Shizuoka Mind Meandering
The warmth of Shizuoka in winter gets overstated, but it is definitely warmer in winter than Tokyo. It therefore takes on or has been assiduously given just a bit of a resort or tropical vibe. That vibe gives me feelings. Memories, pleasant melancholy, thoughts.
As I mentioned here the other day, last week I went to the western part of coastal Shizuoka to perform an audit. Since there were no hotels where I wanted to stay, I decided to reserve a room in a ryokan that was reasonably close to the job site (a 25-minute drive away). I selected 旅の館大沢 / Tabi-no-yakata Osawa. Tabi-no-yakata is a phrase that converts the characters of 旅館 ryokan into their kun-yomi Japanese readings 旅 tabi and 館 yakata to evoke a different feel from ryokan to the reader/listener. What exactly the difference is depends on that reader/listener, but let’s call it a general differentiation.
Their rule was to arrive by 18:00 for check-in, probably because the people running the place are busy preparing and serving dinner for guests after that. I arrived between 16:30 and 17:00, a bit before it started to get dark. Before that, I had dithered about where and when to get lunch, despite knowing that dinner was for sure happening at 18:30 at the ryokan, and if I wanted to have some appetite for it lunch needed to happen on time. After failing to get myself to overcome inertia and stop at a highway rest area, I got off in Shizuoka City and ate around 14:00 at an Osaka Osho.
From there I stayed on surface roads and had an unexpectedly pleasant drive down the coast to the ryokan, which is in the city of Makinohara facing Suruga Bay directly across the highway and a tidal wall, with Mt. Fuji and the Izu Peninsula beyond the bay. Just south of the ryokan one enters Omaezaki City, which is named for the point of a modest peninsula—at least compared to the Izu to the east and the Chita to the West—that extends east-south-eastward into the Pacific Ocean from Honshu, to form a clean and final western end of Suruga Bay. Omaezaki is known for having a lighthouse, excellent views of Mt. Fuji, a port, some factories, and the Hamaoka Nuclear Power Station. Some of the Omaezaki City signage features an atom-and-nucleus motif.
When I arrived I felt the very slight nervousness that I always still feel before entering an establishment that is not a known quantity such as a national or international chain. I got all my things together—I had my whole suit hanging on a hanger without anything covering it, hanging precariously on the mostly deployed handle of a piece of medium-sized rolling luggage, and my backpack—and went inside through the outer manually opened (but only with some elbow grease) sliding doors and inner automatic sliding doors. No one was visible. There was a check-in counter to the right on the same level as the double doorway, which provided an extra shield against wind and cold of the sea that is immediately outside. A handwritten sign next to the single step up into the hallway said 土足でお上がりください / come in with outside shoes on. With no one behind the check-in counter, I immediately exercised my newly learned shod entry rights and stepped up. I spoke out my trusty high-toned-so-it-doesn’t-sound-demanding-but-instead-hopefully-warm-and-perhaps-a-bit-plaintive “Sumimaseeeeen.”
A kind-faced woman of about my age came to the check-in counter to help. I stepped back down the step and over to her, and said my name and everything to check in. She asked me to write my name and address and phone number and gave me my room key. While this happened a woman who I guess was her mother or mother-in-law said, “Tell him I just turned on the heat in the room, so it will still be a bit chilly.” I said “That’s no problem, thanks.” You and I can speak directly, mom.
During the check-in, I was never asked to show identification. This is unusual. Most hotels want something, though they pretty much never mind that I always produce my driver license rather than the Zairyu Card for non-Japanese residents. Behind the counter on the wall, though, was the ubiquitous National Police Agency 重要指名手配 / MOST WANTED poster with the most prominent fugitives’ photos and descriptions. I suppose ryokan are more loathe to ask for identification than chain hotels, but also loathe to shelter fugitives, so this system of not asking but putting that poster front and center strikes a balance with which everyone can be happy.
The sheer quiet of the neighborhood—there were just a few homes and quiet, non-tourist businesses along that stretch of highway—and the view out onto the sea plus the quiet of the interior of the ryokan all gave me a powerful and welcome isolated feeling. It would certainly be a decent hideout if one were to decide to disappear. Not so rural or isolated that one’s presence would make a splash or raise suspicion, but decently far off the beaten path of the thick arterial corridor made up of the Tomei Expressway, the Tokaido Shinkansen, the Tokaido Main Line, and National Route 1, all of which run between Tokyo and Nagoya. The ryokan was a bit south of all that, virtually on the Omaezaki Peninsula; and also not as far east as the biggish city of Hamamatsu, or as west as Shizuoka City. Do a hundred bucks of online translation a day and stay awhile. There are worse existences.
Despite having several substantial cities and a lot of industry, Shizuoka Prefecture itself is really flyover country for most of the traffic on the corridor—cars don’t exit highways unless some place in the prefecture is their destination, and the fast Nozomi trains of the Shinkansen run tirelessly from Shin-Yokohama straight to Nagoya. In every major Shizuoka city, they zoom through with a whoosh of sound and wind every few minutes. When I lived in 1999 in the flyover city of Fuji, the whoosh quickly became as innocuous as birds chirping.
I went into my room, which like all the rooms had an august title: 旭の間 / Asahi-no-ma. It was a tatami room with a futon (as opposed to “futon,” which is of course pronounced FOO-TAHN and is only slept upon by the shameful people of the world) already deployed and the AC unit just starting to emit heat, as I had just been indirectly apprised. There was an alcove next to a glass sliding door that opened out onto a large, flat rooftop deck shared by all the other rooms. A pair of crocs was placed outside the sliding door. The two-chairs-and-a-table-placed-next-to-the-window-with-a-view that is one of my favorite ryokan institutions was present as hoped. A small TV was bolted to the wall next to an air purifier. There was a single cushion next to the table, which had a round container with a lid that held all the necessities for making oneself a cup of green tea, coupled with the hot water pot next to it.
There were three ashtrays located throughout the room: In the entryway, on the table next to the TV, and on the small table in the alcove next to the sliding door. I had not thought about smoking or nonsmoking room considerations when reserving, but clearly this was a room equipped for enthusiastic smoking. Luckily, it didn’t smell like cigarette smoke at all.
The room had no toilet—there were two communal, multi-head lavatories for our floor, which had maybe 8 or so rooms. It also had no shower or bath—there was just the one on the first floor.
After setting my items down and hanging my suit and other clothes in the tiny wooden closet bolted to the wall of the sun alcove, my brain got to work trying to understand if the impending dinner would be brought to the room or served in another room downstairs, and if so would it be communal, or what? The worn plastic folder on the table gave a few legal statements about lodgings in general and this one specifically, but no dinner answer. The entire online website of the establishment was also bereft of clues. I should have asked at check-in, but didn’t, and my personality does not allow for subsequent inquiry on this kind of thing.
The view from the room was nice. The ryokan was built to make the most of its view of Suruga Bay. I could see the lower half of Mt. Fuji and a big moon rising down over the Izu Peninsula, which were expectation-beating sights considering it was an overcast day. I savored the graduations and pastels of the scene. It was perfectly matched to the ryokan’s feel and really to that of most of Shizuoka. Nothing amazing. Just thoroughly pleasant.
If you have now spent a moment gazing at the above two photos, perhaps you feel a bit like I felt.
I heard more guests arriving around 18:00. They didn’t sound like the kind who would become troublesome due to hijinks or rambunctious noise or whatever. Despite knowing better, in my solitude I sometimes let myself get worked up about those kinds of fellow guests. These were just conversing a bit loudly as they got to their respective rooms, though. Within a few minutes the faint smell of cigarettes wafted into my room. But very faint. I didn’t mind it too much. I don’t dislike the smell of cigarettes, and I also don’t really want to breathe a ton of smoke. I was a little worried I would end up smelling a lot of it, but that was the most prominent smell of smoke the entire stay. I did file a mental note that if I wanted to sometime bring the family for a ryokan experience, this might not be the best place.
Lacking information to the contrary, I decided that the meal was most likely to be served in the room. I waited watching the local TV news until 18:30. Nothing happened. So I went out the door of my room, and a dude was simultaneously emerging from his room and heading down the hall to the stairs. In a mirthless but possibly sexy conga line we went down the stairs to the as-yet-unexplored-by-me first floor inner reaches. I followed him past a kitchen door, where the mom and check-in woman and now a son about my age warmly welcomed us, then past what looked like a window from which one could buy items (such as the ice cream that was pictured next to the window), but only in busier or designated other times, and not now. I looked to the right to see a short hallway that led to a blue ゆ / yu / bath curtain and finally found myself welcomed by vertical white board. Thank god. Dinner was not communal. Mind you, communal dinner would have surely resulted in friends. I just wasn’t eager to do the work of making friends.
It said:
Welcome
Mr. Wessman
Taking off shoes and climbing two steps through the sliding doors, I entered my little personal dinner room. I don’t know how to describe it other than to say it was a delight. It felt bizarre and a bit special. I felt like a recluse who is served his meals in utter solitude by staff who swap stories of his eccentric behavior.
The food was simple and good, with a wise focus on fresh local seafood. Just up the coast back to the east is Yaizu, the most famous tuna town of Japan. In addition to the items pictured, the check-in woman later brought in a one-kilogram container of warm white rice, which I could dole out to myself according to my needs. There was no way I could eat it all, but I understood why they would use that system—nobody wants to respond to multiple shouts of “more rice” every evening. The fried prawn and the sashimi were tremendous. So was the wee nabe. What a fine meal. Once finished I left at my leisure and thanked the three proprietors on my way back past the kitchen, where they were now doing dishes and other tasks.
The rhythm of life as a ryokan proprietor must be interesting—I imagine it’s earlyish mornings preparing breakfasts (guests who eat breakfast can choose between 7:30 and 8:00), room cleaning, maybe a small afternoon lull, then early evening check-ins followed by dinner and hopefully some downtime around 20:00 or 21:00.
I had ideally wanted to get a run in before dinner, but the conundrum of where it was to be served paralyzed me. After dinner I lazed for a bit and went out on the weird (because it afforded views of any room that was not curtained) communal deck and did a lot of online checking of the runnability of the highway in front of the ryokan before finally overcoming the most difficult hurdle of getting dressed to run.
Now I got anxious about curfews and so forth; ryokans and their ilk and even old-school business hotels sometimes get unhappy when people come and go late at night. They might even lock the doors after a certain hour. But no such hours were posted and the check-in woman had not seen fit to warn me, so I overcame the silly anxiety and went out. As seen from space, the road had pretty poor shoulders for the first kilometer to the south. There were few cars, though, so running on the right side facing traffic there wasn’t much danger. Once I got past that stretch there was an intersection followed by bonafide sidewalks and it started to feel like more of a traveled place.
That stretch of highway (National Route 150 to be precise), right after entering Omaezaki City from Makinohara, is named ヤシの木通り / Yashi-no-ki Dori / Palm Tree Street. Guess why. There were some shops and a few factories and lots of darkness. I enjoyed all of these. In the sidewalk cracks were frequent tufts of yellowing grass. Not a lot of recent pedestrian traffic, I guess. At one intersection, I stopped for the red light against my instinct of going right through due to the desolation. After two seconds a truck pulling a trailer laden with several brand new Suzukis Swift came barreling through on its green light. Suzuki has a lot of manufacturing around Hamamatsu, and nearby Omaezaki Port must be where they are loaded on ships. A lot of identical trucks came through after that. They moved in a way that indicated efficiency bordering on haste by the drivers. Joggers are probably not expected on the route. It’s nice to be saved by a rare moment of prudence.
At one point there was a sign that shone from the darkness along the way. I didn’t initially believe that my eyes were seeing the Chevron logo, which is not to be found in Japan. But that is what it was. Forgive me for not only taking interest in such a trivial thing but also spending your time recounting it now; my brain is etched as intended by the system with the major logos of the United States and Utah and Washington State economies from 1979 through 2004, and considers them of the highest import. The story of this facility in Omaezaki is that Chevron has had a joint venture manufacturing lubricants and fuel additives there for around 60 years. I would have much preferred to come upon a Chevron station with, say, Twinkies and Munchos and rolling hot dogs of unknown age.
There were strange side roads and paths that I wanted to explore but didn’t. And I didn’t get as far as my ambitious goal of reaching the Omaezaki Lighthouse; not even close. It started to mist a bit and I was still ignorant of the ryokan’s door-locking policy, so on the strength of those excuses I turned around and ran back the way I had come, after having gone 3.5 km or so out. It was only 21:30 but felt a lot later.
Out of nearly total silence, a siren blared all around me for 30 seconds or so on the loudspeaker system that every municipality in Japan has. I hadn’t felt any shaking, but worried (the anxieties that creep into the alone brain) that it might be a tsunami alarm. I was on a highway at an elevation of zero meters and exposed to any angry seas, with tidal walls having given way to ports and beaches. There was a hill a couple hundred meters inland from the road I was on, to which I could run if that were the case.
Instead, an echoing voice started to explain that a fire had started in such-and-such neighborhood number such-and-such, northeast of the such-and-such chemical plant. These were instructions for the volunteer fire corps. Our own corps in Hachioji used to be mobilized this way, before I joined. Then the Disaster Section of City Hall switched to sending emails instead. Fewer complaints that way, I am sure. I resumed jogging.
The moment reminded me of the many platforms I had seen on the afternoon drive of surface roads and also on the present jog. A lot of pedestrian bridges were built twice or thrice as spaciously as usual to accommodate groups of people who might need to take refuge from tsunami. There were also quite a few free-standing platforms raised to 10 or 15 meters and accessible by stairways, in various places near the coast. The whole Pacific side of Japan, especially west of Tokyo, has been preparing for the likely-to-happen-and-also-be-devastating Nankai Trough earthquake since even before 2011. These kinds of platforms probably propagated after the Great East Japan Earthquake based on its lessons. In my anecdotal recollection, before 3/11, a lot of disaster preparedness still focused on the shaking rather than the resulting tsunami of a large tremor. That focus then of course shifted drastically.
I arrived back at the ryokan. The door was not locked. No one was there. I went in and up the stairs to my room. Not even having someone behind a counter give a benign welcome back is so nice. To come and go utterly untrammeled. What an aid to enjoying and maintaining the solitude both physical and mental. I sat around a bit in my room but then worried about whether the bath closed at a certain time. I got ready and went downstairs to the bath. No one was there.
Everything was just as the rest of the ryokan had been—simple and comfortable and usable. The shampoo was not the cheapest, to my mild surprise. I showered, shaved, brushed my teeth, and soaked for a few minutes in the warm bath. Then I got out and drank a muscat drink I had purchased from the lobby vending machine. There was a washing machine in the changing room.
I went back upstairs and went out to breathe some sea air on the deck. Everyone had closed their curtains. There was no way I was going to close mine. I rearranged the location of my futon to place my head near the wall outlet and laid down. Sleep came fast and good.
I laid out my clothes and took the suit out of the tiny closet to hang it closer to the futon, in a doorway near the room entryway. Photos like the above, taken with the iPhone automatic long exposure function, don’t communicate the darkness and light very well, but it was a pleasant night. Nice and dark, and as always I enjoyed the presence of the sea outside the window. Anyone out on the deck could have treated themselves to an eyeful of me snoring vociferously. Perhaps they did and were commensurately uplifted and edified.
Breakfast was at 7:30. I set a couple of alarms to make sure I would not be late. I woke up once around dawn and saw the sky turning orange over the sea. I was tempted to get up and photograph it, but much more tempted to savor another snooze, and followed that impulse instead. Instantly after that it was time to wake up and get dressed.
I got dressed and went down to breakfast. This time, the kilogram of rice was already present and I saw no one while going in or out. Every item tasted great. Even the bowl of thousands of tiny shirasu / whitebait fish, an item I forego more often than I eat, was delicious with a bit of soy sauce dripped thereupon.
I put everything in the car and returned to my room for a last look off the deck. Then I went downstairs and called for someone to check me out. It was the check-in woman. I paid with credit card, absentmindedly looking at the MOST WANTED poster and its now-familiar faces—most of these dudes have been on that thing since I got here in 2004, if not when I first got here in 1998, although a few of the Aum Shinrikyo ones have been caught and offed since then. She wrote a receipt on a pre-printed form of carbon paper, from which she gave me the copy ply. My rate for the stay, including two meals, was 9,000 yen. If one did not purchase meals, it would be possible to live here at the not-terrible rate of 5,000 yen a day.
Instead of driving straight to the audit site, which was a factory somewhat inland and west in the city of Kakegawa, I meandered down the same highway I had jogged the night before. I kept going until closer to the lighthouse, but there wasn’t enough time to go past it without possibly getting behind on arriving at the factory. So I took the highway west under a tunnel and over a hill and back down to the coast again. I passed the massive and dormant Hamaoka Nuclear Power Station. It looked interesting. I would like to have visited the museum there, but of course no time for that.
I got to the factory when intended, right before the 9:00 start time. The ISO 9001 audit went really well and was an enjoyable but fast-paced day of work. I love auditing factories. One reason is that there is no boss or person in charge of things, really. I’m there to respectfully ask a bunch of questions, review documents, and see the gemba to confirm compliance with whatever standard it’s supposed to be following. The people there are virtually always professional and very good at what they do. I get to learn about a new product or technology. It pays okay. It’s great.
When it was over, the sun was already down and I was hungry. With Hamamatsu not too far away, I was eager to get a Brazilian meal—Hamamatsu has a big Brazilian population. I found a place in Iwata (home of the football team Jubilo Iwata of the J-League) and headed toward it. It was a 45-minute drive, but that was a okay. A drive like that is a nice emotional wind-down from a day of asking people a lot of questions and having to be constantly on.
That drive and hunger and the usual emotional comedown set me on a mental journey.
There is a me on the space-time continuum who ended up living a very happy and chill life in Shizuoka Prefecture. I think about him sometimes. I faintly sense his presence when I am down there. I get to imagining the life I would have had, or could still theoretically have, in every place I visit. Shizuoka gets that treatment but much more intensely, because of the many memories and emotions it evokes.
I first went there in 1999, to live in Fuji. I stayed in an apartment above a karaoke-focused sunakku drinking establishment. The apartment was hot in July when I arrived, so I would sleep on the cool veranda. At first I worried that mosquitos would feast on me, but something kept them at bay; I think the faint smell of the winter kerosene stored out there. The place was on the south side of Fuji Station, directly adjacent to the Tokaido Main Line railroad tracks. At night freight trains rumbled through like lullabies while amplified voices of amateur crooners wafted up. It was paradise.
A description of that life is needed. Someday. But here are a few scenes that are in brain constantly, and especially when I go there: The tidal wall that runs along the whole coastline of Fuji, except a small opening at Tagonoura Port. The smell of paper factories, now beloved. Eating Peruvian and Brazilian food for the first time. Not at restaurants, but in the rented nagaya homes of friends who came from South America to work in Japan. Sitting on the grass in a big empty soccer field next to the mouth of Fujikawa and seeing billowing summer clouds overhead and feeling homesick.
Now sometimes I get homesick for Shizuoka.
I got to the restaurant, Recanto Paulista. Clearly the best time to come is not a calm weeknight, but instead when there is a full crowd. And also it is worth a visit anytime.
The meal was way too big, as intended. I ate a respectable percentage of it. I drove away content. I wanted to get home. I will be back in not very long to feel my Shizuoka self again.