Kitakami and environs
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 try to sell you in your local downtown furniture store, one with four legs, a metal frame and a basic mattress - I’m talking the mattress 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 and 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 where we would, or so I was informed, be having flying dumplings - which I assumed would comprise lunch.
Actually I wasn't too sure what was in store since I’d heard a variety of pronunciations, flying, frying, dumplings and dungo.
In short I had no idea what was in store.
And I was kept in suspense since, immediately after parking the car in Genbi we plunged into the Sahara Glass Hall, a store selling glass objects in multitudinous forms. This, I gathered, was largely 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 meant we were headed directly towards flying dumpling territory.
I had assumed that flying dumplings was not, as the name suggested, something resembling a food fight, and ‘Er Indoors later confided that she 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 kneel down, place some money in a small basket and use 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, returning a few moments later filled with a double serve of what I assumed were the dumplings and green tea.
The dumplings were actually 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.
Personally 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 cold conditions.
From there, once we were back in the car, we headed off across country, pausing to look at a Buddha face etched into a stone cliff before arriving at Motsuji, a recreation of a temple complex near Mount Toyama.
The main feature of the site is a garden from the Heian Period (794 - 1192). The site itself dates back to 850 and grew to an enormous complex with more than five hundred dormitories for monks spread around more than forty places of worship before fires destroyed the original buildings. One building on the site, Jogyoda Hall, was reconstructed in 1732, but most of the current buildings on the site are much more recent.
The fires, however, did not destroy the Pure Land Garden which surrounds the large pond which is the real centre-piece of the site and is the venue for various festivals and ritual observances in January and May each year.
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.