Hokkaido Part V: Foot baths and new Taiwanese friends

On my last day in Toya-ko Onsen I explored the small town, the volcano museum and the remains of the destruction caused by Mount Usu's most recent eruption in 2000. Then I soaked my feet in a free "foot bath," or hot spring for the feet only, overlooking the lake and the most striking volcano.
In the evening, after watching a beautiful sunset, I met three Taiwanese tourists who had checked into the youth hostel, and they invited me to ride with them in their rental car to watch the evening fireworks on the lake shore. Afterwards we enjoyed another foot bath.

The Taiwanese tourists were an interesting group of two men and a woman who met on an internet site that helps people find travel partners. They emailed, decided to travel together, and met in person for the first time at the airport in Taipei! The woman, Sylvia, told me that she has traveled that way several times in the past.

Sylvia had an electric heating element which she plugged in and stuck into a pot of water and vegetables to make fresh soup in the hostel dormitory!

Meeting other travelers is one of the reasons I enjoy staying at youth hostels.

In the morning I flew over a typhoon and back to Tokyo, in a Pokemon airplane!

Hokkaido Part IV: Bicycling around Lake Toya

On my second day in Toya-ko Onsen I rented a bicycle again and rode around the 50-km perimiter of Lake Toya. In Japanese, ko means lake and onsen means hot springs area, so Toya-ko is Lake Toya and Toya-ko Onsen is the hot springs area on the Mount Usu volcano side of the lake. With lots of stops for photos, exploration of parks, a picnic lunch and a detour to a fruit stand selling local plums, the trip took six hours, all along a quiet road on the rim of the caldera lake.

As I rounded the lake I enjoyed views of several different volcanos behind the reflective waters, and I saw birds and forests and a snake, several parks, sculptures, and some cute little camping cabins.

Touring by bicycle is definitely my favorite way to travel. I can enjoy nature, fresh air and the countryside, exercise, and make as many detours and stops as I like. I see things at a speed that allows me to digest them, and people wave and talk to me. While bicycling around Lake Toya, I decided to look for a way to see part of Southeast Asia by bicycle this winter.

If you want to read more about the Ainu ...

I received a nice comment on my post about the Ainu from a woman named Deborah Davidson, who is a native of Hokkaido and has translated a lot of Ainu folklore to English. Deborah has a good website with information about the Ainu. If you're interested, you can check it out at http://projectuepeker.blogspot.com/. There is an interesting video on the first page.

Hokkaido Part III: Showa Shinzan and the Ainu Museum

In Abashiri we enjoyed a quiet sunset walk along the river, and saw a couple of Russian tourists. In the morning we took the train to Sapporo where we stopped by Autumn Fest, which is really Oktoberfest and consisted mainly of people drinking and eating outside. No polkas or waltzes.

In the morning Itsumi flew back to Tokyo while I took a train and bus to Lake Toya, a beautiful round caldera lake. Lake Toya, the center of a collapsed volcano, is surrounded by several active volcanos making a beautiful view from any direction. There are four small islands in the center of the lake.

I checked into a youth hostel and rented a bicycle and rode up to Showa Shinzan, which means New Showa Mountain.

In the early 1940s this place was just a wheat field but from 1943 through 1945 a series of earthquakes raised it to a plateau. Then the volcano surged up out of the ground eventually creating a 1,200 foot volcanic mountain, which is still smoking today.

Since Showa Shinzan came into being in the midst of World War II, Japanese authorities tried to hush it up and even urged the locals to douse the volcanic flames (they didn't) so that Allied aircraft couldn't use them for orientation.
Today, Showa Shinzan has become a tourist destination and visitors can take a cable car up the neighboring and much larger Mount Usu for panoramic views of Showa Shinzan, Lake Toya and the Pacific Ocean. Mount Usu is also an active volcano, with its most recent eruptions in 1977 and in 2000.Above is an apartment building damaged during a mudflow caused by the 2000 eruption. We are looking at the second floor, as the first was buried in mud. The damage caused to the corner of the building was caused by a huge steel highway bridge that was carried into the building by the mudflow.

Showa Shinzan seen from the higher Mt. Usu
A smoking crater on the side of Mt. Usu, above the Pacific Ocean

Also at Showa Shinzan I visited an Ainu museum, which consisted of a replica of a traditional Ainu house complete with Ainu tools, clothing, and arts and crafts.

The docent, a woman who is half Ainu and half Japanese, dressed me in Ainu clothing and took my picture, and gave me a gift of a beautifully embroidered tissue case.

The Ainu are the original inhabitants of Hokkaido, northern Honshu and Sakhalin, an island which now belongs to Russia. Compared with other Japanese, the Ainu have rounder eyes, lighter skin and more facial hair, and some people believe they come from Caucasian origins.

Whatever their origin, they suffered greatly when Japan encouraged Japanese "settlement" of Hokkaido for farming in the 1800s. The Ainu faced cultural destruction and discrimination, but in the last three decades there has been a greater appreciation of the Ainu culture.

The tools and clothing and household items I saw in the Ainu museum reminded me of things I've seen in Native American museums in the U.S. and Canada.

In fact, the item on the left in the above photo is marked "Inuit glasses." I'm not sure if the Ainu used the same type of glasses or whether the museum just threw whatever they could find together.

I think the similarity I noticed is because of a similarity in lifestyle, as hunting and fishing in Hokkaido must be similar to hunting and fishing the the Pacific Northwest, and maybe because of a similarity in the way dominant cultures portray indigenous cultures in museum exhibits, as a people of the past who lived a simple life in harmony with nature and reduced to the tools and household items we can see in a museum.

The Hokkaido tourist brochure has a two-page spread on the Ainu. The title is "In Harmony with Nature" and the brochure speaks of the Ainu in the past tense, describing their traditional lifestyle, religion, clothing and dances, with glossy photos to promote tourism. One can see Native American cultures marketed for tourism in exactly the same way, in brochures produced by state and local governments. These brochures, almost always written in the past tense, glorify a culture of the past, but seldom mention the modern lives of the people whose culture they market.

Because of the language barrier, I couldn't ask the Ainu/Japanese docent any questions about her life or culture today, but she did tell me that she is from Asahikawa, which has the largest Ainu population in Hokkaido.

Hokkaido Part II: Sounkyo and Shiretoko National Parks

(Republished with photos)

We took a　bus　to　Sounkyo　Onsen　hot　springs,　which　I　accidentally　called　Sounko Onsen　(unko　means　shit　in　Japanese) but I will never call it that again! Our hotel was in a beautiful valley of hot springs and red and yellow fall leaves, and during our stay we soaked in three different sets of baths. My favorite was an outdoor bath under the brightly colored fall leaves, which felt especially wonderful in the cool mountain morning air.

Our morning plan was to hike up Mount Kurodake in Daisetsuzan National Park, Japan’s largest national park.

Mt. Kurodake is 1,984 meters, or 6,000 feet, pretty high when you’re coming from near sea level. We took a rope-way (cable car) up part way, then a ski lift and then we hiked the last two very rocky and steep hours.

We had great views of the fall leaves, and at the peak we took pictures and ate a great lunch scavenged from our hotel’s delicious buffet breakfast.

During the hike we saw a couple of chipmunks. In Japan it’s nothing special to see monkeys but people think it’s exciting to see chipmunks and squirrels! Below is a photo of the peak we hiked to, seen from the ski lift on the way down.In Japan, it's always easy to get a box lunch. Here, we had dinner at the bus station.

From Sounkyo we took a bus and train to Abashiri, where, with some English-speaking Chinese tourists, we had the freshest sashimi breakfast ever at the fish market next to the harbor.

Afterwards we watched as workers loaded huge metal boxes of freshly caught salmon onto a semi truck.

Then we took a tiny train, consisting of just two cars, along the coast to the Shiretoko peninsula, a world natural heritage site and the most remote place in Japan.

In Shiretoko National Park we hoped to see higuma bears in their wild and natural habitat, not trained ones like the posing bears in Kamikawa, cute as they were. (I think bears are really not supposed to be cute). But most of Shiretoko is roadless, hiking is difficult, dangerous and illegal without a permit, and we were still limping after the rocky climb up Mt. Kurodake. So we took a sightseeing cruiser boat along the north coast of the Shiretoko Peninsula through the Sea of Okhotsk which borders some Russian islands all the way to the peninsula’s tip.

Along the way we saw lots of beautiful coastline, many amazing waterfalls, cormorants, and finally a higuma bear! The bear was fishing in the mouth of a stream. It was beautiful to watch such a huge creature jump and leap after salmon with such agility!

During the last part of the boat trip we got completely drenched with salty spray, so after a quick cold limping walk back to our hotel we enjoyed a wonderful soak in the hotel’s hot springs before dinner. There were three large pools on the seventh (top) floor of the hotel, one colored and scented with lavender. From these pools we looked out over the harbor and the ocean – a beautiful view but not as amazing as the view from the outdoor pool on the rooftop above the seventh floor! There we soaked outdoors breathing fresh air while enjoying a view of the ocean.

Since all of our clothes were wet we used the hotel’s coin laundry machines. We looked around for a soap vending machine before we realized that the washing machine was equipped with soap and would automatically add the right amount at the right time! I continue to be amazed by Japanese technology.

The next morning we took a short hike in the five lakes area and saw some beautiful views of lakes reflecting the surrounding mountains. Access to three of the lakes was closed due to recent bear activity.

In the afternoon we ate delicious sushi including sea urchin, a local specialty, which Itsumi likes more than I do. Then we took a train back to Abashiri.

Abashiri is famous for its prison, a cold and miserable, largely unheated outpost on what once was the Japanese frontier. Abashiri is as famous for its Siberian air as Alcatraz is famous for its rocky, desolate island. We didn’t visit the prison, which is still in operation, but we took the obligatory photos of ourselves behind the fake prison bars at the train station before heading back toward central Hokkaido.