Isinglass

Not far from the hotel, on the road in, we passed a deer enclosure and topiary park; this morning, we went back to look. There were only four or five of the sika (I think) deer in a muddy enclosure, looking disconsolate yet hopeful as they wondered if we were going to feed them anything. The roadside stall was closed (it was early) and there was no sign of the topiarist; who has clipped well over a hundred trees into the shapes of birds, animals, humans, even a boat with a mast and sails. By far the largest number of trees are shaped into birds and, in that bare and empty volcanic landscapes, they looked eerily like flocks of Moa. It took me a while to work out that he was making cranes: some of the more elaborate had their wings spread. Several fearsome looking warriors, one skull-faced, some baseball players with real caps and bats, a gorilla, a bear and some giraffes also featured in the assembly, which was both absurd and other-worldly.

Through the mountain pass, heading east, we came across another set of volcanoes, some of them smoking, and hillsides where steam was escaping from multiple sources in the ground. The road station where we stopped for coffee wasn’t open so we bought from the machine. The kind of plumbing that is necessary to feed the onsens is as remarkable in its way as the national electricity grid – intricate, ubiquitous and frequently arcane in its appearance. Engineers and industrial designers are considered artists here and even pumps and pipes may sometimes have an aesthetic, or at least an expressive, component to them.

We came down an avenue of small, skinny fan palm trees into the city of Beppu. Someone said to me the other day they are not real palms but simulacra, a comment I didn’t understand because they are undoubtedly real trees. Perhaps she meant they are not natives. Mayu had booked us seventy-five minutes in a family bath at an onsen that branded itself with a logo based upon a gourd. A large, carved, gourd shaped stone was set up at the turn off to the carpark and gourds were everywhere in the branding. We went through a low door and down a paved path to the bath. A winter cherry tree was flowering and in amongst the blossoms were a number of small, green winged birds, feeding on the nectar and dropping white petals onto the paving stones below. The pool was small and the water hot, but not too hot. The camellia tree still had buds upon it and the bamboo left spiky shadows on an ochre wall. Red stamens from the cherry blossom floated in the amber coloured water. There was a small, squat, grey structure which was a steam room, inside of which we both sat for as long as we could bear. Ferns grew alongside encrusted pipes.

After we bathed we had lunch in the restaurant that was part of the complex, and spent a little time in the adjoining rest room, where there were futons and cushions to lie upon, chairs for the ancient and the infirm, and a set of magazines from the 1950s, a Japanese publication roughly equivalent to Life Magazine. We both became absorbed in a story about a peasant farmer who had murdered his neighbour and rival with a hoe. There were photos of the dead man lying face down next to the wheel of his wooden cart and also of simulations which took place in the court room, as lawyers and others attempted to demonstrate exactly how he had struck the fatal blow and why it could not be considered to have been an accident.

I very nearly had an accident myself, leaving Beppu. I was turning right onto the coastal highway when a van I thought was turning left into the same road came through, at speed, straight ahead instead. He swerved, I braked, and calamity was avoided. We were heading south down the coast to Oita where Mayu was going, improbable as it sounds, to have her hair done by her old hairdresser from Sydney. Minori had departed the place where she worked in Chatswood eight years ago, intending to return to Oita to live with her mother and father and to open her own salon. This she has done, successfully, and it was to her business that Mayu walked, on Sunday afternoon, from our hotel through the city streets for her appointment. She said later the salon is in a part of town where the legal fraternity gathers and where there are government offices – both good sources of trade for Minori. She took us out to dinner that evening, to an expensive restaurant where a dozen or so dishes, all protein based, were served in succession, while she drank sochi, Mayu saki and I red wine from Spain and the Argentine. I had never eaten the mollusc that makes the turban shell before. Afterwards she and Mayu wrapped their arms around each other as we walked back to the Blossom Hotel, next door to the railway station where Minori was to catch her train home. She seems to a be simple, open, direct and sweet-natured person. Very pleased that Mayu had sought her out after all this time. We invited her to come to Kurohime in the summer.

5.3.23

When we came into the hotel on Friday night I was feeling stressed for the first time on this trip. I think it was exhaustion from driving allied with the bump I gave myself on the head in the morning – failing to stoop low enough to walk through the low gateway that led to the parking area. The standard height here is five foot seven and I am six feet tall. I felt like I had received a blow from a Zen master, rebuking me for my lack of attention. There’s still a lump a few centimetres long just back from my rapidly receding hairline. Anyway, once we were in our room, in the old wing of the hotel, sixties style but Japanese too, with lots of blond wood, and I had a beer in my hands, I felt better. The hotel feels remote, isolated, strange. It is built on a ridge on one side of the Aso valley – which I now understand to be the floor of a huge, ancient caldera – and looks across to the volcanoes on the other rim. The ones we drove around. As we came in there were groups of young women in dark clothes walking through the golden grass to some swings set up on a small rise so that when you are on them you can see across the valley to the mountains on the other side. Something timeless or rather out of time in their swinging too and fro as evening came on and the sky clouded and darkened.

Saturday was a working day, as I set myself to catching up with this diary and Mayu continued the laborious task of downloading her videos to her laptop. Because she’s now using her new iPhone, the sequences have to go up to the cloud before coming back down to her machine, a slow process made even more complex if the internet or the phone signal isn’t strong, as it often isn’t in these remote places. We bathed the evening before in the indoor onsen in the bowels of the building, large, hot, tiled throughout with that slightly faded glamour such places often have. The tiles stained with rust, for instance, or lifting off the walls here and there; the window surrounds bizarrely corroded. This morning, we went to the outdoor one, a short walk away from the hotel.

We took a break at lunchtime and drove to a restaurant, off the main highway, down narrow switchback roads, in a valley where most people seemed to be farmers. It was a soba restaurant and the food was excellent. My serving included a small wasabi root, about the size of my little finger, which I could grate and add to the dipping sauce for the buckwheat noodles, made on the premises and served cold. I love the taste of wasabi but often find the commercially prepared paste too hot. I think they sometimes adulterate it with horse radish. This way it was delicious. The reason why you find these imposing hotels and sophisticated restaurants in such out of the way places is of course because of the onsen, the hot springs. Everything follows from that. On the way back we stopped at another place, in another narrow valley off the main road, so that Mayu could spend the rest of her coupons in a shop there. Travel incentives in Kyushu at the moment include discounts off accommodation (as much as 20%) and vouchers which you must spend at local shops or businesses. Our lunch cost nothing and there was still 3000 yen left over to spend after that.

This afternoon I saw four young women wearing blue yukata and carrying orange umbrellas walking down the path, between low hedges, to the outdoor onsen. It too looks out across the valley and is paved with veined stones that glint a deep blue like lapis lazuli. Earlier today, when Mayu finished bathing before me, she asked a fellow who had just come out himself if I was still in there. He said, yes, he is viewing nature and being healed. At the evening bath I saw the fellow I met at the vending machine earlier, who had come here by bus and was carless and bewildered by the lack of facilities nearby. How do you stay here, he asked, plaintively. He seemed much happier now he’d had a bath. In the pool I fell into conversation with a young chap who said, with some pride, that he is a pilot in the air force, based somewhere to the north of Kyushu. His English was good and when I complimented him on it, he said he had mostly learned it in Italy, where he had gone to train for a year under some kind of exchange program. I didn’t ask, but assume he was working with Americans there. He hopes to be sent to Australia next but isn’t keen on going to Darwin. He aspires to be a big game fisherman and wants to be somewhere where you can angle for marlin or tuna or something of that sort. As we walked out to bathe a violent red sun sank below the western rim of the caldera; as we walked back, a silver moon, three quarters full, could be seen intermittently through the grey, curdled mass of low cloud.

3-4 March 2023

There were four white-headed ducks on the river this morning and I saw some more of the little black and white wren like bird which feeds on the weeds that skirt the rocks in the stream.

We checked out at 11 am and headed up the gorge where, the locals say, it is always cold. Towards the top the road took tight bend and went over a bridge and on up; but as we passed we looked to the right and saw and beautiful fall of water. It’s always tricky turning around on these narrow roads but I managed it just before a large truck came toiling up after us. The car park was two hundred metres further down the way we had come; here those who want to do the forest health walk leave their cars and here we left ours too. Yes it was cold but not bitingly so. Wild camellias, with small pinkish red flowers and yellow centres, could be seen among the trees, along with the reddish blush of new growth on the sakura. The river was loud, incessant and the falls very beautiful. Their formal name compares them to theatre curtains; but locally they are named after two brothers, charcoal burners, who lived up here long ago.

We carried on, up and over the crest of the range and into a spectacular landscape of high rolling plains where acre after acre of golden susuki grass grew. Some of the fields, which were typically unfenced, had been harvested and the hay, whether baled or gathered into stooks (we saw examples of both; the latter looked like those you see in Monet paintings), taken away; others were yet to be mowed. Further along the so-called Milk Road we came out upon a ridge and saw below us a broad plain where there was a large town surrounded by orderly fields and scattered houses. Between the high golden grass and the plain below grew rank upon rank of cedar trees, some of them russet red with new growth, others still carrying the evergreen of winter.; and on the other side of the plain a volcano smoked in amongst a number of other mountains, some cone shaped, others jagged after ancient explosions had blown their tops. One in particular, Mt Neko I think, fascinated me: it looked like a more baroque version of Ruapehu, in that you could still complete, in your mind’s eye, the cone it used to be, while marvelling at the intricate profile of the top of its current shape. After lunch in the town of Aso, we circumnavigated the nest of volcanoes in the northern section of this immense caldera, one of the largest in the world, also called Mt Aso. Along the way, on a good day, you can drive to the lip of the crater of Nakadake, the one we could see all day smoking on the horizon.

Alas, the road to the crater was closed today, because the volcano was at level two activity, on a scale of one to five. It means: do not approach the crater. Five means evacuate. We stopped at the point where the road was closed and where there were several shrines and some statues: the one most prominent a huge fat sinister laughing buddha with knife-bearing side figures on either hand and a horse on his forehead, apparently placed here by a local horse lord in memory of a favourite animal. Horses are eaten here, the meat features on restaurant menus but I have not tried it – yet. There were also several headless or otherwise damaged buddhas and an abandoned shrine behind the much larger, brand-new shining one.

I took a photo of the interior by placing the camera flush against the glass to eliminate reflections. The crater itself was a strange grey green colour, very hard to describe. Behind the headless buddhas was a sturdy looking bridge which did not seem to lead anywhere at all. I saw several people taking selfies who inadvertently dropped the camera phones, as if afflicted by the atmos on Aso.

We drove on around the mountains, passing deep ravines which had intricate stone or cement works along them, presumably to discourage erosion; and bizarre outcrops of volcanic rock frozen in whatever shapes the last eruption had made; all within fields of the golden grass or else the red and green cedar trees. On the other side of Nekodake the rocky outcrops were even more spectacular. Not long after it dropped out of view we stopped at the forest shrine of Kamishikimi kumanoimasu where you climb a thousand steps up through towering cedar trees and then, even further, up a zig-zag path, to where there is an oval opening on the rock just below the ridge of the mountain. It is dedicated to the creator gods Izanagi-no-Mikoto and his wife Izanami-no-Mikoto and for that reason is said to bring good luck in marriage. I wondered if the other worldly feeling you get there, and the sense of godly presences everywhere, is an effect of the place itself or a by-product of the exhaustion of the climb. We made our devotions anyway then wandered back down to where we left the car, in a carpark next to a small roadside post office.

We drove to our current hotel down obscure, narrow back roads, through farm country where, most unusually, we saw cows being feed hay in muddy paddocks or grazing in the golden grass; even a solitary horse. Most animals are kept inside most of the time, which is not to say they are badly treated; the opposite is the case. Wagu beef cattle are cherished, they are even massaged, sometimes with beer, to improve the quality of the flesh. With the horses, I don’t know. Something more complex is going on there, as this sign (for a riding ranch I believe) on Mt Aso is to be believed.

3.3.23

After breakfast at the hotel we drove a short distance away, into Kikuchi town, to see Max and Shinoka. They live in a large rambling house in a street behind the convenience store, in whose car park we parked. Next door is Shinoka’s grandmother and aunt, who are in a relationship resembling that between Yoshie and Mioko. A fifty year old looking after her eighty-something year old mother. But Shinoka said her aunt has never left home, which isn’t the case with Mioko. We drank tea and talked. Gave Max his grandmother’s omnibus autobiography and her selected poems, which was something of a relief. I don’t have to carry Lauris around with me any more. Also Whitakers chocolate and two jars marmite. Then we went out for a walk and ended up at the museum, where there were Jomon pots and ancient arrow heads and much else besides. The pot below was for receiving the bones of the dead.

There was a very beautiful, hand drawn map of the river, from the source the sea, set up high in wood panelling and running both sides of the frame; Mayu filmed it I think. It was exquisitely coloured, predominantly in greens and blacks and whites, and included geographical features as well as human settlements. In another cabinet there were pictures of local dignitaries, mainly artists, writers and musicians and including a venerable painting of a venerable teacher, looking resigned and faintly quizzical down the years at us.

There was a street fair on, with many stalls selling hot food, but as Max remarked it was all the same, mostly fried squid. We went back to their place for a lunch of fried eggs, homemade bread with shitake mushrooms, salad, cheese (fetta and a sharp blue), roasted pumpkin (also home grown), kimchi and pickled daikon. And dark nut chocolate from New Zealand. After lunch Max drove us to the house he, with others, has assumed ownership of, for nothing but taxes, in order to restore it as an art centre or similar. A big old family home that stood on a large square block of land in another part of town, it had been abandoned by the last of the descendants with everything that they owned still within (and without). A remarkable place. Some areas had been infested with white ants but the structure itself is largely intact. The barn, where there was still some hay, had been burned out in a fire and will have to be demolished. There were two old wooden carts therein, probably horse drawn. Also an implement shed made of mud brick and wattle, which had gone a beautiful yellow colour. It too was dilapidated but perhaps not beyond repair.

Inside the house there were pictures still hanging on the walls, for instance an old, very faded map of the world in which only the green countries – Argentina, the US, Alaska, the Congo, could be made out easily. In another room there was a scroll with the white figure of a woman upon it next to a ghostly volcanic cone, like Fuji, perhaps left there after the original picture had gone, or perhaps drawn onto the wall. An Encyclopaedia Britannica, in Japanese, I’m not sure which year – perhaps the famous 1911 version beloved of Borges. Some photograph albums with the family photos intact there in – beautiful glossy black and white prints which looked to be from the early twentieth century. In several parts fishing nets hung on the walls, the kind used in river fishing and apparently not susceptible to decay.

Max and his co-owners have begun sorting what they will keep from what they will throw away; but the variety and number of the household contents are vast and bewildering. There were piles of non-descript, mostly male, clothing on the floor in one of the rooms; and upstairs an antique wooden loom which may, perhaps, still be able to be restored. Nailed to the wall, high up, a couple of monograms from the hilts of samurai swords. Cutlery, crockery, pots and pans, old tools, books, papers . . . the detail vertiginous and unassimilable, poignant, fascinating, strange. In the yard, where they have already begun to plant gardens, the old stump of a plum tree had put out a few new shoots, which were flowering white – an apt image of the enterprise, I hope.

After we left there we drove into to town. Shinoka had to go to the City Offices for some reason and Max wanted to show us the library (where she also works). The head man there, Kobo, is one of his partners in the house restoration project. He and his wife live next door to it. He was a bit older than Max (32), a distinguished man in his forties perhaps who said that his library has been voted one of the twelve most relaxing in the world. It was discreet, modern, with sweeping circular blond wood shelving and white appurtenances; with that hushed murmur of rapt attention libraries do so well. Mayu went to the children’s section to read folktales of Kyushu and Max disappeared somewhere else. I wandered round then went outside, noting that, in the lobby, there was something that appeared to be the palette of the Swiss artist Balthus. Surely not, I thought; then why not?

We left Yoyogi just after 9 am and took a taxi to Shinjuku Terminus then a bus to Haneda. We were early so we hung out in a café until it was time to board the flight – which they kept saying might have to return to Tokyo because of poor visibility over the airport at Kumamoto. This was, as we surmised, Japan Airlines erring on the side of caution. To the GNP and the GNC we added the GNA – Gross National Anxiety (the C in GNC stands for Cool). I was intrigued by a pot plant in the café, which somehow managed to appear artificial even though it was undoubtedly real. The reverse of the usual attempt to make the unreal appear real. A gowned figure, with his back to me, brooded over the concourse from the nearby boutique. The coffee was good. I’ve worked out what suits me – I buy what they call here a cappuccino (milky coffee, more like a weak flat white) and add to it a short or long black, depending on what’s available.

We were right at the back of the plane, in a seat without a window. I started reading Turgenev, Fathers & Sons, and soon began to wonder if I’d read it before. If so, it was a very long time ago and I could simply be reacting to the atmosphere, not unlike that of First Love, which I did read quite recently. Anyway, I’m very happy with it, even though it somehow conjures intense emotions from the resolutely undramatic and the everyday. Or perhaps I should say because.

The rental car is a Nissan and, like most modern cars these days, is half way towards being driverless. You enter into a relationship with it like that which you have with your computer or your phone. It was difficult to handle at first, but not nearly as intimidating as Mioko’s BMW, which scared me in a way that vehicles hardly ever do. We drove through flat land, intensively farmed and then, after crossing a river, through narrow valleys where the houses are all built in traditional style, albeit with tiled not thatched rooves. And then up into the mountains to Kikuchi where, after a brief detour when I missed a turn, we found the hotel. It is near the opening of the gorge, built along the high banks on the right hand side of the river, with a view from our room of the deep blue, green and white river boiling over rapids and pooling beneath mossy cliffs. For some reason it reminded me of the Manganui o te Ao, when we used to picnic there on its banks at Ruatiti. Our room had its own onsen, outdoors, where we could bath naked together to the sound of the river. We ate in the restaurant, in a private room, from which you could, again, see the river outside.

1.3.23

Towards the end of a complex and largely unremembered dream, a young man with a knitted hat on his head, one which came down over and half covered his face, came into the room where I was, which resembled the sitting room at 96 Kelburn Parade, Wellington c.1977. Someone said: this is Mallarmé. He pulled the hat back off his face and head. He was a young, dark and curly-haired fellow wearing round glasses with wide black rims. In his hands was a poem, written on a sheet of paper, which he gave to me. It had coloured illustrations amongst the blocks of words and I remember thinking an autograph poem by Mallarmé was a very valuable thing indeed. I didn’t consider the anachronism, indeed the impossibility, of this happening.

Someone else, I don’t know who, began to read the poem aloud while a group of performers, young like the poet, improvised actions using jars, bottles, other containers of coloured liquids on a wooden table top. They were pouring from one to another as the narrative proceeded. The poem resembled, in its thematics at least, Rimbaud’s sonnet Voyelles / Vowels, but this was a more dynamic expression, with colours transforming from one to another as the lines were read out. It was these transformations that the performers mimicked on the table top, cheerfully and chaotically, so that it soon resembled a science experiment gone spectacularly, happily, wrong.

27.2.23

This morning I took another walk up the hill to the shrine in order to have a better look at the Jōmon period replica house there. I thought there might be an information board, and there is, but it’s in Japanese; alongside a series of drawings and photographs showing how the house was constructed. I scanned it while a rooster crowed nearby. Jōmon, the word, is a Japanese translation of the English ‘cord-marked’, used by American zoologist Edward Morse in 1877 to describe the pottery he found while excavating mounds looking for shells. It’s now the name of the prehistoric culture, or cultures, that flourished in Japan between about 15,000 and 500 BCE – a very long time.

Who these people were isn’t really known yet. For parts of that period the islands we now call Japan were actually part of the mainland, joined to Siberia via what is now Sakhalin Island and to mainland China via Korea. When this was the case the Sea of Japan was a lake. Later the rising seas at the end of the last Ice Age severed the connection first with the Korean peninsula and then the one with Siberia. In fact the prehistory of Japan extends at least another 15,000 years into the past before Jōmon; that is, until about 30,000 BCE. It’s possible that these earlier people shared a much larger East Asian human culture, in the same way that the Jōmon were a part of the so-called ‘broadleafed evergreen forest culture’, ranging from southwestern Japan through southern China towards Northeast India and southern Tibet, and characterized by the cultivation of Azuki beans, domesticated in southern Honshu and still popular in Japan today.

Probably different kinds of people entered the archipelago at different times using three or perhaps four different routes – from Sakhalin south, from Korea across the water, from mainland China, also by boat, and north via the islands that stretch down through the Ryukyu archipelago to Taiwan. Some scholars believe there is, or was, an Austronesian admixture to the Japanese language which, given how far-travelled and intrepid those people were, seems quite likely. These Austronesian-speakers were subsequently assimilated into the Japanese ethnicity. Non-Ainuic, non-Austronesian, and non-Korean words are also found among Insular Japonic languages, and probably derive from the unknown and extinct Jōmon language(s).

Jōmon people were hunter-gatherers who also practiced agriculture and aboriculture, tending to groves of lacquer and nut-bearing trees, as well as growing soybeans, bottle gourds, hemp, herbs from the Perilla family and the aforementioned Azuki beans. They also appear to have been growing peaches from about 5000 years BCE. At one point, in the late Jōmon, the Japanese chestnut became a crucial resource, not simply for its nuts but because its wood is extremely durable and can be used for building in very wet conditions, which prevailed at the time. Rice growing didn’t begin until relatively late, about 900 BCE, when people from Korea settled in the south, on Kyushu, and bought with them wet rice cultivation, bronze and iron metallurgy, and new pottery styles.

After I’d been up to look at the replica house, I went down the other side of the hill, where there are two small family cemeteries with their characteristic solid black marble tomb ornaments. It didn’t seem right to photograph the graves of people I don’t know but I did take a few shots of trees growing in the cemetery, including an extremely attenuated palm with its three fronds on top of a tall black trunk.

Another thing that fascinates me, worlds away from the ancient Jōmon, is the complexity of the Japanese national grid; but I guess that is for another day. I did however see in the news this morning a puff piece about scientists and military men visiting a secondary school to encourage students there to take STEM subjects, in order to join the national task of revitalizing and extending the nuclear power station network. The aim is for nuclear power to reach 20-22% of national generation by 2030 – rather less than the 30% it was before the Fukushima disaster, after which all nuclear stations were closed. Some have since re-opened and others are going through the delicate and complicated processes of de-commissioning. As of March 2020, out of fifty-four nuclear reactors in Japan, forty-two remained operable but only nine of these, in five power plants, were actually working. Twenty-four reactors are scheduled for decommissioning or are in the process of being decommissioned; the aim is that, by 2030, thirty-three will remain in working order; which seems to suggest the building of three more. I’ll return to this later.

first four images: clay mask; stone statue; clay cup; clay figure

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C5%8Dmon_period

It was Mayu’s birthday today. I gave her Wislawa Szymborska’s Map, effectively her collected poems. She isn’t someone whose work I know but I read a few of the poems in Kinokinuya and thought they would appeal to Mayu – as indeed they do. I also bought two kitschy postcards at Hakone and wrote some romantic couplets across the backs of them. Later we went to AU in Shibuya, for the third time, to try to sort my phone out. For a third time we failed; but a solution may be at hand. I can buy a new SIM at the airport on Wednesday, when we fly to Kumamoto on Kyushu, and that might do me for a month or three. I’m actually quite happy using my phone as a camera when we’re out and about and for other communications when we’re home or otherwise connected to WiFi. Yoshie is having problems with her phone as well but they were not sorted out either. I think things might have got a little heated with the AU woman for a minute.

Yoshie’s favourite department store is Seibu in Shibuya, a place she goes to nearly every single day. After we left the offices of the phone company, we went there for lunch. I was asked to choose which restaurant, of eight or so possibilities, I wanted to go to; and purely by chance chose her favourite. Chinese, dumplings. There were two Japanese men with American accents discussing film business at the next table sounding, as film people so often do, like parodies of themselves. Afterwards we went looking for a cake for Mayu and after inspecting those on offer at the counter of a sweet shop placed, incongruously, just round the corner from a set of mannequins modelling women’s clothes, Yoshie decided she could do better elsewhere. The next sweetshop was an annex to a café called Tops and she did buy one there; a cheese cake I believe.

We had tea in the Platinum Room on the 8th floor. There was an exhibition on called Art meets Life, with the art works (not very many) displayed amongst jewellery, handbags, shoes, and I can’t remember what else in gleaming showcases. In the room where we had tea there was a small painting I quite liked, one of the horsemen of the apocalypse perhaps, galloping onwards before remnants of the Japanese flag, with sixteen red rays emanating from the solar disk. It was used by the Tokugawa Shogunate and later adopted as the Imperial war flag by the Meiji Dynasty, in which capacity it served until 1945 but not since. The work, by Yuji Murakami, has a title that translates to something like ‘Great Thump Forward’ and was priced at three million yen, which sounds like a lot but in reality is only about $A3000.00. When I said I liked it Mayu said yes but would you want it on your wall? And I had to say I wouldn’t.

There was a shimmering silver curtain covering the wall behind the table where we sat to have our drinks and on the floor in front of it a little fan that looked like a lost Pokemon. In the Men’s, which I used before we left, a small bunch of flowers was placed in a vase next to the wash basin. They were real flowers.

Seibu, founded in 1949, like many Japanese department stores, is the child of a corporation which originally ran railways – in this case between Shinjuku and Ogikubo. Seibu Group, themselves owned by Seven and I Corporation, are also in turn the owners of the Prince Hotel chain, at one of which we stayed the weekend in Hakone. Seibu used to import and sell foreign cars too, including Citroen, Saab, Chevrolet, Fiat, Ferrari, Holden, and Peugeot, but I don’t think they do that any more. The store feels strangely time-lapsed, as if you’ve entered the set of a stylish Italian movie from the 1960s from which both the stars and most of the extras are absent; a feeling accentuated by the way those few humans you do see all seem to be walking away, soon to disappear forever from view.

When we woke up in the morning the golf course outside the window was dusted with snow, the air cold and clear, the sky a brilliant blue. We breakfasted early in the hotel dining room. You could have big Western or little Western, big Japanese or little; I chose the last and my only regret was that I didn’t manage to order a second cup of coffee: it was delicious. This painting was on the end wall of the dining room: Hakone, 1994, by Koji Yoshioka. Alas, it does not photograph as well as it looks but I do like the ghostly diners you can see reflected within the purple sky. Unless they are purple mountains.

We went for an onsen after breakfast. In the Men’s, as was the case the other day, there were children bathing with their fathers. The bespectacled man and his son from yesterday were there again; and another fellow with two children, a boy and girl, both under ten. Maybe they were twins. Lithe golden bodies, unselfconscious, innocent and playful. I heard the boy singing in Japanese words to the tune of ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’. Onsen etiquette seems to require that you do not make eye contact with others, or only fleetingly, but somehow that makes your awareness of those around you more acute. I like the way you are left alone with your thoughts, it strikes me as generous. On the way back the hotel corridors were full of compositions from the works of Vilhelm Hammershøi.

We had an hour to walk to the pampas fields and back; Mayu wanted to do some filming there. We went via a back lane that was partially unsealed and where ice still lay across the surfaces of some of the puddles, one of which was, improbably, heart-shaped. I remembered how when I was walking to school in Ohakune I used to break the ice on the puddles with the heel of my shoe; and also how I used to save the ones in shady parts of the road to break on my way home. While we were walking along there was a public service announcement broadcast, which Mayu said was about a planned cull of wild boars that day. There are too many of them in the hills, apparently, and people were being warned to be on the lookout for those fleeing the cull. I don’t know how they were planning to kill them nor whether they kill sows as well. Surely they must.

The path between the banks of pampas grass leads diagonally uphill. People are continuously walking up and down but there aren’t very many of them. There’s a pram left at the bottom; someone must be carrying their child. The dark line of cedars to our right has a fringe of snow today, so that you see a beautiful progression of gold / white / black trunks / russet and green foliage / blue sky; but my phone camera doesn’t capture large landscapes well and none of the macro shots is worth reproducing. I was walking on ahead when I heard Mayu cry out: the diaphanous material of her skirt had become caught in some thorns growing beside the path. As I unpicked it, I thought they resembled blackberry prickles but they were low growing and seemed to be without leaves, let alone fruit. For a couple of sequences she had me walk away, once up the path, the other down. I enjoyed being ‘the talent’; as I was walking along I sang: Pack up all my cares and woes / Here I go, swinging low / Bye bye blackbird . . . It is a great joy to sing out loud in the landscape when no-one can hear you and when you might even be, who knows, in tune. Where somebody waits for me / Sugar’s sweet, so is she / Bye bye blackbird.

The view of Fuji when we came out of a tunnel through the mountains was incomparable. What impressed me most is its size. Compared to Ruapehu, for instance, it is three and a half thousand feet higher: a really massive volcano. Also the postcard views don’t give you an accurate impression of the great grey lumpy extruded material that lies along its slopes. Nor of the range of high mountains on either side of the cone. I was surprised also to see the substantial city built at its base. This is the eastern side, the city is called Gotemba and it is one of four: there are others on the southern, western and northern flanks. Fuji too is difficult to photograph. It is as if the millions of shots that have already been taken of it have leached it of its power. I don’t mean its power as a mountain, that is fully intact; I mean its power as an image in photographic reproduction. I ended up preferring some of the shots I took from inside the restaurant where we had lunch, which, incongruously, and for no apparent reason, had a windmill on the roof.

Quite early in the morning we set out for the lake. It isn’t far from here; indeed, the golf course we can see out the window of our hotel room, in its further reaches, runs along the western shore. The route is an ancient one, part of the old Tokaido Road, which connected Edo and Kyoto. The lake itself is long and narrow, resembling a drowned river valley, and we wondered if it was man made – but no. An eruption of the Hakone volcano, on whose slopes we are, about three thousand years ago, damned the Hayakawa River with lava and other pyroclastic debris and so formed the lake. There are massive cedar trees, which can grow for hundreds of years, preserved beneath the waters and on clear days you can still see them there. We didn’t stop at the bottom of the lake but drove along the eastern shore to the top, where we did stop and went for a walk.

A wide paved road led up the side of the hill, between massive cedar trees, to a complex at the top; stairs led off to a shrine further up the hill. Some of the trees are very old: one estimated as 1200 years had a rope plaited round its massive trunk, I don’t know why. These trees are meticulously cared for, with their lower branches removed, leaving characteristic knotted shapes behind. They are also, you can’t help feeling, loved as well as respected. Halfway up the stairway there was a small shrine off to the left, guarded by two dog-like dragons, which seemed to have a particularly sardonic mien. Like the trees, and the stones, and just about every other surface, they were covered in green moss, which is cultivated rather then removed.

At the top there was a pool with a small waterfall and large carp, mostly a blue grey colour, drifting languidly. We paid our respects at the shrine and Mioko bought a fortune which, like mine, suggested only average good luck; so she tied it up with the others. There were many people passing up and down the steps, some with little dogs nestled inside their coats, others with children wearing panda or polar bear or fox hats on their heads. Down at the bottom Mayu and I were able to buy another sticker each for our shrine books but here they don’t paste them in for you, they just sell them loose. The coffee shop wasn’t open yet so we decided to go back the way we’d come in search of one that was. I had a milky coffee with a shot of espresso in it, because I find the standard fare too weak for my taste. The berry cake was delicious and there were aquariums full of tiny jewelled fish. Somehow they avoided appearing in my best shot.

Yoshie had not come with us, preferring an after breakfast sleep. We went back to the hotel to pick her up and then to a chicken restaurant for lunch. They had several horse meat dishes on the menu as well, but I’ve been eating a lot of flesh so had tempura and soba noodles instead. On the wall behind our table was a copy of the famous Meidum Geese, painted in Egypt c. 2600 BCE. This version, which did not have any attribution but was signed, was made on some kind of ochre paper and looked just as much Japanese as it did Egyptian. While we were eating three female pheasants came and started feeding on some seed left out for them on a low mound in the area of grass outside the window, looking uncannily like geese themselves. A crow flew down and they retreated; when we left some small, thrush-like birds were feeding there.

It took us quite a while to drive up to Owakudani, the Great Boiling Valley, where Mayu wanted to do some filming. By the time we got there it had started to snow, with small round hard flakes, like frozen rain, blowing in the air. The place was very crowded and the queues to buy the black eggs they sell here, which take their colour from the volcanic springs in which they are boiled, were very long and they were sold out anyway; we bought some at a convenience store later. They are more red than black. I stood as near as I could get to a vast pit from which steam swirled and a deep rumbling sound emanated. Apparently this great tear in the side of the earth occurred at the same time as the damning of the river formed the lake below. At one of the information boards I saw a profile of the landscape before us and realised the blue-brown diagonal I could see directly ahead was the left hand side of the base of the cone of Mt Fuji, just one of a complex of volcanoes ranging along the southern edge of the Tokyo basin, like an arm thrown over the back of a sofa.

Yoshie stayed around here for a while as a little girl, during the hungry years during the Second World War, with her grandmother’s sister, and wanted to see the place again. She had been sent out of Tokyo, with many other children, to escape the bombing. Her whole class went first to Nagano, near where our house in Kurohime is; but later she was taken out of her class and sent here to Hakone instead. It took a while before we found the place; she did not say what it meant to her to see it again. The house of course had gone but she still recognised the address. I saw a tousled laneway between two walls running away into what looked like waste land. Some of the buildings around here are very modest; some are ruins.

When we were driving in here yesterday afternoon I saw next to the road a field of tall white grass rising to a dark line of cedars beyond. We saw it again, several times, today; but it looked different. A creamy pale yellow in the stems, golden in the heads, as tall as a person and very beautiful. Paths have been cut through it along which you can walk and we hope to do that tomorrow morning. I think it is a native, called Suzuki grass. It was used for thatching and plaiting, maybe for shoes or rain capes; now it is preserved for its aesthetic qualities. It is said to be at its best in autumn; it dies over winter and is burned in spring, to discourage weeds and promote new growth. There was a small, exquisite painting of the burning of the grass in the restaurant where we had lunch, which I wish now I had photographed.

Though you can’t really see it in this pic, it’s snowing now over the golf course, big soft flakes swarming in the air; perhaps we will wake tomorrow to a white world.