After arriving in Yokohama via JR (Japan Rail) at 8:00 in the evening, I go straight to Katsumi's office, thence dinner. I’m dog-tired after the long flight, fuzzy-headed and not a little feverish from a cold that just won't go away.

Katsumi and I eat Thai food. I note that the streets and shops appear on the outside to be just as classy and robust as during any of my past visits. Economic disaster may be looming for Japan, but it's hard to sense in the shops, restaurants and streets. I do notice that the restaurants are less crowded, and many of the shop windows are plastered with "Sale!" banners. Deep discounts are not a new development here, but seem more apparent now.

Katsumi readily agrees to keep one of my bags, and my suit, and my laptop computer at his office while I travel for a few days. I feel apologetic about this: Katsumi works without a break, six or seven days a week to sell my products, and I impose on him with my selfish requests so I can take these leisurely trips through the countryside. I leave his office wondering if this is a prudent way to start the trip.

I check into the Yokohama Washington Hotel. It’s a business hotel, with above-average comfort and amenities, a nice front desk and full staff. With the weak yen I pay around $65 for a single room, compact but clean. Still a bit jet-lagged, I go for a long walk across Yokohama, and after midnight ride the elevator to the top of Landmark Tower, slipping past the doorperson into the lounge to see the view. Back in my room, I take a bath and watch American music videos on the small television set until I fall asleep.

Heading North

Yokohama steams under low clouds and sporadic rain. It is hot, humid (mushiatsui, which directly translates as "bug-hot") and at the same time dark and mildly oppressive. I leave my suit and one bag with Kurashige-san, hoist my pack and find my way via a JR commuter line to Tokyo station, where I board a Shinkansen heading north to Morioka.

The bullet train passes through the Fukushima area. It is raining here as well, and the rivers we pass are high, some flooding over their low banks as they wind through farmlands. Most of the rivers we pass are protected with high dikes. But as the train slows and pulls into Koriyama I see neighborhoods -- houses, roads and businesses, that are awash in floodwaters. This is typhoon season, and Tohoku -- northern Honshu -- has been hit hard.

Flood control has been used as one of the justifications for Japan’s massive, wasteful and environmentally devastating public works projects. The country has a long and sordid history of cronyism between local politicians and the massive construction companies that operate here. Dams, dikes and seawalls weigh down the land. One has to suspect that Japan holds more metric tons of concrete per square kilometer than any other nation. And to the politicians and construction firms this must make perfect sense. After all, the raw materials needed for concrete (cement, sand and gravel) are among the few natural resources found in abundance here.

At Morioka I transfer to the new Akita Shinkansen, which travels over the spiny central mountains to Japan’s west coast. The train makes a brief stop at the mountain town of Tazawa-ko, which is where I disembark. My hastily determined plan is to take a two-day hike along a ridge, including a trip over the summit of Mount Iwate-san. In stammering, first-year Japanese I talk with a woman at the JR information counter. She seems to be telling me that the trails around Iwate-san are closed. I at first think it is because of the Typhoon winds that have been blowing in recent days ("kaze desu"), but after the woman does an entertaining pantomime I realize she is telling me that there is volcanic activity ("kazan desu"). But I’ve come this far, so I walk across the street to the bus station and buy a ticket into the hills, to the end of the road.

The bus does not depart for another 45 minutes so I walk through town looking for a food store. I find a small shop selling fruit and buy two apples. I ask the old woman behind the counter if she has any bread. She says, just a moment (chotto mate) and bustles into a back room. Through a crack in the curtains I see her dump the contents of a small plastic bag onto the floor mat. She returns with three items -- all sweet pastries with supermarket wrappers, part of a recent shopping trip, I figure. I ask if there is a bread store around here. She thinks, then points down the street in the direction I’ve been heading. Supermarket, she says. I thank her and pay for the apples, leave the pastries and head up the street.

On the bus to the Nyuto Onsen area there are a few older people, a few office ladies (OLs, as they are known here) on holiday, and a few local school kids on their way home. It is Thursday. It is also getting late, and I’m getting a bit concerned about finding a place to camp before dark.

At the Ganiba Onsen (one of at least six hot spring inns clustered here), two hitchhikers from Sweden tell me that the trails here are steep, slippery and have many roots. They offer that they wouldn't want to be on them after dark. I go into the onsen and ask where the trail to Iwate-san begins. No one seems to know, but my map shows it near another onsen a short walk down the road. I find the trail easily enough and start up.

The Swedes were right; the trail is difficult and poorly maintained. It is just four kilometers to where my map shows a camping area, but after about thirty minutes of hiking it begins to get dark, earlier than I had expected. I pass a new-looking sign that I can’t quite read, but it seems to be a warning, perhaps related to Iwate-san? Ten minutes later another sign, this one slightly different from the first. The additional kanji I think I can read: it says to go back down. At this point I figure I have -- at the most -- 30 minutes of daylight left. I press on until I find a wide, flat spot on the trail, then stop and set my tent. As the light goes, I enjoy the view of a mist filled valley, eat rice balls and dried squid, and wonder if the winds will pick up or die off during the night.

Ganiba Onsen

The weather does not improve; there is rain and strong wind most of the night, but the tent is comfortable. The sky lightens at 4:30, and I’m up at 5:00. It’s still raining lightly. Breakfast is a handful of dried fruit and an apple, and one granola bar. I arrange the pack, pull on my damp clothes (cotton is death, wrote Joe Kane), put on a rain jacket and crawl outside. The valley is filled with mist, and it is still raining. I decide that Iwate-san will not welcome me today. I quickly take down the tent and head down the now well-lubricated trail. The underbrush is dripping and soon my pants are glistening with water and heavy on my legs. It occurs to me that I will have no way to dry them, and I give myself some verbal abuse for having forgotten rain pants.

When I’m near the trial's junction with the road, I stop to remove the wet jeans and put on more sensible shorts. It is now 7:00.

I spend a few minutes inside a bus shelter rearranging the pack. There is a large puddle next to the shelter and I try rinsing the mud off my shoes with only partial success. But with clean wool socks and a fresh shirt I figure I'm ready to hit the onsen.

It is quiet at Ganiba Onsen. A few people wearing yukata (cotton kimono) wander through the lobby, apparently on their way to breakfast. I spot a young woman carrying a load of towels and ask her what time the onsen will open. Now is OK, she seems to say.

I go back outside and rummage through the pack for a towel and my shaving kit. Thus equipped, I go back inside. This time, however, there is an older woman at the front desk who looks rather stern and officious. She taps her wrist and says, eight o-clock, then turns her back to me and starts rearranging odd bits of clutter that are scattered around the room. I buy an orange juice from a vending machine, find a chair and sit down to wait.

How can I describe this place? It is a two-story stucco building, painted a chipped yellow with a red metal roof. The front entry is framed with large wooden tree trunks, still wrapped in their bark. Between the parking area and the building there is one scruffy maple tree, a large hydrangea bush and some smaller perennials that are long past flowering. Behind this small garden, a sliding wood and glass screen opens into an outer foyer. There are wooden ski racks here, now empty. Another set of inner door leads into the genkan, or formal entryway. The shoes of the Inn’s guests are arranged neatly on the tile floor, no doubt having been carefully arranged the night before by the fussy desk clerk. A low wooden step leads up to the lobby, which is floored with a green expanse of plastic indoor-outdoor carpeting. To the right of the entry and lobby there is an old wooden telephone booth and the registration counter. To the left there is a rack of brown vinyl slippers. Also to the left, and to the rear, are hallways leading, presumably, to the guest rooms, the dining room and the baths.

Here in the lobby, a battered pair of upholstered chairs face off against an equally battered low couch. There is a table between, and a dented copper tray filled with ashy refuse. The smell of the room is of old cigarette burns, pine wood, yesterday's tempura, and just a trace of sulfur. A small dog yaps lightly whenever I pass in front of the counter, but is otherwise immobile.

At the registration counter there are souvenirs for sale: phone cards and lighters with Ganiba Onsen printed on them; key chains and pencils with printed cartoon characters; handkerchiefs; sweet rice cakes...

The weather outside is improving, but only slightly. I go out and sit on the front steps. Soon a man comes out with a bag and an umbrella. He looks at the sky, then says in good English: nice morning. I say back to him, in poor Japanese, yes, very nice weather. We laugh. Typhoon, he says, then walks through the rain to his car.

The outside bath, or rotenburo, is built of large boulders set in concrete surrounding a concrete-floored pool. It is vaguely, perhaps intentionally, shaped like the island of Honshu. The pool is about 20 meters from one end to the other. There is a wall of vertical logs forming a visual barrier of sorts from the path. A shed-like building, also built of poles and timbers -- forms a primitive dressing area. The peaked roof of the shed extends over the water or the pool, creating a protected area out of the rain.

This is a mixed bath, with no physical segregation between male and female bathers. But at the moment I am its only occupant. I sit on a rock with my small towel and enjoy the sound of the stream that runs next to the hot pool.

There are two eggs submerged in the hot stream of sulfurous water that feeds the pool. After a time a man with an umbrella walk down the path toward the pool. He stops at the stream and gingerly lifts the two eggs from the water, quickly wrapping them in a brown cloth. I ask him, breakfast? Lunch, he replies.

After a time I decide to try the inside baths. I get out of the water, slip on the yukata and stumble up the path in the too-small slippers that have been provided.

The inside baths are segregated by sex. I open a door marked with the kanji (Chinese character) for "man" and step inside, trading the outside slippers for a fresh set of inside slippers. As if in answer to my prayers, there is a coin operated washing machine and dryer just inside the door here. I happily change slippers again and return to the front entry to retrieve my bag of damp and soiled clothes. Into the wash go the jeans and two-days worth of dirty laundry. There is no detergent in sight, so I improvise with a squirt of toothpaste. The washer chugs along while I soak in the large cedar tub in the next room.

There is a large window on one side of the room, facing the woods. The bath is dark; its four small fluorescent fixtures can’t compete against the moisture-darkened cedar planks that form the walls, ceiling and floor.

I'm joined by a thin, talkative man who I saw earlier arriving with his wife. He asks where I'm from, what is my job... he talks of his trip to New York, he asks about Seattle. He asks if Americans go to onsen. I tell him it is rare, that most Americans have never tried onsen. He expresses surprise, onsen is good, isn’t it?

The clothes tumble in the tired old dryer. The rain has stopped, so I unpack the tent and hold it up in the breeze, first the rain fly then the lower part. The sun comes out for a few moments and the nylon dries quickly. I add more coins to the dryer and wonder idly if it really produces any heat.

It is the time of day when yesterday's guests have left, but too early for the new guests to have arrived. A vacuum cleaner is wheezing it's way across the green carpet. A bent old woman pushes a mop through the halls. A man arrives on a 50cc Suzuki, a large bag of vegetables strapped across his back. A delivery truck comes and goes.

The clothes are still in the dryer, so I take a walk down the hill. I meet a man with a camera walking up the hill, and we stop and chat. His name is Masayuki Sunagi. He tells me he works at a bank in Akasaka (a district of Toyko). I propose, perhaps rudely, that working at a bank in Japan might be a little bit dangerous -- the economy is in bad shape. He laughs and says yes, but the pay is good, 10,000,000 yen per year.

I excuse myself after a time to go back and check on my clothes. They seem, after 40 minutes of tumbling, to be just as damp as when I put them in. But I feed more coins to the machine anyway. Returning to the front of the inn, I see Sunagi-san filling out a registration form. He offers to buy me a beer, and I accept. It seems as though my clothes will be tumbling for quite some time, so I suggest the rotenburo.

We soak in the bath, this time in the company of a half-dozen or so others. Bathers come and go... an older woman from Nagoya with missing teeth and many questions, two younger couples, a man from Sendai who suggests I go south to avoid the storm...

Finally, after two more offered beers, the clothes are dry. It is pouring down rain again. Someone tells me that it is the remains of a typhoon that hit Guam before landing north of Tokyo the previous night. Thirty people dead, I’m told. Slightly drunk, I re-pack my clothes and walk under my umbrella to meet the 2:29 bus back to Tazawa-ko. I decide to take the advice of the man from Sendai and go south.