Back in Mizusawa

Yoko and Nowa in the old part of Mizusawa

July and we’re back in Mizusawa, as regularly as migrating birds, every summer for many years already. This is Yoko’s hometown and I’ve grown to feel it’s mine as well. Nowa has spent most of her summers and some New Year's vacations there too. 

I’ve also watched it change, both economically, socially and geographically. Mizusawa has some history, although it’s short by Japanese standards where history is measured in centuries and millennia: the town was founded in 1889 and made formally into a city in 1954. But by now, Mizusawa is no longer a city in its own right. In 2006 it was merged with the neighboring communities of Esashi, Maesawa, Isawa and Koromogawa to form the new city of Oshu. The former cities (shi) were downgraded to the status of wards (ku) in the newly formed Oshu-shi. It probably made sense in some administrative manner. Life in Mizusawa didn’t change noticeably and the old Mizusawa city hall close to our house was turned into Oshu city hall.

Our house

We are in Iwate prefecture (ken) in the middle of the Tohoku region in the northern part of the main Japanese island of Honshu. Oshu-shi is almost 500 km straight north from Tokyo. It is located in a north-south valley, with the tall mountains of Akita-ken rising to the west. A coastal mountain range separates the area from the Sanriku coast further to the east. This is very lucky as the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami of March 11^th, 2011, that destroyed many of the coastal towns, such as Rikuzentakata, Ofunato, Kamaishi and Kesennuma, killed more than 15,000 people, and caused the Fukushima nuclear meltdown, hardly affected Mizusawa’s surroundings. Sure, the massive shakes were felt here strong enough and electricity was cut off for two weeks in parts of the town, but that was the extent of the damage.

Mizusawa was a small town, at least by Japanese standards. It used to have a bit over 60,000 inhabitants when it was put together with its neighbors. It is a center of an agricultural area with expansive tracts of rice paddies, apple orchards and vegetable gardens. Consequently, many of the inhabitants are rural types and the age structure rather old. Although Iwate (like Akita) has plenty of hot springs, the main resort areas – like the famous Hanamaki Onsen – are further north from Mizusawa, in the mountains. Mizusawa did have some things going for it, though, that made it different from some of the other small rural towns. It was an administrative center for the region and it had a big hospital.

Rural outskirts

Small rivers and canals run through the old part of town. Some houses along them are old and somewhat dilapidated but new ones are appearing here and there. The waterways are generally clean and there are fish and crayfish in the main channel. Some beautiful gardens line the creeks.

Urban canals

Interestingly, the town is also host to one of the six International Latitude Observatories, which has for decades brought visiting scholars and scientists to the town from all over the world. All these observatories – in California, Ohio, Maryland, Italy, Turkmenistan and Mizusawa – are located near the 39^o08’ parallel to measure the Earth’s wobble. You can still go for days without seeing another foreigner, but at least people are quite used to seeing my kind of big blond gaijin in town. This summer, there are three American kids enrolled in the Mizusawa elementary school.

The shinkansen station

Oshu-shi lies about halfway between the two largest cities in Tohoku: Sendai (pop. 1.1 million) to the south and Morioka (pop. 297,000) to the north. The main Tohoku shinkansen bullet train track goes through Oshu-shi and makes a stop at the Mizusawa-Esashi station. Some people are surprised that the shinkansen makes a stop at the juncture of these relatively small towns, but there is a logical explanation: Ichiro Ozawa (b. 1942). The perennial opposition leader and powerful politician actually hails from Mizusawa and remains quite popular in these parts. Even we received a congratulatory message from him when we got married at the Komagata shrine here in town (this didn’t please my mother-in-law who was a regional planner in the prefectural government and no fan of Ozawa’s). In a type example of politics of patronage, Mizusawa received a shinkansen stop.

A ceremony at Komagata shrine

There’s a twist to the story, however – a twist that explains some of the later developments in the urban geography of the area. Mizusawa is also on the regular north-south railway line on which the local trains to Morioka and smaller towns in Iwate travel. Naturally, the original plan was to build the Tohoku shinkansen line so that it would take the same route and the bullet trains would stop at around the existing Mizusawa station. The station area at that time was the heart of the city, with a thriving main street containing many shops and restaurants and a couple of hotels. Apparently the chamber of commerce feared that a shinkansen station would disturb their idyll and voted against it. Instead, the shinkansen would stop some kilometers further east, in a relatively unpopulated area between the cities of Mizusawa and Esashi.

How wrong could they have been? What happened was that the area around the new shinkansen station started to develop, as many people preferred to live close to the transportation hub that would take them to Morioka, Sendai and all the way to Tokyo. The area around Mizusawa station declined and shops started closing.

Universe -- A new shopping center

In a parallel development, Mizusawa became much more car-oriented. The old center with its narrow streets was made for walking and biking. Now shopping centers with expansive parking lots were developed on the outskirts of the town. The outer roads turned into strip malls with car dealerships, pachinko parlors with slot machines, chain restaurants and other establishments. The best hotel in town is no longer the Mizusawa Grand on the main station street (where our wedding reception was held) but the MizusawaPlaza Inn to the east from the local train tracks. Full disclosure: Plaza Inn is owned and operated by one of Yoko's best friends, Mami Kikuchi; the girls went to junior high school together. The hotel is very popular as a wedding location and boasts two excellent restaurants: a traditional Japanese restaurant Kikusui; and the Western Quattre Saisons. (Typically of the modesty of the Japanese people, the successful businesswoman Mami who in addition owns other restaurants in Iwate still drives a tiny Suzuki Lapin.)

With Mami and her Lapin

As in so many Japanese towns, there is a fancy multipurpose cultural center in Oshu-shi as well. The Z Hall that contains a large concert hall and hosts a variety of events (and where my brother-in-law Jun works) was also built to the east of the tracks towards Esashi.

There was a time a decade or so ago when it was rather depressing to walk along the main street by the station, as so many of the shops were closed down and very few people would be on the street. A large number of small bars were still operating in the narrow small streets north of the main drag but the evenings tended to feel rather lonely, while younger people drove to the family restaurants in the shopping centers and strip malls. Even the classic Takatoyo fish mongers moved further out.

Jun sings at Urara while Akira tends bar

Then something seems to have happened again and the area no longer feels dead. New shops and cafés have opened around the station, as have big and shiny karaoke joints to compete with the rustic Urara, a karaoke bar run by Yoko and Jun’s aunt Eiko and her husband Akira. One reason may be the development of new housing and opening of a shopping center, Universe, not far from the old center a stone’s throw from our house. The son of the owner of a classic coffee shop, Rengaya, a couple of years ago opened a stylish yet cozy café called Jazzrise, which boasts a great collection of jazz vinyls. It has to be said, though, that the collection is no match to that in Ray Brown, a jazz bar just a couple of blocks away from our house, which Yoko’s uncle Toshikatsu, a keen jazz man, introduced me to.

The old station area has recovered somewhat

Apart from the scientists at the Observatory and a few of us big noses who have married into the Mizusawa society, new groups of foreigners have appeared in recent years. I have heard Russian spoken in the supermarkets and a few years ago noticed groups of Pinoys and other Southeast Asian women, who presumably have moved to the area to get married. In Japan like in many other developed countries, young women move to cities leaving men to farm without ready access to spouses.

Rural Japan is facing a serious problem of depopulation and aging, with planners and researchers talking about ‘ghost towns’ (my friend Brendan Barrett, a professor at Osaka University is one who has written about the unfortunate phenomenon). Apart from the obvious social problems and the declining services in rural areas, this has also serious environmental consequences as old managed agricultural landscapes disintegrate into abandonment. Somewhat counterintuitively, this even threatens biodiversity as the rice-based agricultural and water management systems developed here over millennia – known as satoyama – maintain a rich and delicate balance between natural and human systems.

The main river has clean water, fish and crayfish

Luckily, these problems are not evident here and Oshu-shi is far from a ghost town. It has a fairly stable population of some 120,000 inhabitants and, as the existence of new cafés and bars attests, there are enough of young people in the town (and many have offspring of their own, which is obvious when visiting a shopping center). The city has enough of diversity in employment – from civil service to commerce to health care to science to agriculture – to support a reasonable level of cultural amenities and good restaurants (one of the best – anywhere! – is Ermitage, a French-Russian style establishment, which has attracted visitors from far away since 1983). It is well connected to the wider world through the shinkansen, as well as the Tohoku expressway. Hanamaki airport is less than 40 km away.

The water is clean and abundant, the locally produced food superior, and the climate pleasant (especially this summer when many places in Japan have broken heat records and dozens of people have died as a consequence – the new normal with climate change, I’m afraid – the somewhat cooler and less moist air of Tohoku is a blessing).

Mizusawa still may not be a thrilling center of excitement, but it is a good place to be. And it feels like home.

Tambo (rice paddy) art on the city edge

One Sunday in Mizusawa

At 6 a.m. on Sunday morning the silence was unspoiled. The dawn had barely broken and it was perfectly still. I lay in my futon under layers of blankets all covered by a thick quilt. It was cold in the room and the air felt fresh. The solid tatami floor under the thin mattress was good for my back that was stiff after a 14-hour flight followed by more than 3 hours on two trains last night. Yoko was still fast asleep in the futon next to me. Even her brother, Jun, and his son Hiromichi sleeping in the next room separated only by thin sliding doors, fusuma, made no sound. In Brooklyn where we live such stillness would be impossible. The bar across the street would have closed its doors just a couple of hours ago and there might still be some stragglers heading home after a night’s partying. Others would be up to go to work at some establishment or another that didn’t close for the weekend. Inevitably, someone would play loud cumbia music on his car stereo with the windows rolled down. There’d be traffic on Williamsburg Bridge and the subway that in our part of town runs above ground, the distant sound of which would mix with the constant hum of the big city. Such continuous low-grade background noise, I’m sure, contributes to the tense nerves and aggression of the contemporary city dwellers.

Here in Mizusawa, Iwate, no such background hum existed. In the first waking hour I heard two cars pass slowly on the street. A lone bird started to twitter outside of the window as the sun was climbing higher above the horizon. Birdsong was another victim of the urban noise. Ornithologists have been able to document how many songbirds have simplified their song as a result of the loud soundscape in the city; their partners are just not able to distinguish the finer nuances. Another loss to the diversity and beauty of life. The sun came out and I opened the shoji screens in front of the second floor windows. There were still patches of snow here and there—it had been a very snowy winter in northern Japan—but the day was going to be beautiful. I glanced at the temperature inside the room: +9 degrees C. It was time to turn on the heater in the corner. It came to life with a flicker and a click and at once started to spread warm air to the small room. The room filled with a pleasant smell of kerosene and the low purr of the heater. I could no longer hear the bird.

This was the first time I was back in Iwate since the Great Eastern Japan earthquake and tsunami a year ago. Although the epicentre of the quake was not too far from here—straight west off the coast—the damage to Mizusawa had been limited. The town lies far enough from the coast to have been spared from the tsunami. It is comfortably snuggled up in a picturesque valley between snow-capped mountains. The earthquake had been strong here, too, and the town was cut off from the rest of the country for a couple of weeks, as the train service was not running. Electricity had also been intermittent for a long period of time and it had taken days until the television was back on. But no-one had died and no buildings had collapsed. This old house in which Yoko grew up had escaped virtually unscathed with only a couple of minor cracks in the walls. I had thought it unlikely, but I guess I had underestimated the resilience of the structure—or more to the point, its flexibility. This elasticity of the old style wooden Japanese houses was now emulated in modern construction. Rigid structures are broken in earthquakes if their intensity is adequate—and earthquakes happen constantly in Japan—but if the structure is able to sway with the motion of the earth, it has a better chance of surviving. There is an old saying in Japanese: bamboo is the strongest element; it bends with the wind, but never breaks. This saying, although presumably referring to human beings, applies equally to buildings.

Breakfast was a traditional Japanese one. Hiromichi who lives with his mother Miho in Hakodate on the northern island of Hokkaido had brought with him a hokke, a mackerel type of fish found primarily in the Sea of Okhostk, which my mother-in-law grilled for us. Many Japanese today—including Hiromichi—prefer a breakfast of toast with eggs and bacon or marmalade, but a real Japanese breakfast gets you well prepared for an active day. We ate the grilled hokke with bowls of white rice and steaming miso soup, accompanied by assorted small vegetable dishes: pickled cucumbers and daikon radish, seri (an herb that comes out in spring), pungent leaves of wasabi horseradish. Fried fish, rice, vegetables, miso soup could be the backbone of any meal, not just breakfast. In fact, throughout history in most societies there would not have been specific foods for specific meals—breakfast, as we understand it in the modern West, is a rather new invention. Still, I would bet the majority of the world’s population—at least those who have enough to fill their stomachs with—starts their day with the same kind of fare they’ll be eating at other meals as well.


Jun looked tired. He works too hard and seldom takes breaks. He has made a successful career as a freelance stage manager specializing in ballet and opera productions, often touring the country with visiting troupes, such as the Leningrad Ballet or the Ballet de Monte Carlo. The pressure in the work is heavy and he has recently taken up a more sedate job in a theatre in Aomori. Jun is also a very talented musician, whose claim to fame does not rest with the fact that in the 1990s in Tokyo he was the lead guitarist in our band, Bête Noire. Jun had driven down to Mizusawa from Aomori, the capital of the prefecture with the same name north-west of Iwate. Instead of the expected 3 hours, the trip had taken more than 6, as there had been an accident in one of the many tunnels through which the highway passes (we saw the aftermath on TV; the driver of the car that had crashed with a truck stood no chance). Jun had left the highway and driven most of the way through country roads on the mountainsides and in the valleys. There had still been huge amounts of snow and the driving had been slow, but the landscape had been beautiful.

As we sat down with our cups of tea, a considerable tremor shook the house. Yoko rushed to turn off the main gas switch—fires caused by earthquakes are a major cause of associated loss—but the situation was over before anyone else had time to react. We thus resumed our tea and chat.



Mizusawa is no longer a city in its own right. Six years ago it was merged with the neighbouring city of Esashi, towns of Maesawa and Isawa, and the village of Koromokawa to form the larger city of Oshu-shi (population 128,000). In the process, Mizusawa was downgraded from city (shi) into a ward (ku) in the new constellation. In many ways, Mizusawa was an interesting case study of what was happening in small town Japan. There was structural change. At the time my late father-in-law Masayuki Takahashi had first arrived here, after the World War II, when Tokyo had been devastated, he had found a small but lively town, which was largely serving as trading and service centre for the surrounding countryside dominated by rice paddies and other agriculture. He had met my mother-in-law, Tomoko, a daughter in a sake brewing house in the small community of Koromokawa nearby. He would later tell, probably only half-jokingly, that he married the young woman because the family’s business guaranteed him a steady flow of fresh sake brewed with the cleanest water from the mountain streams. The city boy settled permanently into the quiet life in the northern countryside and both he and his wife eventually found jobs in the Iwate prefectural government from which they both retired decades later. Masayuki made his career in the financial administration, while Tomoko became a regional planner with responsibility for some of the major dams and reservoirs Japan built in the mountains during the frenzied reconstruction efforts in the 1960s through 1980s.

Masayuki passed away some years ago completely unexpectedly. Now there is a small shrine for him in the corner of the living room and every morning Tomoko lights up a candle and some joss sticks in front of it.


Despite its relatively small size—although, with some 60,000 people, Mizusawa would be a significant centre in many other countries, in densely populated Japan it’s but a speck on the map—Mizusawa was thriving. It got a shinkansen (or bullet train) station, which it shares with Esashi, on the main Tohoko line from Tokyo to Morioka. It’s said that the station is testimony to the Japanese politics of patronage: one of the country’s foremost political figures—and an eternal opposition leader, it seems—Ichiro Ozawa calls Mizusawa his home, although he has hardly ever lived here. Although the big man is often accused of arrogance and is not nationally popular, he is very powerful—and this is Ozawa country. He even sent a congratulatory message to our wedding at the Komagata Jinja shrine.

Mizusawa is also host to one of the world’s six international latitude observatories created along the latitude 39 degrees 8’ north originally to measure the ‘wobble’ of Earth’s axis. The town’s location in the mountains far from the dust and light pollution of major urban centres makes it ideal for observing the stars and its observations and data are still in use, even if the original mission has since been modified.



Today, Mizusawa has two sides to it. The main growth is outside of the old town centre. There is newer housing and many of the younger people with their new families have moved there. The main shopping centres accessible by private car are also concentrated there. Downtown Mizusawa for its part is more like a real town, with city streets and sidewalks lined with smaller shops and restaurants, mostly the type of drinking establishments known as izakaya.

We headed to the modern side for lunch in a popular restaurant named ‘Victory’, the specialty of which is a huge variety of sirloin and hamburger steaks in imaginative combinations. This would be a family affair. Jun and Hiromichi drove to the Mizusawa-Esashi shinkansen station to pick up Miho who was arriving from Hakodate. Our taxi overtook Yoko’s aunt Eiko and her husband Akira as they were riding their bikes towards the restaurant. Eiko and Akira have a long history in theatre and ran a successful event-organizing business in Tokyo, but decided to move back to Mizusawa for semi-retirement. The retirement bit soon turned out to be less than the foreseen half. In addition to the karaoke bar that they opened and by now have run for several years, Eiko has recently been appointed the director of Z Hall, a cultural centre that contains a main hall seating 1,500 people. Just weeks ago they premiered a massive historical play, written by Akira, that involved some 200 extras drawn from the local population to play the role of disgruntled peasants staging a revolt against the landlords.





The Tohoku region (consisting of the northernmost prefectures of the Honshu island: Fukushima, Miyagi, Yamagata, Iwate, Akita and Aomori) has a reputation of having an independent population opposed to authority. Tohoku was the last stronghold against the rule of the shogun in the 12th century. Esashi today has a not-so-minor industry for location shooting of historical dramas that are so popular in Japan. The currently running epic, Taira no Kiyomori, and the hugely popular Furinkazan a few years back were both largely shot in Esashi. The reason for this is that there still are areas that can easily be transformed to look like samurai-era towns. More importantly, there is plenty of unspoilt nature—mountains, forests and the beautiful Kitakamigawa river—that are not ruined for film by electric poles or other modern features.



Having spent the afternoon in one of the major shopping malls, Aterui, we returned home to rest. As the evening was falling, Yoko and I decided to take a stroll to the town centre for a cup of coffee. Silence had again fallen with the setting sun. The shops on the main street were closing for the day. On a Sunday evening, the centre was almost deserted. In the coffee shop, a young couple were smoking. A few of the izakayas were open and I could see people entering. A group of girls in miniskirts looked cold as they were chatting in front of the Maple department store.

As we returned home, it was time for the third full meal of the day. The Japanese take food seriously, as testified by the numerous cooking and local food programs on TV at any time of any day. Food is the most common topic of discussion, like the proverbial weather for the Englishmen. Virtually every woman and many men take pride in being proficient cooks. Attention is paid to the quality and freshness of the ingredients, and it is important to vary them according to season. Eating on the go is considered a sacrilege and the closest one gets to fast food in Japan is sushi. In these parts, however, one can go weeks and months without sushi or sashimi. Iwate grows cattle, which produces fabulous cheeses and other milk products. Maesawa beef is second only to Kobe beef in reputation. I couldn’t think that I’d be able to eat yet another meal, but the hot ramen noodles in savoury broth were delicious, as was the Maesawa beef salad served with spicy soy sauce and washed down with cold beer. The meal was rounded off by juicy mandarin oranges, mikan, that are a staple of Japanese winter. It was cosy to sit around the kotatsu, a heated space underneath the table that keeps one’s feet and legs warm in the unheated house. The same elasticity that makes the houses endure earthquakes ensure that there is enough of fresh air blowing through the windows and doors to keep the inside temperature close to that outside. The kotatsu, as Mugi-chan the cat would agree, is a wonderful invention that keeps the family warm and together.

Still jetlagged, I was ready to sleep, but there was one more mandatory thing to do, the ofuro. Most Japanese take a hot bath every night before sleeping. The bath tub is filled once with scalding water and each person staying in the house—family, friends, guest—takes a dip in his or her turn. People are very clean and everyone washes thoroughly before immersing in the hot tub. As the most senior male present, I had the honour of taking the first turn in the bath. I retired to the warm futon and the amazing silence in anticipation of waking up to a new bright and calm day tomorrow.

Sakura no Yu

I woke up with a start. It was still early, just after 7 a.m., but everyone else seemed to be up. The futon was warm in the cold room and I had slept soundly. I quickly pulled on some clothes and hobbled down the narrow stairs. My mother-in-law was already busy preparing breakfast with her daughter, Yoko, helping less effectively. Warm fumes of miso and rice hung in the air of the cold kitchen. The father-in-law was not to be seen.

The breakfast consisted of red miso soup with mushrooms that were so slippery that it was impossible to get them out of the bowl and into the mouth with the chopsticks; delicious fried aji fish; a bowl of rice; the ever present pickled vegetables or tsukemono; and green tea. The food was heart warming in the rainy morning and the steam rising from the miso soup felt good on the face as I raised the cup to my lips. I found myself accepting a second bowl once I had poured the contents, including the slippery mushrooms, of the first into my stomach.

The womenfolk had already packed bags with towels, snacks and other necessities for the daytrip to a nearby hot spring spa or onsen. Yoko had even put my pullover into the bag, so the only thing that I needed to do was to add the camera and a novel for the moments of waiting I knew lay ahead. The rain was but a drizzle when we exited the house immediately after breakfast. According to the schedule Yoko’s mother had consulted, the bus to the onsen hotel would leave – with Japanese precision – from a nearby stop at 9:02 and it was important to reach the place in good time so that we wouldn’t miss it. We walked briskly through the small streets of Mizusawa towards the bus stop just blocks away. My father-in-law had joined the group in the last moment and was now walking silently behind me. The only thing he had uttered thus far was ohayoo, the good morning’s greeting. I knew his silence had nothing to do with me: my wife’s father was a quiet man.

By 9:01 my mother-in-law was getting visibly nervous. There was no sign of the bus. She became overly worried that the schedule would be different or entirely cancelled as today was a national holiday, Sports Day to be more precise (it wasn’t quiet clear to me what exactly was celebrated, but there was nobody on the road indicating that this was, indeed, a serious holiday). It would be a major blow to the plans if the bus wouldn’t go. We could easily take a taxi as the place was not far away, but that was not how it had been planned. Luckily, with everyone holding their breath, the blue and green bus was sighted as it turned the corner at exactly 9:02. The disaster had been averted.

We entered the short bus through the backdoor and took our tickets from a machine. The uniformed driver nodded a welcome to us. The bus calmly meandered through the city of Mizusawa. Its size was designed so that it was able to navigate the small streets and corners where it was tight even for two small cars to pass. There was only one other passenger, a young female with short hair and a long sleeved t-shirt (whether she was a child or a young adult was difficult to decide). The bus left town, drove a short distance through sprawl with used car dealerships, pachinko parlors and other small shops before entering a farming area. We were still in the same wide valley surrounded by snow-capped mountains in which Mizusawa is located. Closer to town, in the transition zone to agriculture, the land was dominated by small vegetable patches. Further away, the landscape consisted of small rice fields with traditional looking farmhouses scattered in between them. In the Tohoku part of northern Japan, farming villages seldom had clear centers. Now, in the autumn the paddies had been drained and the rice harvested. In places, farmers were preparing the land for winter and their wives with heads wrapped in scarves under straw hats were bundling the rice husks. The fields were wet after last night’s downpour. Big black jungle crows were finding things to eat amongst the puddles. At one location, two white egrets shone bright white against the rain soaked grey paddy.

The bus moved at a pace that I would have found excruciatingly slow at other times. Today I felt it suited the languid mood perfectly. Anything faster would have been almost sacrilegious. The driver carefully turned onto a small road with rice fields on both sides that led to a country store. Two tiny old ladies were sitting in front of the store with a vegetable cart. They both had round faces with dark slits for eyes. They were bundled up in layers of clothes, so that their shapes were almost perfectly round with only little feet protruding from underneath the ball. They greeted the driver with nods and smiles but did not want to enter the bus. Our driver stopped, reversed, turned the bus around, and returned the same way to the bigger road. It served an important function to provide public transportation to the remoter villages, even if the routes had to be heavily subsidized by the more centrally located taxpayers.

After some time, we arrived at the hot spring onsen. The compound was located on the plain, a sprawling modern one-storey building. The young female who still was the only other passenger apart from us leaped out of the bus and ran to a side door on the left side of the edifice. She was obviously an employee of the establishment and, thus, an adult.

It was still early autumn and rather warm despite the drizzle. The trees still had their leaves although most were starting to change color. Especially, few mominoki maples were already bright red in the grey morning. The Japanese live by the season demonstrating a close affinity with nature. Kouyou is one of everyone’s favorites, the season when the leaves change their color. It makes the Japanese feel so sad and melancholy, feelings that I as a Finn can well relate to. Like the joyful and light-hearted summer has gone so fast and we must prepare for the little death. In the Japanese sensibility, things ephemeral represent the only real beauty.

There were already a few people sitting in the lobby of the establishment when we entered. Yoko’s mother communicated with the red-cheeked young woman at the reception. The girl was wearing a brown uniform with a vest and knee-length skirt. On her feet she wore thick white socks and no shoes. The reception was already considered onsen area where shoes were forbidden. All visitors had also deposited theirs in small wooden lockers at the entrance balancing precariously with one foot on the wet entrance while stepping up to the elevated floor where shoes no longer where acceptable. I had had some trouble fitting my oversized flippers into the boxes designed for much smaller shoes.
The smiling receptionist motioned us towards a group of sofas to wait until our resting room would be ready. This was the first period of waiting for which I had brought the novel. The windows from the entrance hall gave over the rainy landscape to the direction where I presumed a river was running.

There was a wall length of vending machines. Yoko and I – the urbanites – chose hot coffee with milk. Despite the inevitable paper cup, the coffee was most enjoyable and had a strong but not bitter aroma. Japan was a country underestimated for the quality of its coffee. Any small coffee shop – and even the vending machines – could beat Starbucks hands down! The older generation took warm canned green tea. In the next sofa group, a young family was also preparing themselves for a relaxing time at the spa. The youthful father had already opened a large bottle of Sapporo Black Label beer that he was sipping from a tiny glass. The Japanese have an uncomplicated relationship with alcohol: when you’re off work, cork up whenever you feel like it.

The lobby was getting crowded as buses brought more and more people in for holiday fun. Virtually everyone looked local. After all, this was not a famous onsen, so it wouldn’t attract people from the big cities of the Tohoku region – such as Morioka or Sendai – or from further away. There were other much more famous onsen further north, in places such as Hanamaki. Sakura-no-Oyu – the name translated to “cherry blossom hot water” – was just a simple local place of relaxation for the farmers and other people from the area. The water was genuinely from an underground mineral spring – Japan was a volcanic country and it wasn’t difficult to find hot springs – with all of its healing qualities and the setting was beautiful enough. But this was not such a traditionally romantic setting like some others located deeper in the mountains.

The red-cheeked girl reappeared to inform that our room was ready. She led the way across the lobby and through a corridor hurrying with small steps hardly lifting her feet so that her socks made a sweeping sound on the carpet. The four of us entered the tatami room that was small but clean and fresh looking. The window gave to a small yard.

Soon after, I entered the large bath area through sliding doors. It was so steamy there that all shapes were blurred. It was quite crowded with many men and some children. I found a free space in one of the long lines of wash places. I splashed water on the low plastic stool and sat on it. On all sides, men covered in soap foam were scrubbing themselves vigorously. Cleanliness is a central virtue in Japan. Most of the men had the appearance of farmers: weathered faces with eyes permanently squinting as if the sun was shining even here inside the baths. Their bodies were sinewy with decades of hard work on the fields. The hot mineral water that smelled like sulfur would be melting the knots in their strained muscles. Some of the men were stocky with slight potbellies, but all looked like they could definitely hold their own in a situation. Close by, a young father was soaping up a little boy. The father belonged to a new generation and probably to one of the small towns in the area. His hair was dyed reddish brown and he had a tattoo of a dragon on his right shoulder. Despite all of this, he looked very benign.

After having satisfied myself that I was clean enough – and having made a show of washing myself carefully because the Japanese always fear that the gaijin are not equally careful with their personal hygiene – I stepped into the large ofuro bath inside the bathhouse. The water was scalding hot to my feet but I knew that the best way of getting in was simply to sit down until the neck without hesitation. The little by little approach might be better for the heart, but it was too painful to expose one’s body to the slow boiling.

There were some fifteen other men in the tub, many of them with a damp washcloth folded on top of their heads to keep the brain cool. If anyone noticed the entrance of a gaijin, nobody made a fuss about it. Up in Tohoku, it’s egalitarian country. Poor farmers share what they have with any traveler and nobody has any pretensions of being higher than others.
Once I got used to the heat, the water was soothing to the weary bones. One could feel how the mineral water from deep in the volcanic land penetrated the skin and beyond. The sulfuric fumes penetrated the sinuses. It was impossible to be sick if one took these baths regularly.

A man in his 50s with old-fashioned black-framed eyeglasses, a serious comb-over and an exceptionally long member between his skinny legs entered the bath. He smiled broadly with a mouth full of crooked teeth and nodded a friendly acknowledgement when he sat next to me. I responded with a smile and a muted konnichiwa or good afternoon. No more verbal communication was needed between us, or any other bathers. In our natural nudity, we were all equal in our private relaxation.

When the heat of the water became too much, I stood up, nodded to the comb-over, and went outside to the garden where the smaller outdoors pool, known as rotemburo, was located. The rain was falling steadily now and the large drops cooled down my overheated body nonetheless startling me as they hit me with a splash. A mominoki with bright red leafs stood a few yards away, vivid against the grey sky. The river that I had expected to be there ran nearby beyond the slope behind the garden, the sound of its water flowing over the rocks clearly audible to the rotemburo. A low wooden wall separated the women’s bathing area from ours. The sounds of their chattering and laughter mingled with the trickling sounds of the river. Three men who looked like countryside yakuza gangsters with rather large beer bellies were lounging in the tub, laughing and exchanging stories from horse races in the city of Morioka.

Having let the rain cool my body to the point that I started shivering, I went back into the bathhouse and decided to enter the Finnish sauna. I took note in passing that it was actually manufactured by a company from Finland. It appeared genuine enough, with wooden walls and benches and heated rocks in the corner, except for the TV set that had been installed behind a glass for the entertainment of the bathers. A program showing the fate of a tuna from the time it was caught by a trawler, to the fish market and, partially, to the fisherman’s dinner table (the fisherman who had caught the fish chose to keep the eyes, which he considered a special treat for himself), was on, with its typical details of cooking and people exclaiming how delicious it all looked: Eeh! Oishii! One could never open the TV in Japan without seeing a food program at least on some channel.

After a dip in the cold-water pool I returned to our room. Yoko’s father was back there already. He had bought cans of Asahi Super Dry beer and offered one to me in his typically incommunicative manner, just handing one over to me. After the baths, it tasted heavenly. The TV was on in the room, too. It seemed that the TV would always be on. Yoko’s father was watching a marathon race, another of the perennial favorites on Japanese television. How many marathons do they run in Japan every year, anyway?

Soon the women arrived and food was ordered from the kitchen by telephone. I settled for hot ramen noodles with roasted pork slices and bamboo shoots. It was tough to eat at first because the broth was so hot that it burned the tongue. First the outside, now the inside was getting scalded, I thought. The bath, beer and food made everyone sleepy and soon the four of us were sprawled over the tatami mats fast asleep. Yoko’s head was touching mine and I felt a wave of warmth go through my body.

The second time around, the bath was even more enjoyable. My body was cold after sleeping on the floor without covers. But entering the rotemburo was ever so much more difficult as the temperature difference between the chilled body and steaming water was bigger. Entering slowly, I thought that my feet would be boiled. But once I was in the tub my body temperature adjusted and I could feel the heat seeping through my deepest buried organs. It couldn’t feel more relaxing.

This time there were many more children. Apparently, having done their hair and make-up, most women had decided against a second round of baths and, thus, the children followed their fathers to the baths. A little girl of about three or four entered the bath with her father. She was amazingly pretty with big dark eyes and a small nose in an expressive face. Her black hair was held up with elastic ribbons that had small red butterflies attached to them.

The rain had stopped and the air was distinctly cooler now. A wind had picked up and it brought with it the sound of the river racing down from the mountains towards the distant sea. The day was quickly fading away. Dragonflies were still cruising the air in their odd fashion, hovering in one spot, then suddenly spurting to the next, only to continue hovering there. The mountains had come into view at a distance when cracks appeared in the cloud cover and the last rays of sun lit them up in shades of grey. A string of small lights glimmered on the small pine tree in the garden.

[Published also on www.bootsnall.com/articles/06-03/sakura-no-yu-mizusawa-iwate-japan.html on March 8, 2006.]

Receiving the Year of the Bird

The Buddhists have 108 sins to clear at the end of the old year. Therefore, at the temples the gong is hit equally many times when receiving the New Year. At the Shinto shrines, there are no gongs. People just clap their hands twice and ring the bells that hang above the shrine gate by shaking the thick rope that connects to the brass bells hanging under the torii gate of the shrine. This peaceful coexistence of traditions and religions surely is one the reasons for the harmony that exists in the Japanese society, where 80 percent of the people profess to being Buddhist, while at the same time almost 90 percent of the people adhere to Shinto practices.

I had joined the long line of hundreds of people moving towards the main building of Hitaka shrine in Mizusawa, northern Japan. The Year of the Monkey was about to turn into the Year of the Bird. The temperature was well below freezing but as there was no wind the night didn’t feel too cold. The large snowflakes appeared to float in the still air reflecting the shifting lights from the fires. The thick snow cover dampened the sounds and all I could hear was the muted clattering of the bells and the soft crunch of the snow underneath our boots. There was wood smoke in the air.

Mine was the only western face amongst the crowds. Mizusawa is a small town of some 60,000 people in Iwate Prefecture about three hours north from Tokyo by the bullet train, shinkansen. It is located in the north of the main island of Honshu far from either coast between the two major northern cities of Sendai and Morioka. The only reason why the shinkansen even stops there, it is said, is that Mizusawa is the home base of one of Japan’s most powerful political figures, Ichiro Ozawa. Despite the stop, few foreigners find reason to get off here. My reason this time – and many times before – was that Mizusawa was also the hometown of my wife, Yoko, who was born and raised here before she moved to Tokyo to attend university at 18.

While the queue was snaking slowly forward, people would step out of it to take a sip of spring water from or wash their hands in the little well that we passed. Those who were hungry, could purchase mayo tako, minced octopus balls with mayonnaise, or hot cakes from makeshift stalls that had been established alongside the route. The heat and the fragrance from the cooking warmed up even those of us passing by who didn’t indulge. When we finally reached the shrine, Yoko and I bowed our heads, threw coins into the offering vessel, clapped our hands twice, rang the bells and prayed for a more peaceful future than the ending year had been. We then proceeded to do the same at a number of other altars at Hitaka.

Once the cold was getting to us, we joined the other people who had gone through the same route at an open fire that had been set up in the middle of the yard. We were served amazake, or fermented rice wine, from a stall. The fire and the sake warmed the crowd up. This was important as many of the young women arriving from parties with their boyfriends were dressed in very short skirts exposing their thighs to the cold midwinter air. The snowfall had halted and a pale half moon was seen through the hazy winter sky.

The New Year’s Eve hadn’t started quite as spiritually. Yoko, her brother Jun and I had gathered around the table at their parents’ house for a sukiyaki meal. The head of the family, Masayuki Takahashi, had started by grilling thin slices of beef on a hot plate that was placed on the table, adding various vegetables, mushrooms and tofu to the stew. He filled the pot with hot water, sake and soy sauce until all the ingredients were all well stewed. The hot pot sat in the middle of the table and we’d all pick up the pieces we wanted with our chopsticks directly from the pot and dip them into the raw egg that each one of us had beat into a cup next to our plates. There were side dishes, too: pickled cabbage and cucumber, salad with fried tofu. We were all sitting in the kotatsu: a square hole had been made in the middle of the tatami mats and the table had been fitted on top of it. Inside there was a kerosene heater and we would put our feet under the table to keep them warm. The room itself was very cold, as the buildings in Iwate were not built to resist the harsh winter weather that hit them annually (why this is the case remains a mystery; further north, in Hokkaido, where the winter is equally harsh the houses are generally better built and have proper heating).

The television was open during the dinner and we were surfing the channels while eating. Mostly, though, we watched the annual New Year’s kohaku, or prize show in which numerous singers competed. In between, we did spend time between Pride and K-1 fights in which great stars, like the …, fought each other to the enjoyment of the spectators. Both of these “sports” share the same general idea: use any means possible developed by Eastern martial arts or Western fighting to batter your opponent to submission. Back at kohaku we shared in the joys of contemporary Japanese musical performance. ..
At some point of time during the dinner the beer had been switched to sake and its stronger version shoju. Jun was most obvious victim becoming increasingly rowdy as the evening wore on. At some point of time he tired of the admittedly endless succession of big and lesser starts crowding the kohaku stage and moved to the piano in the adjacent room. This was his piano from his Mizusawa childhood before he had moved to Tokyo to eventually become a successful stage manager for opera and ballet. For the coming hour or so, my brother-in-law’s rather avant garde improvisations interspersed with primeval grunts would accompany the more sedate enkas crooned by ladies in kimonos on television. Having just arrived from New York the day before, these sounds would intermingle in my jetlagged mind drifting in and out of sleep on the tatami mat.

Finally just before midnight we would all straighten up, put on our winter coats and boots, and wander off to the snowy night to join the crowds at the shrine.

The first day of the Year of the Bird dawned cloudy. Numerous sparrows were chattering on the clothesline in the garden waiting for their turn to partake in the feast on feeding tray. They looked like soft little balls with their feathers puffed up against the cold. We had our feast behind the window, again crowding our feet into the kotatsu. My father-in-law – or Otoo-san, father, as I called him – opened a bottle of French Champagne as we descended for the late breakfast consisting of innumerable small dishes to share. There were beans and mushrooms of different kinds, pickled onions and daikon radishes, prawns, and the fantastic pork boiled in sake prepared by Otoo-san personally. It melted in the mouth. The cold bubbly champagne lifted the spirits from the effects of last night indulgence and soon we were all feeling fresh again. The final part of the lengthy brunch introduced the o-mochi, the traditional New Year’s fare in various forms. O-mochi is white sticky cake that is made of thoroughly pounded rice. It is so chewy that every year many people, mostly elderly, die suffocating in mochi that sticks to their throats. But this is a decent way to go, eating delicious, traditional food in the beginning of yet another year. To me, the best o-mochi my mother-in-law, Okaa-san, was serving that morning was in a thick brown bean soup. I washed it down with a clear broth of vegetables and pork.

We spent the New Year’s Day and the days following it visiting various shrines and temples. Yoko and I spent time at Komagata Jinja, the Shinto shrine where we had been wed less than ten years before. It had been during sakura, the cherry blossom season. Hundreds of people were lining up to make their offerings and ring the bells at the main shrine. We started from the smaller ones, making our offerings to the war veterans and for familial bliss. The different shrines all had their own target deities with their own special features. Despite the crowds, the atmosphere was enormously peaceful. People of all ages, from small children to the elderly, were taking in the blessed spirit of the New Year. Nobody was making noise, although the mood was distinctly upbeat. Mostly, people followed the direct paths to the different altars but many were also trudging through the thick snow across the courtyard. Snow hung heavily on the pine branches shadowing the shrine.

At the booths that lined the square courtyard, many teenage girls and boys dressed in white and orange robes were selling charms for the New Year. Visitors could write their hopes on strips of white paper and tie them to specifically constructed stands and leafless tree branches within the confines of the shrine. Again, amazake was served and impromptu stalls were selling hot foods to the worshippers. Particularly popular, it seemed, was okonomiyaki: a special kind of omelet with many herbs, vegetables and ginger. An old farmer lady with a shawl wrapped around her head above a coarse coat huddled by the open fire her back bent as a result of decades of hard work. A middle-aged man in wireless spectacles was warming a dachshund inside his bright purple windbreaker.

At this latitude so close to the winter equinox the sun never rose high in the sky. It shone its white light through the pine trees whose branches were weighed with thick slabs of snow. As we wondered towards to the town centre from the shrine, the last rays were already colouring the western sky. It was time to retreat back to the warmth of the kotatsu and a glass of clear rice wine.

© Juha I. Uitto, 2005