Japan Day 12: Saturday 18 March
Tue, Jul. 11th, 2017 10:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annarti
Day 12, featuring Fuji-san (and a bit of Tokyo).
You'll remember that last night it was snowing and cloudy and basically views were not likely. Nevertheless, I set my alarm for 6am and ended up waking up 15 minutes earlier anyway. Idk, excitement. This was the biggest thing I'd been waiting for. I padded quietly to the windows, twisted open the blinds, and--
BAM. FUJI.
I MEAN. This was the view that made that woman on TripAdvisor give the place an Average, because of the building on the left. I JUST. HOW COULD YOU COMPLAIN ABOUT THIS? IT WAS PERFECT.
Snoooooow on the mountain to the left. It's snowing on Mount Fuji :DD
I can't over-emphasise the scale of it. Fuji is BIG. This view just filled the window completely.
I stood on the balcony freezing my toes off just staring at it until it started changing colour. There is not a single cloud I'm
Daaaawn starts happening.
Zooming right in on the crown.
More snow cos the sun had come up a bit.
Can you have too many photos of Fuji at dawn I don't think you can.
I WAS SO GODDAMN EXCITED YOU GUYS. SO EXCITED.
It was just awe-inspiring. I'm so so happy I got to see this. I didn't care about the cold or anything in the face of that. I was so desperately hoping Cassie would be able to appreciate it, too, with obviously the handbag in the forefront of her mind. I think she did? Certainly now looking back she does, but I hope at the time this was at least enough to think yeah, not everything is shit. This, at least, is amazing.
akljsdghalskj
I'm putting all these up here purely to show how excited I was.
Eventually I decided to head up to the onsen to be not freezing while I was watching the sunrise. Briefly tried to wake Cassie, who groaned and either didn't wake up or went straight back to sleep, so went up on my own. Over the hour or so that I was there, there were consistently five or six other women in the onsen watching it with me. Everyone just sitting quietly watching this awesome sight, in the truest and most profound sense of the word. Up the top of the hotel you could really see the whole thing, not even the base obscured by that mountain on the left. Obvs no photos, BUT. OMG. There was one girl who came up with her phone and started taking selfies. She was there for a solid 15 minutes, being GLARED at by everyone in the onsen, pouting at her phone camera and taking selfies. I don't think she even looked at the mountain herself. I'm a frigging AUSSIE and I know how rude that is to do in an onsen full of naked people. So I gave up and went down for breakfast, which was once again a turn-up-on-time affair and I figured I probably needed to get a move-on anyway.
Back in the room, Cassie was up, so I took a shot with the actual window there to try and convey the scale of the thing. It's immense.
I mean, basically just take that shot and blow it up to the size of your wall, then stick it there as wallpaper. That's how big the mountain was outside our window. There were other mountains around the place, too, which would have been fairly impressive in their own right, but Fuji-san just dwarfed them.
Also, I found out that the '-san' honourific here actually just means 'Mount(ain)'. Which only makes it a teeny tiny bit less adorable.
Okay last one and then down to breakfast!
I had to edit this photo a LOT to make it visible. The mountain was so bright and glowing and made the foreground so black. Still, I did a good job, I think. Best breakfast view EVER.
And breakfast itself. We didn't get a menu so I have NO idea what any of it is, except the fish on the grill at the top. And the rice. In the little blue egg cup was something that seemed initially like it was supposed to be eaten on its own, so I shoved a mouthful in and HOLYSHITWASABI, so clearly it was a garnish that you use as sparingly as wasabi itself, but on what? I am not knowing. But it was all just as incredible as dinner last night. There was also miso, always miso. And that view.
After breakfast, we plastered ourselves with as many layers as would fit under our coats, packed up and left our subsequently half-empty suitcases with the concierge, and braced ourselves for the great outdoors.
Destination one was Mount Kachi Kachi Ropeway, which was exactly as adorable as it sounds. It's a cable car that goes up the mountain on the left of every photo up there, from which you get moar view. The PA in the cable car was SO CUTE I CAN'T EVEN. So this was out the window on the way up, where there was last night's snowfall on the mountain.
More sunlit snowy woods.
And the view from the top! Already the clouds were starting to move in, but not in front of the mountain as yet. Bloody hard to actually take a photo, though. It was SO BRIGHT. The air had mist in it, hence the clouds forming, so the air was glowing white, and the sky was bright with it, then the snow was glowing on Fuji-san, and it was just impossible to get any contrast between the snow and the sky. This one is so heavily edited to get some semblance of contrast going XD;
It was so bright I got my sunnies out. Geeze look at my buttons bursting over all the layers under my coat. I had three or four jumpers on, and would have had more if I could've done up the coat XD
Obligatory peace-u shot *^^*v
We went for a bit of a walk around the top of the mountain, but it soon got quite muddy and I had my beautiful suede shoes on, not knowing it was going to get muddy, so we turned back. The full walk would've taken a few hours, anyway.
Never too much Fuji.
Looking back down the cable car over Lake Kawaguchiko. Our hotel was just off to the right of that shot, on the edge of the bottom bulb of lake.
Our next destination involved walking two or three stops to the next bus line, so we explored the town a little bit while we were there, stopping in souvenir shops with such names as 'Fancy Shop,' where you could buy all the usual things, calendars of Fuji-san, biscuits in the shape of Fuji-san, green tea flavoured Kit-Kats, etc.
Ohhhhhhh my god how picturesque can you GET? We figured out how to navigate the local buses, including ticketing and payment (seriously, sometimes you pay when you get on, sometimes you pay when you get off, sometimes you can use your Icoca card, which is the one we were using all over Kyoto, but you never tap-on-tap-off, and it's all weird) and headed on a 45 minute scenic drive around Lake Kawaguchiko and adjoining Lake Saiko to Iyashi no Sato Nenba. It's a reconstructed village of about two dozen thatched-roof houses that's basically an open-air museum of pre-feudal Japan. Each house is either the shop of a local artisan, with ceramics, kimono, paintings, handmade paper, silks and so on, or an historical display of such things as armour, beautiful dolls all dressed up in kimono, and one with photos (and words in mostly Japanese) of when the entire town was flattened in the 60s by a typhoon.
I think it was around about this point that I started to realise just how resilient the Japanese people are. Ancient buildings in Kyoto and environs burning down or being earthquaked two or three times in their respective histories, Himeji flattened by bombings in WWII, Hiroshima, and now this tiny village destroyed by typhoon. And they rebuild everything. It's bloody impressive when you see it laid out like that.
Why is this the only other photo I have of the place? Fail, self, fail. Out the front they had food stalls, so we got another taiyaki and sweet potato on a stick, which is just the thing you need when its four degrees.
Then it was back on the bus and around the other side of the lake back to the hotel. There was one spot where we had to change buses and had to wait for about half an hour for said bus, which is pretty frigging good for what's basically a rural area. Handily there was a thing to do at the stop, being a gem museum. So we hung around there looking at gems and jewellery for, like, 20 minutes, then got bored and sat waiting for the bus for the next ten. Cassie amused herself translating an incredibly bubblegum-cute advertising flyer for something to do with space, but Teddy-san, Unicorn-chan and Goat-chan had to help a fairy with... something to do with stars. I still have the flyer XD
We also saw plenty of people in the lake fishing, so we hoped none of them would fall in. They were standing up in their little dinghies and it looked very precarious.
Back at the hotel, Cassie put in one last call to the idiot useless JR people and the hotel staff wished us luck, then took us back to the station. This is where we would have otherwise taken the Shinkansen and been to Tokyo within the hour, but without Cassie's JR pass, we just took one of regular speed and were there in a bit over two. It was still on the JR line, so I could use my pass, and Cassie's ticket only cost about 1500 yen, so it was no great loss at that point. It just meant we were rushing a bit once we got to Tokyo to reach the hotel before the checkin closed at 8pm.
So we arrived at Ikebukuro Station, which is literally the size of the Adelaide CBD. It's a train station. There are about 50 exits from this place, and we were in a rush. We flagged down an official, who not only gave us directions, but led us to the exit we needed to get out through. I think that was literally his job, to lead disoriented tourists (and possibly locals) to their destination. Japan is big on this, which I haven't mentioned before. They're HUGE on the service industry. There are service jobs that you wouldn't think of as being jobs in Australia, like pushing people onto trains for the last train of the day.
So we made it out of Ikebukuro and grabbed a taxi to the hotel, reaching it with a good five minutes for checkin 8D We'd booked Family Inn Saiko expecting it to just be a pretty basic, money-saving base for a few days in Tokyo, really not expecting anything from it. It was like being welcomed into a country B&B, in the middle of one of the biggest cities in the world. Masa-san was SO welcoming omg. He quickly rushed us through checkin, saying there was a little restaurant just down the road where we could have dinner, but they took last orders at 8pm and it was five past by then, and also we're gaijin, but with him there he'd make sure they served us. We left our suitcases in reception, and off we trundled.
A literal stone's throw from the hotel was this TINY little yakitori place. There was a bar with space for four people, two spots occupied, one table for four, and a second room with another two tables. That was it. There's no WAY a place that size could survive in Australia, and yet this is EXACTLY the kind of place I love to go to in Japan. It was so goddamn adorable. The 'menu' was just a whole lot of bits of paper stuck to the wall, each with a menu item on it, so in the interests of not wasting our hosts' time in trying to translate it, we just asked for recommendations. Grilled chicken, chicken skin on skewers, beef, veggie skewer of mushroom and spring onion, probably another four or five things I'm missing... and it was so CHEAP. The whole lot was less than 2000 yen between us. The couple at the bar struck up conversation with Cassie, something about Sydney and surfing and sharks I think. They were so animated and cool. Even though I obviously couldn't catch a word, the whole atmosphere was just so FUN and cool and friendly. Language barriers be damned, I felt like I knew them by the end of that meal. I love Japan T_T
The hotel itself, we got a traditional room again, with tatami and futons on the floor, and a positively palatial bathroom compared to everywhere we'd been before (excepting of course Fuji-san, but I never actually used that one for showering since we had the onsen upstairs). Also there was a tiny street shrine out our window. And Masa-san was the bestest. I love him. I love Japan.
You'll remember that last night it was snowing and cloudy and basically views were not likely. Nevertheless, I set my alarm for 6am and ended up waking up 15 minutes earlier anyway. Idk, excitement. This was the biggest thing I'd been waiting for. I padded quietly to the windows, twisted open the blinds, and--
BAM. FUJI.
I MEAN. This was the view that made that woman on TripAdvisor give the place an Average, because of the building on the left. I JUST. HOW COULD YOU COMPLAIN ABOUT THIS? IT WAS PERFECT.
Snoooooow on the mountain to the left. It's snowing on Mount Fuji :DD
I can't over-emphasise the scale of it. Fuji is BIG. This view just filled the window completely.
I stood on the balcony freezing my toes off just staring at it until it started changing colour. There is not a single cloud I'm
Daaaawn starts happening.
Zooming right in on the crown.
More snow cos the sun had come up a bit.
Can you have too many photos of Fuji at dawn I don't think you can.
I WAS SO GODDAMN EXCITED YOU GUYS. SO EXCITED.
It was just awe-inspiring. I'm so so happy I got to see this. I didn't care about the cold or anything in the face of that. I was so desperately hoping Cassie would be able to appreciate it, too, with obviously the handbag in the forefront of her mind. I think she did? Certainly now looking back she does, but I hope at the time this was at least enough to think yeah, not everything is shit. This, at least, is amazing.
akljsdghalskj
I'm putting all these up here purely to show how excited I was.
Eventually I decided to head up to the onsen to be not freezing while I was watching the sunrise. Briefly tried to wake Cassie, who groaned and either didn't wake up or went straight back to sleep, so went up on my own. Over the hour or so that I was there, there were consistently five or six other women in the onsen watching it with me. Everyone just sitting quietly watching this awesome sight, in the truest and most profound sense of the word. Up the top of the hotel you could really see the whole thing, not even the base obscured by that mountain on the left. Obvs no photos, BUT. OMG. There was one girl who came up with her phone and started taking selfies. She was there for a solid 15 minutes, being GLARED at by everyone in the onsen, pouting at her phone camera and taking selfies. I don't think she even looked at the mountain herself. I'm a frigging AUSSIE and I know how rude that is to do in an onsen full of naked people. So I gave up and went down for breakfast, which was once again a turn-up-on-time affair and I figured I probably needed to get a move-on anyway.
Back in the room, Cassie was up, so I took a shot with the actual window there to try and convey the scale of the thing. It's immense.
I mean, basically just take that shot and blow it up to the size of your wall, then stick it there as wallpaper. That's how big the mountain was outside our window. There were other mountains around the place, too, which would have been fairly impressive in their own right, but Fuji-san just dwarfed them.
Also, I found out that the '-san' honourific here actually just means 'Mount(ain)'. Which only makes it a teeny tiny bit less adorable.
Okay last one and then down to breakfast!
I had to edit this photo a LOT to make it visible. The mountain was so bright and glowing and made the foreground so black. Still, I did a good job, I think. Best breakfast view EVER.
And breakfast itself. We didn't get a menu so I have NO idea what any of it is, except the fish on the grill at the top. And the rice. In the little blue egg cup was something that seemed initially like it was supposed to be eaten on its own, so I shoved a mouthful in and HOLYSHITWASABI, so clearly it was a garnish that you use as sparingly as wasabi itself, but on what? I am not knowing. But it was all just as incredible as dinner last night. There was also miso, always miso. And that view.
After breakfast, we plastered ourselves with as many layers as would fit under our coats, packed up and left our subsequently half-empty suitcases with the concierge, and braced ourselves for the great outdoors.
Destination one was Mount Kachi Kachi Ropeway, which was exactly as adorable as it sounds. It's a cable car that goes up the mountain on the left of every photo up there, from which you get moar view. The PA in the cable car was SO CUTE I CAN'T EVEN. So this was out the window on the way up, where there was last night's snowfall on the mountain.
More sunlit snowy woods.
And the view from the top! Already the clouds were starting to move in, but not in front of the mountain as yet. Bloody hard to actually take a photo, though. It was SO BRIGHT. The air had mist in it, hence the clouds forming, so the air was glowing white, and the sky was bright with it, then the snow was glowing on Fuji-san, and it was just impossible to get any contrast between the snow and the sky. This one is so heavily edited to get some semblance of contrast going XD;
It was so bright I got my sunnies out. Geeze look at my buttons bursting over all the layers under my coat. I had three or four jumpers on, and would have had more if I could've done up the coat XD
Obligatory peace-u shot *^^*v
We went for a bit of a walk around the top of the mountain, but it soon got quite muddy and I had my beautiful suede shoes on, not knowing it was going to get muddy, so we turned back. The full walk would've taken a few hours, anyway.
Never too much Fuji.
Looking back down the cable car over Lake Kawaguchiko. Our hotel was just off to the right of that shot, on the edge of the bottom bulb of lake.
Our next destination involved walking two or three stops to the next bus line, so we explored the town a little bit while we were there, stopping in souvenir shops with such names as 'Fancy Shop,' where you could buy all the usual things, calendars of Fuji-san, biscuits in the shape of Fuji-san, green tea flavoured Kit-Kats, etc.
Ohhhhhhh my god how picturesque can you GET? We figured out how to navigate the local buses, including ticketing and payment (seriously, sometimes you pay when you get on, sometimes you pay when you get off, sometimes you can use your Icoca card, which is the one we were using all over Kyoto, but you never tap-on-tap-off, and it's all weird) and headed on a 45 minute scenic drive around Lake Kawaguchiko and adjoining Lake Saiko to Iyashi no Sato Nenba. It's a reconstructed village of about two dozen thatched-roof houses that's basically an open-air museum of pre-feudal Japan. Each house is either the shop of a local artisan, with ceramics, kimono, paintings, handmade paper, silks and so on, or an historical display of such things as armour, beautiful dolls all dressed up in kimono, and one with photos (and words in mostly Japanese) of when the entire town was flattened in the 60s by a typhoon.
I think it was around about this point that I started to realise just how resilient the Japanese people are. Ancient buildings in Kyoto and environs burning down or being earthquaked two or three times in their respective histories, Himeji flattened by bombings in WWII, Hiroshima, and now this tiny village destroyed by typhoon. And they rebuild everything. It's bloody impressive when you see it laid out like that.
Why is this the only other photo I have of the place? Fail, self, fail. Out the front they had food stalls, so we got another taiyaki and sweet potato on a stick, which is just the thing you need when its four degrees.
Then it was back on the bus and around the other side of the lake back to the hotel. There was one spot where we had to change buses and had to wait for about half an hour for said bus, which is pretty frigging good for what's basically a rural area. Handily there was a thing to do at the stop, being a gem museum. So we hung around there looking at gems and jewellery for, like, 20 minutes, then got bored and sat waiting for the bus for the next ten. Cassie amused herself translating an incredibly bubblegum-cute advertising flyer for something to do with space, but Teddy-san, Unicorn-chan and Goat-chan had to help a fairy with... something to do with stars. I still have the flyer XD
We also saw plenty of people in the lake fishing, so we hoped none of them would fall in. They were standing up in their little dinghies and it looked very precarious.
Back at the hotel, Cassie put in one last call to the idiot useless JR people and the hotel staff wished us luck, then took us back to the station. This is where we would have otherwise taken the Shinkansen and been to Tokyo within the hour, but without Cassie's JR pass, we just took one of regular speed and were there in a bit over two. It was still on the JR line, so I could use my pass, and Cassie's ticket only cost about 1500 yen, so it was no great loss at that point. It just meant we were rushing a bit once we got to Tokyo to reach the hotel before the checkin closed at 8pm.
So we arrived at Ikebukuro Station, which is literally the size of the Adelaide CBD. It's a train station. There are about 50 exits from this place, and we were in a rush. We flagged down an official, who not only gave us directions, but led us to the exit we needed to get out through. I think that was literally his job, to lead disoriented tourists (and possibly locals) to their destination. Japan is big on this, which I haven't mentioned before. They're HUGE on the service industry. There are service jobs that you wouldn't think of as being jobs in Australia, like pushing people onto trains for the last train of the day.
So we made it out of Ikebukuro and grabbed a taxi to the hotel, reaching it with a good five minutes for checkin 8D We'd booked Family Inn Saiko expecting it to just be a pretty basic, money-saving base for a few days in Tokyo, really not expecting anything from it. It was like being welcomed into a country B&B, in the middle of one of the biggest cities in the world. Masa-san was SO welcoming omg. He quickly rushed us through checkin, saying there was a little restaurant just down the road where we could have dinner, but they took last orders at 8pm and it was five past by then, and also we're gaijin, but with him there he'd make sure they served us. We left our suitcases in reception, and off we trundled.
A literal stone's throw from the hotel was this TINY little yakitori place. There was a bar with space for four people, two spots occupied, one table for four, and a second room with another two tables. That was it. There's no WAY a place that size could survive in Australia, and yet this is EXACTLY the kind of place I love to go to in Japan. It was so goddamn adorable. The 'menu' was just a whole lot of bits of paper stuck to the wall, each with a menu item on it, so in the interests of not wasting our hosts' time in trying to translate it, we just asked for recommendations. Grilled chicken, chicken skin on skewers, beef, veggie skewer of mushroom and spring onion, probably another four or five things I'm missing... and it was so CHEAP. The whole lot was less than 2000 yen between us. The couple at the bar struck up conversation with Cassie, something about Sydney and surfing and sharks I think. They were so animated and cool. Even though I obviously couldn't catch a word, the whole atmosphere was just so FUN and cool and friendly. Language barriers be damned, I felt like I knew them by the end of that meal. I love Japan T_T
The hotel itself, we got a traditional room again, with tatami and futons on the floor, and a positively palatial bathroom compared to everywhere we'd been before (excepting of course Fuji-san, but I never actually used that one for showering since we had the onsen upstairs). Also there was a tiny street shrine out our window. And Masa-san was the bestest. I love him. I love Japan.