Arima Onsen

 This is the story of our New Year's Eve, 2011, in Japan.  Before the story ends, there will be nudity and shades of organized crime.  But the story starts, like all good stories, with some geology.

Geologically speaking, Japan has a lot going on underneath.  Its islands sit astride the Pacific Rim of Fire, where Earth's tectonic plates grate and grind against one another.  In fact, there are four separate plates that come together near or under Japan's 6852 islands.  The movements of these plates have, over the years, pushed the islands up out of the ocean and separated the islands from the rest of Asia.  From time to time, these movements also produce a volcanic eruption or earthquake.  The last eruption of Mt. Fuji was only 300 years ago. Sadly, the earthquakes have happened more frequently and more recently.

With all of this energy below, it shouldn't be surprising that hot water comes squirting out of the ground in a lot of places.  The internet tells me that there are over 28,000 hot springs in Japan.    Most of these hot springs were, long ago, piped into a public or private bath-house for people to enjoy.  The Japanese word for hot spring is "Onsen".  Unsurprisingly, Onsen is also synonymous with a public bath or spa.

So, if you were wondering what the title of this post means then you've now got half of it.  The other half - Arima - is the name of a small town about 15 miles from Kobe, just on the other side of Mount Rokko.  Arima is a storybook little town that draws in tons of people to walk its winding streets, bathe in its hot springs, and to shop in its many little artisan stores. 

Arima Onsen is kind of like the Baden Baden of the Osaka-Kyoto-Kobe metropolitan area.  In fact, the town "feels" a lot like a village in the Black Forest of Germany.  Small buildings, mostly one or two stories, cover the hillsides.  The shops peddle products that are traditional and folksy.  The streets are narrow and winding.  They go up or down with few stretches of straight and level.  Cars and pedestrians are constantly competing for the right to use the street.  It's a lot like any European mountain village....except that all the signs are in Japanese and, instead of Churches, there are Buddhist and Shinto shrines.

As you walk through Arima Onsen, every couple of blocks or so you will find one of the thermal springs.  At one time they were like geysers, or so the tourist signage claims.  These days, all are capped with a well-head to carry the waters to one of the bath houses.  The photo immediately above shows one such spring.

The photo below shows a foot bath that is conveniently located in the center of town.  If you get foot-weary from walking the streets of Arima Onsen, then you can rest your tired puppies in these hot waters.  As you see in the photo, a lot of people do so.

The thermal waters are also thought to be healthy to drink.  The photo below shows the public fountain, complete with little metal drinking mugs.  I couldn't screw up enough courage to take a drink.  This was partly due to the thought of the 10,000 other people who might have used the mug before me on this day.  But it was also due to the horrific memory of drinking Pluto Water from the sulfurous mineral springs of French Lick, Indiana.   Luckily, Arima Onsen's waters are not from sulfur springs.... the town would smell like one big rotten egg if they were.  Instead, the waters bubble with carbon dioxide and owe their restorative powers to innocuous minerals such as carbonate and radium.  (Odor or no, I'm not too keen on the idea of drinking radium.)

Theresa and I were invited to drive up to Arima Onsen with our friends shown in the photo below.  That's Laurence on the left (a colleague), then Akari-san (a friend of Laurence), then Theresa, and then at right is Moriyama-san (a colleague).   New Year's Eve was a Saturday, and was the only day between Christmas and January 8 for which we were certain there was no project work to be done.  So we were invited to relax the way the Japanese relax - by going for a day at the Onsen.

 I mentioned that the shops in Arima Onsen specialized on traditional and folk products.  The shop above is a bakery that produces Tansan Senbei, a type of wafer cookie that is made using the local waters.  The wafers are thin and ridiculously fragile.  They make them in the shops using a device similar to a waffle iron. 

The photo below is a shop that makes and sells writing brushes, used for traditional calligraphy.  According to the the official Arima-Onsen web-site:

We have a legend that the Emperor Koutoku and his wife in Asuka era (593-709) could have a prince after taking the Arima spa and they named their baby Arima prince. It is said that the Arima writing brush was a memorial item to be inspired by the happy birth. When you lift the writing brush, a doll’s head pops up.

So it seems the Arima waters claim to have fertility benefits too.

 Now are story has reach the climax promised in the opening sentence - the nudity and the shades of organized crime. 

We finally did go for a bath in the late afternoon.  In many ways, the authentic Onsen is steeped in tradition and ritual.  In many other ways, it is a lot like showering up after high-school gym class.  The Onsen building itself - and there are a boatload of them in this area - was large enough to hold several hundred people at the same time.  When you enter, you take off your shoes and lock them up.  Then you buy a ticket to enter the bath.  (Very cheap by Japan standards).  The ticket gets you a key to a locker and two towels.

At this point the men go one way and the women go another way.  You enter a big locker room and strip down to your freckles.  No swimsuits allowed.  The big towel goes in the locker for drying off later.  The little towel goes with you to serve double duty as a wash cloth and a fig leaf.

The first room you enter has a bunch of stalls, each equipped with a stool, a faucet, a bucket, and a hand shower.  The idea is that you sit on the stool and wash up much like you would in your bathroom at home.  Assuming you have 150 other naked people in your bathroom at home.  At least there is a lot of steam, so you can only see about 50 of them through the fog.

Each stall is also furnished with a dispenser for soap, shampoo, and conditioner.  You would think this would be all one would need, but people carry in bags with shaving cream, razors, toothbrushes, tooth paste, nail trimmers, and heaven knows what else.  At this point the whole point is personal hygiene.  Someone told me that people come to the public baths because they don't have a true bathroom at home.  Others have told me this is a crock...that everybody has a modern bathroom but folks just like the ritual of coming to Onsen.

After the hygiene part comes the relaxation part.  You can leave the bathing area to go outside and relax in the pools.  There are pools of differing sizes and water temperatures.  You just sit in the warm waters and relax, enjoy the moonlight and the conversation.  This is the part, I think, that the Japanese really enjoy about going to Onsen.  It provides a break of sanity in their daily rituals of insane working hours and commuting schedules.

After soaking yourself to a prune-like state, you go back to the locker room and dry off and dress and return back to the main building.  There are lots of things to do there.  We had dinner in the restaurant.  But we could have also watched TV or took a nap or read a book or gotten a massage. 

Ok...so much for the nudity.  Now for the shades of organized crime.  A friend who will remain nameless once went to the Onsen for an afternoon of relaxation.  After about 20 minutes in the foggy nakedness, she was confronted by as member of the staff and asked to leave.  Now, the culture of Japan is to avoid confrontation, so even in a confrontation they will try to make it look like it is not a confrontation...by dropping vague hints and suggestions that you are choosing to leave rather than telling you to get the heck out.  So it took a while for her to realize that she was being kicked out and why.

The reason was that she had a small tattoo of a butterfly on her shoulder.  You see, in Japan tattoos are the badge of the Yakuza - the Japanese mafia.  Evidently, not too many Japanese people get tattooed unless they are criminals.  So our friend assumes that some other lady saw her little butterfly and assumed she was in the mob.  This made the lady uneasy, so she brought the butterfly to the attention of the staff, and the staff kicked our friend out to preserve the tranquility of the other bathers.  So it goes.  There was no use trying to explain that it was just a little butterfly...hardly the mark of a hardened mobster.   The traditions of the Onsen cannot be broken.

Now, whenever she goes to Onsen, she takes a few large size band-aids to hide the tattoo.  Open wounds are perceived to be less of a public threat than little butterflies.