice).
The basket, attached to a device resembling the flying fox familiar to Boy Scouts the world over, then zoomed across the river to a small shelter high on the opposite bank. It was back a matter of moments later filled with a double serve of dumplings and green tea.
The dumplings were dungo, a dough made from rice flour and water, rolled into a ball, boiled, grilled and served, three to a stick, dunked in sweet sticky soy sauce, red bean paste with sugar and soy sauce with mirin.
I found them an acquired taste and one which I have, to date, failed to acquire, but the green tea went down well in the conditions.
Back in the car, we headed across country, past a Buddha's face etched into a stone cliff on the way to Motsuji, a temple complex near Mount Toyama.
The main feature is a garden from the Heian Period (794 - 1192). The site dates back to 850 and grew to an enormous complex with five hundred dormitories for monks spread around forty places of worship before fires destroyed the original buildings.
One building, Jogyoda Hall, was reconstructed in 1732, but most of the buildings on the site are much more recent.
The fires did not destroy the Pure Land Garden, the real centre-piece of the site and the venue for various festivals and ritual observances in January and May each year.
From Motsuji, we planned to go for lunch, then head to the nearby Golden Buddha, but drizzle set in while we were eating.
The Buddha-visit, which would have involved an uphill walk through the forest was a late scratching from the program.
Instead, we took our time driving through the same sort of countryside I’d seen as our train whizzed past the previous evening.
Back in Kitakami, we found the washing, given the prevailing weather conditions, had hardly dried at all.
After rearranging the laundry in more favourable drying conditions,
I fled to the warmth of the futon for a power nap. Meanwhile, the girls, who hadn’t seen each other for something like a dozen years, continued catching up on old times in the warmth of the living area.
I wandered back downstairs around five and spent an hour working on the Travelogue while the others flicked through photo albums, warm and comfortable in the radiated output of the electric heater. Meanwhile, the temperature outside plunged well into the single-figure range.
It was warm enough in the living room. But venturing away from the heated area reinforced my sense of wonder at how the people who occupied the wooden buildings we’d seen at Takayama managed to survive sub-zero winters.
Around six, there was movement at the station, and various costume adjustments were made while a taxi was ordered.
It might have been peak hour, or maybe we didn’t peek out often enough. There was no way we were going to stand outside for any longer than was necessary. Either way, a second call and a further wait eventually saw the cab arrived.
Hadori, a yakiniku place in the downtown entertainment quarter, is a small operation with the feel of a local/neighbourhood eatery. I was assured there were probably people sitting around the eight or nine tables who’d travelled at least as far (a ¥900 cab fare) as we had.
We sat down at a table with a gas-fired grill in the middle, and plates of meat and related products varying in price according to quality were delivered for us to cook to our liking.
The recipe from there ran something like this:
Dip cooked portions in soy sauce before wrapping them in lettuce leaves (chilli optional).
Accompany the lettuce parcels with rice and wash the lot down with copious quantities of draught beer.
In short, my kind of place...
After dinner, we could have walked home. But bearing in mind that you can’t see approaching rain after dark, wiser heads prevailed, and a cab was the drier and warmer option.
Once I decided to call it a night, I managed another good night’s sleep on the futon.
I suspect this was mainly due to the human equivalent of hibernation.
Once under the covers, it seemed the body shut down completely. Despite having consumed large quantities of high-quality amber fluid, I didn’t emerge from the warmth until absolutely necessary. That was well over nine hours later.