AROUND TOKYO/2: THE MAJESTIC MOUNT FUJI
The Fuji mountain is within easy reach from Tokyo, and is a must visit Japanese icon. We took a direct bus from Tokyo Shibuja station, taking about 2 hours and spent 3 days in the region, but the district offers enough activities for much more time as well. There are 5 lakes and villages that you can visit, each with different view on the mountain. We went to Kawaguchiko, a town by Lake Kawaguchi, which is located closest to Fuji, giving you the best chance to see it.
“Fuji-san” or Mt. Fuji
It seems that some volcanoes are called “san”-s in Japanese, which, based on my previous experience with Japanese people, shows the respect people pay to someone. Japan is covered by volcanic mountains due to its geographical position at the edge of active tectonic plates, and in some areas across the country these volcanoes represent a daily danger to the inhabitants. Fuji is today a dormant volcano, but it has played a role in the life of Japanese people since the early ages. With its perfectly symmetric shape and snow-covered peak most of the year it’s one of the most iconic images of Japan.
Today it’s part of the World Heritage and is a top destination for locals and foreigners too. Around the mountain there is a pretty lake-district with five lakes, most of them with nice views to Fuji in clear weather. Nice weather, however, is very much unpredictable, and visitors often leave disappointed if they only come for a day when the weather turns out poorly. The temperature is also lower here than elsewhere nearby, even the time of the cherry blossoming is scheduled 1-2 weeks after everywhere else in the region.
Climbing Mt. Fuji is said to be a fantastic experience, however it is only possible in July and August once the snows have melted, when the area therefore becomes crowded with trekkers who dare to brave the summit. There’s a local proverb that well reflects the difficulty of the hike: “He who climbs Mt Fuji once is a wise man, he who climbs it twice is a fool.” This time, partly due to the wrong season, partly due to no preparation for such a hike, we only admired the mountain from Kawaguchiko town, located closest to Fuji.
We arrived in the afternoon and were lucky enough to see Fuji, although not too clearly. We decided to waste no time and walk around the town straight away to benefit from the view, since the weather was meant to be cloudy the day after. Our hostel was straight behind a picturesque park in Kawaguchiko that is covered with lavenders at summer (they even organise a lavender festival in the park at that time), so it is often on postcards with the lake. We started our tour from here and crossed the bridge over the lake for an even better view of both the lake and Fuji together. The cherry blossoms were not blooming yet but they started showing the first signs of spring in the lovely sunlight. We made a semicircle around the Eastern half of the lake from the bridge and walked back through the town, 2-3-hour stroll. The lakeside has many hotels and restaurants and is clearly a very popular area during the summer, but it felt quite empty when we were there, which was a very welcome change after Tokyo.
The following day, as expected, was much cloudier, and after a couple of hours in the early morning Fuji-san decided to dress in heavy clouds all around… From this moment our room’s view over the mountain showed an entirely blank space where Fuji was supposed to be. We were so happy that we have done our tour the day before! To still use of the day somehow, we took the ropeway (a funicular) up to the hill above the town to have a nice view on the lake at least and as much of the mountain as possible. You can also walk up the hill in about 45 minutes, however the path is not well marked, so we had given up finding it after a few attempts on the hillside where we wished to see a path. In fact, the right path starts at a steep old staircase before the ropeway when you walk from the village on the main road. Just make your way always uphill – as expected, all signs are only in Japanese.
The view of Fuji, unfortunately, wasn’t a lot from the top either, we only saw the bottom of it and then a huge greyish cloud all around the top half. Luckily, Japanese creativity solved this problem too: they set up a photo boot on the hilltop where you have a beautiful view over the mountain in clear weather, and when it is cloudy, they offered taking pictures of visitors with a nice cherry-blossom covered Fuji printed in the background and you dressed in kimonos for the front! The outcome looked so cheesy that we decided we badly needed this picture, although - knowing the use of it - we opted for the smaller, free version.
After our little excursion it was time to find out how to do laundry in Japan! Long gone are the days when we left our dirty clothes at a nice South American lady for her to wash and dry them while we went on a day trip and then picked them up in the evening. It works quite differently in Japan: there is no lady and no washing at hostels. Here you need to:
Find a self-service laundry centre, which even the locals use, as flats are too small for their own,
Somehow decide which machine is for washing and which for drying
Read and learn the Japanese manuals
Follow them to make the machines work
Oh, and you need to sit there while your clothes are getting done, sadly no one will do it for you while you’re enjoying your time.
We got stuck with this process right after the first point, as we were a bit worried about ruining our clothes that we’re meant to wear for the rest of our trip. Luckily a local man walked in, who although did not speak a word in English, managed to explain with some acting skills the differences between the machines, and we guessed that the most faded button was probably the medium program (as he didn’t know it either). The machine doesn’t say the length of the program either, only once the programme has already started, so there is a risk that you could boil your stuff. We wished for the best and waited, then we were relieved to get back our clothes in one, and without discolouring (although they don’t separate colours) after the half hour program! Drying was a trial-error process too, but we inserted the coins until the clothes were in acceptable condition. Since this occasion we have done a few other washings and it seems that the washing machines are completely different everywhere in Japan, so the knowledge we obtained with so much work here didn’t prove to be valuable in the long-term.
As the local culinary experience we closed the day with some soba ramen, which is a noodle soup. In case you haven’t tried ramen before, it’s a hot soup with usually a pork base that is flavoured with miso or soya sauce. Then you can choose from several additional ingredients to add to this base: a type of noodle (they are mostly like spaghetti but differ in thickness), meat (pork, beef, seafood, chicken or a combination), cut spring onion or tofu. The soup serves the same role as a main dish back home as it’s quite hearty. The fun part is that you get chopsticks to eat it! This exercise needs some time to master. At this first occasion we were fishing for noodles in the soup and probably burnt more calories in the process than gained, but by now we choose the chopstick even when the waiter pities us with a spoon seeing that we’re foreigners. It’s also expected that you slurp this soup (apparently it tastes better if you do), and locals are not shy to do so which is a characteristic of a good ramen restaurant that you can recognise from some distance.
The traditional Japanese home
Perhaps this is the right time to talk about the traditional Japanese houses and their specific features, since our hostel in Kawaguchi-ko was a good representation of these. To start with, when you enter a house in Japan (even in the cheapest hostel in Tokyo) you need to remove your shoes and change to one of the uniform slippers prepared at the entrance hall. Street shoes are stored on shelves by the entrance. Once in your room, you get a bathrobe that you should wear in the building. The room itself looks a bit poorly (or let’s say economically) furnished to western eyes: it has no bed or much other furniture, but a big bamboo mat that covers most of the floor like a carpet and where the sleeping mattress is laid for the night, the mattress is rolled up during the day to make space. There is also a small table with 30-centimetre-long legs, covered with a Japanese tablecloth which is where tea and food is served. Tea and some biscuits are always on the table just like in western hotels, but food is only part of the service if you are in a ryokan or another higher level of accommodation than a hostel. You either sit at this table with your legs underneath (sometimes the bottom of the table is heated!) or knee beside it. Most rooms have in-built wardrobes, so there is very little free-standing furniture. The building materials used for the room, and for the house in general, are mainly natural, including wood, bamboo and paper. Windows cover most of the side wall, and are much lower than in Europe, since there are no beds to hide.
Bathrooms are most often shared on the corridor, and they only consist of separate toilets for males and females with another pair of dedicated bathroom slippers at the entrance, and sinks, but no shower (sometimes there are shower facilities but in the very traditional places we have only seen onsen, described below).
Shower facilities are located in the in-house onsen, a hot spring bath. These are normally separated by gender too, although it is also possible to reserve the area for a family to use it together. There is a changing area with baskets or shelves for clothes and personal belongings right at the entrance (where nothing ever “disappears” despite not being locked) and a bathing area where you need to follow certain rules:
No swimwear is allowed, which feels a bit unusual at first, but seemingly no one worries too much about it so it eventually becomes natural;
A thorough shower is compulsory using the prepared liquid soap before going into the hot pool and then again afterwards.
The hot pool is part of the everyday bathing ritual and is a relatively rapid process, maybe 10 minutes in the pool a, single time, not like the thermal baths we have in Europe, where we take breaks between intervals in the thermal water and spend hours in the spa overall. We figured out this difference after noticing that everyone we started at the same time with had long left, along with several more groups of people by the time we did! The water is very hot and the pool is covered in dense steam - I love hot showers but I find the temperate unbearable after 5 or so minutes. Actually the recommended time in the water is also not much longer than that, you should go out “when your forehead starts sweating”. Many public onsen have open-air facilities too, often surrounded by gardens or a forest, which is a truly pampering experience. After the bath many onsen provide hairdryers and quality face and body cosmetics and accessories for free at a well-equipped changing area, where ladies probably spend more time than in the bath itself.
Our hostel was located close to the lakeside with the traditional Japanese rooms described above, ours overlooking Mt Fuji as mentioned, and a lovely Japanese garden with bonsai-looking trees, which is common in the countryside. It also had an in-house onsen with a full glass wall facing the lake (and a bamboo wall in the garden so that visitors to the lavender park could not look inside – I checked to make sure though). We were very excited to try it! Then to Szilveszter’s disappointment, it turned out that this luxury was only in the female pool, men were inside the building and didn’t have a glass wall with a view of the countryside.
Having spent a couple of relaxing days at Mt. Fuji we were ready to go back to Tokyo, and start the round trip that we planned in the evenings of our first week in Japan, which stretched down all the way to the Southern point of the country.