My sister and I went to Hakone for an overnight trip this weekend and we stayed at an inn called Bangakuro, which has been around from the late 1800s, I gather.

And the place looked like it was from the 1800s. The building might not have been that old, but it looked like it at least survived World War II. Let me say straight off that we had a good time. Having said that, I had mixed feelings about it. I really enjoy modern comforts, but I hate a lot of the more “modernized” Japanese inns with fake bamboo fences, tons of plastic, and ugly wall paper. This place was authentic — real bamboo fences, old wooden tubs, and a building structure from the early 1900s. My issue was that everything looked just that old. So-called modern amenities like modern plumbing, toilets and sinks looked like they were installed in the 50s or 60s.

The service was both good and bad in that it was non-existent. Clearly, this isn’t the type of place that waits on you hand and foot. We had to yell for someone to greet us when we arrived. They showed us to our room, had me fill out a guest form and then didn’t come back til they were ready to serve dinner. Dinner was actually a really nice spread (nothing fancy, but good), but they brought everything at once, and told us to call when we were done. Same thing with breakfast. The staff were obviously just hired hands. This was good in that they left us alone, but it was a chore to ask for anything. While a token tip ($20-40) is customary for most reasonably good inns, I didn’t tip here because it didn’t seem like it was expected of me.

The thing that really makes it worth staying there is the baths. They have a hot spring source on their vast grounds, and it’s the genuine thing. Really dense stuff. The water was milky colored and we smelled like sulfur afterward (this is a good thing). Their pamphlet said that the water comes out really really hot, so they have to mix it with water to make it tolerable to bathe in. And the water is running 24/7. Eight of their ten rooms, including ours, come with smaller private baths, and even those are running water all day. The one outdoor bath is really nothing to write home about (small, private bath that people can reserve) but the indoor baths are satisfying enough. The floors are made of wood and have old fashioned drains.

We were a little too early for the leaves to have turned red, but this place would be definately worthwhile in the spring during cherry blossom season or in the autumn when the leaves are at their brightest. Their grounds are immense and it’s all wooded. Their Web site says the cost is as much as 30,000 yen a person. We paid 18,000 yen per person including dinner and breakfast on a weekend. I wouldn’t pay much more than that. For a little more than 20,000 yen, you could go to a different place with nicer service.

This is probably one of the best books I’ve read in a long time. It’s about a librarian that involuntarily travels through time . The book hooks you from the beginning when he — as a 40-something year old, shows up in his wife’s backyard, naked when she’s six. He can’t control when or where he goes, and he always arrives somewhere naked because he can’t take or leave with anything. Between the time that she’s six and the time that she meets him for real, when she’s 22, she’s already met an older version of her husband more than 80 times. It’s a storyline that could sound really flaky, but the author — Audrey Niffenegger — pulls it off. Niffenegger is a professor at Columbia College in Chicago, and this is her first book. Highly recommended.

Every couple of weeks, I hear clipping noises at work. I was shocked the first couple of times, but not anymore — it’s the sound of collegues (male of course) clipping their nails in the middle of the day during work hours. If you’ve never been in this situation, let me tell you. Tje clip, clip, clip sound travels across the room. An American colleague told me that he thought this was a difference in culture — this was acceptable behavior in Japan. I’m not convinced, but there’s more than one guy in the office, who engages in this activity so maybe he’s right.

When I was in Chicago a couple weeks ago, I went in to a Barnes and Noble store to stock up. I noticed a category of books that I’ve never seen before — Illustrated Novels — and had to chuckle.

They were essentially what people have called Japanese anime or manga until recently. Foreign fans tend to be pretty hard-core about the category of books, but in Japan, there are tons of them for men and women and they’re quite popular. I don’t mean to condone men in their 30s and 40s reading comic magazines on the train on their way to work, or students, who take nothing but a comic book to school. But, manga actually are extremely enjoyable and in some cases educational.

My mother disapproved of manga when I was growing up, but I learned a lot about Japanese historical figures, via manga biographies that made them come alive. In middle school and high school, I got hooked on a story about an aspiring stage actress and adventures of a group of priviledged high school kids, as well as mysteries, horror and love stories. I still have favorite manga writers, but I now also enjoy manga essays. My sisters, who have spent most of their lives in the U.S., can read Japanese pretty well, thanks to manga.

Nevertheless, I would never claim that manga is literature. I don’t know if Barnes and Noble coined the category, but it’s pretty funny from a Japanese perspective especially since one of the series on the shelf was City Hunter, which has a good story line, but also features women with large breasts and short skirts, and a main character, who if I recall correctly has a hard-on at least once a chapter.

(Note: The only reason why I know this about City Hunter is that I had a girl friend in college, who loved the series for some reason)

I was in Kyoto today with my father and sister at the Nishiki Ichiba (market), which is a really fun strip of vegetable stands, butchers, pickle shops, tea shops, and sweet shops. I hadn’t been here since I came with my in-laws a few years ago (Note to DPK — the tofu donuts are still good).

After awhile, we went to look for a sweet potato stand my father used to go to 20 years ago. After about five minutes or so we found a little stand with 4 or 5 people waiting. The store was about the size of a small home office, and looked like it had been there for 100 years. As it turned out, it had been there for 120 years and the current owner told us he was the fourth generation. (When my dad went there 20 years ago, it was manned by an old man, presumably his dad.)

I wish I could put up a picture of this place but a large bamboo bucket of huge potatoes called Naruto Kintoki were being cooked from the bottom by some thing that produces steam right up the bucket.

Any self-respecting Japanese establishment, where owners are serious about their food, has rules or at least a spiele they give to customers, and this one was no different. While we were waiting to make our purchases, the owner told us that he only sells potatoes to take home, and that we weren’t to eat it there, on the street or at a park (obviously, this was a problem at some point because this rule wasn’t there 20 years ago). He then told us that these steamed potatoes were good for a week, and they get sweeter every day. He said the potato would taste best after three or four days. While we should refrigerate them, under no circumstance were we to heat it up before eating it.

Aside from these rules, he was quite nice. And to our surprise the potatoes were cheap. My father bought three large potatoes for about 2,000 yen. The owner told us that the price — 100 yen for 100 grams — hasn’t changed in 28 years. Wild. (Though my father was quick to point out that the potatoes seem cheap now, but they had been expensive 28 years ago)

PMK, who is in Canada right now, would have loved this place. Unfortunately, he’s going to have to wait til March because this guy was going to close up shop for the next several months until the potatoes come back in season. We were pretty lucky this time too because the line was short. My dad told us that he has been there sometimes when the line is so long and people buy so many that you could wait an hour without any luck.

I had a slice today and it was okay. But I have great hopes for my potatoe in a few days time.

So I just spent the last half hour trying to clear my blog of about 500 spam comments (okay I’m exaggerating here, but it sure feels that way) , and I’m still not done. To make things worse, I get notices via email when somebody writes in a comment, so I’ve got exactly the same number of spam to clear from my email account. I am so furious, but the worst of it is, there’s no one to direct your anger to.

There’s got to be some nasty article (although, of course all of my stories are objective) I can write.

Note: You’ll all notice that the first comment I got was spam. I think somebody’s rigged it so they automatically send a comment as soon as I write int. I would temporarily turn off my comment abilities if I can only figure out how. HELP!

The following is an excerpt from a letter to the editor in the October issue of No. 1 Shimbun, the membership newsletter of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan.

“Until a few weeks ago, one could have the FCCJ’s tuna sandwich for 682 yen. Now, we have to pay 1,039 yen for a tuna bagel or 1,144 yen with a cup of coffee. Such prices will only encourage many people (including myself) to have their sandwich somewhere else. One can relish a delicious tuna sandwich (regular, sesame or poppy seed baguette) and a very tasty coffee for 735 yen at a French bakery near Tokyo Station. Allow me to now to switch to the philosophical aspect of the above matter. If one were to order a tuna bagel cum coffee 25 days a month at the FCCJ, one would spend 28,600 yen. When adding the monthly 8,000 yen for the Regular members’ dues and the 1,000 yen levy, one tuna bagel would cost 1,504 yen daily and a little higher for Associate members….”

And it goes on.
Let me just add a note here: This was in a glossy magazine supposedly written for journalists by journalists.

And people wonder why FCCJ can’t attract younger professionals.

My sister and I were watching a morning “news” show while we were eating breakfast this morning. It must have been a slow new day because they were featuring the city of Kusatsu in the Shiga prefecture, where the people were “coming together as one” to break the Guiness world record for the most number of people sitting on whoopie cushions at one time. I’m dead serious.

The previous record was some event in Illinois, where 3,600 people sat on whoopie cushions at the same time. The people of Kusatsu were aiming to get 3,700 people together. In case, you’re thinking about trying to break a new, whoopie cushion record, there are rules. Apparently, everyone must sit down at the same time and stay seated for 10 seconds without getting up. After a slightly tense moment 30 minutes before the scheduled time when they had only half the necessary crowd, grandmas, grandpas, moms, dads and children became one to break the record, as the pretty reporter informed us. Of course we got to see the momentous occasion as well. It’s pretty overwhelming to hear 3,700 farting noises at once. AND they replayed it over and over again for us in case we missed it.

In an interview afterward, the mayor got all teary-eyed and talked about what a proud moment this was for the city of Kusatsu. I’m serious about this too. You can’t make this stuff up. The television show left no stone unturned. Just in case we were curious about the cost of breaking such a world record, they told us the organizers spent 120,000 yen (very roughly $1,000 or so) with each whoopie cushion costing about 30 yen each.

The two might seem like they have nothing to do with each other but they do. At least in Sugamo, a shopping area in downtown Tokyo that is frequented by the over 60 crowd.

My sister and I went there over the weekend just to see what it was like, and we found that they were having a fall festival or something with a few booths that were selling cooked snacks and fresh vegetables.

One booth that we passed by caught my sister’s eye. It was a slot machine game that you could play for 200 yen a try. In any other place, you might expect to win a stuffed animal, candy, maybe even money. Not in Sugamo. No sirree. This is the town for seniors. You win fruit, vegetables or grains, such as apples, rice or potatoes. If you lost, you went home with your choice of scallions or tomatoes. The throng of senior housewives might be a turn off for any right thinking young person, but my sister decided she wanted to give it a go because whe wanted to win some apples.

Long story short, she won first place, which was matsutake mushrooms, an autumn delicacy in Japan that can fetch anywhere from $12 for a few Canada-grown mushrooms to a few hundred dollars for two or three domestically-grown mushrooms. According to a simple survey of the vegetables stands at the Tsukiji fishi market earlier in the day, it looked like my sister won Korean matsutake, the second-most expensive kind (followed by Chinese matsutake and Canadian matsutake). The man at the booth was so surprised he almost forgot to ring the bell.

Apparently the computer based slot machine game, which allowed my sister to stop each of the three windows separately was similar to a phase in one of the Super Mario Brothers games that she used to play.

I’m back home right now — that is Chicago. Until yesterday, however, I was in Washington D.C. for an annual medical check up, which involved a CT, which in turn required an IV, so they can inject contrast in me to light up my organs.

If you’ve ever wondered how these technicians (otherwise known as “the people that stick needles into your arm”) train, I had the opportunity to find out first hand. When I went to get my IV put in, the woman informed me that she was training and would appreciate my understanding as she will be asking her trainer questions as she puts the IV in.

Now a smart person would have run the other way, or insisted that the trainer handle it. But I, like an idiot, just sat there, only realizing how really stupid I was when the woman’s first question to her trainer was, “So, I put it in this way right?”

It’s slightly disconcerting to have a woman with a needle asking someone whether she should stick it in this way or that way while she’s getting ready. To boot, my vein has a weird curve, so they have to go in and then go along the curve to get in. Naturally, she screwed up.

But that wasn’t the end of it.

Fast forward about 30 minutes later, when the CT technician was getting ready to put contrast in my vein through the IV. She first injected some saline to flush the IV — a normal procedure. Except in my case the saline squirted out of the IV followed by my blood. It was all over my arm, on the pillow, and on the blanket that was covering me. Apparently, she didn’t screw on the tube part of the IV tightly enough so it leaked.

This was apparently the season for trainees because someone new in the “urine department” caused the entire hospital staff a great deal of amusement when she stuck all of the samples into the freezer instead of the refrigerator by mistake.

I never thought I’d hear the word “pee” and “popsicles” in the same sentence.