From Motsuji we had planned to go for lunch before heading to the nearby golden Buddha, but when the drizzle set in while we were eating the Buddha-visit, involving a lengthy uphill walk through forest became a late scratching from the program. Instead, we took our time driving through the sort of countryside I’d been looking at as our train whizzed past before ending up back in Kitakami, where we found that the washing, given the prevailing weather conditions, had hardly dried at all.
After rearranging the laundry in what we hoped were more favourable drying conditions I fled to the warmth of the futon for a power nap while 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, spending the next hour working on the travelogue while the others flicked through photo albums, warm and comfortable in the radiated output of the electric heater while 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 had managed to survive the sub-zero winters.
Around six there was movement at the station and various costume adjustments were made while a taxi was ordered. It must have been peak hour in downtown Kitakami or maybe we didn’t peek outside often enough (there was no way we were going to actually stand outside for any longer than was absolutely necessary, thank you very much) because it took a second call and a further wait before a cab arrived.
Hadori, a yakiniku place in the downtown entertainment quarter, is a small operation with the feel of a local/neighbourhood eatery, though I was assured that there were probably other people sitting around the eight or nine tables who’d travelled at least as far (a 900-yen cab fare) as we had.
We sat down at a table with a gas-fired grill in the middle, and various plates of meat and related products varying in price according to quality were delivered for us to cook to our liking. The protocol was to dip the cooked portions in soy sauce before wrapping them in lettuce leaves (chilli optional), accompanying the lettuce parcels with rice and washing the lot down with copious draughts of draught beer. In short, my kind of place...
After dinner, while we could have walked home, bearing in mind that you can’t actually see approaching rain after dark, wiser heads prevailed and we decided that 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, though I suspect this was largely due to the human equivalent of hibernation. Once under the covers it seemed that the body shut down completely and, despite having consumed considerable quantities of high-quality amber fluid I didn’t emerge from the warmth until absolutely necessary, which was well over nine hours later.