Mount Fuji and Japanese Baths

Yesterday, we left Hosei University's Tama Campus (Tama being Japanese for "we want to expand our university, but land in downtown Tokyo costs 3 billion dollars per square metre, so we'll just build some new buildings out in the 'burbs"), and got in a bus to head to a seminar house in rural Japan, also owned by the university. Rural Japan is a lot like urban Canada. The seminar house is pretty sweet. There's hot green tea on tap, and the house itself is located near the base of Mount Fuji. We couldn't see it when we drove in yesterday. It was cloudy, and 80% of the mountain wasn't visible. We were told this is usually the case, and that Fuji is a "very shy mountain" that doesn't like to reveal itself to visitors. Luckily, we got about an hour of totally clear weather today, so we all climbed up to the roof of the seminar house to check out the view. Mount Fuji is a kickass mountain. It's almost perfectly symmetrical, and there aren't any foothills or anything, it just explodes out of the ground. Which I guess makes sense, since it's a volcano, so it actually did explode out of the ground. In any case, it looks awesome. I took a ton of pictures, but forgot my camera cable in Tokyo, so I'll have to wait until Wednesday to upload some of them.

Before we got to the seminar house, we stopped off to do some non-Fuji hill climbing, and hiked up to 1300m. It was a pretty cold climb, and a few of the course delegates got to see snow for the first time. They freaked out, which was pretty cool. Snow is awesome, but it's easy to forget that when you're digging a car out from yet another 50cm blizzard, or trying not to die on the 401.

After the climb, we went to an onsen to warm up. Onsens are traditional Japanese hot spring baths, where the locals go to relax and engage in hadaka no tsukiai which, it turns out, stands for "naked communion". Basically, you get naked, soap up and rinse yourself off in a kind of staging area, and then hang out in an outdoor rock pool with a bunch of old Japanese men (the onsens have separate male and female pools). Once I got over the initial strangeness, it was actually a lot of fun, and super relaxing. They play laid back music over a speaker, and this particular bath was surrounded by mountains, and released huge billowing clouds of steam. It's a good thing I got an introduction to it yesterday, because it turns out the seminar house only has one big onsen-style bath (per gender). Communal bathing for everyone!

Tonight's activities will consist of ping pong (which I've been playing pretty frequently since getting here), and a discussion about "holistic thinking" with Klaus the artist. He has also started referring to his music-beer-and-painting sessions as a "holistic disco", which I think is just about the best phrase ever.

I head back to Canada in 6 days, and while I'm having a great time, there are a few things I'm starting to miss about Canada. For example, not having squid at every single meal. I have eaten more tentacle in the last week than I have in the rest of my life, probably by an order of magnitude. I am all tentacled out.