Hokkaido Wanderings - July 8

We awoke to more wonderful food:  Eggs and freshly baked homemade break with homemade jam (from berries in the garden).

We took our leave and our Hokkaido wanderings began in earnest.

Got to Akan, checked in, relaxed a little then set off to do a little exploring.  The weather had moved in some, so views were not great, but was fun to poke around some of the Ainu shops.  For those who might not know, Ainu are the aboriginal people of Japan.  They’re almost polynesian in appearance and have their own language and culture.  They were persecuted and then integrated almost to extinction, but there are a few living in pockets here and there, and the Lake Akan area is one of those pockets.  In our meanderings, I pounced on a sweet I remembered from my childhood.  Marimo-yokan.  Okay, I think another explanation is in order.  Marimo are these little mossy green balls of vegetation that  grown and float in Lake Akan, and apparently pretty much only there.  Lake Akan is famous for them.  The tourist industry capitalizes on this and creates lots of green, round (cute) stuff to sell to visitors.  Yokan is usually a dark brown, sweet, firm, block of paste made from adzuki beans, which you typically slice and serve.  A desserty kind of thing.  Very nice with green tea.  Marimo-yokan, however, is round and green.  Of course.  Each one is covered with a rubbery round (inedible) casing.  I loved poking or biting the casing as a kid and trying to get a small hole so that the yokan would just  ooze out in a delightful sweet trickle that could be licked off bit by bit and enjoyed for a long time.  If you weren’t careful, however, the whole rubbery skin would just snap off, sometimes shooting the green yokan ball up into the air.  If you missed catching it, you were sunk.  So when I saw the marimo-yokan, I HAD to have one, of course, and insisted Julia try it as well.  Hers sorta popped (but she caught it) and mine oozed.  :)

At a neighbor’s invitation, Mike took us that morning to their nearby farm to see some baby chicks.  (It was evident by now how much Julia liked animals, with all the attention she’d given their cats and dog.)  While we were there, we got to see how they grew shiitake mushrooms on rows and rows of oak logs stored in warm, humid green houses.

It was a smooth drive with our trusty GPS to Akan.  Sunshine broke through the clouds and we were hugged by close emerald mountains.  Giant “fuki” (elephant ear-like leaves on thick fibrous stems) grew by the side of the road.  It reminded me of how we picked those as kids and swatted each other with them.

After dinner, where we unfortunately discovered that it is, indeed, possible to get bad Japanese food in Japan, I tried out the ofuro (public bath).  Julia declined.  Silly critter doesn’t know what she’s missing!  Akan is a hot spring town and there seems to be hot water everywhere.  In the fountains along the streets, in foot-soaking tubs in front of shops and - of course - in the baths.  It was wonderful.  First the scrub-down, then that HOT soak.  I watched some women disappear through a door.  I did a little nosing about and discovered that the door led to a stairway up, and that the stairway up led to an outdoor, roof-top bath surrounded with large stones and with a nighttime view of the lake.  How splendid is that?!  And much of the time, I was the only one there.