River Fun in Japan

Summer in Japan is hot so most families look to aquatic recreation for relief.

The pools are too crowded (see previous post: Taters in the Pool).
The beaches are also crowded. They's broilers under the sun with no shade. Jellyfish, sharks, sea urchin and countless more threatening organisms lurk unseen. Riptides and undertows strike without warning. The water is salty, briny, stinky, and leaves you feeling sticky and nasty. And of the beach-going crowd, many of them tend toward the obnoxious (I'm no fan of beaches).
Water parks are expensive, stressful and again, overcrowded.
Onsen are all about hot and not exactly family recreation.
There aren't many lakes and most of them don't accommodate swimming.
Some of the shopping malls have plaza fountains which is fine until about age 5.
They'll arrest you for jumping into the canals, and you'd have to be pretty drunk to consider it in the first place.
Can you think of any other bodies of recreational water? No, not marshland or sprinklers.

Back home in Texas we'd spend many weekends out on the rivers. Locally, however the rivers are too polluted to swim in (my neighborhood river has recently been cleaned-up, yeah!) but I couldn't accept that there weren't any clean rivers here. Not finding anything overtly promoted, I made a habit of taking swimwear with me whenever we went on a drive in the mountains. After many summers of driving, we found one. After a bland morning at the Saiboku Ham village, driving through to Chichibu for a little hike, we spotted some people splashing around in the Koma river (Komagawa). We pulled over where a farmer was offering parking for 500 yen. We quickly changed into swimsuits and hit the water. It was wonderful; not too cold. It wasn't very deep in most areas, but there were some places where boys were jumping off the overpass. Lots of overhanging trees and shade. Cool breeze coming off the water. Pebble shores with plenty of good rocks to lounge against. At one point there's a salmon ladder (a series of stepped troughs and a flume to help salmon make their way up) that was good fun for people, too. Nearby grocers sold us inner tubes and anything else we needed. My wife, Mami wasn't much for the swim but wading around and relaxing on the banks she declared that it was the most relaxing, "healing" place she'd ever been to in Japan. The sound of the water, cicadas, and breeze in the trees was transportive. And in contrast to beaches, the water is crystal clean, fragrant, relatively garbage-free, uncrowded, well-shaded, and river rats (river goers, as we're called back home) are some of the friendliest folk in Japan or Texas.

OK, this is what I'd been talking about for years. But for my family to understand, they had to experience it themselves. They were hooked. We only left when the sun started going down.

Next week, Mami spent some time searching the Japanese blogs for other rivers and found one in Hanno, not far from Komagawa, the Nagurigawa. Nagurigawa is bigger and even better for an all-day excursion. Nagurigawa has several spots where even an adult can tube a bit, and some places deep enough for diving. One of the parking areas is managed by a grocery, Happy Family (Teddy Bear logo) also rents grills and will set you up all the way for riverside barbecuing.

Going to a river, here are some considerations. Bring wet socks, or water-proof sandals, or some kind of footwear that will work in the water. The stony banks and riverbeds are tough on bare feet. And walk carefully in the rivers; the rocks on the bottom are mossy and as slippery as ice. Try to walk on the areas of smaller rocks. Expect to get banged and scratched up pretty good on the rocks. It's all part of the fun.

You can get to either one by bus and train, but if you drive just head out to the river and watch for signs about parking and swimming. The key kanji to watch for is 泳川. Plenty of rivers are good for barbecue and picnics, but it's hard to find a good, clean one for swimming.

So to recap:
Komagawa in Hidaka for a few hours.
Nagurigawa in Hanno for an full day.

If you know of any others, please post them.

Ham-O-Rama

How much do you like ham? Alot? Enough to drive an hour and a half into the mountains? If so, you'll probably like it. But unless you plan on eating pork all day, don't plan on more than a few hours here. Maybe part of the problem was that it was a burning hot July morning, but all but one of the pigs which were supposed to be available for petting (pet 'em, eat 'em, take some home for later) gone, and the one out was lying in a puddle under the drinking trough dying of eat stroke. There was also a playground, but it wasn't any   more than any moderate urban park.

The centerpiece is a large beer hall where you can consume any of a number of forms of pork, all of which is really quite good. Sausage, fillet, cutlet, steak...fresh and delicious. After that you visit a strangely pork-centric supermarket with more cuts of pork than you've ever seen. On the plaza, there are many vendors and ice cream stands (no pork-flavored soft cream, thank goodness!). Again, all good stuff, but quite strange in it's obsessiveness.

There's an onsen there, too but in the heat of summer and after a big pork dinner we just didn't see any appeal.

This is a place to include in a larger trip around North Saitama / Iruma, perhaps for a good lunch after some golf or hiking in the area.

Lock Up: Horror-Themed Restaurant

Of all the "theme" restaurants we've been to, Lock Up in Shibuya is by far the most memorable.

While most Japanese theme-bars/ clubs/ restaurants run high on concept but lack follow-through in either the food or the theme, I'm happy to report that this place is the exception. I'll get to the food, later. First, the atmosphere, which is the whole reason for going.

 I'd heard that some of the Lock Ups like the one in Ikebukuro were rather weak, but that the Shibuya one was better. I'll verify the others in the future. It took some time and effort to find it, wandering around Shibuya, following a map devoid of any useful landmarks or orientation points; it basically indicated that the place was in the basement of a building somewhere among a bunch of buildings. Not helpful. But once we'd located it (beneath the best Village Vanguard we've seen so far), we made our way carefully down a stairwell lined with cheesy cave-type texturing and adorned with mildly scary thins. But by the time we reached the bottom, we were all genuinely reluctant to even open the door (the duty fell on me, of course).

From here I'll have to be a bit vague to avoid spoilers, something I've never had to worry about before with restaurant reviews.

Beyond the entrance we were treated to a fairly good little haunted house that had a few things that effectively put us on edge. Then we waited briefly to be seated in a very weird hall.

The staff shackled me and led us to our "cell." It was all very Count of Monte Cristo down in the dungeons. The layout was surreal and disorienting, and the decor was as good as any professional haunted house I've been through Stateside. Cut-stone-esque walls; wrought-iron bars and cages; paranoid little nooks and crannies; and a good mix of funk and old-school heavy metal echoing through the background. The best part is a periodic event - but that's all I dare say (spoilers). Furthermore, I wasn't asked to leave for repeatedly messing with the other patrons, poking my head through holes, yelling for help, frightening fellow diners.

They did a good job on the interior, but the food? Not bad. Quality-wise, on a par with the average chain-izakaya. The portions are small, but they get bonus points for presentation. About a quarter of the drinks and dishes are given the horror-treatment. Cyclopean spaghetti, eyeballs in beakers, mad scientist test-tube cocktails, rising-from-the-grave-zombie fingers, and such. With set-menus and cocktails we averaged about 3,500 yen per person. A la carte runs higher and takes longer, of course.

This is a great place to take a date, a family, visitors, or a party. You go here to have a scare, a few laughs, some photo ops, and food and libations. Kids are welcome, but any kids younger than about eight would probably be too scared to have a good time; they really make an effort to scare the hell outta you. My eleven year old loved it. There's nothing particularly grotesque or perverse, but the atmos-fear-factor is pretty high.

Best way to find it is to follow the map, head out past the 109 bldg. toward Tokyu Hands, and home-in on Village Vanguard. From there, descend. If you go, please leave a post here and let me know what you thought.

The Lock Up

Kanji Study

There are plenty of international and mixed-race Japanese kids who are multilingual. It's the ones with a full six years of kanji (the Chinese-based calligraphy) skill who stand apart in the job market. Even though our son goes to a private, English-language parochial school in Tokyo my wife and I still insist that he maintains a kanji skill commensurate with his age. The after-school study sessions and tutoring times are met with moans and stiff resistance by my son, Eiji, reminding me of my Jewish friends back home who were regularly herded off for Hebrew school. He knows it's important, but it's a monumental undertaking and after he gets done with his ever-increasing homework from school, the last thing he wants to do is deal with any additional study. But as of a few days ago, I was able to put away "the stick." I've started using a smart phone app for my own kanji studies which tracks progress, tests, and re-tests in several different ways. It's been brilliant for my own studies, but since I put it on Eiji's iPod he and I have started studying together. Correct answers and aced mini-tests reward you with sounds; when we study at the same time, these sounds fire our competitive spirit as one can hear the other "doing better" from across the room. The competition is furious, and moreover productive. Rules for study: 1. lead by example 2. make it fun whenever possible

Ancient Tombs

The Hundred Caves of Yoshimi Hyakketsu (吉見百穴) in Saitama are standard school field trip and a nice addition to a full day of stuff. It's not really anything to make as a singular destination, but if you want to spend the day in North Saitama or the Chichibu mountains, you definitely want to include it on the itinerary. About 500 years AD Buddhism came to Japan and the Japanese started to adopt it's concepts of life and death, leading to construction of this sort of tombs dug into the sides of mountains. Seeing the hundreds of little chambers cut into the rocky cliffs made us think of the tombs among which Jesus was buried. Surprisingly, we were allowed to crawl into most of them. Overall about a half hour of walking, with a little museum of period ceramic figures called haniwa. In all, about an hour or two if you take your time. But from there, it's only an hour out to the Chichibu mountains. Driving up, we passed two monkeys sitting on the roadside. It was so cool, seeing a monkey just sitting there, looking at us. We ended on a high damn an hour above Nagatoro.