It has been so fantastic to get back to my fan base here in Japan. After all these years, I'm still considered a star. For those of you that weren't aware of one of my earlier careers, in my late teens I played a Samurai soldier (# 1287 of 11550) in the epic Japanese movie "Heaven and Earth". Haruki Kadokawa (famous Japanese director) and I collaborated on this piece and the Japanese people have not forgotten me. At every corner, and on every train platform young and old line up patiently for autographs. Barbara, ever the patient trophy wife, waits, smiles and bows politely while I perform my duty of the stars. Though, through some weird oversight, my name never really made it to the credit roll, I know that this was really some of my best work. If you ever find yourself with about 4 hours to kill, or have insomnia, I highly recommend it - and that's not just my big head talking. Oh, if you actually manage to figure out who is the good guy and which is the bad, please let me know!(http://www.beyondhollywood.com/heaven-and-earth-1990-movie-review/)

Hmmm, now for something closer to reality, it has been a jam-packed couple of weeks. With our Rail passes we headed to Kyoto after leaving Nagoya. The highlight here was the Setsubun festival. Supposedly the last day of winter (though the temperatures indicated otherwise) the Japanese go to various shrines to pray for a good year. We arrived quite early and took in all of the sights. Heaps of booths selling EVERYTHING from unnecessary plastic objects to salted fish to Kebabs. We wandered through this mayhem up to the Shrine where we saw a bunch of workers loading up a mesh cage with highly flammable items. We found out that they were going to light the whole mound (and I'm talking about a cylinder about 5m across and 3 meters high) at 11pm. That left us 3 hours to keep warm which we did by sampling one of pretty much everything that was sold there. At about 11 we rolled ourselves back up the hill to the shrine and watch them perform a ceremony to get rid of bad luck, and then lit the puppy on fire. As you'll see from the pictures, we positioned ourselves quite safely away from the action as this looked like it could get out of hand, but in typical Japanese fashion, it was all well controlled and the flames only shot about 3 meters in the air. Crazy!

Kyoto is renowned for its temples so we spent the next day walking through beautiful serene parks and temple grounds. Though we had considered ourselves templed out, this was a very worthwhile day and very peaceful. Kyoto also had a plethora of good bakeries and Barbara tracked down a tiny little bakery that served up these amazing little cheese pastries. We both still talk about "our bakery" and have raised the bar a bit on our bakery selection.

As a day trip from Kobe, we stopped at Himeji castle - the largest of the remaining 4 original castles in Japan. There aren't many left as they were all made out of wood so this 5 story castle was quite impressive. The trees for the supports were absolutely MASSIVE.

Next we used our passes to the max and headed to Kagoshima in the far south of the mainland. There wasn't much going on there, but our ultimate goal was a little town on the coast named Ibusuki. Upon arrival we made our way down absolutely deserted streets to find what we hoped would be the Onsen of all Onsens. Onsens are natural hot springs and there are a ton of them in Japan. Since we had never been to an Onsen before we scoped as much of the process as we could before heading in. Men and women go separately. After changing into our yukatas (Japanese bathing robes) we met out by the beach where kind little ladies had dug an impression in the ground where we laid down and were then covered with hot geo-thermally warmed sand. It was amazing to lie there with sand covering your whole body. You could feel every beat of your heart in every part of your body from the weight of the sand. After about 15 minutes we were cooked through and the real fun began. After wishing each other the best we headed into our respective change rooms. Japanese bathe...differently...than we do. After pitching my yukata in the laundry bin I walked into a room where the hot springs were. Prior to hopping in, you're supposed to bathe...logical. Same as at home. The difference comes in how one undertakes that. There aren't stand up showers. Everyone was sitting on tiny little stools at what I'll call cleaning stations that each had a mirror, shower head, receptacle for shaving & soap items and each with little round bowls that looked like dim-sum containers but were bigger and plastic. From what I could make out the more water that was used, the better. Seemingly the water didn't have to be necessarily used on your body but also on keeping your bathing station, your towel, and even any bit of floor that looked like it might have been dry wet and clean. Scrub? I don't know what the guy beside me had been doing before he came to the bath but he scrubbed himself to within an inch of his life. I haven't had an exfoliating rub like that in years and I was just playing along in my stall. I had to start giggling at some point as I dutifully pitched water to and fro just to keep up with the crowd. Why we couldn't stand up and do all that I didn't catch. I guess it would have been harder to reach the mystery bowl if we had been standing but sitting (NAKED) on wet plastic isn't one of my favourite sitting surfaces. We both made the best of the situation and opportunity to tidy up and re-appeared from our respective change rooms to compare notes. With my bath and the "full service" toilets that they have here, I'm telling you I've never been cleaner and that goes double for my undercarriage. Stay tuned for Barbara's VERY informative videos on using Japanese toilets.

Other stops included a very interesting stop at Nagasaki to see where the US dropped "Fat Man" on about 70000 unsuspecting Japanese. I'm not condoning what the Japanese did to initiate the whole thing but we've been shocked at what the US has done in the countries that we've visited. That being said, there wasn't a nasty word or comment against the US and the museum, peace park and memorial hall were all very interesting and well done.

I'll only waste a few words on our next stop in Beppu. We've renamed it Bep-poo. So many Japanese and other tourists said it was a highlight but it was hurtin'. As I told my younger sister, there's an ancient Japanese word for places like that...DUMP!

Cultural highlight: we ate with a Japanese family at one of the guesthouses we stayed at. The mother cooked each night and for a nominal fee you could join in. Very good food AND we were complimented on our chopstick skills. It was nice to hear that we weren't total spazzes after 3 months of eating with chopsticks. If, however, someone knows the best way to eat drumsticks with chopsticks, please let us know. They were impossible to get a hold of and no matter how much we tried we couldn't catch one of the locals eating theirs, but we saw the bare bones in their bowls.

Now we're back in Tokyo. We found where the weird and crazy hang out and we've tracked down the hordes of young kids with wild clothes and all manner of weird, damaged and feathered hair hang out. This is the Tokyo you see in the movies, not the guys in suits and well heeled ladies buying sweets as we had been seeing around our first guesthouse.

We've got 2 more days before we fly out. We, perhaps foolishly, have been hard core mega-tourists while here in Japan and are both somewhat sick at the moment. Actually, I have never recovered since arriving here and am hoping to book myself in for a new set of lungs when I get home. The ever present smokers aren't making my life easier either. We hope that the next flights will help us to a full recovery.

We're so close now we can smell the home cooking. As always, missing you all and looking forward to many reunions.

Love Jason & Baebs

Please note - there's a separate photo album for the spa so you might have to dig for the "Onsen experience" album. We've also uploaded a few videos - same goes - you might have to dig a bit.